Polish Bureaucracy....

Isabella spent some of the long drive busy on the phone.  After a while, she finally told us that she had made an appointment for us at the central archives of the Sosnowiec neighborhood.  We weren't expecting this turn of events and I was expecting it to be a bit of a goose chase since Isabella had told us to lower our expectations. The woman she spoke to at the archives had looked up the last name 'Gut' on her computer database and had turned up nothing.  But we went anyways....

The building was incredibly modern and we went up to the second floor and waited about 5 minutes for our scheduled appointment.  The woman was initially abrupt and didn't really want to be bothered with finding our needle in her haystack.  I had prepared a family tree with as much information about names and dates that I could gather and armed with that, we attempted to cross reference the information I had with anything she could find.  

The woman kept shaking her head and saying that she found nothing until she finally stood up, opened up a tall cupboard in the back and pulled out a huge pile of ancient books.  She pulled one out after another, flipped pages back and forth and kept asking me to repeat the various names of all my grandfather's siblings and parents. 

More head shaking.

Finally, when I said my grandfather's name, Melech, she shook her head back and forth and said, "No!  Meiloch!"

We were a little shocked and then I nodded.  "Meilech Gut!" I said.  Then she nodded and finally let us see the page she was looking at.  It was amazing... 

What was amazing about it was that this page she had found, this hand-calligraphied page sitting all these years collecting dust in the archives in Sosnowiec told us things about my grandfather that we never knew...  

My grandfather never knew the day he was born, nor the exact year.  He guessed he was born in 1917 but we were never sure.  When he emigrated to Canada, the immigration officials chose a birthday for him and his whole life we all celebrated his birthday on December 25th.  This document showed us that he was born July 29th, 1914 and that he was really 96 when he died and not 93 like we had originally thought...

The most hilarious part of this unbelievable document was that his father hadn't filed his birth records until 1934!  At the end of the document, it was written (and this is not a joke....) "and the records tribunal condemns this man for not filing these important documents sooner and attributes this lack of respect for the tribunal to his probable laziness."

....and laughing ensued.....

You can see the name in bold....

It's spelled Majloch.  Isabella kindly translated the document for us and I'll put that in a separate post so stay tuned....

Once we found the first document, the archivist now had more information to work with and found 2 more, Shmuel Aryeh, spelled Szmulem Arya, and you can see the name of his wife below, Estera Feldman (no relation that we know of, but a rather interesting coincidence...)

Sura, was Sarah, my grandfather's sister....