The 1929 business directory project

What it is

A transcription and analysis of the Ksiega Adresowa Polski (wraz z W. M. Gdanskiem) dla handlu, przemyslu, rzemiosl i rolnictwa, Warsaw 1929 — the national directory of commerce, industry, crafts and agriculture — town by town, sorted by street and by trade, with an estimate of the share of businesses in Jewish hands.

Wieluń is done: 851 entries, 43 streets, about 140 trades, from pages 1017–1018.

Why it matters

It is the only surviving document listing the trading population of these towns ten years before they were destroyed, compiled by people with no interest in who was Jewish and who was not. Read whole, it shows what no census can: not how many Jews lived in a town, but how much of its trade and craft they carried, and street by street, how completely the two communities were mixed.

Novelty

Checked (September 2026): no prior street-and-trade analysis of the Wieluń entries exists. Virtual Shtetl has a selective list of Jewish firms from the 1930 edition, without counts; the Rocznik Wieluński from volume 1 to volume 15 does not use the directory for economic structure at all; Książek and Olejnik do not use it for this. Partial precedents elsewhere: Będzin (per-trade counts, no denominators), Mir and Kozy (cross-edition counts), Lublin HGIS (street mapping). No published study anywhere combines full transcription, a stated surname method, shares by trade and shares by street.

Still to check offline: Olejnik, Wieluń. Dzieje miasta 1793–1945 (2003), pp. 289–298 and 310–312; Jolly (2010), chapter on business and economic activities; the historiawielunia.fora.pl thread on pre-war address books.

Expansion

Same method, outward from Wieluń: the powiat first (Praszka, Działoszyn, Bolesławiec, Lututów, Osjaków, Wieruszów), then Złoczew in Sieradz county and Krzepice across the old border, then the Łódź voivodeship. The CRARG surname list covers exactly that cluster, which is why it is the right pilot.

Publication unit: the powiat, not the town — a county page with its towns beneath it gives a comparison a single town cannot, and it is the level Polish local historians work at.

Licence: open with attribution, so museums and JewishGen can use the tables and must name the source when they do.

Outputs

• Article, "Dwie strony z 1929 roku" / "Two pages from 1929", EN and PL, with tables.
• The dataset (entries, classification, tier).
• Appendix tables by street and by trade.