With a Little Help From Some "Friends"

 

One good point about posting a family tree in more than one public place is that some genealogy resources come with "friends" who provide additional help.

I'm often amused, after posting yet another Polish name on my tree at MyHeritage, to receive their almost breathless announcement that they have found that same ancestor listed on another family tree. "Hurry, come look and see if this is your relative," the email bids me—and I look, only to discover the amazing discovery is no more than a report that, yep, it was I who just posted that ancestor to one of my several trees.

In this case, however, that wasn't so. Having clicked through the provided link to examine the discovery, I realized what might have triggered the issue. Researching my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak's extended family, I had been using documents retrieved from church records, not civil records. Those church records having been drawn up in Latin, not the native language, had yielded an entry for Franziska's daughter-in-law, Catharina Orszulak—but the bride's actual given name, at least for my Polish forebears, would have been Katarzyna. 

What I had no way of knowing was that while her 1863 marriage record in Żerków was entered in Latin, her 1845 baptismal record from that same parish provided the Polish version of her given name.

That baptism occurred exactly one hundred seventy nine years ago today, a serendipitous observation that was not lost upon me. Still, the near-miss of it all gives me pause to reflect: what else do we miss by not trying more than one way to search for an answer?

Thankfully, the AI assist churning away in the background, courtesy of my account at MyHeritage, spotted the possible discrepancy and reported the connection to me anyhow, despite differing versions of the given name. That AI notification led me to someone else's tree at FamilySearch.org, and the opportunity to consider the source document for myself.

Still, there are other challenges, one of which I've already encountered in tracing these Polish roots: the fact that so many villages are identified by the same name. Take Katarzina's marriage record, for instance, which identifies her as being from Michałów. Great—but which one? According to Wikipedia, there are more than thirty places claiming that same name. I had to pull up a map program to explore the possibilities and find which town by that name would qualify as the closest Michałów to the church in Żerków where Katarzyna had married Bartholomeus Olejniczak—and where she was likely born.

It was thanks to the assist of some AI "friends" that my attention was directed to a document which I might otherwise have overlooked. I expect there may be many more such fortunate discoveries over the years as I tackle these Polish records. After all, a machine which never tires of reviewing documents—perhaps even around the clock—can certainly multiply the effort of us mere mortals who must take some rest from time to time. I certainly appreciate the help. 

Putting On the Brakes

 

There is nothing that can put the brakes on genealogical progress like entering into hitherto unexplored regions. For me, that unexplored region—still!—is Poland. There is so much yet to discover.

No surprise, then, that taking stock of my progress in the past two weeks showed a less vibrant count than I've seen when documenting, say, my roots reaching farther back in America's history than the starting date of this country's establishment. Yes, "Poland" (or its previous iterations throughout history) has been around for far more centuries than the United States, but finding the records for all the people living there is much more of a challenge.

So, how did I do, having shifted my research course this month to chase my father's Polish heritage? While I now have 38,526 documented individuals in my family tree, only sixty nine of them were added to that list in the past two weeks. Between jumping from website to website, trying to patch the record gaps in available digitized documents, then adding that information to four separate trees online, progress has been far slower than in the past.

Still, I feel good about what's been done this month. For one thing, realizing that sharing is part of the challenge—hey, I'm all for "cousin bait"—I want to put those names of newfound ancestors out there where others can find them, too. Who knows? Maybe my second great-grandmother was your second great-grandmother, too. Now, I can point the way to a little-known website which provides scans of the records we both are seeking.

Not that I haven't given up on my in-laws' tree. Even though we made the shift from my father-in-law's Irish roots at the beginning of October, I still had some research business to wrap up on his lines, plus some details on my mother-in-law's family that I stumbled upon this past week. For my in-laws' tree, just ten more names were added and documented, but no matter how small the increase, every one represents a research victory I'm glad to celebrate. My in-laws' tree now includes records for 36,853 ancestors and collateral lines. Maybe some of them are distant cousins of yours, too.

In less than a week, we'll move into another month, and the chance to research another branch of my Polish ancestry. Progress will undoubtedly be just as slow as it's been this month, but I count this as yet another opportunity to become a trailblazer, in hopes a cousin here—or somewhere else around the world—will realize our connection. 

An Unheralded Star

 

Some changes arrive with much fanfare. Others slip in, almost unnoticed. The star I spotted today was one of those latter unheralded entries.

While working on my Twelve Most Wanted project for this month—finding more documentation on my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak—behind the scenes, I've also been updating all the records linked to each of her descendants. Working my way down the line of descent from her daughter Marianna, I suddenly realized there was this little star next to Marianna's name.

That's funny, I thought. I hadn't noticed that before. I certainly didn't put it there. Hovering my cursor over the star, I noticed the words pop up, "Prioritize this person."

Not wanting to find myself in the position of Alice in Wonderland, staring at the little cake labeled "eat me," I was disinclined to click on that recently-appearing star. I did a search to see whether Ancestry.com had recently posted any announcements about that change on their blog. 

Nothing. 

I poked around my own tree and realized that if I clicked on the icon for adding labels—a change at Ancestry which has been around for a while now—among the many choices for "My Tree Tags" was a group called "Research Status Tags." And—you guessed it—within that cluster was a choice labeled "Prioritized Person."

It took a bit more exploration before I could find an additional explanation. Still, that announcement arrived almost accidentally as I continued my work on those Olejniczak descendants. A pop-up window advised, "Prioritize up to ten people in your tree that you're most interested in learning about." I can't even recall how I first spotted that notice, but suddenly, there it was.

After mentioning that the ancestor so marked will display a star icon, the explanation continued, "We'll put special focus on finding hints about them." The entry concluded with a "Got it" button at the bottom of the window.

Special focus on finding more hints? I'm game to see what will happen. However, I already know that Ancestry.com's collection is rather sparse when it comes to Polish records for the region and time period specific to my own ancestors. Granted, with the changing boundaries—and languages—of that geographic area, I'm facing even more challenges, but if a simple star next to Franziska Olejniczak's name can lead me to more information, I'll eagerly look forward to seeing it.

Just Where is That Place, Anyhow?

 

Genealogy can sometimes become a strange mix of mysteries and the mundane. Now that I've found a resource—the Polish website BaSIA—from which I can pull up scanned documents to verify births of my Polish ancestors' extended family, I've been working through the descendants of each collateral line of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, and then the collateral lines of my great-grandmother Marianna Jankowska, to add links to each individual's verifying documents. That can be the kind of dull undertaking that makes even the most dedicated genealogist's eyes glaze over.

Predictably, many of those documents confirmed that the extended family lived in Żerków, just like my own direct line ancestors did. Even moving further in time through the generations on those collateral lines, I'd see records confirming that same residence in Żerków, long after my own ancestors had left the country. But then, as I worked through the process with each descendant, I looked closer at the birth records and realized there was another location mentioned in the documents. The problem with that was: the country had more than one town with that same name—many more such towns. Now what? Just where was that place I was seeking, anyhow?

The trouble began when I decided to be too smart for my own good. I realized the documents I was reading were written not in Polish, but in German. Equipped with my trusty Google Translate, I decided to spot check some of those foreign words, like "wóhnhaft."

In case you don't speak German—I don't, so you're in good company—"wóhnhaft" means "resident," as in "resident of ...." In this family's case—say, the record for Cecilia Karcz, daughter of my great-grandmother's sister Antonina—the town in question was called Lisewo.

Great, I thought. I'll just look that up. 

Not so easy, it turns out. According to Wikipedia, there are at least eight different locations in Poland which go by that same name. Many of them, it turns out, are part of another region of Poland, known as Pomerania.

Thankfully, I already know from my paternal grandfather's branch of the family that those Pomeranian locations would not apply to my paternal grandmother's side of the family, so I eliminated most of the list that way. The rest, though, I'd have to sift through by another process of guesswork reasoning.

As it turned out, two of the remaining same-named towns were part of what is known as the Greater Poland Voivodeship, a province which is also known as Wielkopolska. So, my next step was to turn to Google Maps to see which one of those two contenders might be closer to Żerków.

Fortunately, there was one clear winner in that competition, a town located within the right province, in the county called Września. That Lisewo was a mere eleven kilometers east of Żerków, as opposed to the alternate location eighty kilometers away, which in modern terms would have required a drive of over an hour.

Still, there was something which bothered me about accepting these handy explanations. For one thing, those hundred year old documents sometimes spelled the family's residence as Lissowo, rather than Lisewo. Was that the same place? A case of messy handwriting? Or another example of the Germans attempting to wipe all signs of the conquered heritage off their maps?

I tried one more exploration: what would happen if I searched for "Lissowo" rather than "Lisewo"? While the search result which caught my eye is not exactly for the same Lisewo as the one I believe was my family's home—this entry was for a Pomeranian town—the website called Kartenmeister reported some alternate names for a town they catalogued by the German name Lissau. Note the alternative names: Lissowo (dated 1789, but spelled just as the late 1800s documents I found had indicated) and, under the heading, "Polish/Russian name," Lisewo.

Given all that, I'd say I just found the right place for those ancestors to call home.

Look, Pa! I Can Read Polish!

As I struggle my way through documents with unpronounceable words, I realized something. After several years of banging my head against the brick wall blocking my paternal grandfather's story, I must have developed a knack for learning Polish by osmosis. Not that I can read Polish, exactly, but I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Take my current struggle with finding documents for the Olejniczak branch of the family. The transcriptions for several family members are at BaSIA, but to see the actual scans of the documents, I need to click through to szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl.

Of course, once I got to that website, I realized the entire thing was written in Polish. Well, what did I expect, right? But somehow, looking at choices like this didn't baffle me for long.

Or how about this one?

Incredibly, I guessed right on both of these. So I've spent my days happily clicking on "link do skanu" to produce URLs like the one above—which, by the way, extends far beyond what is showing in the little white box with the archive's web address—and then clicking on "kopiuj link" to harvest and paste the document's specific address into my family trees, or wherever I want to preserve that address for future reference.

I realized that, repeated often over years, a few words from other languages can sometimes become far less intimidating than they at first seemed. Of course, it helped that about five years ago, it occurred to me to learn how Polish phonics work—especially given their use of diacritical marks—and I created a blog post with links to help me remember for the next time I visited this research challenge. Websites like this one on the Polish alphabet and a companion site guiding me on pronunciation became indispensable cheat sheets for future work. 

Now that I'm deep into Polish research once again, I'm finding more resources to add to my Polish toolkit. For instance, I found this charming article helpful in navigating the very different world of Polish names of months—which also made me realize how so many of the Western European heritages follow the same conventions for names of the months. Not Poland, once again, which makes researching Polish ancestors so very different.

While Polish is a language far more difficult than I think I could ever learn, with a little help, it is possible to gain a working knowledge of the terms we researchers are most likely to encounter in our exploration of birth, marriage, or death records. And given Poland's predominant religious heritage as Catholic, many documents were drawn up in Latin—a more universal language to conquer. Then, too, with their political history as part of the dominion of other nations—producing some records, for instance, in German or Russian—a working knowledge of such other languages may make research progress a bit easier...or harder. But with the advent of computers, a little morphing from the dominant language of many programmers—English—can yield a little creative "Polish-izing" which can be deciphered by even someone like non-Polish me.

Still, knowing all that about researching Polish ancestors leads us to develop toolkits and cheat sheets to tap dance our way through multiple languages and handwriting styles. Perhaps that is the only way we can move forward in researching our Polish roots. But after several years of doing so, it is rather refreshing to realize, hey, we can do this, after all. 

Don't Discount the Journey

 

When we are deep in the midst of tracking our elusive ancestors and holding fast to each twist and turn in the race to find all the family details, perhaps it is easy to forget to sit back and enjoy the journey. Don't discount that journey. While we may be tempted to label that journey as a slippery slope—or (gasp) even a rabbit trail—we may as well enjoy the trip. After all, we may be back on this trail once again, so learn to recognize the sign posts of the scenery.

It was on the trail of each of the descendants of my third great-grandparents Nikolaus Olejniczak and Josefa Grzegorczyk (try saying that one three times, fast) when I got stuck on one particular relative. Their great-granddaughter Marianna Banaszak had married a man with another tongue-twister name, Kazimierz Szczepański, and I had found not only their 1923 marriage record, but the 1928 death record for their three week old daughter Cecylia.

But then something else popped up. As I scrolled through the listings for Marianna's married surname, looking for entries with more recent dates, listings for Kazimierz started being linked to the name of another woman: Jadwiga Banaszak, not Marianna Banaszak. I wondered if this were the point at which the index had made a shift from church records based in Latin to civil records in the contemporary language. After all, I had seen Marianna's uncle Walenty listed in church records as Valentinus and, of course, Jan showing as Joannes in Latin and Johann in German. Was there a Polish equivalent to Marianna that I didn't know about?

That's when the journey began: taking the detour to learn more about Polish names. The FamilySearch wiki provided more information than I ever thought possible on every aspect of the very different world of Polish names, both given names and surnames—as well as the grammatical effect of the Polish language conventions on Polish names. And if that weren't enough, Wikipedia provided another entry on the topic of Polish names.

Since I had already discovered some of the surprising differences between Latin and Polish versions of given names—like the Latin Adalbertus becoming Wojciech in Polish—I was ready for any such further surprises. But as far as Marianna went, according to the index to the Słownik imion—or Dictionary of Names—Marianna in almost every European language was...Marianna.

So what about Jadwiga? This was the crux of the journey, and a great introduction to Polish history. Apparently a name holding cultural significance—and recent resurgence—in Poland, it calls to mind the first woman to be crowned as monarch of the Kingdom of Poland. In case you don't recall it, that event occurred in 1384, but her name has lived on over the centuries in Poland—a little something I hadn't known until stumbling upon this puzzling entry for a different wife's name for Kazimierz Szczepański.

What I don't yet know is whether there were two men by the same name living in the area surrounding Jarocin, Poland, with one married to Marianna and the other to Jadwiga—or whether that signified the death of Kazimierz's first wife before those entries in 1934 and 1935 containing Jadwiga's name. While I certainly have further to go to catch up with that answer, I can continue to enjoy what I'm discovering while I'm still on the journey.

 

Cracking the Door Open Just a Tiny Bit More

 

Finding documentation for the ten children of Józefa Olejniczak and her husband Michael Banaszak was far more than I had expected for the limited access I have to Polish records of the early 1900s. Each time I return to this project of researching my paternal grandmother's roots, the closed door seems to crack open just a tiny bit more, for which I am thankful.

I'm thankful, particularly, for the additional records being linked to the transcriptions listed at the Polish website BaSIA. Without their help at those websites, there would have been very little available to me in the U.S. to find.

Now that I've found Józefa's family, my next step is to research the newly-found surnames of her married children. Again, another tour of the BaSIA entries, leading to another set of documents and entries in multiple trees, complete with links listed back to the specific archival scans serving as source documentation.

With each of those discoveries made, as well as the ones yet to find, I feel the need to post those names and dates to each place where I am keeping a family tree—not just on my primary tree at Ancestry, but also at FamilySearch, MyHeritage (good connection to international researchers), and WikiTree. It's so important, having discovered a resource, to point the way for others, so I make sure to paste the link to the actual documents on each entry I make in those trees. Since they are all public trees, hopefully someone else will spot these details and follow the trail to the sources I've discovered.

The process isn't quick, and it certainly isn't easy. It's downright tedious, admittedly, but the process is worth the persevering. I think of the possible cousins who might find this helpful—and, if helped, will take the time to at least drop a line and connect.

In genealogy, we are all in this together. While your part of "together" may come from an entirely different part of the world—hey, I grew up being told I was Irish!—you may someday discover you need to know more about this hidden corner of the world, as well. And the places where you are researching your roots may well become the source of help or encouragement for a distant cousin you haven't even met—yet.