Finding the Stop Between "Here" and "There"

 

It would be so handy in tracing the path of immigrant ancestors if they were careful to leave their homeland and go straight to their new home in that foreign land. In the case of Jan Olejniczak, however, there was this stopping place in between arriving here in the United States from his birthplace in Poland. And I couldn't locate that stopping point to even begin searching for records.

Thanks to discovery of a DNA match who descends from the man who might have been my family's relative Jan Olejniczak, I've been searching through records after his arrival in the United States. In the 1920 census, it was clear that before he arrived in the United States, Jan—his name now anglicized to read John—had not only married but become the proud parent of three children who were born in Germany: Kazmier, Louise, and Lottie. It took quite a bit of examining records of those three Olejniczak children to determine just where in Germany they might have been born. Eventually, the answer surfaced: a town called Reklinghausen.

Easy, I thought: I'll just look up the town in the online, searchable Meyers Gazetteer.

Not so fast, it turned out. "No results" was the answer to my query. I attempted the "sounds like" option, and got several results. Those, however, reminded me of my failed attempts at determining exactly which of multiple Polish towns with the same name might be the right location. So I tried a different approach.

While the original document I had viewed for the origin of Jan's children had spelled the German location as Reklinghausen, an online search yielded a Wikipedia article for the similar spelling of Recklinghausen.

In addition to discovering that the town had been the site of over one hundred witchcraft trials, I learned that it was part of the Ruhr area of western Germany, known for its coal mining activities. Chasing other resources, I gleaned some possible reasons why a Polish young man like Jan Olejniczak might have migrated to that far side of Germany: to get a job in the mines. In fact, Jan would have been in good company there. There was even a German term for those who came from Poland in that influx of Polish immigrants to work the mines in Recklinghausen: Ruhrpolen.

The migration of Polish workers occurred mainly in the 1870s. The significant fact was that most came from the same region where Jan was born. Yet Jan himself would barely have been an infant at that time. Presumably when he did make the move, he would have found a thriving Polish community of his former neighbors and associates when he arrived.

Still to be found, however, are any records of the birth of those three children of Jan and his wife, Pelagia. Nor have I been able to find a marriage record for the couple. The long tasks ahead also include locating passenger lists with the family's names, presumably in a predictable grouping. While I'll be searching to  find more of such genealogical tokens, in the meantime, I'll be tentatively adding this possible branch of the Olejniczak family into my own tree—and reaching out to connect with the DNA match who led me to this clue.