Note: In this post I discuss some primary source documents from Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland] and Upper Silesia I was recently made aware of. I also explain to readers how to access these online ancestral records digitized by the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society. Finally, I highlight a few “gems” I uncovered that date back to my earliest known Bruck ancestor from Ratibor.
Related Posts:
POST 14: RATIBOR & THE BRAUER (BREWER) M. BRAUN “LINK” TO AMERICA
POST 14, POSTSCRIPT: RATIBOR & THE BRAUER (BREWER) M. BRAUN “LINK” TO AMERICA
This story begins with an email my good friend Peter Albrecht von Preußen (Figure 1) sent me with a link to a Dropbox account with a stash of primary source documents from Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland]. Regular readers will recognize this as the town in Upper Silesia (Figure 2) to which some of my Jewish ancestors had an association of over 100 years and where the erstwhile family establishment, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, was owned through three generations of my family, from around 1850 until 1926.
Having previously and on multiple occasions carefully examined three microfilm rolls of Jewish vital records from Ratibor (i.e., LDS Family History Center (FHC) Microfilms 1184447, 1184448, & 1184449) available through the Mormon Church’s familysearch website and having personally visited and spent many hours at the Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach Oddział w Raciborzu, the State Archives in Katowice, Branch in Racibórz (Figure 3), scrutinizing civil registration records of vital events for my family, I had scant expectations of finding anything new. I had no reason to believe additional documents of vital events for Jews from Ratibor still exist. I could not have been more wrong.
Below I will walk readers step-by-step through how to access the database I learned about that includes not only primary source documents about Jews from Ratibor and some adjoining towns but also the more extensive Catholic and Lutheran parish records from across Upper Silesia. I will also detail some of the most satisfying discoveries I made about some near and distant forebears, breakthroughs I honestly thought I would never realize. However, I’m going to start at the tail end and explain the origin of these primary source documents.
The source of the documents Peter sent me is the “Górnośląskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne ‘Silius Radicum’,” or the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society “Silesian Roots.” Under an agreement signed on the 21st of January 2015 with the State Archives in Katowice, the Society obtained permission to digitize genealogical records in the State Archive, a function not then being undertaken by the National Archives. The Society further obtained authorization to post the digitized records to their website.
The published books are classified according to the three main faiths, Roman Catholic, Evangelical, and Jewish within the historical area of Upper Silesia. The records generally cover the years 1800 to 1874 and are duplicates of records which were submitted to the court. At the time these records were created, the Standesämter, the civil registration offices, had not yet been established in Prussia, something which began in 1874.
The Ratibor-related files to which Peter Albrecht sent me the Dropbox link are listed in the following table:
| Book Signature Number | Polish & English Names | No. of Pages |
| 1693 | Racibórz akta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego—urodzenia 1851-1855.
Racibórz population records of the Jewish faith, births 1851 – 1855. |
304 |
| 1694 | Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia 1910
Racibórz population records of the Jewish faith, births 1910 |
12 |
| 1695 | Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–małżeństwa 1869-1870
Racibórz records of Jewish population, marriages 1869-1870 |
299 |
| 1696 | Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–małżeństwa 1872-1885
Racibórz records of the Jewish population, marriages 1872-1885 |
376 |
| 1697 | Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa 1852-1853
Racibórz population records of the Jewish faith, births + marriages 1852-1853 |
386 |
| 1698 | Racibórz(powiat)akta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, zgony 1841-1847
Racibórz (county) population records of the Jewish faith, births + deaths 1841-1847 |
17 |
| 1699 | Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, rozwody, zgony 1815-1844
Racibórz Jewish population records – births + marriages + divorces + deaths 1815-1844 |
87 |
| 1700 | Racibórzakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, rozwody, zgony 1845-1847
Racibórz Jewish population records, births + marriages + divorces + deaths 1845-1847 |
18 |
| 1701 | Gorzyceakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, zgony 1843-1847
Gorzyce (Groß Gorschütz) Jewish population records, births + marriages + deaths 1843-1847 |
26 |
| 1702 | Kornowacakta ludności wyznania mojżeszowego–urodzenia, małżeństwa, zgony1845-1848
Kornowac (Kornowatz) Jewish population records – births, marriages, deaths 1845-1848 |
24 |
| TOTAL PAGES | 1,549 |
For my purposes, Signature Books 1701 (Groß Gorschütz) and 1702 (Kornowatz) were of no interest.
While theoretically including records between 1800 and 1874, readers will notice significant gaps in what’s been digitized. Whether those records still exist or have yet to be scanned is unknown. Excluding Signature Books 1701 and 1702 which cover areas outside Ratibor, the table below shows the years for which birth, marriage, divorce, and death records are available for Ratibor through the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society’s website:
| Ratibor Births | Ratibor Marriages | Ratibor Divorces | Ratibor Deaths |
| 1815-1844 (Book 1699)
1841-1847 (Book 1698) 1845-1847 (Book 1700) 1851-1855 (Book 1693) 1910 (Book 1694) |
1815-1844 (Book 1699)
1845-1847 (Book 1700) 1869-1870 (Book 1695) 1872-1885 (Book 1697) |
1815-1844 (Book 1699)
1845-1847 (Book 1700) |
1815-1844 (Book 1699)
1841-1847 (Book 1698) 1845-1847 (Book 1700) |
Comparing the above to what’s available for Ratibor through the Mormon Church’s Family History Library, we find three films with Jewish records. Microfilm 1184447 includes cemetery deeds between 1888 and 1940; Microfilm 1184448 records deaths between 1865 and 1930; and Microfilm 1184449 documents births between 1815 and 1874 and marriages between 1814 and 1862. Clearly researchers would want to examine both databases since there’s only partial overlap. More on this below.
Before discussing the most informative documents found in the other Signature Books, let me describe the process step by step for accessing the primary source documents digitized by the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society:
- Go to https://siliusradicum.pl/en/ksiegi-metrykalne/
- On the portal page, readers can select one of four languages: English, German, Polish, or Czech;
- While the “User Panel” allows you to sign in or register, the records can be accessed without doing so simply by scrolling down the page to the list of towns;
- The towns for which Signature Books are available are listed alphabetically;
- By way of example, select “ASC Jewish Community—Racibórz (Ratibor”;
- Select “Browse online with Dropbox” towards the bottom of the page, and the ten Signature Books described above will be listed;
- Select one, then scroll through the pages, and download relevant pages individually;
- Once done perusing all the pages in a particular Signature Book, hit the “Back” button. Select “ASC gminy żydowskiej – Racibórz (Ratibor)” under “Copy to Dropbox” or “Download” and you’ll be taken back to the list of Signature Books. The first page of each Signature Book is a PDF page that describes its contents.
Towns in Upper Silesia besides Ratibor for which Jewish Signature Books have been digitized include Beuthen [today: Bytom, Poland]; Chorzow [today: Chorzów, Poland]; Dzietzkowitz [today: Dziećkowice, district of Mysłowice, Poland]; Gleiwitz [today: Gliwice, Poland]; Gollasowitz [today; Golasowice, Poland]; Kattowitz [Katowice, Poland]; Königshütte [today: Royal Huta, Poland]; Myslowitz [today: Mysłowice, Poland]; Pless [today: Pszczyna, Poland]; Rybnik [today: Rybnik, Poland]; and [Tarnowskie Góry, Poland];
For my purposes, Ratibor Signature Books, 1693, 1695, 1699, and 1700 were most informative.
I dub my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Nathan Bruck (1770-1836) the paterfamilias of the Ratibor line of the Bruck family. As recently as Post 149, Part 1, I wrote it was indeterminately estimated he was born in 1762 or 1770 and died in 1832 or 1836. Thanks to a death register listing I found in Signature Book 1699, I now know his exact death date, the 29th of June 1836, when he was 66 years of age (Figure 4), meaning he obviously was born in 1770. This was the most exciting find in the Signature Books from Ratibor.
I will devote an upcoming post to the scant but tantalizing clues I’ve collected about Jacob Nathan Bruck, including the number of children I can firmly document that he and his wife, Marianne Aufrecht, begat. Various ancestral trees I’ve found on ancestry.com and in MyHeritage claim that his first offspring was a daughter named Helene Bruck who was purportedly married to an Itzig Mendel Guttman Aufrecht. Serendipitously, I also found Helene Aufrecht, née Bruck’s, death register listing showing she died in 1838 at the age of 68 (Figure 5), meaning that like Jacob Bruck she too was born in 1770. They could conceivably have been twins but were more likely cousins. While it’s possible Jacob’s first daughter was indeed named Helene, something I’ve not yet found evidence of, Helene Aufrecht was assuredly not Jacob’s daughter and Itzig Aufrecht was certainly not Jacob’s son-in-law. Intriguingly, Helene gave birth to a child in 1815 at the improbable age of 45. (Figure 6)
I often remind readers that some information found on family trees in ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and Geneanet with respect to dates of vital events and names and numbers of offspring is notoriously unreliable. Unverified vital data is often cloned from existing trees by people seeking to build their own genealogical charts. I typically reject much of this data unless it’s backed up by primary source documentation, particularly as it relates to individuals born in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when records on Jews living then are sparse.
It is not my intention to review all the personally intriguing discoveries I made in perusing the digitized Silius Radicum records from Ratibor, since they are of scant interest to most readers. However, several things stand out that are worth briefly discussing.
Even if the Ratibor records in Silius Radicum themselves are unique, some of the data was previously known to me from similar documents in which the same data was recorded. For example, three of the paterfamilias Jacob Nathan Bruck’s oldest daughters were married, respectively, in 1814 (Wilhelmine Bruck), 1817 (Dorothea Babette Bruck), and 1822 (Fanny Bruck). I previously discovered this information on LDS Family History Center Microfilm 1184449 where a register documenting their marriages and family relationships was found. (Figures 7-8) On the typed Jewish Records Indexing-Poland database, much of the same information is recorded, presumably copied from the Mormon Church’s films. (Figure 9)
In Silius Radicum I discovered register pages for the same three marriages, with family relationships similarly noted. (Figures 10-11) However, the handwriting is noticeably different and the registers dissimilar in appearance, meaning the information was recorded in duplicate and likely stored separately. Clearly, the records that Silius Radicum digitized were never photographed by the Mormon Church. Obviously, this is noteworthy because it means the possibility exists that additional records for Jews from Ratibor and Upper Silesia may eventually materialize.
One of my ancestors from Ratibor through whom I’m related to most of my cousins in America because of his fecundity was the brewer Markus Braun (1817-1870). On LDS Family History Center Microfilm 1184449, the birth register shows he had twelve children with his first wife, Caroline Spiegel, then another two with his second wife, Johanna Goldstein, the last of whom was born after he died and named after him. Signature Book 1693, while only covering the years 1851 through 1855, includes copies of the actual birth certificates for several of Markus’ children with his first wife. In Signature Book 1700, I learned that Markus and Caroline were married on the 25th of August 1846 (Figure 12), and discovered they had a daughter named Sara, the first of 13 rather than only 12 children, on the 28th of October 1846 (Figure 13), shortly after they wed.
Again, the dates of birth of most of Markus’ children was previously known to me from Microfilm 1184449. What is new based on the Signature Books from Ratibor are the actual birth certificates for several of Markus and Caroline’s children and the discovery of a 13th child with his first wife. This again proves that the documents digitized by Silius Radicum were not previously photographed by the Mormon Church and likely have not been closely studied by people investigating their ancestors from Ratibor.
One of the most extensive records I discovered was a 14-page marriage folio in Signature Book 1695 which includes Ratibor marriages from only 1869 and 1870. This brief period happens to coincide with when Alma Braun (1851-1919) (Figure 14), one of Markus’ daughters, got married to Adolph Schück (1840-1916) (Figure 15) on the 1st of September 1870, and is their marriage file. One of my German cousins translated and interpreted the document for me. Suffice it to say, the pages contain an astonishing amount of ancestral information, including the precise date Markus Braun died, the 4th of February 1870, at the age of 52; clearly, he died some months before Alma got married. Additionally, had I not already known this information, the file would have allowed me to work out family relationships which are recorded in detail.
As I mentioned above, there is some overlap between the Jewish records for Ratibor available online through familysearch and the newer stash found in Silius Radicum. For example, all the offspring of Jacob Nathan Bruck’s three eldest daughters married, respectively, in 1814, 1817, and 1822, are found in both databases. By contrast, for my great-great-grandparents Samuel Bruck (1808-1863) (Figure 16) and Charlotte Marle (1809-1861) (Figure 17), the Silius Radicum records only include eight of their nine known children; the ninth one can only be found on LDS Microfilm 1184449.
In closing, I admit that I do not know whether the Jewish and non-Jewish vital records the Upper Silesian Genealogical Society has digitized are widely known and/or used by ancestral researchers. I can only speak for myself and acknowledge that I was unaware of them. I hope for others who are in my situation that they may discover some hidden “gems” like I did.