Welcome back! I'm excited to share this breakthrough in my search for my Polish ancestors' town(s) of origin in Poland. I found them! The Novaks (Nowaks)! The Siedlec clue was what really broke it all open (see Series Post #3 for those details). But of course there are quite a few Siedlec/Siedlce towns in Poland. Most are in the state of Poznan (Posen). I wasn't sure to which parish Siedlec would have belonged, and there are hundreds or thousands of pages of church books to search if you can't narrow it to a specific parish and year. Thankfully, though, there is an amazing searchable resource of transcribed marriages, called the Poznan Project. It's a massive volunteer effort to transcribe all of the civil and church marriage records for the region of Posen/Poznan from 1800-1899. Because Nowak is such a common Polish surname, it's very hard to confirm the identity of a single person based solely on a birth record unless you have a lot of corroborating details. H
Read Along as I Share What I Learn about My Family and the Research Process