Perhaps the most basic problem in dealing with pre-World War I records from Mosty Wielkie concerns language. I have a basic high school familiarity with Latin, but I don’t read, writie, or speak any Slavic language. Most of my Ukrainian ancestors spoke and wrote (if literate) Ukrainian, but they also had some familiarity with Polish, Yidish, and German (the latter language required in schools, or so my grandfather used to say). Names written in Ukrainian were written in the Cyrillic alphabet; those in Latin or Polish used the same Latin alphabet I’m now using. In my genealogy I’ve decided to write names using the Latin alphabet, mostly because the vital (metrical) records between 1785 and 1908 are written in Latin.
For example, here’s the birth record of my great-grandfather (1847):
Joannes is, of course, the Latin version of John. The family surname is written (in Polish) as Karpowicz. My grandfather’s birth record looks like this (1890):
Here the name appears, in Latin, as Demetrius Karpewyu (or should that be Karpewyn?) As far as I can tell, the names were written, using the Cyrillic alphabet, as Іван Карпович and Дмитро Карпович. If we transliterate these names using the Latin alphabet, we get Ivan Karpovych and Dmytro Karpovych. In the United States, my grandfather always wrote his name as Dmytro Karpowich, but his brother in Baltimore wrote the name Karpewicz, and each branch of the family still uses these spellings. On this site I’ve standardized this Karpowich.
As far as I can tell, the Latinized first names were only used in church records. On this site and in my genealogy, for those individuals who lived in Mosty Wielkie and didn’t immigrate (like my great-grandfather), for first names I use the Ukrainian equivalent as given by John Pihach, transliterated into the Latin alphabet. When the name might be useful, I provide an English equivalent: i.e., Vasyl (Basil), which is written as Basilius in Latin); Hryhorii (Gregory); Oleksii (Alexis); Ahafiia (Agatha). For surnames, it’s harder; as in the above example, the names are spelled variously and it’s not always easy to reverse transliterate them back to the original Cyrillic. I’ve therefore standardized these surnames, basing them either on the Polish spelling as appears in the records or the most common spelling used in North America today.