Second Sister Marianna

 

Sometimes, research forays bestow some positive benefits, even after years of struggle. After having had past difficulties finding records verifying the collateral lines of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, it turns out that her brother's daughters have all showed up in now-digitized documents. Yesterday, we discussed Franziska's niece of the same name; today we'll look at the second-oldest of the sisters, Marianna.

In the case of this daughter of Bartholomaeus Olejniczak and his wife Catharina Orszulak, I actually found her name in two records. At her baptism at the Catholic Church in Żerków, Marianna's date of birth was recorded as July 27, 1871—seven years after the arrival of her older sister Franziska.

Almost like clockwork, twenty years later on November 16, 1891, Marianna Olejniczak married Adalbertus Marecki. Though not unusual for that time period, he was a man ten years her senior. As we've already learned from Marianna's older sister, who also married someone named Adalbertus, Marianna's husband was more likely called Wojciech at home, a far different name than that rendered in his Latin church records.

Unfortunately, unlike her sister's marriage record, this later version from their home church's marriage records did not include the name of the couple's parents. What appeared to be an entry listing the witnesses included one named Franz Jankowski, who would have been husband to Marianna's paternal aunt.

Piecing together documents and transcriptions from various Polish websites, I was able to find mention of eleven children for this couple, who were born between 1893 and 1910. Among those many children were at least two who died in infancy and another daughter, Josepha, who died as a teenager. My next task for this branch of the family is to pursue any sign of documentation for those children of Marianna and Wojciech Marecki who lived to adulthood, married, and welcomed in another generation of the extended Olejniczak family, presumably all still living in Poland into the early 1900s.