One of genealogy's most frustrating "brick walls" is the inability to locate your family's city, town, or village of origin in the old country. The only thing that's more frustrating is to be absolutely certain that you know the place your ancestors came from, only to discover, after years of wasted effort and expense, that you're wrong.
This article's focus is on families whose ancestors arrived in America within the last 125 years. The most common method of discovering places of origin for these families begins with standard searches of census documents, petition papers, military records, and so forth. But sometimes we can't even be sure of the information contained in these documents.
Early-twentieth-century census documents, for example, have a column for the birthplace of the parents of the census subjects, which often takes us back to a country of origin. Sometimes diligent census takers added the name of the province or county, such as "Vilna, Russia" or "Kovno, Russia." This can be a major aid in determining places of origin, but here a word of caution is required. Both Vilna (Vilnius) and Kovno (Kaunas) are the names of cities in Lithuania, but, almost without question, the census taker was referring here to provinces and not cities. This knowledge should help the researcher avoid some wild goose chases.
Most American documents which link our ancestors to their places of origin stop short of asking the name of the town from which ancestors came. Sometimes even those documents showing names of country of origin can be misleading. For example, since Poland did not exist as a political entity between 1795 and 1914, the documents would say "Austro-Hungarian Empire" or just "Austria." This causes some novice researchers to invest time and effort in looking not only for the wrong town, but in the wrong country.
Passenger Manifests
The most important American documents linking us with our towns of ancestral origin are passenger manifest lists. These lists are unique in that they are written in English, but were written in foreign ports when memories of the immediate past were fresh and relatively free from embellishment and exaggeration.
Passenger manifests (after 1892), as opposed to the earlier customs lists, asked passengers more and more questions over time than the typical five- or six-column customs list of the late 1880s. By 1905, the list included a column for the last permanent residence. This information is useful, but it has its own pitfalls.
The last place where a family lived is not necessarily the town it should be associated with; it may not be the place where it had most of its history and extended family. In 1907, the list asked for the name and address of the closest living relative in the country from whence the immigrant came. This is important information, but that relative may not live in the same town that your ancestors came from. By 1911, the lists included a split column for town and city of birth, in addition to the information about the place of last residence.
This information tends to be fairly accurate, as opposed to stories of family origin told in later years, which are remembered through the haze of time. It's important to understand some of the most important reasons why names of places of origin "changed" when people came to America.
The Stigma of Being from a "One-Horse Town." Many people wanted to show that they were sophisticated and claimed to be from great cities as opposed to rural villages and towns.
The "Tell Them What They Already Know" Syndrome. A person living in Nassau County on Long Island, while traveling to Indonesia, might tell people he is from New York rather than go into a long explanation about Nassau County or the town of Hempstead. Our ancestors did the same when they arrived on these shores.
Fear of Discrimination. People were afraid of being looked down upon because of prejudice against certain ethnic types. Sometimes Jews pretended to be Germans or Sicilians pretended to be Neapolitans. Irish immigrants sometimes tried to lose their accents (and much more about the past) during periods of anti-Irish sentiment.
Particular Customs. Most Irish folk, for example, gave more weight to the county of origin than the city in casual conversation. Someone from the town of Mallow might say that he was from County Cork unless asked for specifics. This is further complicated by the fact that the person, when pressed for more details, might say he was from Mallow when in fact he was from the adjacent townsland of Upper Quartertown.
Passenger List Problems
There are a number of problems in finding places of origin using manifests. Beyond issues of Soundexing, indexing, and the difficulty in locating the right document, if your ancestors came prior to 1905, the manifests will not likely give the name of a town of birth or last residence. (On occasion, an official creating the document prior to 1905 would write in the town anyway in the nativity column or elsewhere.)
Don't Give Up Yet
The following is an example of another source for ancestral towns which contains its own set of challenges and rewards. This document is specific to New York City research, but the concept will likely exist elsewhere and should be investigated. Besides, so many of us have roots in New York that you may find this useful for your own research.
The City Clerk Series
It would be appropriate to acknowledge here, with special thanks, Kenneth Cobb, director of the New York City Municipal Archives, for providing me with enormous guidance in the use of the City Clerk Series.
Here is a paraphrase of Mr. Cobb's description of the series:
Between 1866 and 1937, city policy called for the reporting of all marriages in New York City to the Health Department. The person who provided the ceremony was required to return a certificate of marriage to the Health Department.
Beginning in 1908, couples were required to obtain a license to marry from the Office of the City Clerk, and subsequently the marriage should have been reported to both the city clerk and the Health Department. It seems that far fewer marriages were reported to the Health Department than to the city clerk.
Approximately 12% of the marriages reported to the city clerk between 1908 and 1929 do not appear in the Health Department records. The Health Department records were acquired by the Municipal Archives in 1988. They have been microfilmed and are available for research.
The Health Department records are the ones usually made available for researchers, but are not the ones which provide the most information. The following information appears on the City Clerk Document Series. It is broken down into three components:
The first part is called the affidavit of marriage and contains the following information for both the bride and groom:
Full name
Color
Place of residence
Age
Occupation
Place of birth
Name of father/country of birth
Maiden name of mother/country of birth
Number of marriage
Former wife or wives (husband or husbands),
living or dead
Is applicant a divorced person?
If so, when and where and against whom was the
divorce or divorces granted?
Also included in the first section is the certificate of consent, which appears on the reverse of the affidavit form. This form had to be signed by parents or guardians of minors.
The second part of the application is the marriage license itself. It is basically a duplicate of the affidavit form, with the addition of the city clerk's signature.
The third section is the marriage certificate itself, which instructs the person who solemnized the marriage to return a signed license and certificate to the city clerk.
The City Clerk Series is unique because, in almost all cases, the bride and groom were required to write in the city-not just the country-of origin next to "place of birth." Naturally, the divorce information can be extremely important as well.
Consider the Implications
Suppose you had an ancestor who was born in Europe and wasn't old enough to be married until around 1908. Suppose the family arrived in 1890. Not only is this a pre-indexed period for passenger lists, it is not likely you would find information about the ancestral town even if the passenger list could be found.
So, say your great-grandmother arrived in 1890 as a two-year-old and married in 1908 at the age of twenty: You now have the City Clerk Series documents as a possible source to discover your family's ancestral town. A word of caution: Be advised that the problems we discussed previously with immigrant Americans reinventing the past could possibly be found right here. If the information here conflicts with the information on the manifest, the manifest should probably be given more weight. Still, for many people, the city clerk information will be the only documentary source of an ancestral town available to them.
The City Clerk Document Series has been microfilmed for Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island from 1908 through 1929. Queens and The Bronx will be ready in the spring of 1999.
The indexes for these documents are somewhat unusual but not difficult to use. The groom registry and the bride registry appear in alphabetical order of surname (groom's name and bride's maiden name) on opposite sides of the page. The years are divided by the four quarters of the calendar year.
You can write to the city clerk's office to request information about marriages, but unless you know the actual date of marriage (day, month, and year), you will be sent a Health Department form.
Learn from Mistakes
Recently I met with a family who had just returned from a very expensive trip to Poland, which was undertaken primarily to visit one of the family's ancestral towns. They got there and found nothing.
They did not prepare properly; they made no attempt to validate their assumptions by researching archival records. Armed only with a map drawn by an elderly relative based on stories he had heard from his mother, they headed out for the "ancestral town." Nothing seemed to match. Time and some properly conducted research may provide the answers, but they could have headed to Poland with a greater chance of success had they done some homework first.
The ability to flesh out your family's social history and find your family's earliest genealogical records is dependent on locating the towns and villages where they lived before arriving on these shores. The effort may be challenging, but the rewards are great.
Rafael Guber is the founder, president, and art director fo the Sepia Guild, and is one of the featured experts on the Ancestors PBS television series.
Ancestry Magazine
