Poland?

Question:I have a very unusual last name that is Belarussian or Polish. I have tried to do searches but have not been able to find anything out about my family before they came to America. Are there any English speaking sites where I might be able to find this information? I thought they changed my last name when they came over but there are people in Belarus with my last name. My problem is that I have not been able to find a database that will allow me to track the information. I am on Ancestry.com but I am only finding records from when they came to America.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I have a very unusual last name that is Belarussian or Polish. I have tried to do searches but have not been able to find anything out about my family before they came to America. Are there any English speaking sites where I might be able to find this information? I thought they changed my last name when they came over but there are people in Belarus with my last name. My problem is that I have not been able to find a database that will allow me to track the information. I am on Ancestry.com but I am only finding records from when they came to America.

Cyndi's List is a megalink site for genealogy. Her Eastern European section has links to sites specifically for Belarus researchers. Also, even if the family isn't Jewish, the Jewish Gen's Belarus group has maps, town searches, etc. that may help.

The Familysearch.org site lists some Belarus files that have been microfilmed and are available on loan at Family History Centers.

It's unlikely that you will find civil records online, so reading about the area and networking with others researching the area may be all you can do at this time.

Ask a Polish person for the site, that site might have an English(UK) flag on it, and then you can read it

There are many many problems for people who have non-English speaking roots. Ancestry is all well and good for people with Australian, Canadian, British, Irish, New Zealand, American and even South African roots, but is absolutely useless for anywhere else.

Their are two main problems for this - one being that European borders have rarely been fixed and many places that were once in one country or empire are now in another - records aren't very often where you would expect them to be, and the second problem is that the records are in the languarge of the country concerned, which means Polish, Belarussian or the Russian Cryillic alphabet. The Polish or Belarussians don't go around translating their Birth Marriage and Death records into English in the same way that the English GRO aren't suddenly going to make their indexes available in Arabic or Chinese. It just isn't going to happen, so assuming that the information is online (and former East European Warsaw Pact countries still aren't as 'open' with this kind of thing as other western nations), it will be in Polish, and if you can't speak the language you won't get anywhere fast.

In all probability, you'll have to contact an English-speaking Polish student to do some research locally in the area on your behalf and bung them a few Zlotys for their trouble. The chances of this information being available on the internet, let alone in English, is nil to non-existant.

What is your last name dear?