Forum | PolishOrigins :: View topic - Why are 2 sets metrical records for same village different?

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kingjadwiga

Joined: 30 Jan 2019
Replies: 4
Location: moorestown, nj
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Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2022 8:42 pm Post subject: Why are 2 sets metrical records for same village different?

Can someone explain how the online GC birth records for Tarnawa Nizna in the year 1890 on https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/ don’t show a record for the birth of my grandfather, but on Geneteka a recent entry for him shows a GC birth record in that village for him on records at the Central State Historical Archives in Ukraine in Lviv. There was a note with the information on the record but no scan. Why are the records different for the same village?

Sophia
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Joined: 05 Oct 2014
Replies: 1034

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Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 12:57 pm Post subject: Re: Why are 2 sets metrical records for same village differe

kingjadwiga wrote:

Hi,
Your question intrigued me, so I studied the scans on szukajwarchiwach as well as the entries in Geneteka. I had in mind a few typical issues that I thought might explain what you found, but in the end, I cannot offer you a satisfactory explanation.
Let me go through my thought process anyway. Going first to the scans on szukajwarchiwach, I saw that they are from the duplicate church book. They are arranged first by year, second by type of record (births, then marriages, then deaths in a given year) and third by village (so the 1890 births are listed first for Tarnawa Wyżna, then Tarnawa Niżna, then Sokoliki). At first I hoped that you had only gone through the Tarnawa Wyzna records, did not find your grandfather, and stopped there. I saw from another post of yours that his name is Jan Skrętowski, so I went to look for him. But no, he is not in any of the three villages in the 1890 records. Then I hoped that the Geneteka indexer had simply put the wrong year, so I went through additional years in this book, and then I went back to the prior book that includes 1889 and earlier, but I did not find him. Naturally, when you are looking at a duplicate church book, you can imagine some level of errors or omissions from the original church book, and I considered the possibility that the person who indexed the records for Geneteka might have had access to the original book. It seemed possible that a name could be in the original church book and yet missing in the duplicate church book. I tested this theory by making a list of the children baptized in 1890 in the szukajwarchiwach record images. There were easily 2 dozen of them from Tarnawa Nizna alone, yet when you look on Geneteka, there are only 4 children. And none of these 4 are the same as the 2 dozen.
In short, there is a problem here. These seem to be two different populations. Do you think there is a possibility that the Geneteka list is not actually a Greek Catholic list but mislabelled as such? Were you expecting your grandfather to be Greek Catholic?
Best regards,
Sophia

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