A Fresh Start for Family Finds?

 

In moving to a different realm of my family tree—for these last three months of the year, it is always my father's Polish ancestors—I'm always hopeful that a fresh start will produce increased family finds. That, as I saw today in checking the past two weeks' progress for my biweekly count, is not always the case.

Researching Polish ancestry can make one feel like the voice crying out in the wilderness. Will anyone hear? There are plenty of researchers clamoring to find their Irish ancestors, as I've witnessed while working on my father-in-law's lines during the summer. Judging from what I hear from fellow researchers in my genealogical society or in the classes I teach, the same can be said for researching any roots from the British Isles. Add in places like Germany or even Italy, and you'll find a crowd of researching companions. But Polish? Not so many.

I've been happy to find the few Polish ancestors I've located this past week. Records at FamilySearch.org and websites actually located in Poland have been helpful. And I'm certainly glad to have been able to begin building out the descendant lines of those ancestors' collateral lines, a step I always take in hopes of locating the nexus with those mystery DNA matches.

The pace of progress, however, has still been slow. I suspect that will be the case as I move backwards in time, no matter which ancestor I choose to trace for my Twelve Most Wanted.

In the past two weeks, I've located and documented forty seven new family members related to my father's patriline. That brings my tree count up to 42,026. Admittedly, that's not many new finds—a situation which makes me begin to feel boxed in. The farther back we go in time, no matter which ancestral origin we choose to trace, the harder it becomes to locate records to confirm that familial connection. But the farther forward in time we hope to track their descendants, the more we realize there is another roadblock facing us. 

In my case, that Polish roadblock is apparently limited by the most recent dates of the Prussian records digitized and indexed through FamilySearch.org. Prussia being one of those national entities no longer in existence may be one factor in this challenge, but another is the privacy concerns—and legislation—dictating availability. Sometimes that limit reaches to the previous hundred years. Or the century leading up to the last time this issue was revisited by policy makers.

At any rate, my next step in trying to locate descendants of those Polish ancestors will be a winding route from transcriptions provided at Polish websites to their link leading to archival holdings. The website hosted by PTG, for instance, has led me to some records as recent as the 1940s (though that is rare). The challenge means a slow-down for research progress.

As I set aside my in-laws' research questions for another season, their tree remains frozen at 44,402 individual listings. I anticipate it will remain in that condition, barring any marriages or births of cousins' grandbabies between now and when I pick up the in-law research in the spring of 2027. And with the time flying as quickly as it does over the winter holiday season, that may be sooner than we expect.

As Promised, Another Update

 

Somehow, in the back of my recent memory, I recalled seeing a notice from Ancestry.com mentioning that they would soon be releasing an update to their DNA ethnicity report, which they call Origins. Since I usually reserve the weekends for checking my DNA matches, I thought I'd pop over there after attending to a few details regarding the descendants of my Radomski ancestors.

Nothing, however, is ever easy. I found yet another sibling of Susanna, my second great-grandmother, who had married and had several children—some of whom actually lived to adulthood, a feat which I'm realizing was a rare occurrence back in my paternal ancestors' homeland.

That brought on a back-and-forth process of gleaning the data from the PTG website, adding it to my Ancestry tree, then stepping over to FamilySearch.org and adding the same name and date to my tree there, then scouring the resources there in search of any documentation.

There was plenty to keep me busy.

At the end of the session, I thought, "I'll just take a quick look over at my ThruLines for this surname," and jumped back to Ancestry. The minute I clicked on the "DNA" tab, I knew it wasn't going to be a quick look. The drop-down menu sported a green "updated" sign right next to "Origins." It was just what I was waiting for. And sooner than I expected.

Since I am currently working on my father's roots, that became my first stop. Part of this update is apparently the addition of a section devoted to origins by grandparent, information imputed by them without need for any further testing on my part. This, Ancestry has accomplished partly by looking at a person's matches which have already been identified by side of family—which is why they mentioned that this may not be possible right now for those who only have a few matches. 

In addition, Ancestry has apparently expanded their Polish subregions, enough so that I believe I can already discern which paternal grandparent contributed which subregion of Polish heritage to me. The line I'm working on this month—my paternal grandfather's side—is centered mostly in Pomerania, which Ancestry is simply labeling as "Northern Poland." Apparently, at some point, I will be able to fill in the line labeled "edit label" to identify Grandparent 2 as my father's father. But for now, the "coming soon" disclaimer tells me I'll just have to wait.

With that, I'll pass that waiting time by going back to the original task I had planned for today: checking out ThruLines to see whether anything new showed up for matches on my Radomski line. 

Considering a Few Record Keeping Details

 

As I'm explaining the collateral lines I've found for the Radomski family, you might be wondering, "Why is it Susanna Radomska when her dad's name was Radomski? To answer a question like that, we may need to step away from our story for a process break to consider a few details.

Now that I've moved away from my father-in-law's Irish ancestors to spent the last three months of this year on my own father's Polish roots, it would help to remember a few items we learned when we studied this part of my family in past years. 

Among other things, one of the most obvious differences, now that I'm recording Polish family names was seeing the change in surname endings. Particularly for the quintessential Polish names ending in "-ski," we will see those endings change, depending on whether the ancestor we're referring to was a man or a woman. Women's surnames ended in "-a." With that simple explanation, we know that Susanna and her sisters would always have their maiden name represented as Radomska, even though their father was actually named Andrzej Radomski.

Another detail to grapple with: documentation. In English-speaking countries, we often can rely on multiple documented sources in the same language for tracing our ancestors. Through most of the past century, we had birth records, marriage certificates, or death notices—all completed in the same English we speak every day.

Not so in Poland. Depending on which entity was in charge of the government, a person's records might have been recorded in Polish, or they might have been entered in German, complete with the complicating factor of a handwritten script which few people now even know how to read. Yet, not all records were provided by the government—or survived the devastation of the years following our ancestors' lifetime.

Some of the records left to us were those drawn up by the church of that time period—in my ancestors' case, the Catholic church. That church brought with it the tradition of recording all information in yet another language: Latin. 

With that litany of differences, I as a researcher am left with a decision: should I record the names as I find them in the Latin records of my ancestors' religion? Or should I list them as they surely were known colloquially, in their own lifetime and surroundings? 

To answer that question, I not only have chosen to record my ancestors by the Polish tradition of matching the surname to the ancestor's gender, but to list them by the Polish version of their given name. Thus, for Susanna's father, I enter him into my family tree not as Andreas, which is how his church record would have identified him, but as Andrzej, as his peers might have called him.

Likewise, when I encounter a name which includes a letter which, in Polish, would include a character not recognized in the English alphabet, I chose to represent that letter as it would have been recorded in the person's native land. Thus, when Zuzanna became the bride of Jan, I recorded his name using the diacritical mark, "ł" for Puchała.

Finding and entering those unusual characters in records using my American-made computer with its English speaker's keyboard can seem to be somewhat of a challenge to record all these foreign names correctly. And yet, even with the limitations of not having purchased my keyboard in Poland, I've found an easy work-around. Sure, I can also memorize the ascii codes for each symbol, but who am I kidding? I don't have that great a memory. Instead, I use Google Translate to create, cut and paste the diacritical marks I need into my text. 

Simply go to the Google search page, click on the nine dots in the upper right corner, and select "translate" from the drop-down menu. Then, select the language needed, look for the keyboard icon to "Turn on Virtual Keyboard," then hit the "ctrl+alt" key to select the special characters for that language whenever you need to add a diacritical mark to the word you wish to enter.

I then copy the word and paste it where I need it. I'll paste it in a document I'm writing, or on a blog post, or I'll even add it to the name field for my family tree on Ancestry.com or other tree-building service. With relatively little effort at all, I then can include my ancestors in my tree using the name they were known as, back home in their native land.

Susanna's Siblings

 

For anyone wishing to find distant cousins useful in pointing to a specific shared ancestor, DNA is the best bet. However, where those cousins live and where they tested may signify the best possibility for testing companies. In my second great-grandmother Susanna's case, unless I find any more emigrants among her Polish siblings, the best likelihood for discovering distant cousins would be the most international of the major genetic genealogy companies. Hence, I'll be spending a lot of time at MyHeritage, scouring the match lists for descendants of Susanna's siblings—if, that is, those siblings lived to adulthood and had children of their own.

One dismaying detail about researching the collateral lines for my newly-discovered Polish ancestors was seeing how many of those family members died young. After reviewing the multiple tragedies of loss experienced by Susanna, herself, I braced myself in preparation for looking to the children of the previous generation. The 1850s, at least, were a rough decade for Susanna's family. What more could go wrong in the generations preceding that?

From what I'm seeing at this point, I may yet discover some distant cousins descending from that generation of the Radomski family. Though I am not yet done documenting Susanna's siblings, so far I've found transcriptions of baptismal records for Katarzyna ("Catharinam") in 1821, Susanna's younger brother Simon (likely Szymon) in 1826, Francisca (Franciszka in Polish) in January of 1828, and her apparent twin, Anna, also baptized at that same date. 

Bracing myself for the inevitable—after all, Susanna's own children didn't fare too well in that rural northern region of Poland known as Pomerania—I expected to find each sibling's baptism followed soon afterwards with a record of the baby's burial. So far, no. In fact, I'm finding some marriage records for those siblings, as well. Not only that, but I believe I've found a marriage record for Susanna's own parents in 1814.

Now to move on to mapping out the possible descendancy of those collateral lines. There may be a DNA match from among my Polish cousins, after all.

Straight to the Next Generation

 

Pursuing the details on some ancestors may leave us chasing empty promises, buried among the myriad pages of recorded history. Other records, thankfully, are rather straightforward in providing the details we seek. While I can't say there are even any promises in view for my second great-grandfather Jan Puchała, fortunately I've found information gleaned from a document on his wife.

The information listed in that one record I found was rather straightforward. Baby's name: Susanna Marciana. Mother's name: Marianna Nierswicka. Father's name: "Andr Radom."

Well, almost straightforward.

I can presume that the "Andr" stood for the Latin name, Andreas. After all, this was a baptismal record from the Catholic church in Lubichowo, Pomerania. Or perhaps the cleric meant to enter the Polish version, Andrzej. But Radom for a surname? I wasn't sure this was quite what I had seen in Susanna's own marriage record, where her maiden name was listed as Radomska, the traditional feminine form of her father's surname, which would have been Radomski.

Keeping in mind that this record set, only available in transcription form online at FamilySearch.org, would need to be confirmed by viewing the digitized handwritten entry. Since for this, I would need to go to a local FamilySearch Center, I thought I'd first look for corroboration from another transcription-only website. So I jumped over to the PTG site for the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, and looked up records for anyone named "Radom" who might have been baptized in Lubichowo in 1824.

Sure enough, there was one entry for a Susanna Marciana, whose father was named Andreas Radomski. And just to make sure, I noted that the entry also included a mother listed as Marianna Nierzwicka.

Just like that, I pushed back another generation, exactly as I had hoped when I listed Susanna as one of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year. Armed with this information, it was all too easy to pursue the couple named as her parents to see what siblings Susanna might have had.

There is a reason for this secondary pursuit. Since Susanna was my second great-grandmother, finding DNA matches with whom I'm mutually linked to Susanna would, in theory, be possible. The genetic distance for a third cousin is certainly within reach. Once I know the line of descent for the children of Susanna's siblings, I could even possibly find fourth cousins among my matches.

There is, however, a catch with all of that hopeful pursuit of siblings. To see what my possibilities actually are, let's first take a look at who else was descended from Susanna's parents, Andrzej Radomski and Marianna Nierzwicka.

When Sue Met John

 

Well, actually it was when Susanna met Johann, according to the Latin in their 1842 marriage record. She was nineteen and he was...ahem...thirty three, an age disparity which, in my in-laws' era, would prompt the local officials to alert the newspaper editor, "don't publish ages" in the legal notices.

But it wasn't even Susanna and Johann, I suspect, back in their home town of Lubichowo, where their native Polish tongue would likely have labeled them Zuzanna and Jan. 

The two of them tied the knot on January 24, 1842, bringing together two families from the same village, the Radomskis on the bride's side and the Puchałas—whoever they were—from the groom's side of the aisle. The sixteen years of their marriage—no surprise here to learn that, with the age disparity, Jan died in 1858—yielded the births of at least five children, though the tragedy of the time was that most of those descendants died in infancy.

After the birth of the first and second of the Puchała children (at least that I can find), an age gap was followed by the birth and subsequent loss of three infants: Andrzej in 1851, Franciszek in 1855, and Katarzyna in 1857, after which their father, himself, followed suit. There may, of course, be other children, but none that I've been able to find so far.

Of the other two, daughter Marianna and son Thomas, Zuzanna would eventually live to see several grandchildren, with almost all of them—at least if they survived childhood—remaining in Lubichowo. While I have yet to find a death record for Zuzanna, an entry at the PTG website indicated an eighty six year old woman by that name died in 1909. If that was our Zuzanna—or Susanna—she lived a long but tragedy-ridden life in the rural north of what is now Poland. Whether we can learn anything more about what life was like in the region around Lubichowo, I can't yet say, but I'll be digging until I find something to paint a clearer picture of this couple and their family.

Introducing Susanna

 

When you can't make any further progress on a brick wall ancestor—especially on the patrilineal side—what do you do next? In the case of my father's Polish ancestors, my first step is to look more closely at the woman who married that last patrilineal puzzle. 

That's why, this month, I'm introducing my father's great-grandmother, Susanna Radomska. When I selected her back in January as one of my Twelve Most Wanted to research this year, I realized I had never paid her much mind at all. For all the years I had used the Twelve Most Wanted system to organize my family history research, I had never once considered looking into the origin of one specific great-grandparent: Susanna Radomska. My focus had always been on her husband Jan Puchała, who has never since budged in his stubborn insistence to remain one of my brick wall ancestors. 

With that glaring exception to my research progress, we'll spend this month looking deeper into the roots of this great-grandmother, Susanna Radomska. I already know she was likely born in the small village of Lubichowo in the northern province of Pomerania in the country which was once called Prussia. Only back then, according to the Meyer's Gazetteer, the place was called Lubichow. Handily, as was noted in the gazetteer, the town claimed only one Catholic church. And thankfully, those church records are still in existence.

From those tiny details, I've cobbled together a research approach which first has me checking the transcriptions at PTG, the Pomeranian genealogical website I mentioned yesterday. Then, I'll be moving to FamilySearch.org to explore all the resources available at that website. Due to negotiations between that website and the foreign archives which hold the original documents, in many cases I will find myself having to travel to an actual FamilySearch library in order to view the documents rather than rely on someone else's transcription of the record. This, in some cases, may be absolutely essential, given varying writing styles, legibility after decades of fading ink and crumbling paper, and the inevitable mistakes that can occur when tackling hundreds of such records in the transcription process.

As it turns out, finding Susanna's parents was an easy task, thanks to her own baptismal record. Along with her record, the same church gets credit for numerous other documents containing the same parental names. Bit by bit, we'll discover more on this family from Lubichowo, in hopes of explaining distant cousins among DNA matches and other family mysteries, but the number one hope I have this month is to learn more about just how Susanna met and married Jan Puchała, that brick wall ancestor who became her husband in 1842.