Spokesrider
13 Jun 2018
Genealogy / What/where was Glowgie Government. And Rätslavik? "Russian Poland" [7]
Thanks to your clues I may have a better idea where my grandmother came from. I'm pretty sure her village was close to the river; she told that her father would go down to islands in the river to get willow branches to use in making baskets. (I have in my office a sewing basket that we think came with her when she immigrated to the United States, which I suppose could have been made by her father.) Her brother's naturalization papers say they lived in Dembe before coming to the U.S. I take that to be Dąb in Polish. On google maps I had found a Dąb Wielke and Dąb Mały southeast of Warsaw, so figured they must have moved there after their mother died. It had seemed from what she told us that the place where they farmed reverted to her mother's family when her mother died, though she never said that explicitly. (She was 13 when she came to the U.S.) But even if that happened to the property, it would make more sense for them to have stayed in this region between Włocławek and Płock, where others of her father's family lived.
And now that you gave me more to think about, I see from old maps from the 1920s that there is a Dąb Wielke and Dąb Mały right in this region, near the river. I wonder if by saying Grossdorf she could have meant the "big" Dąb in a manner of speaking, to distinguish it from the little one. I suppose we'll never know for sure, but I now hope to go there several weeks from now to see the places.
By the way, on some of those old maps from the 1920s there are also places labeled Niemiecka. If the Polish word for Germans was anything like the Russian word, I figured it was identifying places having to do with the German communities. But that's just guesswork on my part, and in any case none of them seemed likely places where my grandmother had lived. (Some of those old maps also have some Russian place names in Cyrillic letters, but it seems that it didn't take many years for those Russian names to disappear from the maps.) My grandmother told us that when she and a friend walked home from school, that there were two Russian girls who walked with them a ways, but the German girls and the Russian girls didn't talk to each other, and the Russian girls went on further to a home in the big woods. It seems that much of that region is now a big forest preserve.
I can read and understand a bit of Russian, but not very much. And in preparation for a visit to Poland I've been working through the Pimsleur course in Polish. I recognize a lot of words that are similar to Russian words, which sometimes helps more than it confuses me. It will be interesting to find out if anyone can understand anything I try to say, but I don't think we dare try to get along without finding people who speak English.
Thanks to your clues I may have a better idea where my grandmother came from. I'm pretty sure her village was close to the river; she told that her father would go down to islands in the river to get willow branches to use in making baskets. (I have in my office a sewing basket that we think came with her when she immigrated to the United States, which I suppose could have been made by her father.) Her brother's naturalization papers say they lived in Dembe before coming to the U.S. I take that to be Dąb in Polish. On google maps I had found a Dąb Wielke and Dąb Mały southeast of Warsaw, so figured they must have moved there after their mother died. It had seemed from what she told us that the place where they farmed reverted to her mother's family when her mother died, though she never said that explicitly. (She was 13 when she came to the U.S.) But even if that happened to the property, it would make more sense for them to have stayed in this region between Włocławek and Płock, where others of her father's family lived.
And now that you gave me more to think about, I see from old maps from the 1920s that there is a Dąb Wielke and Dąb Mały right in this region, near the river. I wonder if by saying Grossdorf she could have meant the "big" Dąb in a manner of speaking, to distinguish it from the little one. I suppose we'll never know for sure, but I now hope to go there several weeks from now to see the places.
By the way, on some of those old maps from the 1920s there are also places labeled Niemiecka. If the Polish word for Germans was anything like the Russian word, I figured it was identifying places having to do with the German communities. But that's just guesswork on my part, and in any case none of them seemed likely places where my grandmother had lived. (Some of those old maps also have some Russian place names in Cyrillic letters, but it seems that it didn't take many years for those Russian names to disappear from the maps.) My grandmother told us that when she and a friend walked home from school, that there were two Russian girls who walked with them a ways, but the German girls and the Russian girls didn't talk to each other, and the Russian girls went on further to a home in the big woods. It seems that much of that region is now a big forest preserve.
I can read and understand a bit of Russian, but not very much. And in preparation for a visit to Poland I've been working through the Pimsleur course in Polish. I recognize a lot of words that are similar to Russian words, which sometimes helps more than it confuses me. It will be interesting to find out if anyone can understand anything I try to say, but I don't think we dare try to get along without finding people who speak English.