Józefa: Moving Beyond the Expected

 

By the time my research arrived at the fourth daughter of Bartholomaeus Olejniczak, I was already primed to not expect much from the few Polish records already available online. For Józefa's older sisters Franziska, Marianna, and Catharina, I had found—for the most part—very little. The baby of the family, however, was different.

Born February 3, 1876, by the time Józefa turned one year of age, her mother had died. By the time she became twenty three, Józefa was married. Her intended, Michael Banaszak, moved his bride from her family's home in Żerków to nearby Jarocin, where the records of births and marriages over the following years moved far beyond the limited dates I had come to expect. Unlike what I observed of the records in Żerków, as I kept stretching the search parameters to later and later dates for this family in Jarocin, the information kept appearing in the readout at BaSIA, the Polish website I've been using to search this branch of my family.

All told, I was able to find records for Józefa and Michael Banaszak in Jarocin dating from the birth of their oldest child, Waclaw, in 1900, all the way to marriage records for their daughters Marianna (to Kazimierz Szczepański in 1923) and Johanna (to Ignacy Frankowiak in 1931). 

Like clockwork at almost one child for every two years, Michael and Józefa welcomed ten Banaszak children into the world. Of course, there were the not-unusual sad spots when they lost their children Czeslaus in 1906 as a three year old, and Wojciech in 1915 as a one year old infant. But looking at the birth year of their youngest daughter Wladislawa, born in 1916, I wondered how much more heartbreak the family was about to face as they endured at least one World War, and possibly two—if they lived long enough to see it.

With these freshly-found discoveries about Józefa Olejniczak, I need to enter the information in my trees at FamilySearch, MyHeritage, and Ancestry, as well as include links back to the actual documents identified by my search through the BaSIA transcriptions. Perhaps those entries will flag even more digitized documents housed at any of the other websites. One can hope. But for now, I'm satisfied to know I've been able to reach beyond the turn of the century and into the 1900s with at least this one branch of the Olejniczak family. Perhaps that will be a close enough hook for a Polish DNA cousin to find me now.