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.