Karen Prytula wrote: > Maybe you can help me a wee bit further...another place name on John > Gladsyz's Canadian marriage record, is CHOWSTKOW... Karen, One thing I've learned after 19 years of researching my ancestry is that I'm pretty convinced that clerks wrote down the verbal replies given to them to the questions asked on the forms and likely didn't ask how to spell anything. My ancestors were educated and literate, yet many of the spellings for surnames and place names on U.S. records were wrong. Most of the spelling errors were phonetic spellings based on the English alphabet - something that my immigrant ancestors wouldn't have done when spelling words native to the Polish language. To me, "CHOWSTKOW" actually looks like a combination of a phonetic spelling and a mis-spelling of Czortków. The Polish CZ is pronounced like the English CH. I wouldn't treat it as a separate location, yet, unless you uncover evidence to support that possibility. Thanks so much for the kind offer to help me with research in the Ottawa area, but I don't have any ancestors who settled in Canada. -Marie

Thank you Marie. ----- Original Message ----- From: "MJDallas" <rwlistsboards@comcast.net> To: <poland-roots@rootsweb.com> Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008 4:38 PM Subject: Re: [POLAND] GLADYSZ - Does anyone have this surname in their family tree? Karen Prytula wrote: > Maybe you can help me a wee bit further...another place name on John > Gladsyz's Canadian marriage record, is CHOWSTKOW... Karen, One thing I've learned after 19 years of researching my ancestry is that I'm pretty convinced that clerks wrote down the verbal replies given to them to the questions asked on the forms and likely didn't ask how to spell anything. My ancestors were educated and literate, yet many of the spellings for surnames and place names on U.S. records were wrong. Most of the spelling errors were phonetic spellings based on the English alphabet - something that my immigrant ancestors wouldn't have done when spelling words native to the Polish language. To me, "CHOWSTKOW" actually looks like a combination of a phonetic spelling and a mis-spelling of Czortków. The Polish CZ is pronounced like the English CH. I wouldn't treat it as a separate location, yet, unless you uncover evidence to support that possibility. Thanks so much for the kind offer to help me with research in the Ottawa area, but I don't have any ancestors who settled in Canada. -Marie ********************************* Need to contact the list manager? Write to Marie at Poland-Roots-admin@rootsweb.com ---------------------------------- Discussion of Polish food, culture, and customs are welcome on the list as long as the discussion stays pertinent to the topic of this list: researching our Polish roots. ---------------------------------- Browse the list's archives here: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index?list=poland-roots Search the list's archives here: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/search?aop=1 ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to POLAND-ROOTS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Karen, I don't know of a place called Crotkow, but to me it looks close enough to "CHOWSTKOW" that they could possibly be the same place. In some older style handwriting, the lower case "r" (second letter in Crotkow) and the lower case "h" (second letter in Chowstkow) can look similar to each other, so it may be that a transcriber looked at a handwritten "Chotkow" and thought it was "Crotkow." This is all speculation on my part, of course. There are map websites where you can look up place names in Poland that are very helpful with things like this. I used to have a list of them, but my computer crashed recently and I lost it. I seem to recall that there may have been a link to one of these at the Polish Genealogical Society of America website, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone else on the list can help you with this. Michael Wawrzynski