Wide, But Not so Deep

 

Some research ideas may seem brainy at the first, but turn out to be nothing more than a rabbit trail. I'm hoping my latest foray into the Laskowski heritage in Żerków, Poland, doesn't turn out to be another example of the latter.

What I've ended up doing, now that I've found a couple online resources for documentation of that small village in what used to be Prussia, is building a tree which may be more wide than it is deep. Though it seemed at first that there was a date gap in records from about 1850 through the mid 1870s, by combining what I found at the Polish website BaSIA with church records from Żerków at FamilySearch.org, I'm actually making progress finding collateral lines in the extended Laskowski family.

The thought occurred to me that, once having found these Laskowski cousins, I should search for their partner's surname as well. Sometimes, abysmal handwriting being what it is in any language, surnames could be misread and mis-indexed, but if I also searched for the spouse's surname, additional records could be harvested from this wide search.

Thus, I've been exploring the surnames related by marriage to my Laskowski roots. This involves looking for Jankowski, Wroblewski, and Gramlewicz entries as well. With those extensions to my original quest, I've noticed that Wroblewski, for one, has been rendered at least two different ways in church records, making the search more convoluted. And now, I'm discovering the same for Gramlewicz, if for nothing more than the curse of abysmal handwriting.

Sometimes, for instance, searching for Gramlewicz brings limited returns, while if I searched by the other spouse's surname, I'd get results for more children, for instance. Yet, looking at the document itself, I could clearly see that the name written was what I was seeking, not the several permutations I had spotted in search results.

It is apparent that, in a town as small as Żerków, intermarriages were bound to happen over the generations. As I persevere with this adjusted research process, I'm ending up with a tree spread wide with collateral lines. The hope is that, at some point soon, I'll start seeing some of these family lines intertwine.