Tips to Reading Records from the Polish State Archives

I have spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours reading a variety of scanned records from the Polish State Archives and want to simply share some ‘tips and tricks’ on how to read certain things on the records that may not be obvious…

Names

False, Recte, and Vel

The most common, puzzling piece of reading names is the usage of the Latin terms recte, vel, and false between two surnames. For example:

Conscription record for Chaim Adler *recte* Kristinopol

Conscription record for Szaya Cytryn *vel* Psachie

Conscription record for Juda Leiman *false* Moster

Conscription record for Feiwel Donerstag *false* Pfifan

The use of recte and false terms refer, in general, to whether or not the child’s parents’ marriage was registered with the local municipality (in almost all cases, the parents were religiously married; this term pertains to whether or not the marriage was registered):

recte – the marriage was registered (Latin: true, correct, etc..)
false – the marriage was not registered (Latin: false, incorrect, etc..)

As for the term vel, this generally is interpreted as an alias (Latin: or)

Quite often in records the order in which the names are listed can provide insight into which surname comes from the mother and which comes from the father. Most often the format is [father’s surname] recte/false [mother’s surname] but this is not a firm rule! I have seen numerous instances where the exact opposite turns out to be true.

Related to this is the fact that many children whose parents’ marriage was considered illegitimate would only use their mother’s surname in legal documents. Then later on the parents’ marriage would be registered and hence new children would use their father’s surname. It gets worse when the father or mother already uses recte/false for his/her names. Here’s a common scenario:

Father: Joseph Komito
Mother: Malka Goldberg

1st child (marriage is not registered):
Chaim Goldberg
OR
Chaim Komito f Goldberg (more common)
OR
Chaim Goldberg f Komito (less common)

2nd child (marriage is registered):
Abraham Komito
OR
Abraham Komito r Goldberg (more common)
OR
Abraham Goldberg r Komito (less common)

Two First Names

If a child has two first names, it is not often obvious where the first names stop and the surname begins. For example, consider a child whose name is Joseph Chaim, son of Schya Abraham. His name would be “Joseph Chaim Abraham”. To make this clear, the record will often say “Joseph Chaim 2ga Abraham”, where the 2ga signifies two first (given) names.