Hi Everyone,
I recently completed a trip to Poland and wanted to report on our success. I traveled with my mother and sister, with the intention of finding and visiting family in the Istebna area on the southern border of Poland, very close to the point where Poland, Czech, and Slovakia meet. The last communication my family had with relatives in that area was in the 1960s, and the communicators on both sides were now deceased. Thanks to these letters we did have one address that we knew had been owned by family at that time.
In addition to having an old address, one good thing for us was that all of my mother's grandparents were from the same small area, which makes it easier to concentrate our efforts. Their last names were Kawulok, Jalowiczor, Legierski, and Wolny. When searching online these names seem to be strongly associated with the Istebna area, which also made our task easier.
My family has been friends with Marcin Niewalda since the 1980s and we asked for his assistance with this work and he agreed to help us. This was very fortunate for us because his genealogical research skills combined with his translation skills helped us to work far more efficiently than we otherwise could have. At least 10 times more efficiently. Also he was able to get access to the small town's Catholic church records which might have been impossible for us. Unfortunately none of us speak Polish, so we were helpless in that area without him. If anybody reading this is in a similar situation and would like to search for family in Poland I would highly recommend contacting Marcin and hiring him to make the work go more quickly.
After meeting with Marcin and exploring Krakow for a few days while recovering from our flight, we then traveled together to the Istebna area. We rented a house (http://villadorka.com) in the area which also worked very well for our purposes. We would definitely consider renting there again. We started by contacting the few people there that I knew due to internet contact in the past, as well as visiting the one address that I had and visiting the local Catholic church to identify more connections using the names and birthdates of my ancestors that had immigrated to the United States from that area. Thanks to Marcin's skills we quickly were able to identify many more contacts and began meeting people very quickly. Some were cousins of my grandparents and some were more distant relations. In all cases it was wonderful to meet them but we were very dependent on translation. Most of the younger generation spoke English but most of the older generation did not.
During this time of meeting people we also were attending community events and eating local food in the restaurants and getting to know the entire community. Within days going out became very fun because we had met so many people that we were starting to run into people we knew almost everywhere we went. Before the end of our time there Marcin was able to photograph many of the records at the church which we will study for years to come. We also plan to hire him to return to the area at some time without us to complete the work of photographing the records. He also found some leads regarding where the people came from before they populated the Istebna area, which will also be very interesting to learn more about.
Due to my lack of Polish skills it is difficult for me to participate in discussion here on this site, but I have given Marcin permission to edit and add pictures from the trip and to move portions or all of this post to the best places on the site to post them. I wish everyone here the best of luck with your searches. My website that focuses on the genealogy of the Istebna area as it pertains to those who immigrated to the United States is here (http://trojwies.us/). If anyone would like to post there I would be happy to help create an account for you, I had to shut off automatic account creation due to spam.
