What do you do when every document involving your ancestors is in a foreign language you don't speak? You use Google Translate, of course.
What else was I supposed to do, when one of the few hints on Ancestry.com that popped up for my Polish family said:
W Styczniu 1919 R. Wstąpił Jako Ochotnik Do Pleszewskiej Kompanii Powstańczej, Którą Dowodził Ppor. Pamin. Brał Udział W Walkach Pod Kobylą Górą, Czarnymlasem, Mijamnicami I O Miasto Kępno. Po Zawarciu Rozejmu Powrócił Do Domu.
Do you understand that? I didn't think so; neither do I.
The family member in particular was the son-in-law of one of Bartholomaeus Olejniczak's daughters, Franziska, whom we discussed just the other day, so I really wanted to know what those words meant. Finally—and quite unexpectedly—after poking around the details on this collateral line of my second great-grandmother, I had finally broken through the brick wall keeping me from twentieth century information—and I couldn't understand even one word of that information.
The route for the family connection was this: from Bartholomaeus, my second great-grandmother's brother, I examined what could be found on each of his children. We've already discussed how I had no clear leads for either of his sons. Right now, I am in the midst of exploring what can be found on each of his four daughters.
From the eldest daughter—Franziska, possibly named after my second great-grandmother—I found two marriage records. From the first marriage, to Adalbertus Kondoła (or possibly Kondeła), I then found a baptismal record for their daughter Catharina Agnes, which included an added line noting Catharina's subsequent marriage.
When I looked up the name of Catharina's husband, Joannes in church records, I again was treated to more information: that he was the son of Stanislaus Zajdel and a woman whose maiden name was by now quite familiar: Julianna Mikołajczak. I transcribed his parents' names and his date of birth—May 16, 1885—into my trees at Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and MyHeritage.com.
Then other hints began popping up, finally bringing me into the world of records for the 1900s. Billion Graves gave the date of death for Jan Zajdel as October 26, 1969, with his date of birth in agreement with the record I had found previously. Billion Graves also mentioned that Katarzyna Zajdel died in 1961, and provided a date of birth in harmony with the date I had found for Catharina Kondoła, granddaughter of our Bartholomaeus Olejniczak.
Being careful to enter all this newfound information into each of my trees, I then returned to Jan's entry at Ancestry.com, and discovered another bonus in the hints there. It was the readout in Polish I had printed above. Since I had no idea what any of that passage said, I copied and pasted the entire paragraph into Google Translate, and learned something new about this small branch of my third great-grandparents' line.
According to the translation, here is what the link at Ancestry was telling me about Jan Zajdel:
In January 1919, he joined the Pleszew Uprising Company as a volunteer, commanded by 2nd Lt. Pamin. He took part in the battles of Kobyla Góra, Czarnylas, Mijamnice and the town of Kępno. After the conclusion of the Armistice, he returned home.
Of course, I had no idea what the Pleszew Uprising Company might have been, so once again, I took my question to Google, and found this entry at Wikipedia, in which this particular uprising was noted to have been one of the two most successful uprisings in the long history of occupied Poland. For this, according to the hint at Ancestry.com, among others, Jan Zajdel became a recipient of the Greater Poland Uprising Cross.
That unexpected foray into one branch of my Polish roots finally brought me as close to present times as I had ever managed to go. While I certainly have a long, long way to go to find the rest of the family's story—let alone any Polish DNA cousins—it is encouraging to have found at least one token of what became of my ancestors' family members who chose to stay behind in Poland.
So interesting!
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