Regrouping on the Gramlewicz Line

 

Getting ahead of myself when I fell down that research rabbit hole last month, I discovered I have a DNA match with someone descended from the Gramlewicz family of Żerków, Poland. Conveniently, my planned research goal for the next month was to connect some dots regarding my Gramlewicz ancestors. And today is the start of that next month.

So, what about the Gramlewicz family of Żerków? One thing I know for sure: my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski called someone by the name of Elżbieta Gramlewicz his mother. Though she never came to America—dying in Żerków in 1886—her name as mother was recorded on Antoni's own 1935 death certificate in New York City.

It is only thanks to websites developed and maintained by volunteers from genealogical societies in Poland that I discovered Elżbieta's parents' names, Andrzej and Katarzyna Gramlewicz. And while Katarzyna had shown up in record transcriptions on those Polish websites under two different maiden names—either Nowicka or Zakrzewicz—I've tentatively concluded that Nowicka was the correct designation, making my new DNA match's ancestor sister to my second great-grandmother Elżbieta.

That, however, is not the reason I decided to delve into this line's overall history for November. You see, in addition to this Gramlewicz line, there is apparently another by the same surname, coming from the same small Polish town. And it isn't simply a matter of someone else in town coincidentally bearing the same surname. This other Gramlewicz family also included someone who married a Laskowski—but how they are related to either my Gramlewicz line or my Laskowski line is currently unknown to me.

An even closer brush with this other Gramlewicz family was the discovery, when examining the passenger list of the Żerków families traveling to New York with Antoni's wife and children, that they were accompanied by a young man named Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz—a name which popped up later concerning other New York records connected to Antoni Laskowski's family. But who was he? My efforts in the past to discover how the two families were related did not reveal a clear answer.

This month, my hope is to find just how those two Gramlewicz families from Żerków were actually connected.