Okay, ancestors, y'all come out from your hiding places. No penalty. I promise.
I couldn't help myself, seeking for a specific ancestor to research this coming October, as I comb through all my father's Polish forebears. I just wish they'd all come out of hiding. It's not that I've discovered every fact about every paternal ancestor that's out there—far from it. My problem is that I do have plenty of research questions—but few resources to guide me to the documents I need.
At the beginning of 2021, I had designated Franziska Olejniczak as one of my Twelve Most Wanted to research that coming November. She was my father's maternal grandmother's mother. When that year was done, I can't say I had found much on the woman.
I'm pretty sure Franziska never left her homeland, though at least two of her three daughters married and left her for America. For the third daughter, I found a marriage record and several baptismal records showing she had a large family, but whatever became of those children, I can't say.
The fact that I have a few—a very few—DNA matches whose family tree includes that same surname, Olejniczak, begs me to dig deeper on this line. But where to look? Those DNA matches appear to live now in France, not Poland. There are a lot of blanks to fill in that story line.
It's time to revisit Franziska's story again for my Twelve Most Wanted this coming October, now that I've found a few additional Polish records resources online. In fact, there are other branches of this family which could use some TLC in the records department. While that sounds like a daunting task right now, whether Franziska is "it" for this month's research task or I expand the task to revisit the rest of these Polish great-grandparents, it may only be by dint of will that I make progress on my father's history. For this last quarter of the year, my research mantra may well be, "Come out, come out, wherever you are."
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