Does anyone know how I could find information on my great grandfather? I had already tried the Grodno Archives for information on my grandfather and was not impressed with the search results, as they came back with a totally different first name of my great grandfather to what I had asked them to find.
My great grandfather according to my grandfather Jozef's documents was named Antoni. The record they sent out to me was of a Nicodemus as the best match who fathered a Jozef in 1905. Maybe the records are missing.
Another possibility is that he dropped the name Nicodemus at some stage.
An example is the number of women in Poland called Halina who have Helena on their birth certificate - they dropped the name because it pins people down to a (pre-war) age group. Antoni is by the way an old man's name in Poland. Fashionable once, then out of fashion. Perhaps your great-grandfather dropped Nicodemus. Or perhaps this Nicodemus was a brother - is it a common surname?
The research I have done suggest with a couple variations it is a common type of name. Even though at first I thought not. Odzierejko, Odzereiko, Adzereiko, Adzierejko are some variants. From the families and their trees I have encountered, within a 20 km radius of the village my grandfather came from, the name Antoni had been listed on some of them. We are of polish descent, but my grandfather's background maybe more Belarusian, as the last name ends with jko, from what I have read via some internet surname research and from what my mother had mentioned. The only Nikodim I have found had migrated to America. I too had thought that Nicomedmus may have been another name that Antoni may have had. The more I had searched the more people with the same last name I found, from the area, now are spread over different parts of the world after leaving Belarus. Maybe we are all somehow related or we maybe different families with the same last name.
