Noticing Name Twins

 

In a town as small as Żerków, one wouldn't expect to run into name twins, but it seemed that my Polish great-grandfather Anton Laskowski had one. 

As I worked on my latest project—harvesting all the documentation I could find on births, marriages, and deaths of Żerków residents named Laskowski—I kept seeing the name Anton Laskowski pop up. Remembering that even now, Żerków has barely over two thousand residents, I thought I'd be immune to the research trouble caused by following the wrong name twin backwards in time.

Seeing documents mentioning that other Anton Laskowski seemed wrong. This other Anton had a wife named Elizabeth—surely, the rendering of that woman's name in Latin church records, for Polish would have given it as Elżbieta—whereas my Anton had a mother named Elżbieta. Considering my Anton's father was Mateusz, not Anton, details were not adding up.

Since my project has involved checking each Laskowski record for the entire century of the 1800s at the Polish website BaSIA, of course the missing detail was to identify each Anton's dates. As I moved toward the end of the century, one death record provided that missing information. This duplicate Anton, dying in 1888, was listed as the son of Martin Laskowski and his wife Marie. Sadly, no maiden name for Anton's mother was provided. But the entry did inform me that this Anton's wife was born Elizabeth Roszak. And since he was said to have been eighty six years of age—often an inaccurate estimate—that would place his birth around 1802.

Because my Anton Laskowski was much younger—he was born about 1844, if the age given on his marriage record was correct—I'd guess that, rather than a name twin, my Anton might have been named after the elder Anton. When it comes to namesakes in the Polish tradition, though, I have yet to find guidance on any naming patterns or other family traditions in that earlier century, with the exception of the Catholic adherence to naming children born close to a saint's feast day by the name of that specific honored saint.

Perhaps, considering that, my Anton may not have been named after this older Anton after all. Though I find it hard to fathom in a town of such a small size, perhaps the elder Anton Laskowski knew nothing of the younger Anton Laskowski at all. Is there room for a name coincidence in a town of barely two thousand people? Hopefully, more work on my Laskowski document-gathering project will eventually provide that answer.