I was doing some family history research tonight and tracing some of the people who match me on Ancestry. That led me to a quandary. The image was not shown in Ancestry. The church books were readily available and digitized on FamilySearch. But… you guessed it! LOCKED!

It’s okay. It’s happened before. One of the biggest kept secrets is that many of the books are available through the Polish archives. While the particular example below does not pertain to Pomerania, I used this exact same method a few days ago for territories near Schlochau and Flatow. I know popular opinion is that Poland is not doing enough to help.

This could not be further from the truth.

It needs to be emphasized. The Polish people are our friends in research and truly want to be able to preserve their materials by and large. In fact, before getting to the infographic, here’s a screenshot from the archives in Bydgoszcz:

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Infographic: