If it Isn't Here, Could it be There?

 

Looking for records of Polish ancestors has been, as I've said before, not a plug-and-play experience. Part of the documented family story I may have located through the Polish website BaSIA, but that collection's big gap in the middle of the nineteenth century, right where I need to research, hasn't been much of a help.

I got to wondering: if the records aren't accessible through BaSIA, could I find them anywhere else? I'm not prepared to fully answer that question yet, but I'm beginning my experiment to test out that hypothesis.

Yesterday, I harvested all the information I could find at BaSIA for any mention of Laskowski kin in the town of Żerków in nineteenth century Prussia. At that point, surveying all the possible connections yet lacking any way to confidently link them to my own Laskowski ancestry, I mused over the possibility of adding—and organizing—them as a "floating tree" within my own tree at Ancestry.com.

Today, I tried out that idea. Any time I do this, I always cringe when I cut the individual entry loose from its anchor in the original tree. Yes, I know that the Laskowski entry to which I linked this possible relative is not really a sibling. Nonetheless, it bothers me. But I did it.

My first victim, er, volunteer was the husband of Marianna Zaborowska. It was her 1882 death record at BaSIA which told me that this seventy six year old woman was the wife of Adalbert Laskowski. With those two names and approximate dates, I scooted off to FamilySearch to see whether I could find any records for the couple there.

Fortunately, I had already learned that Adalbert—or Adalbertus—was the way the Polish given name Wojciech would be entered in Catholic church records, which were usually drawn up in Latin. Beginning my experiment at FamilySearch, I selected "search," then chose "images," where I entered the place name for my Laskowski family in the former country of Prussia: Żerków. I estimated the date range when this couple would have had children—if they had any children—and clicked on the link for the digitized collection of baptismal records for that era.

Once that record set was selected, I clicked the little magnifying glass icon at the top of the set and entered the name of interest: Adalbert Laskowski. Five possibilities popped up, including two with Marcyanna Zaborowska's name as mother of the baptized child.

Back to my own tree at Ancestry, I began by entering Adalbert—alias Wojciech—Laskowski as if he were brother of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski. Then, I cut him loose from the supposed father and mother and let Wojciech float free, untethered in family tree outer space.

Because the FamilySearch record set for Żerków baptisms included two children for Wojciech and Marcianna—son Piotr Paweł, born in June of 1841, and son Stanisław, born in November 1842—I added their information to the free-floating Laskowski couple so that at least these four people are now connected to each other. I'll repeat this process as I compare the rest of the records I found at BaSIA with any that I can locate through FamilySearch.org's image collection.

Needless to say, I may be busy at this project for a long, long time. Just maybe, at some point, I'll figure out how these Laskowskis relate to the ones in town who belong to my family's line. If nothing else, I'll map out the connections between the families living nearly two hundred years ago in the tiny town of Żerków, Poland.

Organizing the Splat of the Data

 

So, the data's gathered. Now what?

I'm sitting here, looking at the list I've harvested from a search for Laskowski relatives documented in the tiny town of Żerków throughout the 1800s. I'm trying to figure out a way to organize the great, big splat of it all. There's a gap in the fat middle of it, of course, likely due to the inevitable destruction of some records through the centuries—or, perhaps if I'm lucky, the gap is simply owing to a backlog in uploading indexed results onto the website.

Spanning the century in my search for this one particular surname was my way of hoping to circumvent the problem of missing records. Almost as if vindicating my hunch, I did find some marriage and death records towards the end of the 1800s which provided names of parents whom I hadn't encountered back at the beginning of that century. Yet it still is hard to sift through all this information and find patterns or connections.

When I think of patterns for ancestral connections, the easiest way for my brain to recognize them is to lay out all the information in a pedigree chart. But how to connect all these disparate names? It occurred to me that using the technique of a "floating tree" might be just the answer. That way, I'd enter each of these Laskowski names into my family tree at Ancestry.com, then cut the entry lose from the tree so no relationship is implied. From that point, each time I run into that name again—say, in a subsequent marriage record, or listed as parent of a child who died later in the century—I can look it up in my index (since it is floating free from any relationships) and then add the new name and relationship to that floating individual's entry.

Eventually, I'd have several clustered cells floating around, detached in the ether of my family tree. True, they'd be disconnected still from my own Laskowski line, but I'd be holding them in reserve, in hopes that someday, more records will be added to the various digitized collections I can now access.

Looking at the Polish website BaSIA, I've noticed that each transcription is linked to the scan of the actual document held in the Polish archives. Along with the link to the scanned picture, the BaSIA entry provides the date that each entry was added to the website. I've noticed that some of those entries had upload dates early in 2012, while others were added closer to the end of that decade. I'm fervently hoping this is still a work in progress, with more indexed and scanned records to come. That gap in resources from about the 1850s through the 1880s could contain the very information I'm seeking.

It's a Small Town, After All

 

There are some research problems which leave me feeling as if I'm walking in circles. Pursuing my Laskowski ancestors in Żerków is one of those problems. The more I try to compile a listing of all the documents containing the surname Laskowski for resident of Żerków, the more I'm spotting relatives sporting the other surnames in my paternal line.

Can that be so surprising? After all, Żerków is only a town of maybe two thousand residents now. That each of the residents, over several generations, would be likely to marry spouses from the other, likely limited, families in the area should not be surprising. But I was surprised, nonetheless.

Take my new brick wall ancestor Bonawentura Laskowski. He's my third great-grandfather, so now I'm making progress, having moved into this new generation. But that's where I'm stumped. I cannot find any connections for this man who died in 1827.

I got the brainy idea that, if I couldn't make any progress on the Laskowski side of the equation, perhaps I'd find better luck looking at the other side of the family. That other side is represented by Bonawentura's wife, Orszula Wroblewska. With a name like that, I'm automatically folding in more uncertainty, because I've seen her name rendered several ways. Some records list her given name as Ursula, which would be understandable. But my doubt rises even further when I find only records spelling her maiden name as Wrobleska, not Wroblewska. Could this just be a case of simple misspelling? 

I did a search for documents on the Polish website BaSIA to see what would show up. I narrowed the search parameters to a ten kilometer area around Żerków, and lessened the similarity range to a more lenient level to capture any other possible spelling variations. 

With that, I began to pull in possibilities for this side of the family. I found a twenty six year old woman named Cunegunda Wrobleska who died in 1821, as well as a sixty year old woman named Franciszka with the same surname who died in 1818. But when I came upon the 1820 death notice for eighty year old Regina Wrobleska, something made me stop and consider.

Regina, I noticed, was apparently unlike the others with the surname Wrobleska, for this entry gave her maiden name. The record noted that she was born a Laskoska. Fortunately for whoever might be among her descendants, her parents' names were listed: Adalbertus Laskoski and Barbara. Although there was no maiden name given for Regina's mother Barbara, this was the first instance I had found in Żerków of someone this early in the century provided with parents' names.

But what was this? Besides Orszula Wroblewska, my third great-grandmother who married Bonawentura Laskowski, here was another woman whose life story also tied together these two surnames. Could there have been more?

Looking further, I also spotted another surname which has appeared in this branch of my family tree before: Gramlewicz. Only this time, instead of representing the line of Bonawentura's daughter-in-law Elzbieta Gramlewicz, this was the birth record for Laurentius Gramlewicz, son of Michael Gramlewicz and Marianna Wrobleska. Somehow, all three of these surnames are tied together in my roots—and more than once. 

Yes, Żerków is a small town, after all—so what was I to expect? Whether I can conclude that minor misspellings do not indicate entirely unrelated families, I can't yet be sure. But I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm slipping into the outer edges of some signs of endogamy in my family tree.

In Search of Polish Naming Conventions

 

Researching ancestors from an English language country is far simpler than pursuing those secret ancestors my paternal grandparents never wanted us kids to find. Yes, the cousins persevered and made discoveries, but now that I'm faced with the prospect of untangling at least eighty Laskowski ancestors from the same tiny village, I need some help.

I'm currently in search of information on Polish naming conventions, especially to help me sort out those many mentions of newborn Laskowskis in baptismal records. It occurred to me how much easier my research would be if my Polish forebears abode by some simple rules of thumb like, say, the Irish naming pattern. Or how about the pattern the Irish used for selecting godparents? If only my Polish ancestors had relied on such conventions, I'd have it made. Every time I'd spot a godparent's name, I'd know exactly how that name would fit into the family picture.

I decided to search for some answers to questions like, "How did Polish parents select godparents for their newborn babies?" Or, "Was there any naming convention Polish parents used in naming their babies after older relatives?"

Apparently, while I can find such material regarding Irish families, there are no such articles written on the subject for Polish ancestors that I can find. I did find some very generic advice, along the lines of naming children after saints, or perhaps—though apparently rare—after a godparent. But who would be the one chosen as the godparent? I have more questions than answers.

When it came to Polish naming conventions, I did find articles explaining the Polish custom of variations on surname endings, based mostly on conventions of their own language. And there was a far more modern version of information on what goes into a Polish name. I even found an article on "name days" celebrated in Poland—though I read elsewhere that that Polish tradition is losing ground in more modern times.

Still, I haven't found any naming patterns which might provide clues as to who was related to whom—which leaves me no option but guesswork at this point. Or a lot of research, and the hope that there are many more records to be found out there, somewhere.

Tackling an Old Problem

 

Old research problems can be tantalizing and simultaneously frustrating. I thought I'd spend the weekend jumping back to tackle a DNA match's Olejniczak roots from my research project last month. By now, I had reconciled myself to the thought that DNA doesn't lie—and that Polish immigrants to America had good reasons to do their best to blend into the English-speaking background.

Thus, my question: was John Olenzak really the Johan Olejniczak who once had been baptized as Joannes Olejniczak, nephew of my second great-grandmother? Think again if you presumed this would be an easy project. The process of discovering that the Polish Jan Olejniczak was born on the same day as John Olenzak was not that difficult, but moving further into his family constellation introduced more problems.

For one thing, Johan's naturalization record—of which I only could find a transcription—indicated his arrival in New York City in 1905. Yet a passenger listing for a wife, two sons, a daughter, and two unmarried sisters-in-law showed an arrival in 1906. Obviously, Johan could have traveled ahead—his address at the time was given as the town of Neffs in Belmont County, Ohio. But the sticky part was that the names of these family members traveling to join Johan did not match up with later census records for the family, 

Traveling on the Zeeland from Antwerp were Stanislawa Olejniczak and her children Marjan, Stefania, and Stanislaw, plus Wladyslawa and Josefa Pruchniewicz. The problem is that the earliest census where I can find John's family in Ohio includes a son and two daughters—quite backwards from the passenger listing—and a wife names Pelagia, not Stanislawa as had been entered on the passenger list.

Now what? This is apparently not going to be the slam-dunk weekend project I had envisioned. Jan Olejniczak and his immigrant family will have to travel back to the genealogical drawing board with me and await yet another weekend before we can find any answers.

A Dilemma . . .

 

Now that I'm deep in the midst of deciphering handwritten documents in Polish, German, and even Latin in search of my second great-grandparents' collateral lines, a thought occurred to me. It was a thought I didn't appreciate thinking at the time, but it does serve as a reminder when considering the possibility of errors in records as I face my current research dilemma.

I had been following one collateral line, going through birth, marriage, and—eventually—death records, when I spotted a name I knew couldn't be right. It was in the death record for a child of my second great-grandparent's sibling, where the mother's name was provided. The mother's given name was correct (remember, I had already found this family's details in other documents) but the maiden name written on the document could not have the right one—not if this were the same family I had been researching all along. In fact, it was a surname associated by marriage to totally different branch of the family.

Did the reporting party, under the stress of losing a loved one, suddenly blurt out the wrong maiden name? I've certainly seen this happen in death certificates written up in English in my own country, but this time I was deciphering records from old Prussia—in a foreign language, no less. Can I assume that oft-spotted error in my own country's English-language documents could have revealed a bit of universal human nature? Perhaps death records in other languages contain the same—totally understandable—error, too. My dilemma, though, is how to determine when such an error would be likely, even when stumbling through a foreign language in another country's death records.

On Laskowski Overload

 

Doing a "One Name Study" on a surname as common in Poland as Laskowski may have been overkill for someone just wishing to find my third great-grandfather's parents' names, but narrowing the parameters seemed like a do-able idea. Since Bonawentura Laskowski's death record at the close of 1827 left me nothing but two nondescript dashes for the names of each of his parents, I was hoping for another way to not only push backwards another generation, but also look sideways for the names of any of his siblings.

That's when I got the brainy idea to take a page from the playbook of genealogists who advise doing cluster research. I went looking for everyone named Laskowski who was mentioned in records posted at the Polish website BaSIA. Having set up my search parameters—any mentions of the surname Laskowski between the years 1793 and 1900 in documents for residents of Żerków—I soon found myself in Laskowski overload.

There were no less than eighty mentions of the Laskowski surname in my search results. Mind you, I eliminated any records for which a Laskowski family member served as a witness on someone else's document. Those remaining on my list were results for which the surname directly involved a family relationship to that name, whether as subject or parent in a birth, marriage, or death record. Because of the possibility of spelling variations, I also set the parameters for similarity of name above seventy percent, since there were so many instances of the surname being spelled as Laskoski.

Of course, there are potential downsides to such an approach. For one thing, my Laskowski side might have involved some relatives who married individuals living nearby but outside the actual town of Żerków. Another problem might be further hazards on the spelling and handwriting front: names either written with more than that one letter "w" missing from the handwritten note—Laskoski instead of Laskowski—or names for which abysmal handwriting caused a misreading of the entry. To capture those, I would need to set the "similarity" slide bar to a more lenient setting—and, more likely, actually look at the records for myself to see whether they were incorrectly indexed.

One final observation about this process: there may be other sources for records from Żerków. I'll need to see whether other resources can be found. For instance, I've already found copied versions of church records, thanks to a digitizing project completed years ago by FamilySearch. Though several of the names written in that collection were incorrectly indexed, as I work my way through that record set, I'm discovering family connections which I would have missed, had I simply relied on a computerized search through the indexed version of the records.

With eighty possibilities to consider, I'd say this is a more than adequate start to my project, and one to keep me far busier over this weekend than I had originally expected. Whether I ever find the connection between Mateusz's father Bonawentura Laskowski and the rest of the Laskowski residents in Żerków, I can at least glean a few connections between the family lines I've now found represented in those scanned documents.

Which Way Did He Go?

 

It almost seems as if my Polish second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski was an only child. Other than his younger sister Antonina, who was born and died in 1821, there seemed to be no trace of any siblings in the Laskowskis' hometown of Żerków. It was therefore a hopeful possibility to follow Mateusz's son Antoni Laskowski and his family to their new home in America and discover that there was another man by the same surname living in the Laskowski household. Just a bit too old to be Antoni's own son—Antoni's eldest was only eleven at the time—and likewise of an age which wouldn't fit into Antoni's brother Lorenz's family, this Andrew could have been a cousin.

Andrew Laskowski showed up in Antoni's household in the 1892 New York State census. Born approximately in 1866, I presumed this Andrew was born in the same town Antoni had once called home—Żerków. But after Andrew's appearance in the 1892 census, which way did he go? Unless he migrated farther west to Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Illinois, I could find no trace of any likely candidate for this man.

The trouble with seeing this clue slip so easily through my fingers is that I was hoping he would be the link to help me find any collateral lines for Antoni's father Mateusz. Surely, I thought, this Andrew could have been Mateusz's nephew. And where there was a nephew sporting the same surname, there would have been a brother from Mateusz's own generation.

If I couldn't find the right Andrew Laskowski in America after 1892, I reasoned, perhaps I could find him back home in Żerków. That, however, was not in the books for me, either. I tried searching at BaSIA, both using Andrew's Polish name—Andrzej—and the alternative Latin spelling of Andreas for possible church records. Though Andrew had reported an age leading to an estimated birth year of 1866, I widened my search back to 1860, with a cutoff date two years beyond the date of his entry in the 1892 New York State census. No hits.

It was then that it occurred to me to put another research concept to use: what if I searched for all the entries containing the surname Laskowski in Żerków? After all, the town of Zerkow has a population of just over two thousand people now. At the start of the previous century, that population was 1,631. My chances of finding actual relatives with that same surname living in Żerków in the late 1880s could be fairly high.

The concept of cluster research—or, as one key researcher has dubbed it, the F.A.N. Club—may well turn up some possible collateral lines for me. Admittedly, I'll have to proceed carefully. And the list will basically serve as a guide, not a final conclusion. But lacking any other approach to locate documentation to reveal any collateral lines, I'm certainly game to launch this exploration.

A Polish Immigrant in New York City

 

Finding an immigrant ancestor's arrival in his adopted country can be a challenge, especially for those arriving from a land where English is not the primary language. For my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski, that native tongue was Polish. While his new home in New York City may have had pockets of fellow immigrants from his homeland, Antoni and his wife Marianna nevertheless had to adapt to interactions with government officials in a language which they barely understood.

When I look at their entry in the 1900 census, for example, I learn that not only were their children listed with Americanized names—Jan had become the predictable John, and Mieczyslaus was now a more pronounceable Michael—but their surname had been shortened to Lasko. One might almost think the enumerator had given up on completing the surname entry, as in the way he wrote it, there seemed to be a period followed by a long space after Lasko, until I realized that, years later, their son Michael did indeed go by that shortened surname.

Their entry in the 1900 census also put their birthplace as Germany, which technically was what the place was considered to be at that time. But upon reading their stated date of arrival in the United States as 1890, I realized there was yet another census which I could check to see if there was further information: the New York State census taken in 1892.

Finding the Laskowskis in that earlier state census, I could also see that they were listed as aliens, not naturalized citizens, from Poland. Yet I also could spot some additional names in the household—names which, perhaps, this time I can track to see whether they lead to collateral lines for Antoni's family back in Żerków. Among those names was someone called Andrew Laskowski—more likely to have been called Andrzej, like Antoni's maternal grandfather, back home in Poland.

This Andrew, listed in 1892 as being twenty six years of age, may well have been born in Żerków, the Laskowskis' home in Poland. You can be sure I'll be following up on that clue later this week, as one of my goals this month is to trace the collateral lines for Antoni's father, Mateusz Laskowski. All I've been able to find, so far, have been the baptismal and death records for his infant sister Antonina Laskowska, whose brief life began and ended in 1821.

Whatever happened to Andrew Laskowski, that extra member of the extended Laskowski household in 1892, I can't say yet, but it may be a productive detour to take, in hopes of discovering more relatives among my great-grandfather's ancestors. 

Finding the Path to America

 

If Lorenz Laskowski was the first of the three Laskowski siblings to leave the family home in Żerków for America, his younger sister Agnes was probably the last. Agnes, that woman of many sorrows we discussed last week, had married, birthed three children, then lost all three along with her husband. Two more records pinpointed her last days in her native Poland: her second marriage, to Ignatz Giernatowski in 1887, and the 1888 birth of the Giernatowskis' daughter Pelagia.

Records tracing the Giernatowskis' path to America thus needed to occur after Pelagia's January 1888 birth. The trouble is, finding that path of immigration turns out to be a challenge. Taking the simple route of consulting the 1900 census—where their Brooklyn, New York, residence was entered under the spelling Gernatofski—resulted in entries as misleading as the ones we spotted yesterday for Agnes' brother Lorenz. While the couple reported that by then, they had been married for twelve years, they claimed a year of immigration—1887—predating not only their daughter's 1888 birth in Żerków, but their own marriage there as well. And while Ignatz claimed he had at least initiated the naturalization process, I have yet to find his records. (The 1915 New York State census listed Ignatz as an alien.)

But when did they get here? And how? Their arrival likely predated the opening of Ellis Island, but that doesn't mean passenger records were non-existent before 1892. One entry on Ancestry credited the "Germans to America Passenger Data File" for an entry showing Agniska Geirnatowska, resident of Żerków, sailing from Prussia and arriving in the United States on August 13, 1888—a credible date, but how do I access the actual record? Clicking through to the source leaves me staring at a page which states, "We're sorry, this page is no longer available."

So, where did that page go? I searched online for further information on that title, and found a couple entries. One contained a clickable link in a FamilySearch wiki article on New York Immigration. The other was included in a list of links at Cyndi's List pertaining to emigration from Germany. But when I clicked on each suggested link, it brought me to the same place: an error message at the National Archives.

Oh, well...back to the drawing board, and reading through further instructions...

It's clear, however, that Ignatz and Agnes did arrive in New York City with their daughter, based on their appearance in both federal and state census enumerations. As for that daughter, the issue is compounded by Pelagia's appearance in various records as Blanch, Pauline, and Pleshia or Plashia. Agnes remained in Brooklyn up until the time of her death in 1926. We can only presume her husband followed her in death; once again, perhaps owing to the challenge of spelling his name, his last record of life's passing evades us.

Born at Sea?

 

Lacking actual documentation, there is no easier way to get a snapshot of where a migrating family wandered over the decades than to look at census reports for their children's places of birth. That, at least, helped me estimate the date of arrival of the Polish immigrant family of a man once known as Lorenz Laskowski.

Younger brother of my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski, Lorenz was apparently the first of the three remaining Laskowski siblings to actually sail for America. The reason I can figure this, despite three different dates given for the family's immigration in various census records, is owing to the birth of Lorenz's two eldest children. Joseph, the eldest, was born in Żerków in 1885. The family's next child, however, was Harriet, who according to census records was born at sea in 1886. What better clue could a researcher hope for than that?

Tracing the migration dates of Lorenz Laskowski from tiny Żerków to bustling New York City was not all that easy. Mostly, it was complicated by the not unpredictable adaptation of his name to Lawrence Laskoski sometime after his arrival in America. As of yet, I haven't found any record of naturalization—with a search using both forms of his name—despite his claim on the 1900 census that he had at least begun the process.

That, however, is not a concern for me, seeing how the same census gave his date of arrival in this country to be 1884—supposedly followed a year later by his wife Anna and his daughter Harriet, who in the same document was said to have been born at sea in September of 1886. Do the math here, folks. Those numbers can't be telling the right story.

But finding any verification by cross-checking Harriet's own paper trail proves challenging. After locating that 1900 census detail about her birth in September of 1886, the next record I can find is her November 1915 New York State Affidavit for License to Marry John Joseph Loughlin. Her name is clearly shown as Harriet R. Laskoska, following the Polish custom of changing surname endings to the letter "a" for women, and reporting her parents to be Lawrence and Anna, with the mother's maiden name spelled— incredibly—as it should be: Blaszczynska.

And yet, after that point, all records for the Loughlin couple show John's wife to be named Henrietta—even in the few cases where her maiden name of Laskoska was also included. Did John Loughlin suddenly remarry another woman with the same maiden name before the 1920 census was taken? I find no such marriage record, nor any record of Harriet dying or divorcing him before that date. Perhaps that is a mystery for another day—a tempting rabbit trail, though not part of our research goal for this month—but strangely, I have three different DNA matches (at two different companies, no less) who descend from this mystery Henrietta.

I'd say we are observing yet another of those undocumented name changes which my paternal ancestors seem quite adept at pulling off. Unfortunately, even if that is so, I still am lacking any documentation on when Harriet was actually born, and riding on that detail—key to this month's inquiry—when Lorenz and Anna and their fledgling family decided to leave Żerków and seek their fortune in a land said to have streets paved in gold. Or, at least, a place with less sickness and death than the home they left behind. 

Looking for Laskowski Matches

 

This weekend has been one of those times when I couldn't help exploring. Since the death record of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski revealed his parents' names, I thought I'd do some checking through my ThruLines results at Ancestry.com. After all, in drawing up my biweekly tally, I discovered that I had eleven new DNA matches there. It would be lovely if any of those new cousins connected through my paternal lines.

While eleven new DNA matches was certainly a jump for me—I usually get two to four new ones biweekly—the journey through the new listings was a disappointment, though not surprising. Of those eleven, only five matches connected with a segment larger than ten centiMorgans (hint: this is a puny amount of DNA to build a cousin case upon). The highest count was one match with seventeen centiMorgans. And the clincher: only three of those eleven have a linked tree.

No surprise, I told myself. Perhaps these new cousins need time to prepare their tree. But what about the rest of my matches? After all, I have 2,562 matches at Ancestry who are estimated to be at the fourth cousin level or closer. Yet no matter which way I stacked the data, no new Polish relatives popped up for me.

Since I did discover that Mateusz's father's name was—at least in Latin—Bonaventura Laskowski, I checked my ThruLines to see if any leads materialized there. Nope. All I saw were the same ten linked to my third great-grandfather who were listed there the last time I checked.

A little disappointed, since I've added fifty three more Polish relatives to my family tree this month, I went exploring results at the other companies where I've tested my autosomal DNA, but found nothing new—more to the point, nothing promising. I can see now why so many of the names I've added to my tree over the years—now having 38,579 documented individuals—have been on my maternal side: researching foreign family members from a mere hundred fifty years ago is far more challenging than pushing back to colonial times on those American ancestors. Despite courthouse fires and other hazards of records storage, we still have ways to find those documents of ancestors who ventured into this New World.

Truth be told, at a few points in this past week—just for fun, mind you, and a change of pace—I worked on my mother-in-law's easy-to-find ancestors. I merrily advanced that tree to the tune of eighty two additional people in a crowd of 36,935 relatives. It just felt good to get in a genealogical jog after crawling through record roadblocks back in Poland.

Despite the disappointments on progress, I do have to remind myself that revisiting this research project this year has been far more successful than it was last year. Though the door to discovery in the past was opened by transcriptions of records, now many of those records are cross-linked in Polish websites to archival resources. Now, all I need to do is learn how to decipher hundred-year-old German script and I can read for myself what the documents are telling me.

All record sets have their limits, though, and for this month's Twelve Most Wanted, I may soon be coming to the limit line for this Polish ancestral family. But at least I can take heart to believe that, as I saw happening this month over last year, given another year's time, the next go-round may bring even more results.

Researching, Map in Hand

 

The deeper I dig into my paternal grandmother's Polish roots, the more I realize that such research simply cannot be accomplished without proceeding with map in hand. It's not that I am unfamiliar with the names of Polish towns or cities. My main challenge came when I realized that the Polish had a penchant for falling in love with a town's name—and applying that same geographic designation to umpteen other spots scattered across their country.

We've already noticed that last month when searching for more information on a sister of my great-grandmother Marianna Jankowska. There were apparently eight different places which all claimed the same name for their town's identity. Trying to figure out which one was this relative's hometown called for some map work.

The same is happening now as I shift to another branch of my Polish ancestry. Working on my great-grandfather's brother Lorenz Laskowski, I had found his marriage to Anna Błaszczyk occurred in a Catholic parish called Żegocin, yet the civil record came from a different place—Czermin. Well, which place was the correct location? 

Not to make things any easier, but I discovered there were two places called Żegocin: one in Kalisz County, and the other in Pleszew County. Consulting a map, as always in these circumstances, showed two towns by that same name in the two different counties—but the distance between them and the Laskowski family home in Żerków was almost the same for each.

Next step: read up on each location to seek additional clues. Almost right away, I spotted the clincher on the entry for Żegocin in Pleszew County: a small village, its records are kept in the administrative district known as Gmina Czermin. And that was the reason for the civil record being given the location as the village of Czermin.

In a way, it's a good thing to be researching a country which uses a language I don't speak, and tends to bestow the same name on multiple locations. It prompts me to keep a map close at hand. And it reminds me to look up anything I don't already know for sure. The progress may seem slower, but it keeps me from being tempted to take the wrong turn in these geographic forks on the genealogical road.

The Impetus to Leave

 

Timelines are a useful tool for putting an ancestor's life in perspective. Juxtaposing the key dates in a relative's life alongside the timeline of local, national, or world history can help us understand why past family members made the choices they did. In the case of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski's children, however, combining the timelines of these siblings may help illustrate why at least this one family came to the conclusion that it was better to leave home for a foreign land rather than stay in unacceptable circumstances.

The impetus to leave, in the case of the three remaining Laskowski children, can be likened to that oft-used phrase, "the straw that broke the camel's back." No one unfortunate event was likely to have unearthed the entire family from the land they called home for generations. Taken together, though, the choice made sense.

Consider this timeline spanning thirteen years of the extended family's life in Żerków in the country that was then called Prussia. Beginning in 1874, four days after Agnes Laskowska celebrated her marriage to Alexius Szumski, her nineteen year old brother Joseph died.

That didn't necessarily usher in any sense of foreboding, though, for by the end of that year, the Szumski family welcomed in their firstborn daughter Victoria. Soon after, more celebrations came with Lorenz's marriage to Anna Blaszczynska in 1878 and Antoni's marriage to Marianna Jankowska the following year.

The year after that, though, everything seemed to change. Five year old Victoria Szumska, Agnes' daughter, died in November. The next summer, the siblings' father Mateusz died. Another half year later, Agnes' infant son Joseph died. Another six months later—and almost exactly a year after the loss of her father—Agnes' own husband, Alexius Szumski, died.

Mercifully, a break in tragedies for the next four years allowed the family some time to recover from their many losses—until their mother, Elżbieta, died in April of 1886. After that, it was Antoni's turn to lose a son, which occurred before baby Joseph turned two months of age in February of 1887.

That same year may have brought the turning point for the growing families of all three of the remaining Laskowski siblings. For one thing, widowed Agnes remarried that year. Though I don't have exact dates of emigration for any of the couples, the possibility must have been on their mind by then.

Reports of dates of travel given in various census records point to the late 1880s for each family's possible travels. Agnes and her new husband welcomed their baby daughter Pelagia into the family in January of 1888 before they left for America. Lorenz and Anna may have preceded them, as their daughter Harriet was said to have been born "at sea" in September, 1886. And once eldest son Antoni settled affairs after his parents' passing, he may well have been traveling ahead by June 1887 to make preparations for his young family to join him in New York City in February 1889.

The decision to make such a drastic move—even with extended family at one's side—must have come at great price. Seeing the combined timelines of each Laskowski sibling concurrently helps envision the many difficulties the extended family faced before coming to that final decision to cut their ties with their homeland.

A Hidden Child

 

When we research the lines of a family whose story was passed down to us from older relatives, we may think we know all the details—until our research leads us to encounter an unexpected child. In the case of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski's children, that hidden child was someone I knew nothing about until just this week.

As I work my way through my Polish roots, I've been adding each person's name and dates to several online trees, among them my contributions to the universal tree at FamilySearch.org. As is done on several genealogical sites, FamilySearch offers up suggestions about possible records pertaining to the ancestors I've already added to my tree. While entering the names of Mateusz Laskowski's children—Antoni, Lorenz, and Agnes—the program confidently asserted that there was a fourth child in that family.

That fourth child of Mateusz and his wife Elżbieta Gramlewicz was apparently named Joseph, and the document FamilySearch was showing me was his death record.

What?! How can I have a death record of a child for whom I haven't yet found birth information? But this was apparently so: right mother's maiden name, right father's name, even the right residence in Żerków. 

When I first spotted announcement of this document, I presumed this was yet another case of a Polish child dying at an unfortunate young age, but this was not the case. At his death on September 20, 1874, Joseph Laskowski was nineteen years of age. But when was his birth? I had missed seeing any record for that pre-requisite event.

A quick search with an estimated birth year of 1855 easily yielded a record that fit the parameters. The baptismal record from the same parish which provided the Laskowski family's other records confirmed that Mateusz and Elżbieta did indeed have a son named Joseph who was born on March 4, 1855, and baptized that very day.

What happened to cause the death of someone at an age of presumed health and wellbeing? Using Google Translate to navigate my way through the Latin handwriting on the death record, it almost pained me to read what it rendered: "incendiary intestines." Even if Google got that one wrong, it hurt to think of it.

Whether that nineteen year old man ever married or had children, I haven't been able to determine. With those two recorded appearances, like documentary bookends on an otherwise vanished life, Joseph Laskowski popped in and then out of my genealogical radar without any further trace.

Looking at that final date on his life's timeline, I began wondering what else might have been going on in his Prussian homeland in 1874. Recalling my exploration yesterday through the story of Joseph's sister's life and all the woes she endured, I realized that that same year of Joseph's death was the beginning of the many happenings in her own life. That's when I decided to review the timeline of each of the Laskowski siblings, not as separate entities, but combined so I could view in one timeline the story line for the entire family. 

Taken together, that combined timeline presents an overwhelming number of key events, all leading up to the point when the remaining siblings made the move from their Polish homeland to live in America. Tomorrow, let's take a look at what may have brought them to that decision. 

The Many Facets of One Woman's Life

 

Nearly a Christmas baby, Agnes Laskowska entered her parents' life in Żerków on December 22, 1851. Baptism had to wait until after the beginning of the new year. That detail became only one of the many facets of the story of this third child of Mateusz Laskowski and Elżbieta Gramlewicz.

I'm tempted to read between the lines on this child's story, but perhaps such an attempt would be misleading. Still, I can't help but imagine a life filled with sorrows—or at least see a picture of challenges.

When Agnes was twenty two, she married Alexius Szumski. The wedding was followed soon afterwards with the arrival of daughter Victoria, then son Ludwig and, finally, their son Joseph. 

While that may portray a family well on their way to a full and happy life, that was not the case here. Not long after Ludwig's arrival in 1878, life began to unravel for the Szumski family. Before Alexius and Agnes could welcome their third child, they were struck with the death of their daughter Victoria in November 1880, barely a week before her sixth birthday.

There was more to come. The couple lost their third child, Joseph, at the start of 1882—a year in which Alexius himself was to die that following July, leaving thirty year old Agnes a widow.

As often happened during that era of history, Agnes then married again in 1887. Now the bride of Ignatz Giernatowski, the newlywed couple soon welcomed their daughter Pelagia on January 17, 1888.

Perhaps as a way to remove themselves from the site of so many sorrows, Ignatz and Agnes afterwards decided to make the move from their home of many generations in Żerków to the United States. By 1900, they were living in Brooklyn, the part of New York City where so many of my other Polish family members had moved. Agnes' sad report in the census that she had been the mother of four, of whom only one remained, leads me to suspect that perhaps the language barrier and tendency to attempt spelling phonetically yielded Pelagia's name in that record as "Blanch."

It is probably owing to that same language barrier that I've been unable to trace any further details on Ignatz Giernatowski, but the New York City Municipal Death Index revealed that Agnes died on April 23, 1926.

It is fairly clear, once reviewing the many facets of Agnes Laskowska's life, why she might have had a clear motivation to move so far from all that was familiar in her childhood hometown. As for her two siblings who also emigrated, the story might not appear so clearly—until we blend the three siblings' stories into one timeline, and add another possible factor. We'll take a look at the threads in that story tomorrow.

Morphing Names

 

It would make sense, I guess, to expect that the names of people who traveled thousands of miles to settle in a new home might also undergo a metamorphosis of their own. That, at least, seems to have been the case for Mateusz Laskowski's second-born son.

When my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski came to New York City from Poland, he may not have been the first of his immediate family to make the journey. His younger brother, Mateusz's second son, may have preceded Antoni's trip to a new life in a New World. When that younger brother stepped onto American shores, he became known—eventually—as Lawrence. But what he was called before that voyage is something I need to sort out from mixed messages—both concerning his name and that of his wife.

The headstone placed over his burial location in Rockland County, New York, listed his name as Lawrence Laskoski. I can only attribute the missing "w" from his father's surname to an issue of phonics. In Polish or German, the "w" in Laskowski would have been pronounced as LasKOVski, as the "w" would have had a pronunciation like a "v." Untrained ears might easily have missed that "v" sound and simply rendered the name's spelling as Laskoski.

That is an easy guess for the difference in the surname's spelling. But finding the actual Polish counterpart to the name of Lawrence, his American name, was a bit of a challenge. In Polish, Lawrence would have been rendered as Wawrzyniec, yet when documenting his son Joseph's birth in 1885, the proud father's name was listed as "Wawrzyn (Lorenz) Laskowski."

With that comes another name challenge. The mother of that same child, Joseph, had been listed in that same document as Anna Laskowska born Błaszczynska. Yet, when I went to find any marriage record for Anna with that maiden name, I found nothing. Checking my notes from last year's attempt at researching this couple, I noticed that I had found something for them—but the entry for the Laskowski marriage, which I found at the Poznan Project website, had given the bride's name as Błaszczyk, not Błaszczynska.

Because the civil entry showed the groom's name as Lorenz, and because I had also obtained the record of his own 1847 baptism—which, as record of a Catholic sacrament, would have written his name in Latin as Laurentius—I was certain these two marriage records corresponded to the same couple. Indeed, following the family to New York and checking later documents for their children revealed marriage records in the next generation providing that second version of their mother's maiden name—all, that is, except for the diacritical mark from the Polish documents.

Besides Antoni and his brother Lawrence, there was a third sibling who also had made the journey from Poland to America. We'll take a look at this sister and her story tomorrow, and then we'll blend the three siblings' timelines to examine what might have prompted their decision to leave home for a new land.

Image above: Results given at Polish website the Poznan Project for fuzzy search for surname Blaszczynska plus spouse Laskowski.

If the End Told All

 

If the part at the end told the whole story, then family history researchers would be in luck. That, however, may not always be true. Still, I'm hoping that the information contained in a document drawn up at the end of Mateusz Laskowski's life turns out to be correct.

Found, at my new best-friend Polish website, was the death record for Mateusz Laskowski, my second great-grandfather. Dated July 29, 1881, it confirmed Mateusz's wife's name—who was born Elżbieta Gramlewicz—and his residence in Żerków. Better than that—and in hopes whoever was the reporting party knew the right details and didn't bungle reporting those under stress—the document also included Mateusz's parents' names.

From that one document, I now know my third great-grandparents were Bonaventura Laskowski and Orszula Wroblewska. That, of course, is only pending verification of those details, as death records are notoriously fallible when it comes to ascertaining the decedent's parents' names. Even more so, if we consider the problem of remembering a mother's maiden name, especially during times of great stress.

At the time of his death, Mateusz was said to have been sixty five years of age—in other words, born in 1816. Yet his 1844 marriage record provides an age of twenty five, so maybe his birth was closer to 1819. Whenever it occurred, it was presumably in the same place where his marriage and death were recorded: in Żerków.

All told, I've been able to find records on three children of Mateusz and Elżbieta: Antoni, my great-grandfather, Lawrence, and Agnes. All three of these Laskowski children eventually emigrated from Poland and ended up in New York.

I always wonder whether there had been other children of this couple—and whether any of them had also left Poland for a new home in North America. Those three were the only Laskowski children I had been able to find documentation for. But with more resources available to us this year than in previous years, perhaps I will be able to uncover more details in this month's project.

For tomorrow, we'll explore what can be found on each of those three children in the various online resources now available to us. While access to American records will be fairly easy to accomplish, the main goal is to push back from the end of the story for each of these three to documents from the earlier years of their life back in Poland. 

Given a Little Time . . .

 

When I look back now at the research plans I had drawn up a year ago for this month's project, I notice how circumstances at the time had led me to draw certain conclusions. Having struggled to find documentary proof of my Polish ancestors over the past few years before that point, I had come to the conclusion that there was likely not much more progress I'd be able to make when I revisited that challenge this November.

How much things have changed.

Not that any changes have been earth-shaking, but bit by bit, I'm finding resources linked to other resources, pointing me in the direction of those actual document scans I had been seeking. With last month's ancestor, I was able to build out the collateral lines for two Olejniczak siblings, including one for whom I've traced descendants to the early decades of the 1900s. Posting that information on several different online family trees has certainly added to my cousin bait potential—none of which I would have suspected I'd discover only a year prior to that.

The same may turn out to be true for this month's edition of my Twelve Most Wanted. Since my goal is to examine the collateral lines of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski, I will essentially be repeating the process I followed in October—this time with a different ancestor but in the same town where I've already been able to find additional records.

Just taking an initial peek at the possibilities this weekend has shown me that I might find far more than I had anticipated only one year ago. Some records may have been recently uploaded to the websites where I am finding them. Some records were surely there all along, but different search capabilities revealed their hiding places. Others may have evolved through cooperative efforts of volunteer groups and local repositories. No matter which way, the discoveries are serendipitous for me now, and renew hope that I'll be able to find what I'm looking for—and possibly even more than that.

It would be nice to push back another generation beyond my second great-grandfather. Finding his siblings and tracing their descendants might help me connect to some mystery DNA matches I have at either the company with the largest DNA database, or perhaps at the database with the largest number of DNA matches who currently live in Poland. Seeing how much more I had discovered last month gives me hope of that possibility.

Pushing one step forward in that direction would be a welcome addition to my goal for this month's research, as my ThruLines results at Ancestry.com only show ten confirmed matches who share Mateusz Laskowski as their ancestor. Surely, there have to be more than those fairly close relatives.

Tomorrow, we'll begin with a look at what I already have found on Mateusz Laskowski from prior years' research attempts. At that jumping off point, we'll start searching for additional records to add to his story, looking in both directions: backwards in time, and forward to all his descendants.

On a Lark, a Wide Open Search

 

After attending to the uploading of several additional Polish ancestors to my various family trees online, on a lark, I tried my hand at a wide open search of the research location which kept my focus for the entire month of October, and is set to be my continued focus in November. I opened up the search engine at Google and entered the term, "Żerków." After all, that is the Catholic parish where many of my paternal grandmother's family records were found, and the seat of an administrative district by the same name. I was curious to see what else might be out there, online, and of possible use, so I conducted a general search.

Granted, the town of Żerków has barely more than two thousand residents right now, so I doubted there'd be much to find online of genealogical use. One resource I wanted to check for sure was the FamilySearch Wiki. I wasn't sure whether there would even be a page devoted to Żerków as a subject—and there wasn't, specifically. But there were some useful finds.

For one thing, doing a Google search of the overall FamilySearch.org website yielded two entries. The first was a catalog entry for the microfilms of Lutheran and Catholic church records for Prussia dating from 1430 through 1998, with many of the films available for viewing online. The second discovery was an inventory of those church records, sorting out the data by locality, district, and church organization, all laid out in a table format alphabetized by locality—with, of course, a long way to scroll to reach the bottom and the entry for Żerków.

There were other results for Żerków found through my experiment with Google. Since I've already written about this location in prior blog posts, it was not unexpected to see those articles show up in Google, too—but an appearance on that Google list by fellow geneablogger, Julie Roberts Szczecinkiewicz, was a pleasant surprise to see. I was already aware that Julie has blogged about her Polish roots, but I hadn't noticed this particular post mentioning Żerków, specifically.

Since adding this expanding branch of my family to my trees posted at several other sites has been a goal, it was good to notice that results for my Żerków search included an information page at WikiTree including subcategories of Prussian villages in the area, as well as an alphabetical listing of all those individuals in the universal WikiTree from Żerków. While I see no relatives on that list other than those I had added, myself, that is a list I'll come back to over time, in hopes of discovering others researching this same line.

While in November, I'll move on from researching that Olejniczak line to that of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski, we'll still be relying on records from the same general vicinity around Żerków. I'm looking forward to seeing how many additional records I'll be able to find on the Laskowski side, now that I've found the archival link to transcribed records at my new favorite go-to Polish website, BaSIA.   

The Unfinished Work Behind, the New Challenges Ahead

 

Despite a tidy research plan—my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors, one designated for each month of the year—the end of one month often leaves me in this same difficult position: with a pile of unfinished work I'm about to leave behind as I step into the new month's puzzle. With the start of November, I say goodbye to the family of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, and greet the incoming research puzzle embodied in the story of a different second great-grandparent, Mateusz Laskowski.

Franziska and Mateusz were related only by marriage, as Franziska's daughter Marianna Jankowska married Mateusz's son Antoni Laskowski. Perhaps Franziska and Mateusz knew of each other from associations through their church parish in the Polish town of Żerków, though Mateusz was already a teenager by the time Franziska was born.

With this new month, while we'll hopefully learn more of the details of the Laskowski side of my family, I can't just set aside the unfinished business on the Olejniczak family. After all, I just settled it in my mind that Franziska's nephew Jan Olejniczak may well be the Polish immigrant who settled in Ohio, and came to be known in his adopted country as John Olenzak. With a DNA match to guide me, I will be building a family tree behind the scenes as I continue the search for records to illuminate the possibility of this family match. With lots of work on that project, I may be sharing news of progress occasionally, before we close out the year of 2024.

Next week, we'll review what I've already gleaned on Mateusz Laskowski and his immediate family. As we've already seen from our exploration of the Olejniczak line last month, there are many more resources online now for finding Polish documents to confirm names, dates, and family relationships for these immigrants from Żerków, Poland. Piecing these together, we'll see whether we can push back the brick wall another generation or two before the month of November comes to a close.