Another Month, Another Ancestor

 

Some researchers may set out a single research question and wrestle it to the death, rather than give up gracefully when lacking access to records. In my case, I set a time limit to each research plan, knowing I am playing with hard-to-find ancestors. A few years ago, I designed a plan I call my Twelve Most Wanted—those twelve making up a list of the hard-to-find relatives I would devote one month each to pursuing for the coming year.

To further organize my research approach, I also divided up the year so that I would equitably pursue those ancestors: three months each for my mother's line, my father's line, and then each of my in-laws' ancestors.

Today marks the shift from the search for my father-in-law's ancestors to those of my own father. With that shift, we move from the stress of lack of records in Ireland for famine-era immigrants to the stress of having to decipher records in a language I don't speak and which appears to have far too many consonants per each vowel for my English-speaking mind.

With the start of October, that means we will now spend time exploring whatever records can be found from a place nearly six thousand miles from my home, written in a language which, for me, could just as well have been from a different universe. We'll head to Poland—virtually, of course—and see if we can find anything new about my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak.

To pinpoint details more accurately, we'll be searching for information on my father's maternal grandmother's own mother. If I were fortunate enough to have a relative in this matriline willing to volunteer for a mitochondrial DNA test—an mtDNA test, as some people abbreviate the long name for the mother's mother's mother's ancestral line—perhaps I could learn more about the maternal side of Franziska Olejniczak's family, but I'll have to be satisfied with results from my own autosomal DNA test. That result, though I've waited for years to see increasing numbers, has only drawn in eight matches—all of whom are cousins I already have charted on paper. More are likely out there, but lacking the means to draw connections with previous generations in a foreign country, I have no way yet of knowing.

Tomorrow, we'll take a quick peek at what I already know about Franziska Olejniczak and her family line. Then we'll formulate a plan for next steps to take, in hopes of pushing that family tree further out—at least in search of more collateral lines and, eventually, distant cousins.