Monday, September 15 - Łomża
Monday, September 15 - Łomża
This morning we visited with Mrs. Marta Chojnowska, the archivist for that Łomża Diocese. She has church records of baptisms, weddings and funerals of my ancestors. We are trying to get more information on my great grandfather who immigrated to the US from Poland in about 1905-10 and settled in Reading, PA.
My last name is Carts, and my great grandfather's name was Franciszek Czartorynski. We've found immigration records and church records in Reading. We think my grandfather Americanized his last name when he went into the army in the 1930s.
Anyway, the immigration records show the home town of the Czartorynski brothers as being in Łomża, Poland (and sometimes listed as Łomża, Russia, because Poland was part of the Russian Empire back then) so here we are looking for more ancestry on Franciszek.
This morning we visited with Mrs. Marta Chojnowska, the archivist for that Łomża Diocese. She has church records of baptisms, weddings and funerals of my ancestors. We are trying to get more information on my great grandfather who immigrated to the US from Poland in about 1905-10 and settled in Reading, PA.
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| The Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel at Łomża, aka Katedra św. Michała Archanioła w Łomża. |
My last name is Carts, and my great grandfather's name was Franciszek Czartorynski. We've found immigration records and church records in Reading. We think my grandfather Americanized his last name when he went into the army in the 1930s.
Anyway, the immigration records show the home town of the Czartorynski brothers as being in Łomża, Poland (and sometimes listed as Łomża, Russia, because Poland was part of the Russian Empire back then) so here we are looking for more ancestry on Franciszek.
We found records of Franciszek's (and his wife Kamila's) ancestors going back to 1792. I'll spare you the details. We found that the oldest records are in Latin, then the record language changed to Russian Cyrillic cursive. We are fortunate that Mrs. Marta knows Latin, Russian and English to get us through all that. (Poland became independent again after WWI ended in 1918 and church records were written in Polish after that. But that was long after my forebears left so none of that applies to us.)
Records are written paragraphs describing, say, the marriage of this man and this woman, who their parents were, where they were from, whether the wife was a maiden or a widow, witnesses, etc.
So, my forebears were actually from the small village of Czartorya, near Łomża. Czartorya, Czartorynski, that's a link. One record suggests they were landowners and another suggests that they were minor nobility.
We also learned that the reason many emigrated to America was for economic opportunity (expected) and/or to avoid conscription into the Russian army (unexpected).
Records are written paragraphs describing, say, the marriage of this man and this woman, who their parents were, where they were from, whether the wife was a maiden or a widow, witnesses, etc.
So, my forebears were actually from the small village of Czartorya, near Łomża. Czartorya, Czartorynski, that's a link. One record suggests they were landowners and another suggests that they were minor nobility.
We also learned that the reason many emigrated to America was for economic opportunity (expected) and/or to avoid conscription into the Russian army (unexpected).
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| Sorting through records. |
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| Example of the record book. |
Tomorrow we're going to visit Czartorya and look at graveyards.
We also learned that if you were conscripted/impressed into the Russian army, it was a 25 year commitment.
ReplyDeleteThe local spelling of Czartorynski is either Czartoryski or Czartoryjski. It means "from Czartorya/Czartoria".
ReplyDelete