Sometimes you get lucky

The information sources for Norway, where the majority of my family originated, are excellent, as I've mentioned in other posts to this blog - not so with my wife's family. My wife's father was born in Poland in 1925. When the Nazi and Russian army divided Poland between them in World War II, he and his family were sent to a prison camp in Siberia.

I knew from stories, that he and two of his brothers fought in the Polish Army and that the rest of the family trekked through the Middle East and Africa, eventually arriving in England where some settled after the war. However I didn't have a very clear picture of the history or timeline of events and finding records was next to impossible.

My father-in-Law had passed away before I had become interested in genealogy... There were stories and a few tidbits from surviving relatives, but very little concrete information. I persisted though and persistence in genealogy eventually seems to pay off. I did a search for information about the Polish Army during World War II - more for background information than anything else. However it was by hunting through this background information that I stumbled upon a solid piece of information.

I stumbled across a refrence to something called the "Indeks Represjonowanych" - in Polish of course (which I neither speak nor read) but "Google Translate" is a wonderful tool (learn to use it!) and it translated as the "Index of the Repressed" and there was an online, searchable database.  On a chance, I typed in my wife's maiden name into the search engine and out kicked her father, uncles, grandfather and great grandfather's names along with dates and locations of where they were taken to in Siberia and, when and where they were released 18 months later (the staging area for the Eastern Corp of the Free Polish Army.)

This find was invaluable and more precious to me than all of the other successes I've had - mostly because it was so unlikely to find.  But, as I wrote earlier... Sometimes you get lucky

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