On Laskowski Overload

 

Doing a "One Name Study" on a surname as common in Poland as Laskowski may have been overkill for someone just wishing to find my third great-grandfather's parents' names, but narrowing the parameters seemed like a do-able idea. Since Bonawentura Laskowski's death record at the close of 1827 left me nothing but two nondescript dashes for the names of each of his parents, I was hoping for another way to not only push backwards another generation, but also look sideways for the names of any of his siblings.

That's when I got the brainy idea to take a page from the playbook of genealogists who advise doing cluster research. I went looking for everyone named Laskowski who was mentioned in records posted at the Polish website BaSIA. Having set up my search parameters—any mentions of the surname Laskowski between the years 1793 and 1900 in documents for residents of Żerków—I soon found myself in Laskowski overload.

There were no less than eighty mentions of the Laskowski surname in my search results. Mind you, I eliminated any records for which a Laskowski family member served as a witness on someone else's document. Those remaining on my list were results for which the surname directly involved a family relationship to that name, whether as subject or parent in a birth, marriage, or death record. Because of the possibility of spelling variations, I also set the parameters for similarity of name above seventy percent, since there were so many instances of the surname being spelled as Laskoski.

Of course, there are potential downsides to such an approach. For one thing, my Laskowski side might have involved some relatives who married individuals living nearby but outside the actual town of Żerków. Another problem might be further hazards on the spelling and handwriting front: names either written with more than that one letter "w" missing from the handwritten note—Laskoski instead of Laskowski—or names for which abysmal handwriting caused a misreading of the entry. To capture those, I would need to set the "similarity" slide bar to a more lenient setting—and, more likely, actually look at the records for myself to see whether they were incorrectly indexed.

One final observation about this process: there may be other sources for records from Żerków. I'll need to see whether other resources can be found. For instance, I've already found copied versions of church records, thanks to a digitizing project completed years ago by FamilySearch. Though several of the names written in that collection were incorrectly indexed, as I work my way through that record set, I'm discovering family connections which I would have missed, had I simply relied on a computerized search through the indexed version of the records.

With eighty possibilities to consider, I'd say this is a more than adequate start to my project, and one to keep me far busier over this weekend than I had originally expected. Whether I ever find the connection between Mateusz's father Bonawentura Laskowski and the rest of the Laskowski residents in Żerków, I can at least glean a few connections between the family lines I've now found represented in those scanned documents.