Hello friends, cousins and Polish family historians: there are now more than 125,000 indexed acts from birth, marriage and death records available to search at Galicia Gen!
Each index brings to life someone’s ancestor; whether direct or indirect, it allows us to glimpse into a different world. I could almost say that you can take a chance to time travel: how many kids did a family have; was there an epidemic raging in a certain village; did a family have a double wedding; who were the people closest to a family; what tragedies did a person overcome? While I can’t answer all these questions, these acts paint the beginning of a family’s picture.
I have been indexing since 2018 and I prefer to index marriages. For me, there are less acts and I can finish the source faster. Whenever I start to index a new village, marriages are great to get to know the surnames of the place. I find a year that has easier to read handwriting and start there (typically, 1880s and later but there are some terrible handwriting even in later records). Like many writers, I don’t typically index in chronological order – I will skip around depending on my mood and how attentive I can be.
Despite marriages being my favorite, if I already know the surnames, birth and death records aren’t too difficult. I also have preferred villages – villages that are of particular interest to my family history. While I want to index most of today’s northern Podkarpackie, if new records come up for my villages, I will pause to index them.
With indexes, you can also start to look for patterns. Were children born every year to a couple or only in a certain month of the year? Were women married at younger than 18? What about names – why does it seem that everyone born in a certain village was named “so-and-so” but go about 15 km away and you’ll rarely see it (such is the case for Gertruda; around Tarnobrzeg it’s everywhere but by Kolbuszowa it’s a rarity).
I invite you to take a look at the new indexes and hope you find new discoveries:
Birth Records
Marriage Records
Death Records
Many of these indexes are also available at Geneteka; some were already completed by others but there are others exclusive to Galicia Genealogy due to the source material.
