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 found her father's birth record and his parents' marriage record. From the marriage record, we learn that Dawid Kronfeld was born in Łańcut, Poland in 1874, the son of Wolf Kronfeld and Rachel Schmid.


Groom entry: Dawid Kronfeld, Lemberg/Lwów Jewish marriages, 1901

Then, I turned to all the "usual" sources to check for vital records (birth/marriage/death) from Łańcut, only to be met with the horrible news that zero Jewish records survived from the town.


The Search for Other Kronfelds

When you're working with a unique surname, it's sometimes best to search for everyone with that name to see if you can backtrack into family connections. Because of the shortage of vital records from Łańcut, that's what I attempted to do.

I scoured the internet for all references to Kronfelds from Łańcut and reviewed indexes from JewishGen, JRI-Poland, Gesher Galicia, newspaper databases, Holocaust databases and more. In all that searching, I never found a single reference to Dawid's parents Wolf and Rachel.

My first breakthrough came in a very random place. After Googling the surname Kronfeld and Lancut in the same search, I was led to an online portal for the archives of Bremen, Germany, where there was a passport entry for an "Isaak Schmiedt f. Kronfeld" of Lancut, born 1882. The "f" is for "false" - a terminology used when a child was going by a surname of one parent despite the "illegitimacy" of the parent and the "technical" wrong use of the surname as a result. In reality, many Jews in Galicia had religious and not civil marriage, with the consequence that they were deemed illegitimate by the state. Learn more about these abbreviations here. So this was an Isaak whose mother was Schmiedt and father was Kronfeld. Looked like a good match to me, but I needed to know more.

Screenshot from the Bremen archives, showing Isaak Schmiedt f. Kronfeld of Lancut

I tracked Isaak to eventually live in Wiesbaden, Germany with his wife. Eventually, he was deported and killed in Buchenwald concentration camp. I contacted records repositories and scoured archives throughout Germany and Holocaust databases, and I accumulated a lot of information about him. But nothing had the names of his parents. 

At long last, I had a breakthrough when JRI-Poland added indexes from Lancut conscription records that survived, which included Isak Schmied false Kronfeld. The column on the right included parents' names: Wolf and Keile. First, I was thrilled to have a breakthrough. But then I was confused. Is this the same Wolf? Did Wolf have two wives, Rachel and then Keile? Is Rachel also known as Keile? It remained unclear. That being said, the record had a margin note saying that Isak had relocated to a specific address in Lwów, which is exactly where my ancestor Dawid was living. So I expected them to be brothers, or at minimum, related in some way.

Conscription entry for Isak Schmied false Kronfeld of Lancut, showing parents Wolf and Keile

Because Isaak had lived in Germany before the Holocaust, I explored German archives as well. Eventually, I heard back from the Hessian State Archives, who had an inheritance file for Isaak Kronfeld from 1960 (long after he died in the Holocaust), and this identified next of kin: a sister.

Inheritance document, identified Helene Spinat geb. Kronfeld as next of kin of Isaak Kronfeld

The sister, Helene Spinat née Kronfeld, died in Tel Aviv in the 1940s, and the document went on to mention her children's name. So my next project was exploring information on this family to see if I could find out more.

A key fact came from one of the daughters of Helene, whose name was Regina. Eventually I found her husband's name and then her marriage record from Frankfurt, Germany. And on there, her name wasn't listed as Regina, but rather, Keila Rücza.  

Excerpt from Regina Spinat's marriage record, identifying her as Keila Rücza Spinat of Lancut

Earlier, I mentioned that I didn't know if there were one or two Wolf Kronfelds or one or two wives Rachel and Keile. This was pretty telling: one person named Keila Rücza seemed to be that it was highly likely Wolf's wife was in fact a doubled-named woman (Rachel being Rücza).

In my ongoing searches, I eventually found a couple other mentions of Kronfelds from Łańcut in JRI-Poland and other databases. But in all of these searches and developments, there still remained no primary documents mentioning Dawid's parents Wolf and Rachel or Keile or Keile Rücza ?? and nothing to confirm that they were indeed all part of one family.


In Come the Notary Records

The Polish Archives have digitized millions of records and also made the majority of their catalogues available and searchable online at the Szukaj w Archiwach website. I had heard about notary records being valuable sources from around Poland so I wanted to see if any were catalogued from Łańcut. And I was in luck. Here are three examples of what's shown: notarial records from different notaries covering different years, all stored in the same archives in Przemysl. And that's where I turned to next.

Notary records stored in the Przemysl archives

Where I really lucked out was that these notaries kept name indexes in the back of the books. So I asked the Przemysl archives to check if there were Kronfeld entries in the indexes from the 1880s and 1890s, and I was in luck. After many months of waiting, eventually, I received back a response that there were several notarial files mentioning Wolf Kronfeld. After another many months of waiting, a stack of scanned Polish notarial files were sent to me by email.

And I got what I wanted: the records clearly indicate that Wolf Kronfeld of Łańcut was married to Keile Rucze Kronfeld, as appearing in several files documenting their property transfers!

Wolf Kronfeld's signature, followed by a circle notating the mark of Keile Rucze Kronfeld

Wolf Kronfeld's signature followed by Keile Rucza's signature in Hebrew letters

Originally, I had only asked the archives about the 1880s and 1890s, but then I needed more! I wrote back to request scans of the entire index for the earlier notary, covering the years 1861-1875, which they sent me. For anyone interested, the complete name indexes for those years can be reviewed here. And then the next round, I requested all the Kronfeld entries. 

After another long period of waiting, the results were in. And I learned of another generation: the parents of Wolf Kronfeld, whose names were unknown until then: Isaac and Sarah. 

Signature of Isaac Kronfeld followed by the Hebrew signature of his wife Sarah

Thanks to these notary records, I have since been able to piece together all Kronfelds appearing in Łańcut from throughout the 19th century!

Family tree of the Kronfeld family of Łańcut, Poland


One Other New Resource: Land Ownership Records

The Przemysl archives has recently added another collection that turned out to be helpful about the Jews of Lancut: land records. It turns out plenty of Jews owned property in the town, including my ancestor Isaac Kronfeld. These can be found in this collection Archiwum Geodezyjne, which includes records from countless towns in the region. 

I've indexed the Jewish entries in the 1849 index of landowners in Lancut, Alphabetisches Verzeichniss der Gemeinde Lancut mit der Ortschaft Kąty. My spreadsheet index of the Jews can be reviewed here.


Cover page of the 1849 Lancut landowner list

Entry for Isak Kronfeld, identifying his ownership of a parcel of land


Here's two other files of relevance as well:

Duplicat Grundparzellen Protocoll der Gemeinde Lancut mit der Ortschaft Kąty. Duplicat Bauparzellen Protocoll der Gemeinde Lancut mit der Ortschaft Kąty, 1849

Protokół parcelowy gminy Lancut, 1879

* * * * * 

It took over a decade of research before these new records appeared, and it was certainly worth the wait. It's just a good reminder that whenever we think the searching is done, there is always more to be found.

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