1929 Polish Business Directory Project

Jewish Records Indexing - Poland in cooperation with JewishGen

These listings not only tell us how our families earned their livings but often they are the only accessible source of 20th Century information about our relatives.

The 1929 directory is the base for the project. This directory is organized by occupation within each town. Entries typically include the name of the business or proprietor, and the address or street name. The directory has an occupation section with translations from English to Polish, French to Polish, German to Polish and Russian to Polish. Within the directory pages, occupations are listed in Polish with a French translation, and range from doctor and banker to midwife and stall-operator at the weekly marketplace. Click here to download an English/French/Polish translation table of all occupations.

Each town listing starts with information about the town, the larger the town, the more comprehensive the description.

Phase 1 – Creation of the Town Index

The first phase in the 1929 Polish Business Directory project is the creation of the on-line searchable Town Index. This is an essential element to help researchers find their town(s) of interest in the business directory. All the pages of the Business Directory will be made available on-line when the searchable Town Index has been completed.

There are 82 pages in the Directory’s Town Index (numbered II to LXXXVI). Click here to view the Town Index pages. Volunteers are needed to enter the town names and locations into a spreadsheet. Data entry can be done from pages that are available on and printed from this web site. As soon as the computerized Town Index has been created, work on the indexing of the directory names will begin.

Typical Index Page

Close up look at the first part of an index page

The List of Localities for the Address Section
[see original Polish and French text below]

The administrative districts and provinces are noted for each place on the List of Localities to help differentiate those towns with similar names. Names of cities and towns are preceded by the abbreviation prefix m. (for miasto) while names for urban settlements have the prefix os.m.(for osada miejska).

The symbol p. follows the name of each locality: This stands for powiat, which means ‘the district of’ and is followed by the name of the city or town from which the district derives its name (for example p.Biala = District of Biala). Abbreviations below describe the names of the provinces for each locality.

The letter ‘v’ indicates names of the localities one must search for when looking for non-independent localities that are part of larger communities which have their own administration.

For the localities within the territory of the Free City of Gdańsk, Polish names are provided and are followed by original names in brackets. In the special index provided before the Free City of Gdańsk chapter, original names and their translations are provided.

To Volunteer

Table 2:

Special Instructions

Where they appear in the original pages of the directory, it is necessary to use Polish characters in your data entry. Click here for Appendix A: JRI-Poland Standard Polish ASCII Codes.

Most foreign-language fonts have the special accented characters in the extended ASCII region (ASCII codes over 128). To key these special characters you will normally need to use the ASCII numeric codes rather than typing individual letter keys. For Polish, these are the ASCII codes used for the various accented characters. It is important to enter and store the accented characters (particularly the a-ogonek and e-ogonek) since these characters affect the SOUND of the words, and hence the matches produced by the Daitch-Mokotoff soundex system for sound-alike names. General information about Polish and Russian (Cyrillic) fonts can be found at http://www.jewishgen.org/JRI-PL/translit.htm.

JRI-Poland Standard ASCII Codes for Polish Diatrical Marks

Central European support with built in fonts is available in Windows 95/98 but it must be installed. Or, you can download Polish Fonts that meet the JRI-Poland ASCII standards. We recommend that you download the font "Eastern European Roman", which meets the JRI-Poland standards for Polish at http://www.jewishgen.org/JRI-PL/fonts.htm.

Macintosh Users: If you need help regarding Macintosh fonts, please contact Howard Fink.

There are several methods of entering characters with Polish Diacritical Marks:

ALT [key] Combinations

Substitute and Replace Characters

Polish Keyboard

ALT [key] combinations for Polish Diatrical Marks

Most foreign-language fonts have the special accented characters in the extended ASCII region (ASCII codes over 128). To key these special characters you will normally need to use the ASCII numeric codes rather than typing individual letter keys.

To use ALT [key] combinations to enter Polish diacritical marks, use the JRI-Poland Standard ASCII Codes for Polish Diacritical Marks listed above.

Hold down the ALT key while typing the ASCII code ON THE NUMERIC keypad. Then release the keys. When entering the ASCII codes you must enter a 4-digit code, which normally means you type a leading 0 (zero) before the rest of the ASCII code. Typing the ordinary number keys at the top of your keyboard will not work – you MUST use the numeric keypad.

Example: if you have chosen a Polish font and want to key the letter ó, hold down the ALT key and type 0243 on your numeric keypad. Then release the ALT key.

Warning: Your other software may already be using these key combinations.

Substitute and Replace characters for Polish Diatrical Marks

This method was developed by the Lublin Shtetl Coop. Thanks!

The concept is to type the Latin letter and a plus sign (+) or an astersisk (*), indicating that there’s something additional to be included. Then when you are finished entering all of the Business Directory data, replace each set of Substitute Characters with the corresponding ASCII code throughout the entire template.

Warning: For the two different accented "Z’s", the researcher must be careful to distinguish between the two forms. We have used a plus sign (+) and an asterisk (*). Check that your "replace" function works correctly with these characters.

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