PRUSSIAN city and church RECORDS

Once I discovered ancestors that had emigrated from Kurkau, Prussia, I started looking for their birth, marriage, and death records. I had some luck on Ancestry and FamilySearch, although many record entries were missing and there were numerous indexing errors. The real “finds” happened when I accessed the Polish government web site that displays digital images of the original city and church records in German. It required a little effort, but once I understood how it was organized and how to translate a few German words, I did not need to understand Polish to be rewarded with more information. I was able to find their parents, children that died before emigration, siblings, in-laws that also emigrated to the same town in America, and much more.
 
The following steps might seem overwhelming, but taken one by one they are not difficult. If you give them a try, you too, could learn more about your family! 
 
Steps for accessing Prussian city and church records:

• Determine the church diocese for a town or village using the Meyers Gazetteer https://www.meyersgaz.org  
  • Enter the village name
  • A page appears showing the town and the government entities in which in belongs; click on the name for further detail about the village
  • Underneath the village name is a menu bar; click on Ecclesiastical. A page appears that provides the parishes by denomination for that village
  • Access the website for Archiwum Panstowowe W Olsztyme Archiwum Panstowowe W Olsztynie   (http://olsztyn.ap.gov.pl/baza/wynik.php)
  • Do a “find” for the church diocese name; it should take you to all of the entries for that diocese.
  • The title for each volume is in German. (Google Translate, https://translate.google.com, is one site that can be used to translate the titles.) The years the records cover are in the right hand column.  Note: There is an alphabetical index by year (Alphabetisches Nahmen Verzeichniss zu Kirchenbücher).  However, I found entries in the records that I did not find in the index.
  • Once a volume is selected it is possible to click on the page number. If the page is not known, it is possible to use the “trial and error” method of page selection remembering that they are organized chronologically within the church diocese, not by town.
  • If you need help understanding the German entries a good free tutorial on how to interpret the records as well as number of commonly used words may be found on FamilySearch: (https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/German_Genealogical_Word_List).