Sunday, July 6, 2025

Polish Schoolchildren's Signatures - Now Searchable!

I wrote the following back in a 2018 post:

Anyone who had family in what was Poland of 1926 (which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine and Lithuania, as well as much of modern-day Poland and parts of what used to be Russian Empire, Galicia, Czechoslovakia and East Prussia among others) needs to be aware of an incredible resource hosted by the Library of Congress.

In 1926, in honor of America's 150th anniversary of independence, Polish schoolchildren wrote their signatures in "admiration and friendship for the United States."  Children of all religions participated--Jewish names are interspersed with Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech children's names. 

At that time, you had to use a relatively manual process to find pages from a particular town and then search through that town's pages in hopes of finding relatives.  But a reader named John recently commented on that post and pointed me (and now you!) to a site that has made this resource wonderfully searchable.  I've played around with it, and here's how you can as well!

Page of signatures from schoolchildren in Horochow, Poland (now Horochiv, Ukraine), 1926