Looking for a Birth certificate from 1890?

Question:I'm looking for a birth certificate for a Boleslawa Zegota/Zengota born in 1890 Poland/Russia on May 31. Can't find it. Possibly because of all of the wars and destruction in the Poland/Russia area?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I'm looking for a birth certificate for a Boleslawa Zegota/Zengota born in 1890 Poland/Russia on May 31. Can't find it. Possibly because of all of the wars and destruction in the Poland/Russia area?

Looks like you had the wrong birthdate. Hope the info below helps you find her birth certificate (looks a bit costly to me).

www.ancestry.com
Boleslawa Zegota
Born: 31 August 1890 ,Mlawa, Mazowieckie, Poland
Died: 31 May 1982 , USA
Married:
Antoni Zembrzowski (or ZEMBRZUSKI)
Born: abt 1887 ,Poland
Died: 30 jan 1956

Their son: Joseph Zembrzowski
Born: 07/02/1913 , United States of America
Died: 01/24/2000 ,South Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Married:
Agnes Glantschnig

New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957
Name: Antoni Zembrzowski
Arrival Date: 16 Oct 1922
Estimated Birth Year: abt 1887
Age: 35
Gender: Male
Port of Departure: Copenhagen
Ethnicity/Race-/Nationality: Polish
Ship Name: Frederik VIII
Port of Arrival: New York, New York
Nativity: Poland
Line: 25
Microfilm Serial: T715
Microfilm Roll: T715_3200
Birth Location: Poland
Birth Location Other: Jarlutach
Page Number: 52

www.jewishgen.org
Mlawa--modern name of the town she was born in
Ciechanowskie--which of the 49 Polish provinces this town was located in during the period of 1975-1998. .
76--indicates which branch of the Polish State Archives holds the Jewish vital records for this town.

Archive :Archiwum Państwowe m.st. Warszawy Oddzia? w M?awie
Postal Code, City :06-500 M?awa
Street Address : ul. Narutowicza 3
Telephone : (23) 654-33-09

www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/polandv.ht... :
The archives require a $30 deposit to initiate a research project, and charge an hourly fee of $15. You will be advised what records were found, and you will receive a request for payment for the research. To purchase photocopies of the records, there is an additional fee of $10 each.
Depending on the nature of the research, responses may take two to six months. Be sure to include dates and places in your request — without knowing a specific locality, no research can be done, because all vital records are kept on a local, municipal basis.

You can write to the Polish States Archives headquarters in Warsaw in Polish, English, French or German -- The archives' International Relations Division, which handles all foreign correspondence, will translate your request into Polish and forward it to the appropriate regional archive.

For guidance, see the PGSA's Polish Letter Writing Guide, or the Polish letter-writing guides at the Polish Roots site. The LDS have also published an 8-page "Polish Letter Writing Guide" (Research Guide #36339), available for 50 cents, which is also available online in PDF format. Other Polish letter-writing guides appear in print in: Frazin (1989), pages 33-41; and Chorzempa (1993), pages 231-238; and Shea & Hoffman (2000), pages 134-138.

Interpreting the Reply
You will always receive a reply in Polish. For assistance in interpreting the reply, see the excellent article "Translating Letters from the Polish National Archives" by William F. Hoffman, in RODZINY, Journal of the Polish Genealogical Society of America, XVIII:2 (August 1995), which was reprinted in Landsmen VI:1 (Summer 1995), and also reprinted in Shea and Hoffman's In Their Words: A Genealogist's Translation Guide to Polish, German, Latin and Russian Documents. Volume I: Polish. (New Britain,
CT: Language & Lineage Press, 2000), pages 138-148. This "Guide to Reading Letters From Archives in Polish" is now also available online.

Why your request might not be successful:
Your attempts to obtain records by writing to the Archives and USCs may not always be successful. Here are some possible reasons for a negative response or lack of response, particularly from the various local USCs. Thanks to Stan Diamond, Michael Richman, Lauren Davis and Morris Wirth for these tips:

The Jewish civil registers (for the applicable town/years) were, indeed, lost.

You have the wrong town. Statements from family members that their parents came from "Kielce", "Radom", "Lublin" or "Warsaw", etc. may be misleading. They may have been from that gubernia (province) or area, but not necessarily from the gubernia capital city with the same name. Broaden your search to other towns, and try to determine the specific town of origin from other documents.

Or you might have the wrong town because there is more than one town with the same name. Provide province/gubernia/district information, or the name of a nearby town, if possible.

People living in villages registered events in a nearby larger town. Even some fair-sized towns registered all their events in a larger town during certain periods.

You provided an Anglicized spelling of a surname, which bears little resemblance to the spellings in the Polish records.

Example: To a Polish-speaking person, the name spelled "COHEN" would sound more like "TZOKHIN". (See guides to the Polish alphabet and Polish pronunciation). An inexperienced Civil Records Office manager or employee would not look for "KON" or "KOHN" or "KOEN" or "KAAN" or "KOCHEN", which is likely the way that this name was spelled in Polish records.

You did not provide the Polish version of the given name, which is the way the name would appear in the registrations. "Harry", "Jennie", "Louis", "Fannie", "Morris",
"Ida", "Max" and "Lena" are not names that were ever used in Poland! Supply your relatives' Yiddish given names -- those are the names recorded in Polish civil registers.

You should give alternate possible spellings of your surnames and given names. Inexperienced clerks would not know that "Jankiel" is equivalent to "Jakob", etc.

Your family changed their surname after immigration, in spite of what you've been told.

Your family never got around to registering the event, or the registration was delayed a number of years. It is not unusual to find births registered two, three, or even ten or more years late.

The manager of the USC to whom you wrote is not sufficiently versed in Russian to quickly spot the Cyrillic rendition of the name. Civil records in the Kingdom of Poland were kept in the Russian language (Cyrillic alphabet) from 1868 to 1917.

The inherent problems of using the indexes. The annual indexes compiled by the original clerks could be incomplete, missing altogether, or contain errors. Examples of typical index errors include: surname and given name transposed, entries mis-alphabetized, etc.

The recipient did not understand what you were asking for, because your letter was not in Polish, or because you asked for so much, it was confusing. Thus, your letter was not given attention. Keep it simple. In small towns, the office is run entirely by one person, who is unlikely to know English.

You've written to the wrong place. The vital records for a town are sometimes split between two or even three different branches of the Polish State Archives, and the 20th century records are probably still in the local town's USC Office.

The archives or USC never received your letter. Mail does get lost from time to time, in the United States, in Poland, or somewhere in between.

The USC could not afford stamps to reply to your genealogical inquiry. You should enclose an International Reply Coupon (IRC), available from your local Post Office, and explain its use.

(Compiled by Warren Blatt, August 1998, Updated Dec 2001)

Ancestry.com has a whole lot of info and adding more each day.

The cost is expensive but if you are really into your genealogy well worth the money

There is also a site that is really good and affordable called Genes Re-United
http://www.genesreunited.com.au/genesreu...

Info on this site may help:

http://www.polishroots.org/genpoland/ind...

try Ancesrey.com

I just read in Family Tree Magazine that Poland is one of the five WORST countries for genealogical info. You'll need some determination and some luck!

Here are some tips I learned:

The Family History Library (aka Mormon Genealogy Library) has microfilms of many parish records and some civil registration records, too. Also, its site at familysearch.org includes a Polish genealogical word list and a letter-writing guide.

The Polish National Archives has a helpful site in English: www.archiwa.gov.pl?CIDA=43. They have a website on Family History.

Also try the Polish Genealogical Society of America: www.pgsa.org. They have a 970,000-entry database.

In 1999 Poland's 49 provinces were reorganized into 16, so that will affect who has what records.

If she was born in eastern Poland, then the record is likely to be in Russian. If she was born in western Poland, the record will be in German or Latin.

Soooo, sounds like your best bet is a Family History Center where you can rent microfilm of records. See familysearch.org for a location near you.

PS I'm guessing, though, that you'll need to know the town where's she from first. I doubt that you'll be able to look just in "Poland." Have you checked for her immigration and naturalization papers? Or her marriage license?

PPS I just found a great Polish translation site: www.poltran.com

PPPS Here's another website summarizing how to research Polish genealogy: http://www.polishroots.org/genpoland/

You can't find it because they didn't exist. Poland was partitioned at the time and the Russian partition was not keeping records of births. Under the old European system, all births were recorded by the town's parish. In most towns, the parish priest was the only literate person in town. Not until the reunification of Poland after WWI will you find birth records that are kept by civil authorities. You would look for baptismal records in lieu of a birth record.

I will add one other thing, though. I can't find "Boleslawa" as a town. But Boleslawiec is an extremely well-known town. If you're a collector of European dinnerware, the town is like Mecca. It's also in the former Prussian partition and there are significantly more records available from the region. I'd suggest you start with the Poznan Marriage Project and see if you can find some records.
http://bindweed.man.poznan.pl/posen/sear...