Like my other great grandmother I had very little information but after a lot of research I "narrowed" down where Katie came from:
-Sieniawka, Österreich (1904) - the Hamburg passenger list
-Sieniawa, Czeraiw?, Galicia, Austria (in 1922)
-Siniawka, Austria ( in 1922 in a different record)
-Chasanov, Austria (in a 1932 record where it states her ethnicity to be Ukranian)
-Powiat, Chessonof, Poland (in a 1930 record where it states her ethnicity to be polish)
To make things more confusing in the 1930 record, her first husband is also recorded as being from Powiat, Chessonof, Poland but in the 1932, he is recorded as being from "(district) Basnia, Poland"
There are at least 5 villages/towns in present day Poland called Sieniawa and 2 called Sieniawka (both near the German Border). Then there is Siniawka which was in "Poland" around 1930 but is now a part of Belarus...
I did a soundex search at http://www.jewishgen.org/Communities/Search.asp for Chasanov and one of the hits is Cieszanów. Seems I found another phonetic massacre.
Using google maps, I found my "Sieniawa" near Cieszanów
Cieszanów is very close to the Ukrainian border, 36 mins away from Sieniawa by car, and was part of Austria up until 1918. Basznia is right around the corner too.
The LDS has records for Sieniawa but looks like I may need to learn the basics of a few more languages. The records over the last 300 or so years are in Latin, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian & German.
