Hello all. I've read here & in other genealogy groups that people often didn't declare birth/marriage/divorce/death with the civil government in Galicia & Poland etc. because the pricing was prohibitive, so all info was registered only religiously. Something like a marriage might be registered well afterwards for a paperwork reason -- impending illness/emigration for instance, explaining why I've see marriages of people in their 60s (who had kids in their 20s). And this is why birth records will say that a child is "illegitimate" because parents not civilly married.
I have a few questions about this.
- What was the cost of such a registration in Galicia & Congress Poland?
- Was it the same situation in "Russia"/Ukraine?
- How did these costs compare to people's "net wealth" (or whatever you wanna call it)?
I found the 1880 birth in Krakow of a cousin's husband on JRI-Poland & after I got lost looking on the new Polish site, I tried familysearch, using the film # listed on JRIP. The film wasn't available for me to page through at home, so I requested the record via the new
FHL lookup service. I got back not just a copy of the page but also a close-up (both JPGs) as well as a complete word-for-word translation (Word doc), amazing!!
In the nice explanatory notes after the translation it says "his parents were married only religiously, in a synagogue, not in the civil records office. The custom to avoid taxes when having many children." That last sentence surprised me -- after all, future kid births has nothing to do with marriage registration, so that's obviously wrong. But I assume this was just confused with the question of birth registration costs -- was it almost impossible in the first place (even for just one kid), or was it just super expensive?
I want to send a response thanking the service but also correcting this comment, but first i need to edumacate myself!
regards,
Juliana Berland (France)
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Galicia: BADER, BADIAN, FELDMANN, FREIDENHEIM/FREUDENHEIM, GERTLER, VIENER * Germany: ADELSDORFER, BÄR/BAER, EPSTEINN, HAUSSMAN, ISSAK, MEYER, MOSES, ROSENSTEIN * Romania: HORNSTEIN * Russia: AMBURG, BENIN/BERLAND, BERKOVICH/BERKOWITZ, EPSTEIN, GELBURD/GOLDBERG/GAYLBURD/GILBERT
