Dakim

„Next part of Franz Sokala search

Hi,
Making a long story short and simple: Poland in the XIX century was divided into 3 countries. There were 3 administarative systems, on the territory that you are intrested in there was a prussian administrative system. There would be a different way of looking for your ancestors in Warsaw (russian partition), another in Cracow (austrian partition) and yet another way here in Upper Silesia (prussian partition .Yet another important factor are the dioceses, few kilometers to the west and south of Nieboczów – where administrativly it was still Upper Silesia, but the dioceseof Opole – where usually the metrics are avaliable up to XVII century.

To get to know more about Franz Sokola and Josepha maiden name Koczwara, it would be the best to find their marriage certificate, or the death certificate, the greates option would be to find the birth certificate.
The easiest way is to look through the second copies from the National Archive, but documents from this area that are older than 1st of October 1874 are ussualy lacking (except for partial duplicates that are avaliable online), so we are only left with the
Civil Record Office (USC), and the start from the 1st of October 1874.
There are record books from before 1874 in the original form, that are stored in the ARCHDIOCESE ARCHIVES IN KATOWICE, but there you would need to ask for a query, to reduce the cost of this query it would be best to first check all you can in the National Archive as the cost are lower, access to the data is easier and some of them are avaliable online (more are showing with time), moreover the data is more specific than in the church books.
It may be that in the marriage certificate of Paul Sokola and Juliana Siura only the age of newlyweds (approximated age) and the place of birth/place of residence is shown, without the names of the parents or only the father’s names. In the death certificates from before 1874 it is almost certain that there would be no information about paretns of a deceased adult.

The above information was presented to better illustrate the specification of family search in the region of Upper Silesia.

In the case of Paul Sokola and his wife Juliana maiden name Siura, it is advice to request a search in the National Archive of Katowice branch in Cieszyn in the USC of Grabówka from years 1874-1879 – there is a chance that they died during this time. If not [in case they died earlier], the olny way would be to ask the ARCHDIOCESE ARCHIVES in Katowice for the query.

Regarding Marcoll Koczwara and his wife Clara maiden name Baston, I was only able to find the death certificate of Marcoll – number 48/1875.

I don’t see neither the death certificate nor the second marriage of Clara (I went through indexes from Pszowy-Rydułtowy and Pszów up to 1930), except for one in Civil Record Office from Lubomia. Her second son in law – Franz Pytlik was from Syrynia, so maybe Clara had moved to her daugther Jadwiga when she became a widow and got old (which was common), and Syrynia village was under the jurisdiction of a Civil Record Office in Lubomia.

In relation to the further search, it depends on the data that you will find in the document (death certificate) mentioned above.

In regards to Catharina and Caroline – they are either not related to Franz at all, or are some distant cousins.
There were at least four Pauls’s Sokol in this territory in the same time. Two were from Syrynia, one from Nieboczów and one from Pszów. We are intrested in the one from Nieboczów.

To summ it all up, please write to Natinal Archive branch in Cieszyn, and order from them to search in death indexes from years 1874 to 1879 for USC (Civil Record Office) in Grabówka (unit 14/368) for Paul Sokol and Juliana Sokol born Siura (from Nieboczów), in the case they will be able to find it in the death certificates of those people ask them for copies of the scans.

In the USC in Pszów-Rydułtowy (unit 14/376) you can order death certificate of Marcoll Koczwar from 1875 – unit 48/1875 (exact name 1.3/44)

In the USC in Lubomii (unit 14/456) you can order death certificate of Clara Koczwara (in the order you can ask them to check if the maiden name of this particularr Clara is Baston, jsut to be sure that this is the person we are looking for and not someone with the same name and surname) – unit 12/1903 (exact number 3/74)

When you get the certificates, you can post it here and we will be able to advice where to look for next, but I think that the next step would be to ask in the ARCHDIOCESE ARCHIVES in Katowice

The procedure of ordering in National Archive looks like this:

1. First we let them know what we are intrested in – exact unit numbers of the certificates if possible, or the bigger data sets you would need them to search through.

2. National Archive gives responses within 14 days, they will inform you via email what they found and what will be the total cost of the scans and the case number.

3. Based on the case number the requestor is transfering the money onto the National Archive bank account.

4. After the money transfer is booked on the account they are sending the email with a link to those scans [if I remember correctly they are avaliable there for two weeks so you would need to downloead them before the deadline].

The price for the single page/scan is 2PLN, (deadth and birth certificates are one page long each so 2PLN and marriage certificates are done on two pages so 4PLN) so in the case that all death certificates are found, it would be 8PLN

National Archive of Katowice branch in Cieszyn works swiftly, so if there is no backlog of request/queries you should be able to get the results before the end of the year.

Here are the contact date for the National Archive:

Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach – Oddział Cieszyn (katowice.ap.gov.pl)

Kind regards,
Artur”