Understanding the Three Partitions in Your Family’s Records
Once we pinpoint the village (wieś or parafia) from an Ellis Island, Baltimore, Bremen, or Hamburg manifest or a US naturalization petition, the partition determines the language and format of the homeland records:
- 1. The Austrian Partition (Galicia / Małopolska): Written in Latin in wonderfully structured tabular parish registers (birth, marriage, death, house number, parents, and grandparents).
- 2. The Russian Partition (Congress Poland / Królestwo Polskie): From 1808 to 1867, records were written in Polish in Napoleonic narrative paragraph style; after 1868, the Tsarist administration required the same narrative format to be written in Russian Cyrillic—recording ages, occupations, witnesses, and exact dates.
- 3. The Prussian Partition (Poznań / Wielkopolska, West Prussia, Silesia): Covered by both Catholic/Lutheran church registers and, from October 1874, detailed German civil registration (Standesamt).
How We Turn Cyrillic, Latin, and Polish Acts Into Your Family’s Book
Instead of leaving you with undecipherable scans in Russian Cyrillic, Latin, or German script, our historians transcribe and translate the key records into clear English, map your family’s village alongside their American settlement in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Milwaukee, or New York, and bind the story into a custom hardcover edition (from $590 for an Ancestor Portrait or $1,690 for a Lineage Edition).
Begin With a Free 48-Hour Archival Feasibility Check
Before you spend a single dollar, share the names, approximate dates, and American towns you already know in the form below. Within 48 hours, our historians check the surviving US and European records for your family and reply in writing with what can be proven, a proposed chapter outline, a guaranteed delivery date, and a firm USD quote for both our Ancestor Portrait ($590) and our Lineage Edition ($1,690).
Frequently Asked Questions
01The village name on our ancestor’s Ellis Island manifest looks completely garbled. Can you still locate it?
Yes. German and British steamship clerks frequently wrote Polish and Slavic town names phonetically—and many villages had three different official names (Polish, German, and Russian/Ukrainian) between 1880 and 1939. By cross-checking historical gazetteers (such as the Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego) against the nearest relative’s post office town on Page 1 of the manifest, we pinpoint the exact parish.