Last month I posted a message about a mystery related to
indices that JRI-Poland had received for Tarnow, but which
did not match up with any actual records in the Tarnow Archives.
There were two sets of unknown indices: 3240 Births and 2646
Deaths.

As a result of a very intuitive analysis by Marilyn Dornhelm, we
now know the true source of one set of these indices. The Birth
index is actually >from Tarnopol. This is not at all close to
Tarnow geographically, but very close alphabetically. A possible
explanation is that this set of indices was collected with many
other records during war years and then "returned" to the wrong
archive later on, possibly because of a torn or illegible label.
We are going to ask the Archivist to take a closer look. Perhaps
the old label is still there but hard to read or covered up.

This index does not match the index that JRI-Poland already has
for Tarnopol, because the surnames of the new-born child are
sometimes the mother's name rather than the father's (as they
are in the existing Tarnopol index). The given names are an
almost exact match with the previous Tarnopol index. Apparently
the newly discovered, mislabeled index was made using legal
surnames, reflecting whether or not the parents were married in
a civil ceremony, without regard to a religious marriage. We
will be looking at a way to integrate this information with the
Tarnopol index that is on-line already.

On behalf of JRI-Poland, I want to extend our deepest appreciation
to Marilyn Dornhelm for solving this mystery for us. At the same
time I would like to thank the many others who replied with ideas!

I have removed the Tarnopol Births >from the mystery file and placed
a new file containing only the mystery Deaths on-line. The file
also has a list of surnames, sorted both alphabetically and by
frequency. This new Excel file may be downloaded from:
http://www.jri-poland.org/TarnowMysteryDeaths.xls

Please take a second look at the surnames in this revised list and
see if you can help us find the true source of this last set of
records (Deaths 1877-1899, plus a small number through 1942).

Thank you,

Howard Fink
Tarnow Archive Coordinator
Jewish Records Indexing - Poland