Back to Poland: Taking a Different Route

 

Finding a DNA cousins thanks to a match at Ancestry.com was fortunate, but it serves to point out a few problems facing those seeking connections with relatives third cousin or beyond. The major drawback is that while DNA can show us our fourth, fifth, or even sixth cousins, it can't show us all of them. The reason is simple: after recombination of genetic material between the parents in each generation, some of those more distant relatives' genes may not make the cut. I may inherit some genetic material from my third great-grandparents Mikołaj Olejniczak and his wife Józefa Grzegorczyk, but that doesn't mean every single one of my Olejniczak fourth cousins will inherit the same strand.

Since right now, it appears that the one DNA cousin I mentioned yesterday is likely my only Olejniczak connection at Ancestry, that means it's time to turn back to Poland for help in piecing together the family trees for those other Olejniczak matches. But in doing so, I'll first take a different route to try to solve my research problem.

What I've already done has been to build out my own tree, based on actual documents I've been able to find through Polish websites like BaSIA. This process has its drawbacks. The prime roadblock is that the most recent record I've been able to locate on that website dates to the early 1930s. And that is only one. That is simply not close enough in time to connect with the several Polish DNA matches I have found on MyHeritage.com. 

I have been able to look at trees on MyHeritage belonging to these Polish DNA matches, but many of them are evidently researchers whose great-grandparents' life span reached back to dates more recent than that lone 1930s document I was able to find. Realistically, most of the records I've found through BaSIA are from the first decade of the twentieth century, a far cry from these DNA matches' great-grandparents' lifetime.

I realize there are actually two different approaches I can take to try to resolve my dilemma. The first, of course, is to reach out to these matches and see if they would be willing to correspond and collaborate. There is a language barrier involved in this approach, unless my matches were star students in English class in high school—and how many people remember foreign language classes from when they were teenagers?

Granted, there is Google Translate, at which I'm becoming quite proficient, apparently. At the very least, I could send a message in English and attach the translation in hopes Google knew what they were doing when they set up the Polish option. And then there's one more drawback: to hope my matches actually pay attention to their in-box.

The second, and more immediate approach, would be to look to an intermediary genealogy source, a place where people dedicated to genealogy from all over the world assemble to help each other build their family trees: FamilySearch.org. For years, now, I've been building out the Polish branch of my own family tree there, and lately I've noticed some contributions made from others on FamilySearch with decidedly Polish names. Someone from the other side of the immigration divide is actually working on this family, too! Perhaps I can find others on FamilySearch who are working on these same Polish lines and collaborate with them, too.

The universal tree on FamilySearch is like one giant web. I can follow my ancestors from the vantage point of my tree, then trace the branches that have married in, and follow those branches down through the decades. Perhaps there, I can corroborate what I'm finding on places like MyHeritage, which is ripe with DNA matches from Poland, but lacking in the deepest of roots back to the homeland.

For the next couple of days, I'll be turning my attention back to FamilySearch and what I can find on collateral lines linked to the Olejniczak family. Then, I'll jump from that back to MyHeritage and see if the insights from FamilySearch can help guide me as I attempt to build out my DNA matches' trees from MyHeritage. It's an experiment, but hey, I'm the genealogy guinea pig, willing to try (almost) anything to see how it turns out. 

The Long Slide Down to the Present

 

Sometimes, it seems near impossible to connect collateral lines of our ancestors with stray DNA matches on our list of results. That's the way it's been, working with my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak's brother's family. Despite knowing that Franciszka's brother Bartłomiej had at least six children, I could only find marriage records for five of them. And when it came to tracing grandchildren, only four of those couples appeared in birth records for their own children.

One son of Bartłomiej in particular, Jan—the one whom his 1869 Catholic Church baptismal record had listed as Joannes—seemed to have disappeared from view entirely. Not even a death record could I find for the child.

As I've worked through each of my Polish ancestors, the understanding that some of those many untraceable children may have "disappeared" because they actually headed to America was first on my mind. After all, once such a relative made a move like that, it might be far easier to research that branch of the family in American documents rather than Prussian or Polish records.

Such a hope would bring with it some research hazards. Prime among those would be the possibility that the immigrant chose to blend in by adjusting a Polish-sounding surname to sound more American. While many family history researchers have laid to rest that tired explanation that their ancestor's surname was "changed at Ellis Island," there is still the possibility that, at some point after arrival, an immigrant might make such a choice. Then how could we trace them?

Even though I already knew my own grandmother's brother had made such a choice with his surname, I entirely doubted a DNA match that popped up in my ThruLines results at Ancestry. After all, that match linked me with a supposed family member by the slimmest of connections: a puny seven centiMorgans shared between us.

The sticking point, though, was the surname that was supposed to be similar to mine. Granted, Olejniczak might be a mouthful of consonant soup to someone not acquainted with handling Polish phonics, so I can understand the desire to make it a surname more easily called to mind—or at least less likely to be misspelled. But I could also see that resultant changed name stand on its own as a separate Polish surname. I had presumed it was a coincidental connection.

The thought has ever since nagged at me, so now that I'm working on this Olejniczak branch of my father's family, I decided to check it out afresh. After all, now that I have the BaSIA website with its resources linked to actual archival records, I had been going through each of Bartłomiej's children and grandchildren carefully, looking up each Prussian document, squinting at the German handwriting and hoping my rudimentary understanding of how to read the script was not leading me astray. 

Still, after all of that, no sign of Jan after his baptismal record. 

Fast forward to my DNA match in, of all places, Ohio. Besides not expecting any of my Polish relatives to have chosen to head to Ohio—New York was more my family's tendency—I knew I had to work on that similar surname choice for the immigrant in question.

This is where looking at every document that can be found for a specific person becomes important. Especially with a surname like Olejniczak, which has spelling made to stump even the most careful of us, it turned out that I could trace the evolution of Jan's name from Olejniczak to the eventual form that it took.

Included in that change was the first, unsurprising, incorrect transcription of the 1920 census. In looking at the actual handwriting on the document, it appears the enumerator might have gotten the spelling correct at Olejniczak, but the effort was somewhat mangled, possibly overwritten. Still, it provided information on Jan—now listed as John—along with his wife, three foreign-born children, and the following three, all born in Ohio.

That census provided valuable help in giving a timeline of the Olejniczak family's travels, based on the birth of those last three children. It also indicated that the family arrived in America in 1905, and that they were naturalized in 1913.

Tracing the family from that point forward illustrated how the surname morphed to its final appearance. What was more valuable, though, was looking back, based on that 1920 census, to locate naturalization records. A Form 1-IP from the U.S. Naturalization Service, found at FamilySearch, summarized John's legal process in becoming a U.S. citizen, with the only discrepancy being a date of birth matching his baptismal record in every respect except the month—July instead of June.

I certainly wouldn't have considered a DNA match based on a connection as small as seven centiMorgans, but combined with multiple records over the length of this immigrant's lifetime convinced me that this John was one and the same as Jan Olejniczak, son of Bartłomiej—and that Jan's own grandson was indeed a DNA cousin.

If only the DNA matches who stayed in Poland would present research trails as easy to follow.

About Bartłomiej

 

If Bartholomew—or Bartłomiej in Polish—turns out to be the younger brother of my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak, it might pay DNA dividends to explore the details concerning his descendants. 

Bartłomiej was, as we've already discovered, born in 1838 in a small Prussian village which is now called Jeżewo in Poland. One of three villages by that name, this one historically identified as part of the Kreis, or district, called Gostyń. The listing of his parents in his baptismal record confirms his mother Józefa's maiden name as Grzegorczyk, and his father as Nicolaus, the Latin version of the Polish name Mikołaj.

Following the paper trail through Bartłomiej's lifespan at the Polish website BaSIA allowed me to glean details on his 1863 marriage to Katarzyna Orszulak, and locate baptismal records for their six children, Franciszka, Walenty, Jan, Marianna, Katarzyna, and Józefa. Those records take us from Franciszka's birth in 1864 through Józefa's arrival in 1876, just before the family lost their mother Katarzyna in 1877.

Pertinent to my DNA quest, each of Bartłomiej's children not only lived to adulthood, but married and had children of their own. Best I can tell, each of those families remained in Poland, with the exception of one, who apparently emigrated as a young man and ended up in Ohio with a young family of his own.

Piecing together that family story—both from my part, looking ahead in time from the vantage point of the family in Prussia, and from the DNA match's viewpoint, looking backwards to find the link with the family left behind—has at times had me wondering. Name changes as immigrants sought to anglicize their surname (or even their given name) make the attempt challenging. And the DNA match leading back to my second great-grandmother's brother Bartłomiej means that, at best, I am looking for relatives who are fourth cousins, no closer.

Finding one such example, though, has me hoping to find more. There are some branches of this Olejniczak family line who seemed to have simply disappeared. Adding to the problem is the stark reality that some DNA matches haven't connected themselves—or perhaps are unable to—with their third and fourth great-grandparents.

With limitations on access to available digitized records in Poland, I can't always count on building my own version of a match's tree. There are bound to be missing links. No matter how tempting it might be to guess the connection, the only verification would still be up to the records, themselves.

And yet, the more we search, the more records we discover. I need to remember that when stalled at a brick wall moment.

Brother Bartholomew

 

Any time we expand our family history research to include collateral lines, you know that can lead to solving questions about our mystery DNA matches. That's exactly my aim in pushing backwards in time to discover the parents of my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak.

In fact, though I've been questioning the various entries for Franciszka's mother's maiden name, just testing those versions on document searches at FamilySearch.org and Polish websites led me to identify another child born to the couple, Nicolaus (or Mikołaj in Polish) Olejniczak and Józefa Grzegorczyk (or possibly Grozegorski). That child, born in 1838 and baptized that year on August 19, was Franciszka's younger brother, Bartholomew.

That, of course, would be the brother's name in English. The baptismal record, written in Latin for this Catholic family, listed his name as Bartholomaeus. I suspect that, having been born to a Polish family in what was then considered part of the country of Prussia, his family likely called him Bartłomiej at home.

The beauty of finding this document is that it corroborates one of the two maiden names I've already found listed for Franciszka's mother: Grzegorczyk. Granted, that could be a second priest misspelling the surname in the same erroneous way, but it does help point me towards that variation for future searches.

My quest to discover DNA matches descending from this Olejniczak family may already have paid off, with one DNA cousin who has that same surname in his tree. Whether that tree is correct, I can't yet say. First, we need to check what can be found about this Bartholomew—a.k.a. Bartłomiej—in the Polish resources we've already begun using, something to explore this coming week.

When the Going Gets Slower

 

There are times, as I pause to do my biweekly count, when it seems I am rocketing through the collateral lines of my family's generations. Such is often the case when I am working on my mother-in-law's family, as I do each spring. But when it comes to my dad's Polish side of the family, the going gets slower. Much slower.

Today's numbers show that handily. Over the past two weeks, I've managed to add seventy three new documented relatives to my family tree. That number came with considerable effort, cross-checking records on two different websites in Poland, as well as three genealogical sites based in the United States.

True, I've managed to add links to each record, leading back to archival holdings in the region close to where my ancestors once lived in Poland, but checking corresponding documents for each member of the family has been a slow process. My tree now has 42,103 hard-won victories, comprised of difficult searches such as this, done over the past decade and then some.

Meanwhile, not a stitch of work has been done on my in-laws' tree. That work will wait until the spring months, when I'll take up my mother-in-law's line once again. Thus, that tree has been frozen in time at 44,402 documented relatives. Barring any close family changes—weddings and baby announcements being prime movers there—that number will remain static until April.

It's not for lack of effort, and certainly not owing to time that the research pace has slowed. It's just that some research projects are more challenging. Finding family in Poland, while not impossible, does present its challenges. The one carrot dangling in front of me and drawing me onward is the fact that there are actual DNA cousins among my matches, primarily at MyHeritage. I do want to benefit from the information these tests are providing. It's just that finding corroborating evidence is my current sticking point.

DNA testing may be a great resource for genealogy, but the paper trail provides me with the assurance I need to see the path that connects me with my genetic links in Poland. With time—and the addition of future digitized records in Poland, hopefully—this process will be worth both the work and the learning curve.

Preserving Stories, Prompting Memories

 

Once a month, our local genealogical organization gathers for an informal meeting, simply to allow members to talk with each other about their research, interesting finds in local history, and, frankly, anything else of interest they'd like to discuss. We started that a few years ago as an antidote to the Covid-era online meetings, since members missed the opportunity to just talk with each other.

This week at our meeting, the subject turned to preserving family stories, regardless of whether our immediate family members cared to know about them. Concern about the loss of family stories—realized too late to go back and ask our grandparents or even aunts or uncles what we'd missed—weighed heavily on some of our members. 

One solution was to write those stories down as they came to mind. That may sound like a reasonable solution. Just do it: sit down and write. But some members realized that they had experiences in life, things that had happened years ago, that they had since forgotten about. If it weren't for someone jogging their memory—a random question from a family member or friend—the situation would never have come to mind, let alone take form with pen on paper.

Those of our members who have been gifted with some of the recent products marketed to help us preserve our family stories had a quick response to that predicament. They discovered that using such products caused them to stumble upon such forgotten memories. The writing prompts jogged their memories, sometimes even prompting them to wander through a series of memories, before they started writing.

One member is nearly done with a year-long writing program given to her by her family last Christmas. She's been quite diligent to regularly work through the program, and has been surprised at the personal or family experiences she's actually forgotten over the years. Now that is down on paper, soon to be included in the book that will be published from her work. Hopefully, the writing prompts represented the very questions her (now grown) children would someday wish they had thought to ask.

We all have questions we wish we had thought to ask our elders when we had the opportunity. Leaving our own breadcrumb trail of stories may help the next generation when it's their turn to wish they had thought to ask.

Location, Location, Location: Finding Resources

 

When it comes to determining whether a branch of the family tree diverged to follow the trail of a misleading name twin, one detail that can serve as a warning is location. In Franciszka Olejniczak's case, two records supposedly for my second great-grandmother provided different locations, one for the each of the events on record. One identified the town of her birth as Jezewo. The other showed her marriage in Jaratschewo.

If Polish tradition follows that of several other countries and a wedding was customarily held near the bride's home, we are in trouble if we assume each of these documents represented my second great-grandmother. While I certainly can't ask any of the wedding guests if the bride was the "real" Franciszka, digging deeper into information on the two towns might provide some guidance.

First step might be to see how closely the two towns were situated. Though this involves Polish ancestors, I know one piece of advice from researching my father-in-law's Irish ancestors was always to map out the distance between the two towns; if their locations were within a reasonable walking distance from each other, that might make sense.

However, these were names in German given to towns which were then part of Prussia. Maps today correspond to current geo-political boundaries. My first step, then, would be to consult an online version of Meyers Gazetteer. But to look for Jezewo, the town where Franciszka was baptized, I already run into problems: there were not one, but three places which went by that name. Which was the right one?

Checking all the details on that baptismal record, thankfully it provided not just the name of the family's home, but also the "Kreis" (district, similar to the American county) and the province. Returning to the Gazetteer, we can see that the third choice offered, Jezewo in Gostyn, matches the baptismal record. Thankfully.

From that point, I turn to Google to search for the modern-day name for the Polish town once called Jezewo in Prussia. The transformation was barely perceptible, with one tiny diacritical mark added for the benefit of pronunciation: Jeżewo. Once I added the second destination on my map, the location of Franciszka's marriage, I determined that the 7.4 kilometer distance between the two was reasonable enough for a possible move for the family, or a marriage celebration in a nearby town.

In going through these steps, I also explored what else could be found on the two locations, both historically and through genealogical sources. It's always handy to stumble upon helpful other resources, and this search led me to some I'll be bookmarking.

One helpful resource I found in this process was an inventory of available church records for the Prussian province of Posen. This useful table includes a large listing of records from the FamilySearch catalog, searchable by locality, Kreis (district), and church organization. Each entry under the heading "Title" is clickable and leads to that line item's record set. For instance, clicking on the entry for Jeżewo brings me to church records in multiple image group numbers for that village alone.

Record sets like those included in this finding aid at FamilySearch.org will keep me busy working my way through the many Olejniczak descendants I've managed to add to my family tree so far, providing another resource to compare with what I've already been able to find through the Polish online resource BaSIA. The process may be tedious, but it is allowing me to work my way from the early 1800s with Franciszka's parents, well into the early decades of the 1900s. Hopefully at some point soon, I'll have enough information to dovetail into the family trees of my Polish DNA matches.