Polish Notary and Land Records: Hidden Gems to Unlocking the Past
After a multi-year blogging hiatus, I'm back to talk about Polish notary and land records. While here in the US, we think of a notary as anyone with a stamp that you have to run down for a random document, in Europe, notaries carried lots more significance. In 19th century Poland, town notaries recorded all the important deeds and contractual affairs of the town. These have become incredibly important in my research from Łańcut, Poland. Łańcut is one of those towns you never want to see as your ancestral homeland – not because there's anything wrong with the town itself, but because zero birth, marriage and death records have survived . So this post elaborates on my multi-year journey to uncover the history of my Kronfeld family of Łańcut, absent any available vital records. My grandmother's father was born in Lviv, Ukraine - at the time Lemberg/Lwów, part of the Austrian Empire and later Poland. My grandmother knew nothing about the family history before him. Eventually, I...