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.