Organizing the Splat of the Data

 

So, the data's gathered. Now what?

I'm sitting here, looking at the list I've harvested from a search for Laskowski relatives documented in the tiny town of Żerków throughout the 1800s. I'm trying to figure out a way to organize the great, big splat of it all. There's a gap in the fat middle of it, of course, likely due to the inevitable destruction of some records through the centuries—or, perhaps if I'm lucky, the gap is simply owing to a backlog in uploading indexed results onto the website.

Spanning the century in my search for this one particular surname was my way of hoping to circumvent the problem of missing records. Almost as if vindicating my hunch, I did find some marriage and death records towards the end of the 1800s which provided names of parents whom I hadn't encountered back at the beginning of that century. Yet it still is hard to sift through all this information and find patterns or connections.

When I think of patterns for ancestral connections, the easiest way for my brain to recognize them is to lay out all the information in a pedigree chart. But how to connect all these disparate names? It occurred to me that using the technique of a "floating tree" might be just the answer. That way, I'd enter each of these Laskowski names into my family tree at Ancestry.com, then cut the entry lose from the tree so no relationship is implied. From that point, each time I run into that name again—say, in a subsequent marriage record, or listed as parent of a child who died later in the century—I can look it up in my index (since it is floating free from any relationships) and then add the new name and relationship to that floating individual's entry.

Eventually, I'd have several clustered cells floating around, detached in the ether of my family tree. True, they'd be disconnected still from my own Laskowski line, but I'd be holding them in reserve, in hopes that someday, more records will be added to the various digitized collections I can now access.

Looking at the Polish website BaSIA, I've noticed that each transcription is linked to the scan of the actual document held in the Polish archives. Along with the link to the scanned picture, the BaSIA entry provides the date that each entry was added to the website. I've noticed that some of those entries had upload dates early in 2012, while others were added closer to the end of that decade. I'm fervently hoping this is still a work in progress, with more indexed and scanned records to come. That gap in resources from about the 1850s through the 1880s could contain the very information I'm seeking.

It's a Small Town, After All

 

There are some research problems which leave me feeling as if I'm walking in circles. Pursuing my Laskowski ancestors in Żerków is one of those problems. The more I try to compile a listing of all the documents containing the surname Laskowski for resident of Żerków, the more I'm spotting relatives sporting the other surnames in my paternal line.

Can that be so surprising? After all, Żerków is only a town of maybe two thousand residents now. That each of the residents, over several generations, would be likely to marry spouses from the other, likely limited, families in the area should not be surprising. But I was surprised, nonetheless.

Take my new brick wall ancestor Bonawentura Laskowski. He's my third great-grandfather, so now I'm making progress, having moved into this new generation. But that's where I'm stumped. I cannot find any connections for this man who died in 1827.

I got the brainy idea that, if I couldn't make any progress on the Laskowski side of the equation, perhaps I'd find better luck looking at the other side of the family. That other side is represented by Bonawentura's wife, Orszula Wroblewska. With a name like that, I'm automatically folding in more uncertainty, because I've seen her name rendered several ways. Some records list her given name as Ursula, which would be understandable. But my doubt rises even further when I find only records spelling her maiden name as Wrobleska, not Wroblewska. Could this just be a case of simple misspelling? 

I did a search for documents on the Polish website BaSIA to see what would show up. I narrowed the search parameters to a ten kilometer area around Żerków, and lessened the similarity range to a more lenient level to capture any other possible spelling variations. 

With that, I began to pull in possibilities for this side of the family. I found a twenty six year old woman named Cunegunda Wrobleska who died in 1821, as well as a sixty year old woman named Franciszka with the same surname who died in 1818. But when I came upon the 1820 death notice for eighty year old Regina Wrobleska, something made me stop and consider.

Regina, I noticed, was apparently unlike the others with the surname Wrobleska, for this entry gave her maiden name. The record noted that she was born a Laskoska. Fortunately for whoever might be among her descendants, her parents' names were listed: Adalbertus Laskoski and Barbara. Although there was no maiden name given for Regina's mother Barbara, this was the first instance I had found in Żerków of someone this early in the century provided with parents' names.

But what was this? Besides Orszula Wroblewska, my third great-grandmother who married Bonawentura Laskowski, here was another woman whose life story also tied together these two surnames. Could there have been more?

Looking further, I also spotted another surname which has appeared in this branch of my family tree before: Gramlewicz. Only this time, instead of representing the line of Bonawentura's daughter-in-law Elzbieta Gramlewicz, this was the birth record for Laurentius Gramlewicz, son of Michael Gramlewicz and Marianna Wrobleska. Somehow, all three of these surnames are tied together in my roots—and more than once. 

Yes, Żerków is a small town, after all—so what was I to expect? Whether I can conclude that minor misspellings do not indicate entirely unrelated families, I can't yet be sure. But I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm slipping into the outer edges of some signs of endogamy in my family tree.

In Search of Polish Naming Conventions

 

Researching ancestors from an English language country is far simpler than pursuing those secret ancestors my paternal grandparents never wanted us kids to find. Yes, the cousins persevered and made discoveries, but now that I'm faced with the prospect of untangling at least eighty Laskowski ancestors from the same tiny village, I need some help.

I'm currently in search of information on Polish naming conventions, especially to help me sort out those many mentions of newborn Laskowskis in baptismal records. It occurred to me how much easier my research would be if my Polish forebears abode by some simple rules of thumb like, say, the Irish naming pattern. Or how about the pattern the Irish used for selecting godparents? If only my Polish ancestors had relied on such conventions, I'd have it made. Every time I'd spot a godparent's name, I'd know exactly how that name would fit into the family picture.

I decided to search for some answers to questions like, "How did Polish parents select godparents for their newborn babies?" Or, "Was there any naming convention Polish parents used in naming their babies after older relatives?"

Apparently, while I can find such material regarding Irish families, there are no such articles written on the subject for Polish ancestors that I can find. I did find some very generic advice, along the lines of naming children after saints, or perhaps—though apparently rare—after a godparent. But who would be the one chosen as the godparent? I have more questions than answers.

When it came to Polish naming conventions, I did find articles explaining the Polish custom of variations on surname endings, based mostly on conventions of their own language. And there was a far more modern version of information on what goes into a Polish name. I even found an article on "name days" celebrated in Poland—though I read elsewhere that that Polish tradition is losing ground in more modern times.

Still, I haven't found any naming patterns which might provide clues as to who was related to whom—which leaves me no option but guesswork at this point. Or a lot of research, and the hope that there are many more records to be found out there, somewhere.

Tackling an Old Problem

 

Old research problems can be tantalizing and simultaneously frustrating. I thought I'd spend the weekend jumping back to tackle a DNA match's Olejniczak roots from my research project last month. By now, I had reconciled myself to the thought that DNA doesn't lie—and that Polish immigrants to America had good reasons to do their best to blend into the English-speaking background.

Thus, my question: was John Olenzak really the Johan Olejniczak who once had been baptized as Joannes Olejniczak, nephew of my second great-grandmother? Think again if you presumed this would be an easy project. The process of discovering that the Polish Jan Olejniczak was born on the same day as John Olenzak was not that difficult, but moving further into his family constellation introduced more problems.

For one thing, Johan's naturalization record—of which I only could find a transcription—indicated his arrival in New York City in 1905. Yet a passenger listing for a wife, two sons, a daughter, and two unmarried sisters-in-law showed an arrival in 1906. Obviously, Johan could have traveled ahead—his address at the time was given as the town of Neffs in Belmont County, Ohio. But the sticky part was that the names of these family members traveling to join Johan did not match up with later census records for the family, 

Traveling on the Zeeland from Antwerp were Stanislawa Olejniczak and her children Marjan, Stefania, and Stanislaw, plus Wladyslawa and Josefa Pruchniewicz. The problem is that the earliest census where I can find John's family in Ohio includes a son and two daughters—quite backwards from the passenger listing—and a wife names Pelagia, not Stanislawa as had been entered on the passenger list.

Now what? This is apparently not going to be the slam-dunk weekend project I had envisioned. Jan Olejniczak and his immigrant family will have to travel back to the genealogical drawing board with me and await yet another weekend before we can find any answers.

A Dilemma . . .

 

Now that I'm deep in the midst of deciphering handwritten documents in Polish, German, and even Latin in search of my second great-grandparents' collateral lines, a thought occurred to me. It was a thought I didn't appreciate thinking at the time, but it does serve as a reminder when considering the possibility of errors in records as I face my current research dilemma.

I had been following one collateral line, going through birth, marriage, and—eventually—death records, when I spotted a name I knew couldn't be right. It was in the death record for a child of my second great-grandparent's sibling, where the mother's name was provided. The mother's given name was correct (remember, I had already found this family's details in other documents) but the maiden name written on the document could not have the right one—not if this were the same family I had been researching all along. In fact, it was a surname associated by marriage to totally different branch of the family.

Did the reporting party, under the stress of losing a loved one, suddenly blurt out the wrong maiden name? I've certainly seen this happen in death certificates written up in English in my own country, but this time I was deciphering records from old Prussia—in a foreign language, no less. Can I assume that oft-spotted error in my own country's English-language documents could have revealed a bit of universal human nature? Perhaps death records in other languages contain the same—totally understandable—error, too. My dilemma, though, is how to determine when such an error would be likely, even when stumbling through a foreign language in another country's death records.

On Laskowski Overload

 

Doing a "One Name Study" on a surname as common in Poland as Laskowski may have been overkill for someone just wishing to find my third great-grandfather's parents' names, but narrowing the parameters seemed like a do-able idea. Since Bonawentura Laskowski's death record at the close of 1827 left me nothing but two nondescript dashes for the names of each of his parents, I was hoping for another way to not only push backwards another generation, but also look sideways for the names of any of his siblings.

That's when I got the brainy idea to take a page from the playbook of genealogists who advise doing cluster research. I went looking for everyone named Laskowski who was mentioned in records posted at the Polish website BaSIA. Having set up my search parameters—any mentions of the surname Laskowski between the years 1793 and 1900 in documents for residents of Żerków—I soon found myself in Laskowski overload.

There were no less than eighty mentions of the Laskowski surname in my search results. Mind you, I eliminated any records for which a Laskowski family member served as a witness on someone else's document. Those remaining on my list were results for which the surname directly involved a family relationship to that name, whether as subject or parent in a birth, marriage, or death record. Because of the possibility of spelling variations, I also set the parameters for similarity of name above seventy percent, since there were so many instances of the surname being spelled as Laskoski.

Of course, there are potential downsides to such an approach. For one thing, my Laskowski side might have involved some relatives who married individuals living nearby but outside the actual town of Żerków. Another problem might be further hazards on the spelling and handwriting front: names either written with more than that one letter "w" missing from the handwritten note—Laskoski instead of Laskowski—or names for which abysmal handwriting caused a misreading of the entry. To capture those, I would need to set the "similarity" slide bar to a more lenient setting—and, more likely, actually look at the records for myself to see whether they were incorrectly indexed.

One final observation about this process: there may be other sources for records from Żerków. I'll need to see whether other resources can be found. For instance, I've already found copied versions of church records, thanks to a digitizing project completed years ago by FamilySearch. Though several of the names written in that collection were incorrectly indexed, as I work my way through that record set, I'm discovering family connections which I would have missed, had I simply relied on a computerized search through the indexed version of the records.

With eighty possibilities to consider, I'd say this is a more than adequate start to my project, and one to keep me far busier over this weekend than I had originally expected. Whether I ever find the connection between Mateusz's father Bonawentura Laskowski and the rest of the Laskowski residents in Żerków, I can at least glean a few connections between the family lines I've now found represented in those scanned documents.

Which Way Did He Go?

 

It almost seems as if my Polish second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski was an only child. Other than his younger sister Antonina, who was born and died in 1821, there seemed to be no trace of any siblings in the Laskowskis' hometown of Żerków. It was therefore a hopeful possibility to follow Mateusz's son Antoni Laskowski and his family to their new home in America and discover that there was another man by the same surname living in the Laskowski household. Just a bit too old to be Antoni's own son—Antoni's eldest was only eleven at the time—and likewise of an age which wouldn't fit into Antoni's brother Lorenz's family, this Andrew could have been a cousin.

Andrew Laskowski showed up in Antoni's household in the 1892 New York State census. Born approximately in 1866, I presumed this Andrew was born in the same town Antoni had once called home—Żerków. But after Andrew's appearance in the 1892 census, which way did he go? Unless he migrated farther west to Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Illinois, I could find no trace of any likely candidate for this man.

The trouble with seeing this clue slip so easily through my fingers is that I was hoping he would be the link to help me find any collateral lines for Antoni's father Mateusz. Surely, I thought, this Andrew could have been Mateusz's nephew. And where there was a nephew sporting the same surname, there would have been a brother from Mateusz's own generation.

If I couldn't find the right Andrew Laskowski in America after 1892, I reasoned, perhaps I could find him back home in Żerków. That, however, was not in the books for me, either. I tried searching at BaSIA, both using Andrew's Polish name—Andrzej—and the alternative Latin spelling of Andreas for possible church records. Though Andrew had reported an age leading to an estimated birth year of 1866, I widened my search back to 1860, with a cutoff date two years beyond the date of his entry in the 1892 New York State census. No hits.

It was then that it occurred to me to put another research concept to use: what if I searched for all the entries containing the surname Laskowski in Żerków? After all, the town of Zerkow has a population of just over two thousand people now. At the start of the previous century, that population was 1,631. My chances of finding actual relatives with that same surname living in Żerków in the late 1880s could be fairly high.

The concept of cluster research—or, as one key researcher has dubbed it, the F.A.N. Club—may well turn up some possible collateral lines for me. Admittedly, I'll have to proceed carefully. And the list will basically serve as a guide, not a final conclusion. But lacking any other approach to locate documentation to reveal any collateral lines, I'm certainly game to launch this exploration.