Just Where is That Place, Anyhow?

 

Genealogy can sometimes become a strange mix of mysteries and the mundane. Now that I've found a resource—the Polish website BaSIA—from which I can pull up scanned documents to verify births of my Polish ancestors' extended family, I've been working through the descendants of each collateral line of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, and then the collateral lines of my great-grandmother Marianna Jankowska, to add links to each individual's verifying documents. That can be the kind of dull undertaking that makes even the most dedicated genealogist's eyes glaze over.

Predictably, many of those documents confirmed that the extended family lived in Żerków, just like my own direct line ancestors did. Even moving further in time through the generations on those collateral lines, I'd see records confirming that same residence in Żerków, long after my own ancestors had left the country. But then, as I worked through the process with each descendant, I looked closer at the birth records and realized there was another location mentioned in the documents. The problem with that was: the country had more than one town with that same name—many more such towns. Now what? Just where was that place I was seeking, anyhow?

The trouble began when I decided to be too smart for my own good. I realized the documents I was reading were written not in Polish, but in German. Equipped with my trusty Google Translate, I decided to spot check some of those foreign words, like "wóhnhaft."

In case you don't speak German—I don't, so you're in good company—"wóhnhaft" means "resident," as in "resident of ...." In this family's case—say, the record for Cecilia Karcz, daughter of my great-grandmother's sister Antonina—the town in question was called Lisewo.

Great, I thought. I'll just look that up. 

Not so easy, it turns out. According to Wikipedia, there are at least eight different locations in Poland which go by that same name. Many of them, it turns out, are part of another region of Poland, known as Pomerania.

Thankfully, I already know from my paternal grandfather's branch of the family that those Pomeranian locations would not apply to my paternal grandmother's side of the family, so I eliminated most of the list that way. The rest, though, I'd have to sift through by another process of guesswork reasoning.

As it turned out, two of the remaining same-named towns were part of what is known as the Greater Poland Voivodeship, a province which is also known as Wielkopolska. So, my next step was to turn to Google Maps to see which one of those two contenders might be closer to Żerków.

Fortunately, there was one clear winner in that competition, a town located within the right province, in the county called Września. That Lisewo was a mere eleven kilometers east of Żerków, as opposed to the alternate location eighty kilometers away, which in modern terms would have required a drive of over an hour.

Still, there was something which bothered me about accepting these handy explanations. For one thing, those hundred year old documents sometimes spelled the family's residence as Lissowo, rather than Lisewo. Was that the same place? A case of messy handwriting? Or another example of the Germans attempting to wipe all signs of the conquered heritage off their maps?

I tried one more exploration: what would happen if I searched for "Lissowo" rather than "Lisewo"? While the search result which caught my eye is not exactly for the same Lisewo as the one I believe was my family's home—this entry was for a Pomeranian town—the website called Kartenmeister reported some alternate names for a town they catalogued by the German name Lissau. Note the alternative names: Lissowo (dated 1789, but spelled just as the late 1800s documents I found had indicated) and, under the heading, "Polish/Russian name," Lisewo.

Given all that, I'd say I just found the right place for those ancestors to call home.