As someone with some Polish roots, I sympathise with people requesting the handling of additional alphabets for place names. Since Poland has had, over the centuries, rather short periods of independence, does authenticity require the rendering of names in one of the Cyrillic alphabets or in the (fairly modern) half-romanized alphabet of modern Poland (ISO-8859-2)? Were the places to be recorded in Poland at the time of the event being recorded? This is a real issue for the northern regions of what is now Poland. Places like Filipow, where some of my ancestors come from, has been in Russia, Lithuania and Poland (and almost always disputed territory until after WW2). Should we record in the alphabet of the time of the event or of modern Poland? Is either more authentic than using a modern transliteration into ASCII or ISO-8859-1? For people with Ashkenazi ancestors, authenticity is a fluid concept. Names have often been through several transliterations. Many Polish Jewish names will have been "Cyrillicised" from the original Hebrew. In my case, it was Margolis (Hebrew/Greek)->Margolinsky (Polish)->Margolis (English). There is the additional complication that during the various influxes into the UK (and USA) immigration officers often misheard/couldn't cope with the names given and assigned their own versions! Our family view is that we record whatever the person was known by in the country where they resided. A further complication is the deep distrust for authorities shared by many immigrants (not just Jewish ones) given their bad experiences in the country they've just left. Anything source that required an immigrant to fill in an official form (especially BMD registrations and census documents) has to be regarded with some caution. One of my great-grandfathers was variously Moshe Cherakoff (approximately Polish), Charles Maurice and Maurice Morris! He also didn't register any of his daughters' births. Authenticity is an elusive concept. Bob