1849 Cadastral Map

1849 Kańczuga cadastral map and house index

Announcements, Research,

1849 Cadastral Map

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.

The map is online here:

http://maps.geshergalicia.org/cadastral/kanczuga-1849/

and the house and land owner database is searchable here:

http://search.geshergalicia.org

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.

Undated Galicia Business Directory

Undated Galicia Business Directory

Research,

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:

Undated Galicia Business Directory

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.

Videos from 2008 of the Kańczuga cemetery in Siedleczka

Holocaust, Videos,

The cemetery used by the Jewish community of Kańczuga was located in nearby Siedleczka. In 1942, the Nazis rounded up some 1000 plus Jews left in Kańczuga, took them to this cemetery and murdered them, dropping their bodies into a mass grave there. Since that time the cemetery was largely neglected, until 2008 when a group of Kańczuga descendants, including Michael Freund and Howard Nightingale, organized a renovation of the cemetery. The renovation included cleaning up the grounds and re-building a wall around the cemetery.

While the cemetery restoration was completed in May 2008, it seems that in March 2008 videos were posted to Youtube that show the cemetery prior to the restoration work. The second video shows the nearby memorial over the mass grave of those Jews murdered in 1942.

Video walkthrough of the Siedleczka-Kańczuga cemetery:

Video of the memorial to the 1000+ Jews murdered in 1942:

If you visit the cemetery in Siedleczka, consider videotaping your visit and posting an updated video of the current appearance of the cemetery and let us know (we’ll be happy to post it for you if you’d like).

Kanczuga Fancy Script

The first fruits…

Announcements, Research,

I am happy to announce that our project to retrieve documents from archives related to Kańczuga is beginning to bear its first fruits.

Kanczuga Fancy Script
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.

1850 Landowner Excerpt
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.

1889 Jewish Community Charter Excerpt
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.

Introducing Kanczuga.org

Announcements

Welcome to Kanczuga.org. This site is set up to consolidate research into the Jewish community of Kańczuga. Up until WWII, Kańczuga, although a small town, had a very large percentage of Jewish residents. Kańczuga also served as the center point of the Jewish community of a number of surrounding towns and villages. All of this was destroyed during WWII, when the Nazis either deported or shot all the remaining Jewish residents of Kańczuga and all the nearby towns by 1942.

This site has several goals:

It is intended that anyone looking for information on the Jews of Kańczuga will be able to either find the information here, or be directed to the right place to find what you need. Consult the Existing Resources page, and the Organizations and Web Sites sub-pages for this information.

New research into the Jewish community of Kańczuga is being initiated through this site. There are currently four different original research projects in process or planned, and we will add more as ideas for original research are submitted. To see the big picture, see the Research page. Current projects include:

  • Landsmanshaft Cemeteries project, where we have already photographed hundreds of gravestones from sections of cemeteries purchased by Kańczuga Landsmanshft organizations, and will be fully indexing those gravestones in the future.
  • Archival Records project, where we are creating an inventory of Kańczuga records that exist in the archives in Przemysl (Poland) and L’viv (Ukraine), and will then copy and index records that are not already available through other sites.
  • Nearby Villages project, where we will be creating an inventory of records in the Przemysl (Poland) and L’viv (Ukraine) archives for 21 different towns and villages which surround Kańczuga.
  • CAHJP Project, where we will be copying and translating documents held by the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) connected to Kańczuga.

Collecting photographs and stories related to the town of Kańczuga, and the Jewish community that existed there. In addition to creating whole albums of photographs from contributors, we will also seek to have photo essays written, stories contributed as articles on the site, and we will allow visitors to upload images directly to our Public Album.

Building a complete family tree of the Jewish community of Kańczuga before WWII back through the beginning of the 19th century. This will be achieved through collecting sections of people’s trees that intersection Kańczuga and combining them all into a merged family tree.

The site welcomes suggestions for new research, new site features, content, etc. If you want to make suggestions for the site, or volunteer to work on research projects or on the site itself, please Contact Us. If you can help fund any of our research projects, or just want to donate to our general operating fund, please Donate.