My Great-Great Grandmother Voted - How I Discovered That and Her Birth Year

My grandmother Sonia was close to her paternal grandmother Ronia.  In fact, when Sonia's parents moved to the village where her maternal grandfather lived, my grandmother and her sister remained in the city of Horochov with Ronia.  Ronia was a city woman who did not want to move to a village, and the girls stayed with her to continue at their school.  (You can read my grandmother's perspective on that time here.)  In any case, I had no documentation of Ronia's life, other than what my grandmother had told me about her.

Recently on JewishGen, there was a post about "Documents from Volyn, Ukraine."  Since my father's parents are both from Volyn (Volhynia), I took a look.  This post mentioned a site (https://en.volynia.com/) with indexes of various documents from this area.  The site lists surnames included in each set of documents and in the list of those registered to vote in Horochov in 1938 there was a Bajcz--my grandmother's maiden name.  I reached out to the site owner and asked if this was Avraham Bajcz, my great grandfather.  He said it wasn't--but it was a woman named Bronia.  Hmmmm.....  Bronia/Ronia were very very similar.  I ordered a copy of that record.

Bronia Bajcz Voter Registration

Bronia Bajcz, born 1860, was registered to vote in Horochov; I didn't have Ronia's date of birth, but 1860 would make sense given that my great grandfather was born about 1885.  Bronia was living at 101 Pilsudski Street, which is the street where my grandmother grew up.  I believe this to be my great-great grandmother Ronia--both the street name and the year of birth make sense!  And her "profession" was "kept at the expense of children," which was the case for Ronia, whose son supported her.

Ronia died around 1937-1938.  So it's unclear if she actually voted in 1938, but she was registered and therefore likely voted in previous elections.  And now I have her name in a document and not just orally from my grandmother.

So sign up for JewishGen's discussion group.  I have it set to send me a daily digest of posts, so I can skim the titles and just read those of interest.  Some days I click on nothing. But some days, the one post I click on can lead me to a document like this one.

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