Weaving the Strands Just a Bit Longer

 

What do you do when you can't reach back far enough in the DNA cousin's pedigree to confirm the genetic connection? In one case I've been tackling for the past couple months, it appears this DNA match connects through an immigrant descendant of my Olejniczak ancestors in Poland. This is one of those DNA problems that may require following an assumption just to reach any verification. Thus, I'm weaving the strands of this family line forward in time, in hopes of discovering the connection.

The potential DNA cousin is supposedly a descendant of Jan Olejniczak, born in Michałówo, a tiny village near Żerków where he was baptized in June of 1869. His father Bartłomiej was brother of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, wife of Franz Jankowski. Jan—or Joannes, as he was baptized—eventually disappeared from the region in Prussia where he had grown up. Could he have emigrated? Was this Polish immigrant in the United States named John Olejniczak one and the same as Jan?

To determine the answer, I've started by accepting the assumption that Jan or Joannes were one and the same as this American immigrant. From that point, I've been working my way through Jan's American descendants, bit by bit. There are, of course, many questions still unanswered, but to know just what I'm working with, I need to have a documented tree.

So far, I've worked a few lines of this possible Jan Olejniczak down to the level of fourth cousin once removed. The strategy is to build out that line of descent to see whether I can find any other DNA matches connecting to this strand. So far, I've picked up a few more DNA matches whose trees include Olejniczak surnames, but none of those family lines seem to connect with my Jan.

Some research questions take time to weave together the strands. This line of descent seems to be one of them. Jan—or John Olenzak, as he eventually was called in Ohio—had several children, some of whom had children and grandchildren. While I can always be hopeful and say from progress that this looks like a possible connection, I'm still far from finished. Questions still lurk in the outer reaches of this wandering adventurer's journey, and this exercise will take far more time to complete—and even then, the conclusion may be that I've followed the wrong name twin's line.

But at least I'm still working on it.