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.