Pulling Out That To-Do List Again

 

Spending a month of focused research on only one ancestor can sometimes lead to great discoveries. Not so, this past month. While there has been a great deal of exploration on volunteer-powered genealogy websites in Poland—for which I am grateful—I have yet to find enough information to flesh out the Laskowski family tree in their homeland in Zerkow.

Time to pull out that to-do list once again, in the hope that more records will be added to those Polish websites in the future. After all, there are several gaps of time in the records used to create the transcriptions available on the websites. As long as those records are somewhere in the archives which provide the original source, checking again in the future may lead to further discoveries.

For now, I know where my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski once lived. I know his parents were Mateusz Laskowski and Elzbieta Gramlewicz. I know he had a brother Lorenz and a sister Agnes, both of whom followed Antoni to New York and settled there, as well. I have a fairly complete listing of each of their families' descendants up to the current time. Fortunately, since I have eight DNA matches connected to Antoni's Laskowski line, I have been able to attach each one of them to my family tree.

I am fairly sure there is more to the Laskowski family story. I can already see that there were other Laskowski surnames in the tiny town of Zerkow during the time Antoni lived there. Who were those people? How did they connect? That will be for another year's research project.

Besides that, I know that Antoni's grandparents were Bonaventura Laskowski and Orszula Wroblewska. But I don't know anything else about those people. Included in that to-do list should be some research on the Wroblewska family, finding any other reference to documents containing that Wroblewski surname in the Zerkow area. Perhaps stretching back that additional generation will also provide me with the link to attach those unexplained other Laskowskis to this tree as well—or, at least, definitively reject them from inclusion in the family line.

While that seems like enough of a list to keep me occupied for another month in a future research year, keep in mind that, beginning tomorrow, we'll resume our exploration of Antoni's mother's maiden name, Gramlewicz. After all, that is the surname which yielded me a DNA match at MyHeritage. But it is also a surname which seems to have other Laskowski connections, as well. Before next month is out, I may make some collateral discoveries on Antoni's extended family, as well as that of his mother. I'm eager to get back to the chase on Antoni's in-laws. We'll do that, tomorrow.