Three cadastral maps from the Kańczuga Nearby Villages Project have been found, scanned, and are now available in the Gesher Galicia Map Room. We are very grateful to the team at Gesher Galicia, both in the US and in Poland, that have made it possible to find these and make them available to researchers everywhere.
We don’t yet know of associated house indexes for these maps (like there is for the Kańczuga map), but if we find them we will be sure to transcribe them and make them available. If you have family from these towns, it would be great if you could share information on your family, when they lived in the town, etc. in the comments below.
After several years of effort in the Polish archives, funded by donors from the Kańczuga mailing list, I’m happy to announce that we now have a cadastral map of Kańczuga. The map is from 1849 and corresponds directly to a database of house and land owners that is also now indexed and online in on the Gesher Galicia web site.
If you want, you can scroll down on the left side, and under ‘Record Sources’ you select:
Kańczuga Homeowners List (1849)
That will show you the 255 records in that database, with 40 records shown at a time. Otherwise you can search in the full database, then select the above source to filter it so only the results from that database is shown (there is no way to directly search just that database).
The database includes the house numbers, and correspond to the house numbers on the map. The original data source, a ledger, has land plot numbers as well, but is not in the database online (yet). Donors to the Kańczuga research project can receive the original scans of the ledger. If you’re a donor and want the original scans, or want to donate to the project, please send me a message via the contact page.
Genealogyindexer.org, the web site created by Logan Kleinwaks, is an incredible resource for Jewish genealogy research. If you’re not familiar with it, I suggest checking it out. The site offers a search engine of over 300,000 pages of books that have been scanned and placed online, including business and phone directories, yizkor books, school records, military records, etc. You can follow which new documents are added to the site by following the @gindexer twitter account.
There are hundreds of records that mention Kańczuga, and I recommend doing your own search, but I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention a new document added recently, which is an undated Galicia Business Directory, probably published between 1907 and 1913. Here’s the page that includes the entry on Kańczuga:
The job titles are in German. You can use Google Translate to translate them. As Markus Thurm is in my family tree, I looked up what a Lotteriekollekteur was – it’s a lottery agent.
Also worth nothing is the line with a few words and the little graphics at the top of the entry. These are explained on page 7 of the full document, and it means that Kanczuga was a market town and community of 2338 people, uses the court in Przeworsk, with both a post office and a telegraph station. If you look at the other entries on the page, you’ll see that it points to which towns the people went to for postal mail and for telegraph service. So even from this single page we can see that Kanczuga was the central market town for the surrounding communities, and was where many of them went for mail and telegraph service.
If you find your relative on the page, post in the comments below.
I am happy to announce that our project to retrieve documents from archives related to Kańczuga is beginning to bear its first fruits.
Cover Page from 1819 Kanczuga Landowner Record Book
We’ve identified several important records in the L’viv archives, including landowner records from 1819/1820, 1833 and 1850. The records from 1833 and 1850 were not known to exist for Kańczuga before, so this is really great news. Now we need to organize the indexing of these records.
Excerpt from 1850 Landowner Records
There are also some documents connected to the Jewish community of Kańczuga, such as a community charter from 1889. These kinds of documents do not have as many names as property owner lists, but do provide us with very interesting information on what the community was like in those days, and how it was organized.
Excerpt of 1889 Kanczuga Jewish Community Charter
There are some additional documents we believe exist, but we have not yet been able to locate. This can happen when a document is listed in the local inventory, but is not where it is supposed to be. It’s possible a mistake was made and the document doesn’t actually exist, or it’s possible they were just misplaced. In either case we may never locate them, but we will continue to try to find what we can.
We are currently working to make these documents viewable even before we index them, to those people who donated to the project. The index, when ready, will be freely available, but we don’t know when that will be finished. We expect to have the images viewable by donors online in the coming weeks. Donors will be contacted directly with instructions on how to access the files. If you are interested in viewing these documents and have not donated to the project, we of course welcome you to contribute now (minimum of $50) and we will send you the image access instructions as well (when the images are ready). If you are contributing to this project, please make sure to write in the donor note that it is for the Kańczuga Archival Records project.
We will be moving next on to the Przemysl archives to discover what records exist there for Kanczuga. We already know of the Birth, Marriage and Death records there that have been indexed by JRI-Poland (for which we are very grateful to JRI-Poland), but we will be checking to make sure no other documents exist there that may be of interest.
