Which Way Did He Go?

 

It almost seems as if my Polish second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski was an only child. Other than his younger sister Antonina, who was born and died in 1821, there seemed to be no trace of any siblings in the Laskowskis' hometown of Żerków. It was therefore a hopeful possibility to follow Mateusz's son Antoni Laskowski and his family to their new home in America and discover that there was another man by the same surname living in the Laskowski household. Just a bit too old to be Antoni's own son—Antoni's eldest was only eleven at the time—and likewise of an age which wouldn't fit into Antoni's brother Lorenz's family, this Andrew could have been a cousin.

Andrew Laskowski showed up in Antoni's household in the 1892 New York State census. Born approximately in 1866, I presumed this Andrew was born in the same town Antoni had once called home—Żerków. But after Andrew's appearance in the 1892 census, which way did he go? Unless he migrated farther west to Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Illinois, I could find no trace of any likely candidate for this man.

The trouble with seeing this clue slip so easily through my fingers is that I was hoping he would be the link to help me find any collateral lines for Antoni's father Mateusz. Surely, I thought, this Andrew could have been Mateusz's nephew. And where there was a nephew sporting the same surname, there would have been a brother from Mateusz's own generation.

If I couldn't find the right Andrew Laskowski in America after 1892, I reasoned, perhaps I could find him back home in Żerków. That, however, was not in the books for me, either. I tried searching at BaSIA, both using Andrew's Polish name—Andrzej—and the alternative Latin spelling of Andreas for possible church records. Though Andrew had reported an age leading to an estimated birth year of 1866, I widened my search back to 1860, with a cutoff date two years beyond the date of his entry in the 1892 New York State census. No hits.

It was then that it occurred to me to put another research concept to use: what if I searched for all the entries containing the surname Laskowski in Żerków? After all, the town of Zerkow has a population of just over two thousand people now. At the start of the previous century, that population was 1,631. My chances of finding actual relatives with that same surname living in Żerków in the late 1880s could be fairly high.

The concept of cluster research—or, as one key researcher has dubbed it, the F.A.N. Club—may well turn up some possible collateral lines for me. Admittedly, I'll have to proceed carefully. And the list will basically serve as a guide, not a final conclusion. But lacking any other approach to locate documentation to reveal any collateral lines, I'm certainly game to launch this exploration.