Scott L. wrote: "Depending on the records I view (mostly marriage records for my
g-great grandmother and her siblings, and her own death record), the spelling for
the town in Prussia >from which she and her family came is listed as Ostrowa,
Ostrowo, and Ostrova. I have searched the internet and found quite a few matches
throughout Central Europe with these town names. Any advice on how I can pinpoint
which of these towns in Prussia my family came from?

Scott:
Tell us more about the records themselves. Where did you find them?
What, specifically, do they say? Can you show them to us on ViewMate or
otherwise?

http://www.literad.de/geschichte/ortsbuch39.html

is a fine source for info about German towns, villages, etc. It tells us that
there were eight (8) places named Ostrowo in Prussia: 7 in Posen province, 1 in
West Prussia. One of them (today's Ostrowo Wielkopolski) was the seat
of the county with the same name, and it's a good bet that among the 8,
that one is where your folks came from. In 1890 there were over 1,000
Jews there--over 10% of the general population. The other 7 seem to
have been wide places in the road, more or less.

Ostrowo is not well-served by the archives, alas. The only Jewish item
that the LDS library has on film is the 1836-8 family register, which
likely connects well with the Posen citizenship list that Ed Luft (Hi,
Ed!) published some years ago. If you have reel--er, real--patience,
the civil-registration books for 1874-1893 are also available on
microfilms--21 of them--but they cover everybody in town, not just the Jews.
On the other hand, the first 4 reels are indexes...

Roger Lustig Princeton, NJ <trovato@verizon.net>
researching Upper Silesia, plus a Posen ancestor or two