Catharina Makes Connections

 

Bartholomaues Olejniczak's third daughter Catharina—whom I suspect was actually called Katarzyna anywhere other than in Catholic Church records—ended up surprising me with connections by marriage to another member of her family tree. Although I can find some, but not all, Polish records at FamilySearch.org, this discovery came to me, thanks to the links at the Polish genealogy website, BaSIA.

The only reference I could find to Catharina was a mention of her 1897 marriage. Unsurprisingly, that event took place in Żerków, apparently the family's longstanding home in Poland. Her intended, Martin—make that Marcin in Polish—was the son of Marianna Smołka and her husband Stanislaus Mikołajczak.

"Wait a minute," I thought. I've seen that long, consonant-studded surname before. Long and unusual names complete with diacritical marks not part of my American lexicon can catch my eye like that.

Sure enough, I had seen that name before. Mikołajczak turned out to already be a surname figuring in my ever-expanding family tree. In fact, Stanislaus and Marianna Mikołajczak had another child who had married into this same Olejniczak family: their daughter Franziska.

Before you groan over yet another Franziska being added to this family saga, let's pause and consider just how few records I've been able to find on this family through the "usual" means. I'm celebrating every small victory I can find. And this Franziska we had already met when talking about the bride of Catharina's older brother Walenty—or Valentinus.

Thanks to the finding aid at BaSIA, I now have a digital copy of the 1897 marriage record for Catharina Olejniczak and Franziska's brother, Martin Mikołajczak.

What I couldn't find, though, were any records of birth for the couple's children. At this point, that lack could be the result of destroyed records, or records not within the dates of the collection at hand. Or that could mean that the couple moved out of the area, whether to another part of Poland or Europe—or even emigrating to America. Without a more thorough search, at this point I cannot say. But I'll keep looking.