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.

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 Józefa. 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.