by Jonathan D. Shea and Diane Bojniewicz Szepanski

 ISBN 0-9631579-5-7                         Copyright 2006

This publication lists tens of thousands of towns and villages with the name
of the parish church with which the locality was affiliated.  Place names
repeat frequently in Europe.  For example, there are three pages of listings
for the common place name Nowosiolki alone!! 

This book identifies each of them with precision, thereby enabling the
researcher to see how they are distributed and search in other sources for
corroborating geographical data to determine which village is the correct
one.  It focuses on the old Archdiocese of Wilno, a territorially expansive
Roman Catholic diocese located in the Russian Empire in the 19th century.

The land area spans portions of three modern day countries; eastern
Lithuania, the northeastern corner of Poland and the northwest portion of
Belarus.  While guides of this type exist for most of Eastern Europe, there
was no compiled source for individuals whose family roots lie in the area
under study.

The book itself is massive and the costs of printing and shipping would be
prohibitive.  The authors provide a service allowing you to search the list
of towns and villages and identify the ones that interest you. 

The links below will allow you to access the database of villages (located
 in the former Archdiocese of Wilno - now known by its Lithuanian name,
Vilnius - as of the late 19th century). The purpose of the project is to help
genealogists locate the villages they are from which their ancestors came
and identify the parish that served each village -- a key step in gaining
access to the birth, marriage, and death records that comprise the most
significant sources of genealogical information.

File Coding

The files below are in text format, with UTF-8 encoding. This is the simplest
way of formatting text that preserves the diacritical marks in Central and
Eastern European languages, which can be crucial to finding the right place.
The text format also protects you -- viruses cannot be activated from within
text files. If you click on a file and the result appears garbled, you need only
adjust the coding. In Internet Explorer 6.0, for instance, simply select View
on the toolbar (or press Alt and V at the same time), and under Encoding
click on "Unicode (UTF-8)."

Duplicate Entries

Please note that many places in this part of the world share the same name.
The reason Gaj, for instance, appears in the list 7 times is because there are
7 places in the database by that name. If you contact the authors to ask
about a specific town or village, your chances of receiving a helpful reply are
greatly enhanced if you can provide some information that helps clarify which
place you need.

Polish Names

The information sources available to the authors were mostly in Polish, and
that's why the Polish versions of place names predominate in the list. You can
read a short file designed to help you figure out the Lithuanian or Belarusian
version of a Polish place name by clicking here.

Map

To see a map of the area covered by the Archdiocese of Wilno, click here.

To Get Information:

If you find a place in the list and believe it is your village, you can send a request
for more information to the authors. 

The numbers in parentheses following the village name indicate the total
number of villages that bear this name.  Therefore, if there is a (3) after
a particular village, this means that there are three villages with this name
all belonging to three different parishes.  Please use these guidelines
before calculating the correct fee.

Please send the names of your village(s), along with a check for $3.00 for each
village requested, payable to Diane Szepanski. (please do not make it
payable to PGSCTNE or LANGUAGE & LINEAGE PRESS ). Please enclose your e-mail address or send a self-addressed, stamped envelope. 

Please send request to:

Wilno Diocese Request
Diane Szepanski
138 Fern Dr
Plantsville CT  06479

If you have questions about this service, you can e-mail here.

Village and Town Lists:  Names Beginning with . . .

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