Where is Gross Boschpol? This is a village located in Pommern, Kreis Lauenburg, about 453 kilometer northeast of Berlin – near the Baltic Sea and near the city of dansk/Danzig.

From 1945 on the bigger part of Pommern has belonged to Poland and the great majority of the German inhabitants had to leave in 1945. Today the name of Gross Buschpol is “Bozepole Wlk.” You will find it on every map like Google maps although t is still a small village. In do not know yet how much inhabitants Gross Buschpol had in 1865, but in 1933 there were 361 inhabitants.

Like in a lot of Pommern regions a lot of the parish register records were destroyed in 1945. This means that I have a very bad records situation.

There were Lutheran inhabitants and Catholics in Gross Boschpol based on numbers of 1904 I think that about 20-25 % of the Gross Boschpol inhabitants were Catholic. Near Gross Boschpol there were some villages with almost 100% Lutherans (like Damerkow or Goddenow) and villages with a Catholic majority (like Chmelenz, Paraschin or Felstow). This region was the border region between the Lutheran stringholds in the west and the Catholic strongholds just east of Gross Boschpol.

The Lutheran inhabitants of Gross Boschpol attended the church in Zinzelitz (Dziecieliec today) while the Catholic Church was in Rosalin (Rozlazino).

If Retthammel ancestors were Lutheran then the news is very bad after the only Zinzelitz parish registers which have survived WII are death/burial records of 1858-1874. These burial/death records were already filmed in 1938, so that we still have these records although the originals are destroyed as well.

The LDS has only filmed the 1876-1883 Gross Buschpol civil register records. You will find a German map of the Kreis (County) Lauenburg. Gross Buschpol is blue underlined in the east section of this map. The border which you see directely east of Gross Buschpol was the border between Prussia and Poland until 1772 and from 1919 to 1939.