In a message dated 2/28/2006 7:14:58 AM Mountain Standard Time, silvagen@gmail.com writes: Out of curiosity, what makes people think the village is in Galicia? The posting I copied to the GB list came from Catherine Havermeier on the PBS list. She suggested that the book was about Austrian Poland. If the actual references are to Russian Poland then I suspect her assumption was wrong. I would like to comment that a peasant's life could vary somewhat between regions but there were still quite a few similarities as Ms. Havermeier noted when she said that her ancestors from western (Prussian) Poland told of a life very similar to the one described in the book. The Russians were probably the last to do away with serfdom and their peasants probably had a somewhat harsher life than those ruled by the Prussians or Austrians. There was an uprising and war against the Russians in 1830-1831 but I don't know if that spilled over into Galicia. I suspect that it affected the Austrian Kaiser's attitude toward the Poles of Galicia in some way. I remember reading a speech by a Polish peasant from Galicia who was elected to the first Austrian parliament after the 1848 rebellion. He was furious because they were considering paying some sort of "compensation" to the nobles for the land they would now own instead of rent. He read a litany of torturous punishments he had had to endure for virtually no reason and told how he had to grovel whenever his "lord" was present. He said something like, "And for THIS I should pay compensation!!!" I have not found any similar cases of such harsh landlords in Bohemia (after about 1830) but that does not mean there were none. The Bishofteinetz Heimatbuch tells of a nobleman who "punished" a teacher who was a freeman for marrying the daughter of a serf by making him forfeit his free status. It was not until after many years that the nobleman finally restored the teacher to free status -- although by law teachers were supposed to be free. It seems the nobility could interpret the law as they chose because they were also the first in line in the justice system and this nobleman chose to ignore or deny the teacher's many petitions. Everything I have heard about the Russians seems to indicate that their system was perhaps one of the harshest. I believe they continued the 14-17 years of military service for conscripts long after Austria hadn changed the law to 3 years active and 9 years in the reserves (about `1868). My husband's grandfather was Lithuanian and the family were in an area then ruled by Russia. His father raised horses. One day he sent the son to market with a herd and told him that when he sold the horses to take the money and just keep going to America. Five of his brothers eventually joined him. One went back for some reason. He got caught and ended up in the Russsian army for a number of years before he managed to get back to Pennsylvania.. Karen