Tracking DNA When the Trail Isn't Clear

 

Using DNA to point us in the right direction beyond the ancestral line we already know seems to be a logical step...until we hit a brick wall. When I work on my father's Polish ancestors, I already know I'll have that challenge. I've seen it this month as I worked on my second great-grandmother Susanna Radomska, and I'll be running into the same challenge, now that we're making an early transition to the November challenge for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026, Franciszek Jankowski.

Franciszek, my second great-grandfather on my paternal grandmother's mother's line, is yet another of those ancestors for whom I have very little documentation. In other words, the trail to that man's ancestry is not clear to me. Tools like Ancestry.com's ThruLines won't help much, despite the chart showing I am connected to the DNA tests of ten other subscribers who also claim this ancestor. 

There was a slight stroke of good fortune in even finding that detail. On the transcription for the 1854 marriage record of Franciszek and his wife, Franciszka Olejniczak—whom we'll be studying for the last month of this year—both the bride and groom had their parents' names listed. So technically, when I say I have ten results on my ThruLines for the Jankowski family, I'm really looking at ten people who also claim Franciszek's father, Jan, as their ancestor. 

But clicking through to see who those ten DNA cousins are, I don't see anything particularly helpful. Why? Those ten people are relatives who are much closer than the anticipated third or fourth cousins linked to Franciszek or his father. I already know who those people are. They are relatives who are more immediately connected to me as descendants of cousins or even half-siblings.

How to find DNA matches who descend from, say, third great-grandfather Jan Jankowski, is the real question. No one else has shown up on Ancestry's ThruLines. At first, this made me wonder whether those diseases and wars that cut short the lives of so many descendants in the Jankowski family—in fact, most of the rest of my father's Polish ancestors—had made a thorough job of the demolition of these people groups.  But I'm finding signs that there were, somehow, additional survivors.

In a zigzagging route from one DNA match to shared matches, and then beyond to their shared matches, I'm finding distant cousins whose immigrant ancestors settled in places like Chicago or Michigan or Wisconsin, much like I had found when researching other parts of my paternal line. Seemingly disconnected from the rest of their family—or perhaps without any concept of how large the distance between one American city and another for these immigrants—these immigrants began life after their journey and stayed in that one place for generations.

The trees of their descendants show such a story, but rarely seem to explain how they connect back to Poland. I'm wondering whether DNA will ever be able to explain the story. In combination with the use of multiple Polish websites, partnered with what can be found at FamilySearch.org, double-checking the assertions and assumptions displayed on each match's tree may be one way to find the answer. But with such small matches, the risk of telescoping results—is it this fourth generation which produces the match, or one even farther beyond that?—makes me heed the warning to proceed with caution.

Hopefully, a first step this coming week of cross checking family records at FamilySearch with archival records linked to the BaSIA transcription project will shed some light on missing generations in the Jankowski lines of descent.

Where to Look

 

It definitely helps to know where to look when you're researching your roots in Poland. This country presents some research challenges, being a prime example of what I mean when I say that genealogy can no longer be a case of one-stop shopping.

I found that to be especially true while I was working on my paternal ancestors from Pomerania, that northern region stretching across both Germany and Poland. While working on the Radomski line this month, I've relied on one particular website which zeroed in on records from Pomerania. That website, hosted by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association—the acronym PTG referring to the organization's name in Polish—held a database of transcriptions having one unifying detail in common: they all were records from the region of Pomerania.

While countrywide resources like Geneteka may be helpful in finding your Polish roots, I've come to appreciate the specialization of such a narrow scope as I find at PTG. But now that the coming month's research focus moves us away from Pomerania to the old Prussian region, then called the Province of Posen (the Germanisation of the Polish place name Poznań), I'll need to switch to another regional resource.

Actually, over the years, I've used two different websites for my long-distance quest to discover more about my Polish ancestors. At first, I began checking transcriptions of marriage records through the Poznań Project website. That resource was helpful, but left out details cataloguing the rest of life. To find birth and death records, as well as marriage details, the Poznań Project pointed me to BaSIA.

BaSIA—the website's Polish name is translated as Database of Archival Indexing System—provides indexed material from what was once called Greater Poland, from the eighteenth century onward. Significantly, records stretch well into the 1900s, which will help me with my upcoming goal to trace the lines of descent for all the Jankowski children.

The BaSIA system, powered by volunteers, gleans key details from both church and governmental archived records from the region, which is then put into a searchable system online. From those entries, links to the actual archived records enable a researcher to pull up the corresponding images, which can then be downloaded to the user's own computer.

While I've been able to access many records from this region for my Jankowski family through digitized records, there have been several children in that line for whom I can find no record at FamilySearch.org, my primary resource for Polish research so far. The process from this point forward will be to cross check what I've found—or not found—at FamilySearch with what I can access at BaSIA. A tedious process, indeed, but a necessary one to fill in the many blanks on this branch of my family tree. With access to records up into the twentieth century, I'm hoping the process will enable me to push forward another generation on this family group. 

Branching Out

 

Looking back to the beginning of January when I planned my research goals for this year, my intention in selecting Franciszek Jankowski as my focus for November was to branch out and see what became of each of his nine children. Since I've begun that process, I already know that at least two of his daughters left their home in Poland to raise their own family in the United States. What became of the rest of these children, I still need to uncover.

Since Franciszek was my second great-grandfather, any of his descendants in my generation would be third cousins. For those accustomed to using DNA testing for genealogical purposes, you already know that is a reachable match relationship.

With that in mind, I've tested at all the major DNA companies offering such details. However, I have yet to stumble upon many DNA matches who lead me back to this Jankowski ancestor. Now that I've outlined all I can find on each of Franciszek's children—believe me, there is still so much to uncover—I've realized some of the reasons for this lack of telltale matches.

First among those reasons is that not all of the Jankowski children survived to adulthood. My introduction to that fact occurred right away with his firstborn son, Anton, who died only a few months after his parents' first wedding anniversary in 1856. His was not the Jankowskis' only loss. As I work my way through the rest of the baptismal records for this family, I've found more.

Complicating matters is that for some of the other Jankowski children, I can find no further records at all. That could make sense for Franciszek's namesake son, born in 1874, who might have found a bride outside his immediate community—if we consider the possibility that not all records of that time period survived to our current day. But what of all the daughters?

There were two other daughters whom I did manage to trace. One was Stanisława, a younger sister of my great-grandmother Marianna, who married Franciszek Janczak in 1894, then moved to Buffalo in upstate New York to raise her family. The other sister was the baby of the Jankowski family, Antonina, who married but apparently remained in Poland. It is with this youngest Jankowski sister that I am currently struggling to trace descendants.

DNA tells me there must have been surviving Jankowski relatives in Poland, for on MyHeritage, I have several matches still living there whose posted family trees at least include an indication of a connection to that surname. Unfortunately, most of those trees are listed as private trees. Though I've requested permission to view those trees, I've not received any answer. I wouldn't be surprised to discover we may be in a tight loop, with neither of us knowing how to communicate in the other match's language, a dilemma I've yet to overcome.

However, over at Ancestry.com's DNA program, I also find matches linked to the Jankowski line. Thankfully, those matches have included a public family tree—with the added bonus that we each speak the same language. Tracing those Jankowski lines has been relatively straightforward. 

That, however, would not suffice as the research challenge for this upcoming month, so we'll be heading back to Poland—at least on paper and in cyberspace—to see if there is any other way to trace those missing descendants.

The answer to that, in fact, will be yes. There are a few ways to trace those missing Polish ancestors. That, though, requires a multi-step process relying, first, on transcriptions provided by volunteer genealogists, then links to online repositories. We've visited those websites in previous years, but with the passing of time, things have changed, and it might do us good to review the website updates before diving in to the tedium of such ancestral documentation.

Back Home With the Jankowskis

 

I probably wouldn't have known much about my second great-grandfather Franciszek Jankowski if it weren't for his daughter marrying and then leaving home with his three remaining grandchildren. That his daughter Marianna didn't suffer the fate of so many young people growing up in the old Prussian town of Żerków was unusual enough. I'd already noticed the finality of multiple extended family members having laid their young children to rest. Though it might have seemed young, Marianna's marriage at age sixteen may have been her ticket away from the doomed future which befell so many of her family members.

When Marianna left home to follow her much older husband to New York City, she left behind the small town of her parents' generation. By the time of her 1889 departure, her father would have been closing in on sixty years of age. Her mother, Franciszka, would have been in her early fifties. The Jankowskis' youngest child, Marianna's sister Antonina, would barely have turned eleven.

Thankfully, when Marianna's parents were married, marriage records of that time period included information on the parents of both Franciszek and his wife Franciszka. Though I have yet to access the actual document at a FamilySearch Library, the main details from that February 13, 1854, marriage record tell me several details about Franciszek.

For one thing, his age given in the marriage record provided the estimate of a year of birth in 1830. More helpful than that was the provision of his parents' names, likely Jan Jankowski and Anna Stajeska in their native Polish tongue. Franciszek's wife, Franciszka, was the daughter of Nicolai (likely Mikołaj in Polish) Olejniczak and his wife Josepha. Franciszek's mother-in-law came with a bona fide Polish tongue twister for a maiden name: Grzegorczyk (though that run of consonants only serves to puzzle those who haven't taken the time to learn how to pronounce Polish phonics).

All told, I've been able to account for nine children for this couple, though as far as I can tell, many of them died in infancy or early childhood. Tracing documents for these family members requires not only relying on the digitized records available at FamilySearch.org, but also by venturing out online to websites in Poland, where volunteers dedicate themselves to posting transcriptions of digitized records from Polish archival sources.

Documenting who those many children are will require bouncing between three or four websites, juggling with verbiage in two different languages (neither of which are Polish), and posting those sources in all the places where I keep family trees.

As I mentioned earlier this year when I set up my research plans through my Twelve Most Wanted program, my main goal in zeroing in on Franciszek Jankowski is to trace the lines of all survivors in the hopes of pinpointing the shared ancestral couple linking me with several DNA matches I have at the major genetic genealogy websites. Expanding the Jankowski branch of my family tree may be challenging, especially for those descendants remaining in what eventually became war-torn Europe in the 1900s. As research resources become more available online, helpful tools may make this more of a possibility than in years past.

If He Were Here, We'd Call Him Frank

 

If I were researching my mother's ancestry, I'd have a multitude of records housed in America to reach all the way back to colonial times. Not so with my father's lines. Both his parents came to the United States as children. Right away, researching those roots means immersing myself in what it means to be Polish: to be from a place with a distinct culture, language, and heritage attached to a land which often belonged to someone else.

To begin with, the records I seek for these ancestors were not drawn up in English. Nor, for the most part, were they written in Polish. So when I introduce my focus for November's Twelve Most Wanted, my second great-grandfather, I'm introducing someone whose birth record in Latin likely identified him as Franciscus—or, thanks to the Latin syntax recording his 1854 marriage, as Franciscum. Back in his hometown of Żerków in the old Prussian province of Posen, his neighbors probably called him Franciszek  But if he were to migrate to New York, like his daughter Marianna did, we'd probably just call him Frank.

Franciszek never made it to New York, though he lived long enough to see two of his daughters leave home for the New World. Marianna, my great-grandmother, married at sixteen, and became mother to four children. She followed her husband to New York after their youngest child, a son, died in infancy like so many other children in their extended family during that time period.

My grandmother was three months shy of her fourth birthday upon that journey from Hamburg to New York. If she remembered her grandparents at all, it would be with the dim memory of childhood. Any stories that might have been told about family members left behind apparently have not been passed down to any of my older relatives—at least, not that they've been able to recount to me.

It is into this void that I push through to find any token of Franciszek Jankowski's life through the scant documentation left behind as acknowledgement that he ever existed. Far more than a connect-the-dots challenge, we'll need to rely on records of the area's history and geography to re-imagine what life must have been like for the relatives who were left behind when Marianna, her two sons, and her daughter Sophie took that final journey so far away from home. 

Jumping Tracks

 

Despite best laid plans, sometimes our research objectives cannot be achieved within the set time frame. Such is the case with Susanna Radomska, my second great-grandmother from the Pomeranian town of Lubichowo. Earlier this year, I had thought her data might have been reachable, considering she likely died in 1909, according to a transcription posted online at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. Though finding her parents' identity was quickly accomplished, my hopes for finding more about her roots—or even my secondary wish to learn anything further about her husband, Jan Puchała of my father's patriline—did not materialize into solid evidence.

With that disappointment, I've decided to jump tracks. We'll begin early with the November selection of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026. This will involve redirecting our attention from Pomerania at the northern reaches of Poland to a more central region of the former boundaries of Prussia, a province then known as Posen.

In the coming weeks, we'll zero in on the town of Żerków, home of my second great-grandfather Franciszek Jankowski. This change also signifies a shift from my father's paternal side to that of his mother—specifically to her maternal grandfather.

With the spare time gained by this month's research loss, we can also linger a bit over such details as geographical significance and impact on the daily life of these ancestors in Żerków. Sometimes, in researching ancestors so far removed from the familiarity of the places we now call home, we lose sight of what daily life might have been for them. Assuming every ancestor was simply a farmer tied to the land paints a rather lifeless family story, indeed, when life for our relatives from previous generations was likely far from the few facts we can find on the faded pages of governmental or church records.

Despite this luxury of added time to explore, we still need to start with a proper beginning. With that, tomorrow will bring introductions to Franciszek Jankowski, his wife and as many of their children as I've been able to find.

. . . and I Alone Have Escaped to Tell

 

There is a passage in the Bible, contained in one of the oldest stories in that book, concerning the many tragedies which befell a man named Job. One by one, devastation caused the destruction of his business ventures, his home, and ultimately, the loss of all his children. With each tragedy, a breathless runner brought the news to him, then added, "...and I alone have escaped to tell."

Those lone reporters remind me of what I'm discovering, now that I'm searching for signs of any surviving lines of my paternal grandparents' ancestors. At first, reviewing my DNA matches, I found third and fourth cousins from a few lines, but those were all descendants of other siblings of another great-grandmother, who had also emigrated from Poland in the late 1800s. When it comes to looking for signs of my Polish ancestors, those who migrated to America became much like those reporters of bad news in the biblical account: "and I alone have escaped to tell."

This becomes far more understandable when we look at what survives of Prussian records for the provinces my ancestors once called home. In the case of the Radomski family—both for Susanna's own generation and that of her children—so many of the children died young. True, there may still be cases of lost records and the hopeful future discovery of family connections over the generations. But I doubt I'll find many more than I've already identified. The DNA of those unfortunate cases of infant mortality were not among the few who did manage to escape to tell of their generation.

As I look ahead to the next Polish ancestor I'll be researching—likely with an early start to the November selection of my Twelve Most Wanted—I see much the same pattern repeated. Though this ancestor lived and died in a different region of the old Prussian domain, many of her children suffered that same fate. Very few of those descendants escaped the scourges and diseases which plagued my ancestors of that region, as well. Their DNA did not live to tell of that generation, either.

Perhaps, as is sometimes mentioned in DNA classes, I just need the patience to wait until that missing perfect DNA candidate tests. That, I would love to see. But as I look over the records I have been able to find, the ones which reveal the Prussian story for my family, it becomes quite obvious that there were many from those ancestral generations who never lived to tell of their roots. They never escaped what befell them to pass their genetic story to future generations.