Talk:Frederick Schwatka

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 11:41, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Ethnicity?

Although several references refer to Schwwatka as being of Polish ancestry, his family spoke German and emmigrated from Prussia. Wkharrisjr (talk) 20:10, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I wondered about that too several months ago when I made some edits to the article. The claim seems to be supported by citation 2, but I couldn't tell if it really supported the claim since I can't read Polish. Where does your information about the German and the emigration come from? If you have support for your claim from a reliable source, please substitute it for the Polish claim. Finetooth (talk) 21:29, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Clearly, sources are needed, but with Prussia sharing eastern frontiers with Poland, there are many Prussian Germans with Polish names. Gwen Gale (talk) 21:32, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Fredrick Schwatka is a distant relative of mine. Our common ancestor, Augustus Schwatka and his wife Catherine Giesenderfer are listed in genealogical records as immigrating from Germanic countries- Augustus in Eastern Prussia and Catherine from the Rhine Valley. Augustus was active in the German community in Baltimore and was also active in the Reform Lutheran church and seems to have spoken German. This evidence suggests a Germanic ethnicity for Augustus and very probably for Catherine. The question is, how do I cite genealogical research and records to support this assertion?Wkharrisjr (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 01:53, 10 July 2009 (UTC).

Most interesting. If the records are published either on-line or off, you can cite the source(s) in the usual way. In this case, you might be able to imitate the citation template embedded in the text after the Polish claim. It's generally best to fill in author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and accessdate if all of those bits of data are known or to fill in as many as you can. If the records are private family papers that were never published, they probably don't qualify as reliable in the sense laid out in WP:RS. In that case, you might be able to track down the same or similar information in a reliable published source. The idea is to make the claim verifiable by any reader who wants to check to see what supports a claim. The editor who added the Polish claim might be such a reader, for example. If you are unfamiliar with the mechanics of the citation templates, I'd be glad to help with the formatting. I wish the Polish claim were supported by an English-language source. That would make it easier to decide whether to keep it or not. If you have strong support for the German claim, it might replace the Polish. If not, perhaps they could both remain with some sort of explanatory note about the uncertainty. Finetooth (talk) 02:55, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll check my records tonight and see if there is anything that can be referenced. Snce they emmigrated in the late 1790's, I don't think there are any published records of their emmigration, although there are some marriage records and such that have been published.Wkharrisjr (talk) 14:50, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

I had my mother-in-law, who reads Polish and is a genealogist, review the source cited in refence to Schwatka's ethnicity was not clear. I replaced it with a published work that that stated Schwatka was born into a Polish family, but I added a parenthetical note about his grandparent's involvement in the German church in Baltimore. I'll research this some more and try to come up with a more definitive reference.Wkharrisjr (talk) 00:35, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Polish American Encyclopedia

In the Polish American Encyclopedia, by James Pula, he is listed as Polish. I don't want to disregard the other conversations on this page, but since he has a Polish last name and easily could be of mixed ethnicity or a Germanized Pole (considering there were millions of them in Prussian Silesia), I want to put it forward. He is listed as a Polish American in a published historical text.Pola.mola (talk) 00:13, 4 August 2013 (UTC)