A Road Map for the Family Tree

 

As I had discovered last summer when puzzling over the many name twins in my father-in-law's Irish family tree, a road map is an indispensable tool when mapping out the family tree. I remember my delight when I pulled up Google Maps and discovered that the program could pinpoint a specific Irish townland I was seeking. Now that I'm struggling over my paternal grandfather's secret roots in Poland, I'm seeing how that same tool helps guide the way in this new-to-me research region.

Currently, I'm straddling two different records resources: transcriptions of the digitized Polish records at FamilySearch and transcriptions at the database of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG). When I find what appears to be the right record for someone in the collateral lines of my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś, I then enter that information, including a link back to the verifying online document, in each of the trees I'm updating.

Along the way in this process, I encounter discrepancies. In a long line of baptismal records for grandchildren of Marianna's sister Franciszka Wojtaś, for instance, I find one child born to Franciszka's namesake daughter and her husband Piotr Gracz, yet the next child born into the Gracz household has a mother named Barbara. What? Did Franciszka die before that point? But no, moving on to the baptismal record of Piotr's next child, lo and behold, Franciszka has been resurrected to her position as mother in the Gracz family once again. Chalk that up to clerical error.

Some discrepancies, however, keep me wondering. The main one is finding a couple by the same name, presenting their child for baptism in a different—and unexpected—Catholic parish than the one where the family's older children had been baptized. Could there be another couple known by the exact same names? Name twins from neighboring towns?

Running into that problem more than once, I decided to return to the process I had used when researching Ireland: pull up Google Maps and see how close the two locations might be. Only this time, there was a twist: baptismal records gave the then-current location of the town, based on Prussian names for those Polish villages. In today's records, those names are different. Nevertheless, a little exploration through online searches has pointed me in the right direction for each of the village names I needed to convert from their old Prussian identities.

It is so easy to fall into the mindset that, up until our "modern" times, people stayed relatively stationary in the one village where their parents grew up, and their parents lived before them. We forget that these were the same intrepid people who birthed emigrants willing to board creaky wooden ships to sail an ocean to a foreign land where no one spoke their language. Even with their limited methods of modality two centuries ago, moving to the next village couldn't be all that hard. 

Just to be sure though, pulling up a map to measure distances between two of those quaint Polish villages helps ease my mind that perhaps with those eight to ten baptismal records from two or three different villages, I'm still following the trail of the same couple. And that that couple is indeed part of my family line, and not someone else's family. 

Advertising for Connections

 

The grunt work has begun: scouring documents and transcriptions of records at both FamilySearch.org and the database of PTG, the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. My end goal is to see how far I can go in building a diagram of all the descendants of my third great-grandparents, Marcin Wojtaś and Anna Szczygielska, now that I've actually discovered their identity. While I've already worked on my own direct line, that of their daughter Marianna, my next goal is to build the line for Marianna's sister Franciszka.

Franciszka was born in Poland about 1817, and as far as I can tell, she remained there for the rest of her life. On October 1, 1838, she became the wife of Andrzej Chmielecki in a church ceremony held in her home parish of Pączewo in the region of Pomerania.

If it weren't for the transcriptions of Pomeranian records at PTG, I doubt I would have found further information to confirm Franciszka's children. I learned through those transcriptions that the Chmielecki family eventually included five sons and six daughters. Born to them in the married couple's home parish of Czarnylas were: Marianna, Andrzej, Franciszka, Paulina, Józefina, Anastasia, Jan, Józef, Anna, Franciszek, and Izydor.

While the next genealogical step for me will be to find a way to locate actual documentation for each of those children, I also have a DNA goal to keep in mind: I want to find cousins. Thus, it is key for me to get the word out there that these people are somehow related to my Wojtaś line. How do I do that? Simple: I advertise for connections by placing those newly-discovered collateral relatives in all the public-facing family trees I have built online.

Thus begins another behind-the-scenes project of plugging in these names to multiple trees. First, on FamilySearch, to find possible documentation, allowing me to verify the names as I add them to my part of the universal tree there. From that point, adding those same document links to my notes for each individual on my tree at Ancestry.com, and adding those names and dates to my tree at MyHeritage where, hopefully, a Polish cousin and I might bump into each other digitally. And finally, I'll make a note of each connection on my mere stub of a tree at WikiTree.

Not that I've been a paragon of virtue in building those other trees; my main reason to spread myself so thin is simply to get the word out. Yes, I'm shamelessly shouting from the rooftops my one question, "Are you my Polish cousin?" If I can't travel to Poland—and face it, even if I could, who would understand this English-speaking genealogist?—advertising for connections on the digital spaces where family history fans gather will be my next option. Though it involves a tedious process in preparation, it's certainly worth the try.  

Finding the Ones who Didn't Emigrate

 

Finding DNA matches who still live in Poland puts a researcher in a tantalizing place. I want to connect with those Polish cousins from Pomerania, but how? Language barriers are a first consideration, though developments in technology may someday diminish that challenge. But the main dilemma I have right now is finding records to connect those current cousins with their ancestral past and document the path of the relationship.

In the past, I was fortunate to connect with one such Polish cousin, though it was someone on a different side of the family than the Wojtaś line I'm working on this month. Actually, this cousin had found me online and reached out to connect. Fortunately for me, this woman was able to write in English, or communication would have been next to impossible. Though I never had the chance to copy actual documents from the Polish side of our connection, I was able to send her copies of documents in New York from the branch of her family who had emigrated.

Genealogical research has advanced so much since that point—can you believe that connection was back at the turn of the century, which makes that sound so ancient—but access to more recent documentation from Poland is still beyond my reach. However, it is possible to find records from the mid-1800s, and transcriptions, while less dependable, can be found for Polish relatives up through the earliest years of the 1900s.

Right now, I'm focusing on the other children of my third great-grandparents, Marcin and Anna Wojtaś. While Marianna, my second great-grandmother, and her sister Anna had children who emigrated and ultimately raised families in the United States, they had one other sibling of whom I know very little.

That sister was known as Franciszka Wojtaś. Based on her 1838 marriage record, Franciszka was likely born in 1817, two years later than her sister Marianna. From the October first marriage ceremony, I can see from the record that Franciszka was wed to Andrzej Chmielecki, a man named after his own father. Seeing his mother's name—given as Marianna Zigorska—I wonder whether this was an unintentional spelling variant on the Zegarski line which eventually made its appearance in the extended Wojtaś family  with the marriage of Franciszka's sister Marianna.

As I work my way through church records in the region of the Ponschau parish (now Pączewo) where Franciszka was married, I'm beginning to find baptismal records of her children. These I'll enter into the Wojtaś branch of my family tree, and follow those lines as far as I can, to see whether those family members ended up emigrating, or remaining in their homeland. Eventually, this will point up possible family lines which did not die out, but may be represented among the DNA matches I've found on MyHeritage now.

Bit by bit, we'll piece this story of our DNA cousins together, one document at a time.

Finding the Family Connections

 

DNA testing can point us back to the ancestral place where we had previously failed to locate records and confirm the connections we cannot yet see. Better yet—at least in my experience—DNA testing can lead us to see the family connections we previously had no idea even existed. That certainly was the case with my paternal grandfather's roots.

Last week, I mentioned finding the baptismal record for Marianna Wojtaś, my second great-grandmother. Of course, that was a name I would never have known if it weren't for clustering DNA matches at MyHeritage, where I apparently have a good number of Polish cousins. But it wasn't even the Polish cousins who had shown up in that AutoClusters readout I had tried, now so many years ago; at first it was the cousins from Milwaukee who at first had had me stumped, but then led me to the truth about my grandfather's secret origin.

Now, moving forward, I've placed most all of those DNA cousins in their proper place in my family tree, but reconstructing the roots of these collateral lines still challenges me. For one reason, I can look at records from one online resource, and discover that there is no comparable document listed at another online resource for the same geographic area.

Having found the baptismal record for Marianna Wojtaś, I learned she was likely born sometime in June of 1815. After all, with the prevalence of infant deaths during that era, parents didn't dally in getting their children baptized. Marianna's record showed the sacrament was performed on June 29 in a parish then called Ponschau, but now known as Pączewo in Poland. The church record also noted the Wojtaś family's home to be located in nearby Wolental.

However, when I went to the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) to cross-check the records of Marianna's possible siblings, while I could find other children of Martin and Anna, there was no listing for Marianna, herself.

Still, I decided to pursue these other siblings, starting with the Wojtaś sibling whose many children ended up emigrating far from their home in Poland: Marianna's sister Anna.

From the transcription at PTG, I learned that Anna was baptized at Pączewo in 1821. FamilySearch.org became my next stop, where I learned Anna was married on January 17, 1848. The marriage was conducted not in Pączewo, but in Schwarzwald (Czarnylas), perhaps because, by that point, Anna's sister Marianna was living there with her own growing family.

I've been able to find several baptismal records for the children of Anna Wojtaś and her husband, Jan Krzewinski. It was several of the children, rather than Anna herself, who moved away from their native Poland to settle in the United States, in the city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin.

Though Anna's sons Piotr and Andrzej became Peter and Andrew in their new American identities, all of Anna's emigrating children—Izydor, Marianna, Piotr, and Andrzej—kept their Polish surnames up until their deaths during the era of the first World War. While some of their children or grandchildren opted for more Americanized surnames in subsequent generations, I've been able to connect their lines of descent with the many DNA cousins I've found through testing at all the major DNA companies working with genealogists.

Finding those DNA connections, first through the AutoClusters program at MyHeritage.com and then exploring the connections through matches at other companies, has been quite an experience. Yet, confirming those discoveries was also aided by the relative ease with which we can retrieve historic records in this country.

What about researching those Polish DNA matches who didn't descend from Wojtaś family members who immigrated to Wisconsin? That's the challenge I'll be working on this week. 

Pruning the Family Tree

This month, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet. Well, more to the point, now that I've regained functionality on my "merge with duplicate" button at Ancestry.com, these past few weeks have left a lot of carnage out in the genealogical ether; I've been vanquishing doubled profiles in her tree, left and right. Since today is the time for my biweekly count, let's see just how many duplicates my mother-in-law's "endogamy lite" family yielded. 

Before the beginning of this project, I had closed out the previous biweekly period with 41,826 individual profiles in my in-laws' tree. My pruning project, over this subsequent two week period, has apparently made a sizable difference: the tree now contains 41,717 relatives. I've ended up with 109 less people than where I started, two weeks ago. I'd say that's a lot of pruning.

This month, I've been focusing on my own father's Polish roots, facing an entirely different research challenge. While most of the time, I'm poring over Catholic Church records from the Prussian villages where my father's paternal grandmother's extended family once lived, I'm also paying keen attention to the DNA matches connected to this line—and to their shared matches, especially those I haven't been able to place in the family tree up to this point.

As I add these matches into my tree, slowly but surely, that branch has been blossoming. Over the past two weeks, that work has yielded 105 new entries. The challenge now, especially for those DNA matches who still live in Poland—or even in nearby European countries—is to find documentation to support their contention that we share these same Puchała, Zegarski, or Wojtaś lines. For the most robust records resource, I've looked mostly to FamilySearch.org, but I'm also thankful for the transcriptions from the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, which has been providing me with a research roadmap to guide the way to documents.

Granted, in past biweekly periods, I've experienced greater progress than I have this time—not to mention the reversed count for my in-laws' tree!—but the challenges of this month's research goal require a slower and more careful pace. Given that the Polish roots of my father's family will be my research focus through the end of this year, I anticipate a more sedate report for the next three biweekly periods as well, before we close out this year and move on to next year's Twelve Most Wanted.

Evading Those Glaring Exceptions

 

I was reminded yesterday about a saying I had stumbled upon almost two decades ago when struggling with my Polish forebears. I had thought, when I located it in an article back then, that it would be useful to keep in mind:

Almost anything you say that is correct most of the time can have glaring exceptions.

I rediscovered that sentiment yesterday while collaborating with a distant cousin. We had beed discussing a shared DNA match whose account name did not match the paternal surname from which this match had supposedly descended. The surname and the family tree didn't seem to line up logically. Noticing the match's name ended in -czyk, I wondered whether that might be a Polish suffix with a particular meaning, so I looked that up.

The inquiry led to that article I mentioned, written twenty five years ago by someone named Fred Hoffman, which had been reprinted in the Polish Roots website. Sure enough, that -czyk suffix could indeed signify something—specifically either a diminutive version of a given name, or the idea of "son of"—but by the time I discovered my answer, I had already fallen down a different rabbit hole. Now I wanted to know why the name Fred Hoffman has persisted for so many years in my searches for Polish genealogical research tips.

I remember running across that name in various online resources, even back before that twenty five year mark I mentioned. Somehow those twenty five years seemed a bit more persistent than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. I had seen that name in nascent online genealogy forums researching Chicago roots, for instance, or surnames, or a variety of other topics related to Polish roots for years. 

Who was this guy? I could hardly believe he was still around, after all these years, so I googled him. Sure enough, in addition to the reprint I had stumbled upon in answering my own question about the name suffix, I found other details still online.

I found a bio for Fred Hoffman on the website of a publishing company, Langline, the Language and Lineage Press. I found an "about me" page on his own website, complete with several useful hints regarding Polish genealogical research. And I located the first of a four-part interview done with him by Donna Pointkouski on the blog What's Past is Prologue.

All came with that simple, casual way of clarifying the more confusing aspects of Polish genealogical research so that it all makes sense and gives us the confidence to tackle the mess our relatives made sure to keep secret from us. Granted, some rules of thumb may end up having "glaring exceptions," as Fred Hoffman cautioned, but at least grasping the concepts helps give a hand up to a place where we can see our once-hidden past a bit more clearly.

Lingering on Newfound Ancestors

 

If, in a matter of one mere week, I've already discovered the names of my second great-grandmother's parents, what is the next step? Obviously, the quest in family history is always to push back another generation, but in this case, I'm not going to be so greedy about this month's research goal. For one thing, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep up this momentum through the generations, given the difficulty in accessing some Polish records. But there is another reason to take my time and linger on this new discovery about Marianna Wojtaś' parents' generation.

That reason is simple: it has to do with DNA testing. But not any kind of DNA test. I'm specifically thinking of my matches at one genealogy company: MyHeritage.com. The reason is simple. While Ancestry, whose tree-building system and record access I prefer, provides me with plenty of Wojtaś  descendants among my DNA matches, they are mostly descended from the family members who chose to immigrate to the United States—specifically to Wisconsin. MyHeritage, on the other hand, has a more international reach for their DNA testing program, which is handily demonstrated by my matches who still live in Poland, or at least live in a country far closer to that homeland than Wisconsin.

I would like to know how those foreign DNA matches connect to my branch of the Wojtaś family. And there may only be one way to do that: build the family tree back to Marianna's parents, then reverse direction and trace all the descendants of each of her siblings.

In many cases, I've found that challenge is not as daunting as it sounds. Sadly, for those Catholic families claiming many children, many of them laid their children to rest in the church cemetery not long after their birth. There were so many childhood deaths, and if not then, often a loss of life in early adulthood. But for the few who lived a full life, it's time for me to build out those collateral branches and document their descendants.

The easiest step will be to select the one sibling who had children who also migrated away from their Polish homeland. We'll begin next week by reviewing what I've discovered about that one specific Wojtaś  collateral line, thanks to DNA testing.