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.