Finding Another Franziska

 

Working through the line of descent from ancestors and then combining that with a search through all the family's collateral lines can begin to reveal patterns. I have yet to determine just who it was whose name Franziska echoed down through namesakes in the generations of my paternal grandmother's matriline, but I am finding that name repeated. Surely this is a sign that someone, somewhere in my family's past, had a favorite ancestor to be honored that way.

Whether Bartholomaeus Olejniczak decided to honor his sister—my second great-grandmother—by naming his oldest daughter after her, I can't yet be sure. Perhaps Bartholomaeus and his sister Franziska had a grandmother by that name—a generation which is, so far, beyond my research reach.

Thankfully, Bartholomaeus' daughter Franziska can be traced through a couple records from the now-nonexistent country of Prussia. According to a transcription found at the Polish website BaSIA, I was led to the scan (#86) of the actual 1889 marriage document for a twenty-five year old Franziska Olejniczak, daughter of Bartholomaeus and Katharina Orszulak Olejniczak.

In that record, I learned that this Franziska's husband was known by two possible surnames: either Kondoła or  Kądala. To complicate matters, his given name—Adalbertus in Catholic church records—was not exactly a Polish name. That Latin version appears to have been the substitution of choice for Prussian sons known in Polish as Wojciech. Thus, the search for the couple's seven (or more) descendants gets complicated—until, of course, Franziska's husband died and she married, next, a man known as Anton Bogaczyński, with whom she had three more children.

Did any of these ten children live to adulthood? So far, I know that at least one child did. Born to Franziska and her first husband on March 22, 1892, in Ludwinow, the child was baptized Catharina. A note below her record on the top line of the page in the register for the parish in Żerków revealed that her full name was Catharina Agnes Kondoła and that she was subsequently married to Joannes—or Jan—Zajdel.

Following documentation and links on various online resources led me to the Billion Graves website, where an entry for someone with that same identity—Jan Zajdel, born May 16, 1885—showed his death on October 26, 1969, and burial in western Poland in Grodzisk Wielkopolskie. 

That makes this the first person related to descendants of my father's Polish line whom I've been able to trace into relatively modern times. Whether he was indeed the husband of Catharina, and whether this couple ever had children, I have yet to discover—if I find out anything at all.

Progress for such a research goal—finding descendants of my Polish ancestors' collateral lines—seems so incremental and piecemeal. Here a little, there a little, each breadcrumb of information preserved eventually will add up to substantial information. But so slowly it unfolds.