Moritz Research Blog

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...

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...