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.