From Casualty Lists to Hospital Records: How My "Polish" Ancestor Ended up in Records of the Austrian Military Archives
My ancestor David Kronfeld was born in modern-day Łańcut, Poland in December of 1874. David and his family considered themselves Polish. All of his children went to secular school in Lwów (modern-day Lviv, Ukraine), with students of mixed religion, and they spoke in Polish. At the time of his birth, though, the places where David lived were not "Polish" per se; they were located in the province of Galicia, within the Austrian Empire. And like many other young men at the far edges of the Austrian Empire, David was drafted into the Austrian Army. There is only one known large collection that survives of Austrian Empire soldiers from this time period that cover those living in the territory of Galicia, which are available through FamilySearch here . But they are not indexed and there are thousands and thousands of pages (although separated by letter, they are not in any easily managed order to find an individual's file). The only documentary evidence that I had that David w...