Immigration Origins
From Selected Connecticut & New Jersey
Cities and Towns
For some, one of the most challenging aspects of research is finding the exact birthplace of an ancestor
in Europe. This database contains geographical information on immigrants taken
from obituaries, church and civil records, naturalization papers and any other document
that may have contained geographical information on the origins of our families.
The community code designation (i.e. CTJ- New Britain, Connecticut) indicates that
the person had some contact with that community. Either the individual was
married or died there or resided in the listed community, even for a brief time,
before moving elsewhere.
The names of females in the database may be married or maiden surnames. Some
of the womens' surnames contain the Polish feminine grammatical endings (-ska or
-cka) so be sure to search under both versions (i.e. Korzeniecki and Korzeniecka).
The majority of geographical information provides a village or parish of birth.
In a few cases, there is only a county, province or partition or country.
This is because the document from which the information was taken lacked more exact
information. For example, a marriage license may have listed the husband's
village of birth but for the wife the information was left blank or merely had "Poland"
or "Galicia" recorded.
A small number of the individuals in the database were not immigrants but spouses
of immigrants born in the United States.
The database spans the first half of the 20th century for the most part and concentrates
on the wave of immigrants who settled here between 1895 and 1920 although there
are scattered entries for later and earlier settlers.
There may be multiple entries for the same name. In most cases, these are
different individuals who shared the same first and last name. However, if
an individual had more than one spouse, that person may appear twice. What
appears here on line is but a mere fraction of the materials we hope to post eventually.
Most of the material we have is taken from selected localities in the states of
Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Delaware. Even if you think you
had no family in any of these states, check the database anyway. You never
know where your relatives may have been migrating before they settled down permanently.
Perhaps their lives touched a locality in one of these states and you are unaware
of this.
The database is, of course, not complete. It is virtually impossible to document
EVERY immigrant in a given community. If you do not find a person listed that
you think should be there, it is because we have no geographical information on
that person at this time. We will add such persons if you provide some documentary
evidence of the persons birthplace and their connection to the listed community.
Some of the names are spelled incorrectly. They may have been anglicized or
contain common errors made by record keepers who were native speakers of Polish.
Some names are dialect versions of surnames. Check all possibilities!
There is a $3 fee per name. If you happen to request an entry that says only
"Poland" we will, of course, refund your fee.
