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.

A Mother's Maiden Name

 

Finding a mother's maiden name can become a challenge for family historians. In this month's case of researching my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak, however, I've already found records where people were all too glad to divulge that information. In fact, I've managed to glean two options for that valued detail.

As we reviewed two different records for Franciszka, it was possible that her mother's name had been recorded in error in one of those two documents. In Franciszka's baptismal record, her mother was identified as Josepha Grozegorski, while Franciszka's marriage record showed her mother as Josephae Grzegorczyk.

I'm not too concerned with the variations in the given name. After all, church records are supposed to be written in Latin. Josephae was probably right, given the context and the syntax required in the document's wording. And Josepha in the baptismal record was probably a similar Latin version, as actually the Polish form would have been Josefa. But the surnames? That's a different matter.

Still, we have to cut these clerics some slack—as well as remember that, until I can get to a FamilySearch center in person, I'm working from transcriptions. Remembering how miserable it sometimes is to read other people's handwriting—to say nothing of sloppy handwriting of prior centuries—I'm quite satisfied to give the benefit of the doubt, at least until I can see those documents for myself.

But which one would the actual maiden name be? As incredible as it might be to an English-speaker's mind, I tend to go with the consonant mash up, Grzegorczyk.

There are some reasons for this. First, having spent considerable time trying to make my peace with Polish phonics, I already know how to pronounce the not-unusual suffix "-czyk." Then, the first part of that surname, "Grzegorz" forms the Polish man's name for which the English equivalent would be Gregory.

I did a simple search online for information on the Polish surname Grzegorczyk. Wikipedia, incredibly, offered a small blurb on the surname. Ancestry.com, of course, provided some perspective, not only explaining the origin and the suffix, but offering two options for that surname. One version of the surname, as it appears in records I've found, is Grzegorczyk. The other, with the entry providing far more information, is for the spelling Grzegorzyk.

All that to say, Grzegorczyk is a patronymic surname. In other words, Josefa's patrilineal ancestor somewhere back in history was likely named "Gregory" and all that followed in that family were known as "son of Gregory."

It is highly unlikely I'll ever be able to trace such a theory through records. I'm having a hard time locating Polish records that reach back to the time of Franciszka's mother in the early 1800s. But having learned a bit of the surname's history, no matter how unpronounceable that consonant soup appears to be on paper, I'm feeling more confident that the priest writing out her baptismal record probably paused to ask, "Now how do you spell that?!"

Same People, Different Place

 

Name twins are always lurking in research shadows, putting family historians on high alert. The trouble with researching ancestors like my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak is that I've run into that same name in different residences. Do both records pertain to the same person in such cases? I've had to put Google Maps through its paces to ensure that, in such cases, I'm dealing with the same people—it's just that they've moved to a different place.

In the instance of my Polish forebears, there is another step to add to the verification process: records for my second great-grandmother's lifespan were drawn up when the places where she lived belonged to a different country: Prussia instead of Poland. With the change of government often came a change in geographic names.

Take this example of Franciszka's marriage record. On February 13, 1854, Franciszka became the bride of Franciszek Jankowski. The document noted the place where this occurred: Jaratschewo in Jarotschin, part of the Prussian province of Posen. That, of course, is not what the place is called today, so I checked to see whether I could learn the Polish name for that old Prussian village.

In this case, the revision was predictable, basically incorporating Polish phonics instead of German: Jaraczewo. But then, not satisfied to leave it at that one marriage record, I went looking for a birth record. After all, Franciszka's marriage record gave the name of her parents, so I assumed I'd have additional help in finding her birth record. 

Sure enough, there was a baptismal record for Franciszka, giving her date of birth as January 22, 1836. Along with the baby's name, parents' names were included. Granted, this was a church document, so the information was given in Latin, not Polish (or even German). But there was one slight problem: those parents' names in the baptismal record didn't quite match up to the wedding record. Close, but not exact.

For the wedding record, I already had learned that Franciszka's parents were Nicolai Oleyniczak and Josephae Grzegorczyk, but when I came to the earlier church record, the names appeared as Nicolaus Olajniczak and Josepha Grozegorski.

I wasn't too concerned about these differences as much as I was about the fact that each document gave a different location. What if these two Olejniczak children were simply name twins?

To the maps I went, on the theory that if the one town was within walking distance of the other town, I still had a chance that each represented the same person. Once again, for this baptism location, I needed to translate the Prussian town name to its current designation in Poland. Jezewo in Kreis (county) Gostyn in the province of Posen during Prussian rule became, simply, Jeżewo. Because this was such a small village, though, I needed to check for the nearby town of Borek Wielkopolski. (In fact, though I can find a Wikipedia entry on Jeżewo, it is offered only in Polish with translation into French and a couple other languages, but not English. Of course, it is possible to run the text through a translation service, but even if you don't, you can still enjoy the pictures.)

Having checked all that and entered the two locations on Google Maps, asking for directions for those traveling on foot told me that the distance between the two event locations was a little over seven kilometers. In other words, Google estimated that a person could make that hike in an hour and forty minutes.

Having checked all that eased me into thinking that perhaps bride Franciscam and baby Francisca were the same individual, and that spelling her maiden name of Olejniczak had stumped at least two different priests. Father of the bride Nicolai was likely one priest's approximation of the Polish name Mikołaj, and the baby's father Nicolaus was far more likely to be a Latin version of the same.

But mother Josephae? Though this could be the key to providing me with information on the generation preceding Franciszka, the mother's maiden name provided in one document was far too removed from the other version. This surname was one to check into more deeply.

Going Easy on the Search Terms

 

Finding Franciszka Olejniczak in the midst of records in multiple languages may prove to be a challenge. There are some things to keep in mind when researching a Polish ancestor like this second great-grandmother of mine. Here's a little "score card" to help, providing some things to keep in mind as we proceed. We've got to go easy on ourselves when researching in this location during the time period which includes her lifespan, from the early 1800s to the beginning of the next century.

For one thing, Poland wasn't a political designation at that point. Though Franciszka and her parents Mikołaj Olejniczak and Josepha Grzegorczyk may have always thought of themselves as Polish by ethnicity, they were residents of a country then known as Prussia. Even reading a brief overview of the historical consequences of Prussian and German rule over what is now the western portion of modern-day Poland, I can begin to understand the possible underpinnings of why my father's immigrant family brought with them a sense of avoiding all identification with a Polish heritage.

Such historical details may lie hidden behind our genealogical rush to find the bare basics of documentation evidence, but they cannot be ignored. Yet, even in the rudimentary search for paper evidence of their existence, it is easy to see the language predicament they—and, by proxy, we as researchers—faced in their daily life.

For one thing, those of my Polish ancestors who adhered to the faith system of their own forebears were mostly Catholic. Thus, from the very first writing of their name in baptism, these ancestors were recorded in the language of the Church: Latin. However, that is not necessarily a guarantee that the priest recording the records was himself a native speaker of the Polish language. A Catholic priest from, say, Italy or France might hear a Polish surname and write it as he heard it, including the phonics of his own native language, all somehow bundled up with the requirement of a Latin record.

A name like Olejniczak might suffer all sorts of permutations with that treatment. Take the letter "j" for instance, and think of how differently it was pronounced by the various languages on the European continent—not to mention the history of the evolution of the letter itself. For some, "j" and "i" were interchangeable. Thus, to search for old records under a surname like Olejniczak requires an understanding of that history.

That would be the hazards of navigating Latin records. Then, too, there were civil records, which were kept in German, with its old script which is hardly read in our current times, taking an effort to decipher, using another set of skills. 

Underlying all that was the fact that, in a Polish resident's own language, there were different phonics and customs for naming. Regarding phonics, a name which in a Latin baptismal record in 1836 might be rendered as Francisca might in Polish be written as Franciszka—and pronounced with a "sh" sound for the "sz" in the Polish spelling of her name. Likewise, her father, given as Nicolaus in her baptismal record, would actually be written as Mikołaj in Polish, complete with diacritical marks which could be transcribed by English-speaking volunteers in our day as a "t" instead of an "ł."

Wild cards rule the day for searches through digitized record collections.

That, however, is not all, when it comes to going easy on search terms. We also need to take into considering cultural naming traditions. In the case of the Polish culture, their language expects agreement between what might be called "masculine" versus "feminine" word endings. This extends to surnames. So, for instance, any daughter whose father's Polish surname ended in the quintessential "-ski" would have her own surname completed with the revised "-ska." In Franciszka's case, her surname did not end in a vowel, so that would not usually apply to such cases, but it is something to keep in mind when researching many other Polish surnames.

All of this blends together to tell me one thing: when searching for an ancestor whose family originated in the area now known as Poland, don't take that search process literally. Use wildcard characters, depending on the usage rules of the website being consulted, or enter segments of the name, like "Francis" instead of "Franciszek" or "Franciszka." And if the website allows percentages of similarity in a search box, slide that bar down from a high and mighty ninety nine percent to a more forgiving number.

Just as I did in October for the other members of my father's Polish family, next I'll jump into the Polish websites to see what can be found on Franciszka's family. Hopefully, there will be additional names showing up in both church and civil records to tell us more about this extended Olejniczak family.

Meet Franciszka

 

At the beginning of each year, when I plot out my research plans for the next twelve months, how little I know about what I might find when I actually get down to the work itself. In the case of this last quarter of the year, when I usually focus on my father's Polish ancestors, that predicament especially applies. 

It was no surprise, then, to begin October with plans to research my father's paternal grandfather's mother, Susanna Radomska, and end the month discovering that not only was I hobbled in that goal, but faced the same situation with my early attempt at handling November's goal, a different ancestor named Franciszek Jankowski. Thus, we find ourselves jumping forward once again to December's goal from my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026, to attempt the impossible with another of my second great-grandparents, Franciszka Olejniczak.

In introducing Franciszka this early, I can at least say I've already discovered a few facts about her life. Mostly owing to her marriage to Franciszek Jankowski in 1854, I can say that she was likely born around 1836, and that her parents were named (at least according to church documents in Latin) Nicolai "Oleyniczak" and Josephae Grzegorczyk.

This discovery of her marriage record enables us to broaden the search for Franciszka's extended family around the Prussian town of Jaratschewo, now known in Poland as Jaraczewo. There are, as it turns out, other records linked to that Olejniczak surname which might be helpful guides in this pursuit.

First, however, it might be necessary to review a few details, tomorrow, about Polish research in general before we proceed with Franciszka's life story.

Maybe his Wife Will Tell

 

It's been a month of mostly fruitless searching. After realizing, two weeks in, that no more records were materializing for my Twelve Most Wanted focus for October—my second great-grandmother Susanna Radomska—I jumped forward to my November candidate. Again, two weeks in, and I realized there was nothing more to locate among documents in Poland for a different second great-grandparent, Franciszek Jankowski.

Here we are, wrapping up the shards of crashed research dreams for both October and November, and I'm wondering, "Now what?" That's when I realized: if I can't find anything more on Franciszek, maybe his wife will tell what became of the missing family pieces.

Fortunately, Franciszek's wife Franciszka was already my selection for the last of my Twelve Most Wanted research plans for 2026. Yes, I know: even though we just turned back our clocks, that doesn't make the month jump forward to December. But since I'm now on a roll with Polish records, it makes sense to broaden the search on this couple and examine the other side of that family.

With that, tomorrow we'll begin with an official introduction to Franciszka Olejniczak. But before we entirely close the books on this year's attempt at learning more about her husband, we need to recap what still remains to be done, so that the next time I tackle Franciszek Jankowski, I'll be primed and poised at the starting line for a new month's research sprint.

My main unanswered question for Franciszek this month was what became of all his children. Other than the two daughters who migrated to the American state of New York and the one daughter who married and remained in Poland, I have yet to discover what became of all the other children in this immediate family. On my next attempt at researching this family, I'll want to find documentation for each of the other six children.

In addition, I'll want to find records regarding his daughter Antonina Jankowska and her husband Josef Karcz and all their children—at least the seven for whom I have found birth or baptismal records. I want to know whether any of those children eventually followed their aunts and uncles to the New World. Or, if remaining in Poland, whether they lived to adulthood and eventually raised families of their own. I also want to know if, among those Jankowski descendants, there are any DNA matches whom I have yet to identify.

Most of that wish list will require one of two items. The one item will be discovery and digitization of baptismal, marriage, and death records for years earlier than the few spotty glimpses I've managed to catch of the older members of this family. An actual birth record for Franciszek himself, for instance, would help by confirming the names of his parents, as I suspect his mother's maiden name may have been entered in error on his marriage record. Finding siblings for Franciszek might be assisted by having that correct mother's maiden name, too.

The second item I'll need will be retrieval of records more recent than the early 1900s. This will particularly help in tracing the younger children of Franciszek and Franciszka, as well as the next generation with daughter Antonina's children.

All this may take time to find its way onto online resources, especially if the only resource will come from volunteer-driven genealogy websites in Poland, itself. Those sites have been an immense help to me so far, and I can see how those volunteers have brought even more records online than I had found in past research sessions. I'm hoping the trend continues, so that the next time I revisit this research question, there will be ample resources to check for answers.

Until then, it's on to December's challenge, a month early. We'll meet Franciszka Olejniczak tomorrow.

A Scary Thought

 

I had a scary thought this month as I was banging my head against an immovable ancestral brick wall—and no, it wasn't scary simply on account of Halloween. It's a thought that has been rising up like a spectre, even back as early as the summer months when I was struggling with my father-in-law's Irish forebears, and even more so, now that I seem to make no headway on my Polish roots.

That thought has to do with the ebb and flow of interest in genealogy, not just for myself, but for all the people whom we, as leaders of genealogical societies, hope to entice as members. While yes, there are many people who become interested in discovering more about their family's history, and some who even express that interest by joining local or state genealogical societies, their continued interest eventually wanes. 

I know that when I brainstorm with other board members of genealogical societies about dwindling membership participation, we often end up fixing the blame on external factors. Some say we're not visible "enough" on social media. Or that we meet at the wrong hours of the day or week. Maybe that we're not "relevant" to younger potential members. Or that potential members can get everything they need or want by researching their family online at the many websites designed for that purpose.

Whatever the explanations that society leaders come up with, I think they are losing sight of one point: that the trajectory of a person's pursuit of family history can have a far shorter range than we expect.

For those of us fanatics devoted to chasing our family's stories, we think everyone, once started on this path, will become addicted and never give up the pursuit. Perhaps for someone like me, the one who claims I was born wanting to know, that desire will never fade. But not everyone is like that. Some people's interest peaks when they get married, or have their first child. Some people never thought they'd be interested at all, until a sibling or cousin talked them into taking a DNA test or shared a surprising discovery from their own research. 

For people like that, interest in genealogy sparks, then increases, then experiences a decline. Maybe even an ebb and flow of interest, such as I had when teaching full time; holiday breaks and summer vacations became my only time to research.

But I'm realizing there is another reason that can choke out that genealogical interest. That reason has to do with the very experiences I've been having the past few months—and in an odd way, is a reaction to the oft-asked question, "How far back have you gone?"

Face it, when you can't go any farther, when there are no more records to access and the trail goes cold—not just for your kazillionth great-grandparent, but for everyone living in that same village or, worse, for the entire country—what else is left to do? That's where the interest lags.

Frankly, I suspect that many of our own society's longstanding members haven't tried their hand at researching their ancestors for years. They remain loyal to our society simply because they wish to support the cause, or help others who are just starting, or like the vibe of talking about someone else's genealogy "happy dance."

To me, the more important question is, why did they stop researching? And the scary thought is, what happens to genealogical organizations when members realize they have no more to find about their family history? Unless our members remain willing to be available to help others still excited about their research path, it's no surprise that so many have talked about dwindling membership numbers at genealogical societies.

And that's a scary thought.