Explanation of Language Usage
On This Site
I will use both Ukrainian and Polish to refer to place
names located within Halychyna / Galicia. In most cases, I'll use
Ukrainian first, then followed by Polish. The Ukrainian will be in
transliterated form and/or original Cyrillic form.
I will do this for several reasons. First, it allows me
to address both the Polish and Ukrainian genealogist. Often, resources are
geared only to one of these groups at a time. If one is fortunate enough to
understand the correlation between the two languages, this does not pose a
problem. However, for the beginner genealogist, his/her familiarity may be with
only one of these languages’ terms. He/she may not know that his/her own
ancestors who came from Lwów also came from Lviv!! I will use my site to educate
the genealogist who is new to researching Galicia.
Second, I will include both language’s terms in order to
provide an unbiased feeling to the site. I want my site to help all genealogists
interested in the region. It’s hard enough to find information on Galicia...the
last thing you want to do is scare someone away!
I’ve considered a system of using Ukrainian for places
currently in Ukraine and Polish for places currently in Poland. But this would
not help the new beginner who is familiar with only one of the languages. Also,
since so many of the available resources use only one language, someone could
become confused, or worse yet, misinformed entirely. Let’s face it, most of the
place names from resources before World War II will use the Polish, which puts
the Ukrainian genealogist familiar only with today’s proper Ukrainian terms at a
severe loss. Likewise, someone only familiar with the Polish spellings from
these outdated sources does not know how to proceed in post-WWII research. I
believe that my dual language system eliminates these problems.
When writing Ukrainian I’ll use the Library of Congress
system of transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet into the English. I
personally find the Library of Congress system irregular and insufficient.
However, it is currently the most popular system in North America. Visit
European Reading Room
website for the table of the Library of Congress' Cyrillic Transliterations.
For reading proper Polish and Ukrainian in the Cyrillic
alphabet, please set your web browsers to read the following encoding:
(also known as CP-1250)
Cyrillic Windows (also known as CP-1251)
Both Polish and Cyrillic: Unicode (UTF-8)
On pages where Polish predominates I've used the CP-1250
encoding, on pages where Ukrainian predominates I've used CP-1251. On some
pages where I had to use both Polish and Ukrainian for examples, I used Unicode.
This encoding allows both Cyrillic and Central European (as well as most
languages in the world) be readable.
If you still have difficulty reading Polish and Ukrainian
characters, visit Paul Gorodyansky's webpage on the subject.
For Microsoft Internet Explorer users, visit his page:
Instructions on changing the encoding
Microsoft Internet Explorer:
Click on View, then Encoding. Choose a Cyrillic encoding. For my
pages, choose Cyrillic (Windows)...or
Cyrillic-1251. (Note: Different pages on the Internet use different
encodings. If one of the pages can't be read, choose another Cyrillic
encoding to find the right one that works.)
For Polish characters, Click on View,
then Encoding. Choose Central European.