When Unusual Mixes With Common

 

What happens when you combine the unusual with something common? In the case of this month's quest to discover more about my father's Olejniczak great-grandmother, I am beginning to realize that combining that surname with a given name as common as John puts the brakes on research progress.

How common is a name like Olejniczak? In all my life, I don't ever recall meeting anyone with a name like that. Even considering, with Polish phonics, that name is pronounced far differently than it looks to American eyes, I don't believe I've ever heard anyone mention that name.

To me, that is always a good sign. To look for an unusual name can mean an easier route to finding the right person for the name—so how common is a surname like Olejniczak? Here in the United States, compared to all other American surnames, Olejniczak ranks well below the twenty thousandth mark, showing up only 1,592 times in listings of all the surnames in the country in a recent tally.

But how does the surname rank in the country of its origin? One surname distribution site ranks Olejniczak 139th of all Polish surnames, with well over twenty thousand residents of Poland claiming that as their surname—a far different picture than we see in the United States or any other non-Polish country.

Not quite rare, but at least unusual: that's how I'd classify that surname. But what happens when we combine that search edge with a given name as common as John? My guess is that the uniqueness of the search term plummets—both in Poland, where I'd be looking for Jan (or, in church records, Joannes), and elsewhere for an immigrant named John. Suddenly, the uniqueness evaporates. Combine that with an immigrant's possible decision to modify that foreign-sounding surname, and the search terms get thrown wide open.

As it turns out, our Franziska Olejniczak, my father's great-grandmother, had a brother. In church records, his name appeared in its Latin version, Bartholomaeus. There, it was fairly easy to find the names of his sons, including that son with the common name Jan—or Joannes in church records, where we find him baptized in June of 1869 in the same town where I've found so many of my father's other Polish ancestors.

It just so happens that, of all my thousands of DNA matches, there is one—and only one—who connects with me through the Olejniczak grandparents of this Joannes Olejniczak, son of Bartholomaeus. It's a very small match, to be sure, but it is there, calling for attention.

Not happy to just take things at face value, that did grab my attention, and I looked. Despite hopes that this would be a workable match and a documentable line of descent, I found it to have rather disappointing support. While the tree of this DNA match showed this immigrant John Olejniczak to be born in 1868, there were very few documents to support the timeline for that tree. Reports of birth in "Germany," while possibly a politically correct label for the time period, may indicate a different person with that same common name of John, despite the unusual surname. And a morphing surname evolving over the years to help this immigrant fit into American culture did not help, either.

This will obviously call for examination of records, both to trace any clues of this other John Olejniczak's identity and family history and to search for more details on my own "John" Olejniczak, wherever he might have ended up. We'll jump into that chase tomorrow.