Letter to the Editor. When and where was Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska born?

In our paper [1] which presented the profile of dr Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska we reported 25 th August 1872 or 1875 as her date of birth and Warsaw as the city she was born in. That information was corroborated by the data collected by the University of Zurich [2] and Karpińska's curriculum vitae which she wrote herself and included as part of her doctoral thesis [3]. We deemed the sources the most reliable. We were encouraged to research further that information by the inconsistencies in documents which we previously came across along with the information reported in Jarosław Goth and Katarzyna Waszyńska's paper which argued that Karpińska was born on 30 th August 1872 in Plock [4]. Having analyzed numerous historical records which constituted circumstantial evidence, it was established with high likelihood that that the birth certificate from Plock indeed belonged to Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska. The document gives the basis for the claim that Ludwika Karpińska was born in Plock as a daughter of Ka-zimierz Karpiński and Katarzyna Fery [5]. The same names of Karpińska's parents were recorded in the books of the buried persons at the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw [6], a copy of the ID card [7] and death certificate [8] which were kept in the personal file of Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska when she was employed in the Municipal Psychological Lab in Lodz. Despite the existence of the birth certificate, establishing Ludwika Karpińska-Woczyńska's date of birth still posed a challenge. The certificate was written in Russian with some surnames and first names being written in Polish. The person who drew up the certificate must have been familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet better as he or she frequently substituted Latin letters with Cyrillic ones and distorted surnames given in Polish e.g., Karpińska's mother's maiden name was recorded with errors in Polish and its direct translation from Russian demonstrated that her name was Fery rather than Fearzy. The certificate presented all dates written in full words.