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...

Germany is one of the easiest countries for researching Jewish ancestors because the country's records have been so well-maintained. For Jews living in the largest cities of Germany ( Berlin , Hamburg , Frankfurt , for example), civil records have been indexed and are largely available on sites including Ancestry.com.   Other parts of Germany, though, are not so straightforward. One example is the town where I have ancestors from, called Bad Schwalbach. Bad Schwalbach (formerly called Langenschwalbach) is the district seat of Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis in the state of Hessen and near the border with Rheinland-Pfalz. Bad Schwalbach's location, near Wiesbaden, Mainz and Bingen Generally speaking, Jewish records from Hessen are quite easy to access. They include the following sources: Civil records beginning 1874/5 are available on Ancestry.com; those from Frankfurt date back even further, to the first half of the 19th century, in the horribly mislabeled collection " Rhineland, P...