_______________________________

TATRA AREA RESEARCH GROUP
_______________________________

© TARG All rights reserved.
Newsletter for September 2002
---------------------------------------
Hello and welcome to all TARG members, new and old. I'm happy to report
that the previous TARG website is all loaded onto the new host server. Some
pages have been updated (Research Aids and Trips pages among them) and I
even got the counter working. You will also now find the back issues of this
e-newsletter -- all 42 of them! I still have the site's guestbook to get
functioning and naturally many fine photos to upload that you TARG members
have sent me. The URL to reach the new site is simple. It is just:
www.mytarg.net. Please have a visit and let me know what you think.
I've been looking at the site's list of 800+ TARG villages and it got
me to thinking. While I would love to get acquainted with each one by
pouring through my many books in order to write a bit of history for each
village webpage, TARG members may not want to wait that long for me to catch
up! After all, if I did two a day it would be almost Halloween 2003 before I
was done! So I would like to ask if anyone -- would you like to "adopt" your
village? If you already know about a TARG village, simply write something up
in an e-mail and I will get it edited and uploaded on the right page for you.
-- Paul K. Bingham
TARG Founder

WEBSITES TO CHECK OUT_____________
1) The new TARG website at: www.mytarg.net!
2) Morse's Ellis Island special search site is now at:
www.avotaynu.com/ellis.html. (For more on this see article below.)
3) My cousin Lucjan keeps working on the English version of his Jurgow
website. If you have ancestry from Spisz, it's worth a look at:
www.jurgow.pl/english/

YOUR LETTERS______________________
Dear Paul: I would appreciate you canceling the monthly news letter to
my husband Joseph Kominiak. I am sorry to say that he passed away on August
13th. He really enjoyed receiving the TARG newsletter every month. Thank
you, Valerie Kominiak
***Hello Valerie, We are so sorry to hear of your loss. As requested, we
will remove your e-mail address from our list. Our best to you and to Joe's
remaining family. - Paul (Joe had ancestry from Spis, Slovakia)
Dear Paul, I think the interactive map on the TARG website is terrific!
I tried to copy the part with Krempachy on it, but haven't been able to get
it because the map is so big. How do I print just the part that I would
like? (That is, the area just around Krempachy.) Thanks for your help. --
Joe Seliga
***Hi Joe, Thank you for your nice note - and it's great that you find the
new website helpful! To answer your map question, I believe you can
successfully print any of the map grid elements off the TARG website. I'm
not sure what your specific computer and software configuration is, but here
are two ways that work for many:
1) WYSIWYG Solution: to print exactly what you see on the screen using
MicroSoft Windows, press down both the "Alt" key and the "Print Screen" key.
Then open a blank page in a program like MicroSoft Word and click the
"Paste" button. Whatever portion of the map you had on the screen, (along
with the Window's frame and tool bar surrounding it) will appear on your
page. Click "Print" and you should get a copy of this window frame and it's
enclosed map section.
2) Entire Map Solution: to print the entire grid map you are viewing move
the mouse cursor over the map that does not have a "hot spot" over any
particular village and right click on it. A box will pop up with several
options. Click on the "Save Picture As." option. Another box will pop up.
Choose the folder you want the file to go into on whatever drive you want
and then rename the file if you like. Note: this is a .GIF file and most are
over 1 megabyte in size. (i.e.; a few may be too big for a floppy disc.)
Once you have the image file stored, you can open it in your favorite paint
or graphics program. The .GIF file format is a very common format and all
such programs should be able to handle it. (Even many word processing
programs these days can handle them.) Once you have the image in your
program you can trim and edit, then print what custom portion of the map
that you want. Hope this helps! - Paul
Hi Paul: Visited the website. All is looking good. Those areas under
construction are so noted. I don't think it can be said enough. Thanks for
all of your hard work! -- Dan Zelonka
***Dan, you're very welcome. Thank you. - Paul
Hello Paul, You have a great site! Obviously, much time and effort went
into its development. My wife and I hope, one day, to join one of your tour
groups. My maternal grandmother, Sophia Rusinak came from Stara Ves
(Slovakia), my paternal grandfather, Carl Gajniak, emigrated from Jablonka
(Polish Orawa) and married Anna Bugaysky. -- Jim Gajniak
***Jim, Thank you and I hope everyone can go back to the old country at
least once. It's a marvelous experience. - Paul
Hi Paul! I received the Polish phone book - thank you so much. I have
already found a few people in it. Great doing business with you. -- Joyce
Hello Paul, I'm really excited knowing there are STRAMA and STRZEP's in
the phone book. Both family surnames are from Maruszyna. I had not
found/located family there, but now plan to write to all of the surnames to
'fish' for a lead. I am hopeful with the right leads in the phone book, I
can lucky on grandma's side! Thanks again. -- Janet Baluk
***Thank you , ladies. I hope the phonebooks produce solid leads for all of
those who sent for copies of it! (I still have more...see below.) Remember,
too, that a quick method to write a note in Polish to the people listed in
the phonebook can be found in the May 2001 issue of the TARG newsletter (see
the website at: www.mytarg.net)

SPECIAL TARG TRIP IN 2003!!!____________
If you visit the new TARG website at: www.mytarg.net and go to the
"Trips Planned" page, you will see that the NEW TARG tour to the Tatras in
summer of 2003 has dates attached! Yes, we do now know when we will be
going! The tour will be from Tuesday, August 5th through Friday, August
15th. The exact details and day-to-day itinerary is still being finalized.
Announcements of those details will likely come next month and brochures
will be printed up thereafter.
I can tell you that we will go completely around the Tatras, spending
days and nights both in Slovakia and Poland. We will visit sights in
Slovak's Orava, Liptov and Spis counties as well as the regions of Orawa,
Podhale and Spisz in Poland. You will get a more complete look into the TARG
sphere, the Goral culture and exposure to your ancestral villages as Helene
Cincebeaux has ever offered before. As always, she is flexible and cars and
translators will be available for you to break away to visit your ancestral
villages and catch up with the main group later, should you desire it.
Airline flights, bus fuel and the dreaded VAT (Value Added Tax) are all
up since our 1999 and 2001 trips. Nonetheless, she is working hard to keep
the cost in the same range as it has been in the past. One of the things she
has done is trimmed one day off of all of her tours for 2003. But by reworking
the itinerary, we will lose only the time lost outside the TARG sphere. We
will also stay more nights in each of the nicer hotels this time around and
not do the dreaded hotel-hopping so often. Less time repacking as well as
reloading and unloading the bus will also give us time we didn't have
before. I am so pleased with the way this is coming together this year. I
want to go now!
I have already had 12 people contact me saying they are interested in
going. Seating is limited, so please let me know if you would be interested
by contacting me personally at bingham@iols.net. Again, TARG is not
sponsoring the tour, nor does it make any money from her tours. But TARG is
assisting Helene and her team in arranging what will be the best tour
possible for TARG members. She and the group at TAC have been doing summer
tours to the Czechoslovak and Polish area for 13 years now. If you would
like to learn more about their tours visit their website at:
www.Our-Slovakia.com.

TARG SURNAME DATABASE______________
I have kept plugging away at the task of surname entry into the growing
TARG database. I'm up to 19,200 entries now. I figure I will exceed 25,000
entries before I'm done. I hope to make the database available to TARG
members once it's finished. (Note: an entry is normally for more than one
surname occurrence from a village. Because of that, the actual numbers of
occurrences represented by 19,200 entries is perhaps 40,000 or higher.) All
entries include the surname, the source of the data, the village in which it
occurred and the date of the occurrence. Some also include other detailed
information about the source, contact information and proper spelling of the
surname with diacritic marks. The surname data has come from many sources
including cemetery headstone inventories, parish record extractions, old
Hungarian census data, phonebooks, local newspaper references, society and
school registration records and individual TARG submitters. Once this data
is compiled, it should be very easy to see where surnames occur, spelling
variations by village and over time, and perhaps in which villages to start
looking for your surname if you had no idea where to start prior. My thanks
to everyone who has submitted to the project and done record extractions for
me over the years to get us to this point!

DIGITAL CAMERA WOES_____________
My cousin Lucjan has been having some intermittent malfunctioning
problems with the digital camera TARG sent him. He was at a parish church
last week trying to photograph some record entries and the camera again just
refused to work properly. The Japanese manufacturer will honor the warrantee
in the US, but not over in Poland. Camera shops in Krakow quote almost as
much as the camera cost new to fix it. So Lucjan will be sending it back
with a lady coming to Chicago from Nowa Biala shortly. She will then mail it
to me when she gets to the states, and I will send it for warrantee repair
then try to get it back to him. Frustrating for all of us waiting for more
photos and record info. Sorry for the delay!

STEVE MORSE ELLIS ISLAND SITE_____________
Well, the Ellis Island foundation made Steve Morse shut down his special
search site. His site had allowed internet users to get in and search the
Ellis Island data in ways their own programming couldn't do. The folks there
didn't like various things about this "intrusion" into their data and
ordered a stop to it. An interim compromise has been reached, however, and
so you can now use Steve's nifty search program from Gary Mokotoff's Jewish
Genealogy site at: www.avotaynu.com/ellis.html. Talks are on to possibly let
Ellis Island incorporate Steve's search programming officially into their
own servers sometime in the future. We'll try and keep you posted on further
developments.

POLISH PHONEBOOK COPIES___________
Again, so many contacted me about obtaining photocopies of the 287-page
1998 South-Central (Nowy Sacz) phonebook which contains all of the Polish
TARG villages, that I had to get even more printed. I presently have two
copies. The price is $26 plus shipping. (If you are interested, please
contact me with your mailing address and I can get you an exact total. For the slow
"Printed Matter" rate it generally runs around $4 and for Priority (2-3
days) it's about $11.)

CONTACTING TARG_____________________
To contact TARG the e-mail address is: TARG_NET@hotmail.com. Our mailing
address is: TARG, P.O. Box 3533, Escondido, CA 92033. Our website is:
www.mytarg.net. Thanks for participating!
^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^

Back to E-Newsletter list, back to Main Page.