Location of Radwau (town in Poland) and its church?

Does anyone know of the churches in Radwau, Poland, and exactly where is Radwau located? I think I am looking for the history of this around mid-19th century. Thank you.

Radwau, if Polish, should be a germanized name. If so, you must look for something as Radłów on the map of contemporary Poland.

And indeed, Radłów exists in Małopolskie and there is a church there erected in 1337.

Only a few references online to it being a place rather than a German surname. The most reliable is to a German soldier dying there in 1944. It just lists it as Eastern Front.

Some possible references to it being near Lviv (now in Ukraine) here:
google.pl/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Radwau+lwow&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=vyiAVYCkIe6v8wfty4DgBQ

There may of course be (or have been other places) with that name. There's also the possibility that if it was a Jewish shtetl, it may have been razed to the ground in the war.

By the way, Bob, are you sure the word is 'Radwau' and not 'Radwan'? An easy mistake to make if it's (or was copied from) a handwritten document.

Who said of it being a German surname? Not me, I pointed out that that this may be a germanized name of a place and have given him Radłów, a town in Małopolskie. Radwau is d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y a name which is not Polish in its form and never has been such, so if he speaks about "churches in Radwau", we shall try to find a Polish form of the name.

This is, of course, a hypothesis and there may be another name (or in fact another reason) which gave the base for this distortion of the original Polish name.

See above. Plus the existence of the surname, but barely a trace of the place apart from optically character recognised sources and one wartime record, doubtless transcribed from a handwritten document....

See above.

Radziszewo (there are many and used to be more) is a possibility. There's a record of a Mr Radziszewski around Lviv using the name Radwau back in the 1880s, however this could be a misreading (OCR) of Radwan or a variant of that.


Nothing you've write worth seeing, either above, below or sideways. This is normal.

I would go along with Ziemowit's idea of Radłow. I live very near there.

Radłów is a town in Tarnów County, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, in southern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina called Gmina Radłów. It lies approximately 13 kilometres north-west of Tarnów and 66 km east of the regional capital Kraków.

More information from the OP would be a help - I do still wonder if the name has been taken from something handwritten.

I received a copy of my grandfather's death certificate and it stated that his father's(my great grandfather's), name was Jacob Kulaga and my grandmother was Mary Driedru and he was born in Radwau, Poland.

There are also three villages in Poland with the name Radwan...
pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radwan
And in the 19th century today's Radwanice town was called in German "Dorf des Radwan" - the village of Radwan literally.

My guess would be Radwan, perhaps as Looker says, the one that's now Radwanice. Your reading of Radwau sounds like a handwriting issue.

So, it is clear now that we're not looking for any German surname. Tell us who issued the death certificate, in which year it was issued and in what place? In what language is it written? This is important as it will show in what language the name of the town (village) could have been transformed.

Jacob Kulaga sounds a Polish name (Jakub Ku£aga), but Mary Driedru does not (French or Belgian?).

Above all, the language of the certificate is most important to pin down the region - I am assuming it isn't in Cyrillic script, therefore we can rule out the part of Poland that was in the Russian Empire. If in German, which is likely, the certificate should also show whether it was issued in Austro-Hungary or Germany. This narrows it down.