After the interesting time I had in Rutki, and backtracking some of my journey to find that memorial, I went back to Rutki and followed that sign to Wizna.
I knew the road would take me through a few even smaller villages. One of them was Grądy Woniecko, the birth place of the earliest Mularzewicz ancestor who’s birth record I have. I only stopped long enough to take a picture of the sign. It seemed like the only thing in town was a prison, which Polish Wikipedia confirms opened in 1999.
The earliest Mularzewicz record I have so far is for the a marriage for Moszko in 1838 in Wizna. However, Wizna is primarily known to me as where my Kurlender family comes from. My great-grandmother Sorka was born there in 1865. When I first got her Polish birth record, I was not sure it was hers because I lacked more information about her. But I was just being hesitant. After retrieving all of the indexed Kurlender records, I was able to put them all together into one large family tree.
As I did with Rutki, I tried to find where the synagogue used to be, but while I found some pictures online, I could find no address or other details. So I just went to the center of town. There was a sign pointing for information, but when I followed it, I got to a one way street out of the center of town and could never find where it wanted me to go.
And to be a good genealogist, the names inscribed on the monument in the Wizna park:
- Dobronski Jozef
- Glinski Jan
- Grzeszczyk Marceli
- Konopko Franciszek
- Krasnowski Jozef
- Lipinski Jozef
- Markfart Boleslaw
- Olszewski Teofil
- Ostrowski Stefan
- Pruszko Jozef
- Piotrowski Andrzej
- Ptaszynski Edmund
- Radziwon Antoni
- Renkiewicz Apolinary
- Szulc Antoni
- Trepanowski Jozef
The URL of this post is http://idogenealogy.com/blog/2012/09/23/wizna/.
All photos and content Copyright 2012 by Banai Lynn Feldstein.
Hello, thank you so much for sharing your travels with us. I hope to travel to Poland one day as well. I’m searching for a shtetl I believe our relatives came from called Wizan. Do you know if this might be the same one?
The Polish language does strange things to the endings of words, but it would not make Wizna into Wizan. If that is the correct town name you are looking for, then it’s not the same as Wizna. If you found that on a document that could have misspelled it, then you might be looking for Wizna.
I also have been searching for the village where my ancestors came from and I know that it is Wizna. I have been thinking about visiting the town in the near future.
Any chance your are looking for your grandmother’s birthplace?
The Wizna that I am referring to is between Łomża and Bialystok in Northeast Poland:
14 miles west of Łomża and 34 miles east of Bialystok.
Marc, my grandmother was born in Rutki. Other relatives were from Wizna. They’re pretty close to each other.
I think you mean east of Lomza, but yes, I think that was the only Wizna in Poland. I was able to figure out the correct Rutki for my family because some of them were from Wizna. There were possibly 50 towns named Rutki, Rutka, Rudki, and Rudka in Poland, and I had a few of those spellings on different records.
A note to all who commented and to Banai Lynn Feldstein: I made some contacts in Wizna and plan to visit there sometime soon, corona permitting. Many of the Wizna Jewish residents are buried in a mass grave there. My trip will be exploratory to find ways to force the local government to convert the mass grave to an official cemetery. I may need your help if things don’t go smoothly. Do any of you have an old address or names of your relatives for me to look up? I do speak Polish.