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...

This post is the first of a two-part series on how DNA matches pieced together longstanding unanswered dead ends in my family tree. While many use commercial DNA tests as a kitschy way to see one's ancestral heritage, for a genealogist, reviewing other DNA matches' trees may result in major breakthroughs in understanding one's own family tree. Here is a case study highlighting this result in Ukrainian records from the former Russian Empire. The next post will cover records from the historical region of Galicia in the former Austrian Empire. Grandma Tillie My great-great-grandmother was named Tillie Levine. When I started my research many years ago, all that was known in the family was that she died in New York in the 1950s and that she was in her 80s or 90s. After digging into the research, I acquired a copy of her 1956 death certificate from the New York City Department of Health and viewed her grave. Both gave me the detail that her father's name was Jacob. I also lea...

When I started my genealogical adventures, all I knew about my grandfather's father's origins was that he was "from Kiev." I had no idea whether he was from the city  of Kiev or a nearby shtetl. I also was working with a remarkably common name: Louis Levine. Was the surname originally Levine? Did it change from something else? We did not know. Where Was Louis Born? The first important step was determining through US records where my great-grandfather had come from. The best sources to identify the birth place of an immigrant who came to the US in the late 1800s to early 1900s and who was born in the 1890s is one of three sources: (1) naturalization papers, (2) military registrations, and (3) ship records. Ship records are of course crucial to understanding an immigrant's background, but often times, finding the ship record without the first two steps listed above becomes more challenging (especially with a name like Levine , and without knowing the town of origin)...