. . . And Elżbieta Makes Twelve

 

Welcome to December, the last month of the year, filled with holidays and celebrations. In my case, I hope to celebrate some discoveries about my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, her siblings and parents.

I named Elżbieta the last of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025. As I outlined in my research plans nearly a year ago, I hope to learn more about not only Elżbieta herself, but her siblings and parents, as well.

Before we begin this month's search, though, here's an overview of what I've already uncovered about this Polish ancestor. Like many family history researchers, I first learned of Elżbieta's name courtesy of the 1935 New York City death certificate of her son, Antoni Laskowski.

Though I had sent for my immigrant great-grandfather's death certificate the old "SASE" way years ago (if you know, you know), it wasn't until recently that I've been able to retrieve further family information through online means, both in New York City and back in Poland, the land Elżbieta never left. Thanks to FamilySearch.org, I can now view her January 22, 1844, marriage record to Mateusz Laskowski in their home parish in Żerków. 

According to that Żerków marriage record, Elżbieta was noted to be twenty four years of age, putting her estimated year of birth at 1820. However, I have yet to locate any baptismal or birth records for her. The only other detail I've been able to find is courtesy of one website in Poland, which then pointed me to online records from a Polish archive, confirming Elżbieta's 1886 death in the same town where she was married.

To find Elżbieta's siblings will mean locating that birth or baptismal confirmation to first uncover the names of her parents. These details will help me to confirm a number of DNA matches, both at Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com especially, due to the latter's high number of customers from European countries. That puts this as job number one for this coming week, but while I'm looking for further details on this Gramlewicz family behind the scenes, we do need to talk about the one connection I had made with this family, back in New York City, the same place where Elżbieta's name first appeared during my earliest search for her identity.

Looking Ahead

 

With the close of one month, it's time to look ahead to the upcoming month's research challenge. For December, that bustling month of holiday preparations, I'll hopefully reserve some time to gain a breakthrough on yet another of my father's Polish ancestors, my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz. 

For this upcoming month, I'll be taking my cue from last month's research success. I'll not only be exploring what I can find on Elżbieta's parents, but examining her collateral lines. Of course, the main reason for such a move is to seek connections through DNA matches, but in finding records for those collateral matches, it is also possible to find corroboration for other family details, such as mistakenly-entered surnames on records. After all, Polish surnames are not exactly the easiest to spell, as I've already discovered with the past two months' research projects on my paternal lines.

To search for Elżbieta, we'll shift our attention from last month's focus on the tiny villages in Pomerania to the west and the province of Posen, another region where Poland was also swallowed up by the governmental designation of Prussia. Thankfully, once again, a local Polish genealogical organization will come to our rescue with their website providing not only transcriptions of Prussian documents but also links to view the actual records. In particular, we'll be seeking the Gramlewicz family in or near the town called Żerków.

As we launch into December's edition of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, I'll start with a recap of what we've already discovered about Elżbieta Gramlewicz from work in past years. Then, as always, it will be time to explore what record sources are now available to us this year, and look for promising signs of Elżbieta's life story between 1825 and 1886.

In the Encouragement Department

 

Trying to find a way around a brick wall ancestor can be discouraging, especially when, failed attempt after failed attempt, the frustrated researcher still comes up empty-handed. That miserable series of disappointing results, as I've experienced with my Polish ancestors' cases, only serves to make the arrival of a document discovery all the sweeter. With this past month's focus for my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2025—the siblings and parents of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś—I'd say last week's discoveries did just nudge me across the threshold into the encouragement department.

Thanks to the records available online through FamilySearch.org, I was quickly able to locate the June 29, 1815, baptismal record for Marianna from her Catholic parish in what is now the Pomeranian village of Pączewo. That, of course, revealed her parents' identity: in Latin, their names were written as Martino Wojtaś and Anna Szczyglieska.

From there, I easily located Marianna's 1833 marriage record in the same parish, confirming her parents' names, as well as the identity of her husband—Johann Zegarski in Latin, but Jan in Polish.

Jumping to Marianna's parents' generation, I began searching for her siblings. So far, I've been able to identify three: two sisters and one brother. Based on my discovery of those five DNA matches in Australia whose trees point me to an ancestor named Susanna Wojtaś, I'm eyeing that one brother, also named Johann, to see whether he had any daughters by that name.

There are likely other children in the family of "Martino" and Anna beyond the ones I've already found records for. I suspect some of them will lead me to more DNA matches, so this will be a family line I'll look forward to pursuing in upcoming years. But for now, at the close of this month, I'll button up my pile of documents and handwritten notes and diagrams and prepare to move on to December's Twelve Most Wanted challenge, another of my father's Polish ancestors.

Much to be Grateful for

 

The Thanksgiving holiday continues over the entire weekend for our family, so the gratefulness didn't stop with yesterday's sunset. Today, for instance, the turkey saga continues as we button up the leftover meat in the stock made from the picked-clean bones and roasted vegetables and park it all in the freezer for future soup-making endeavors. Much of the rest of the weekend will be devoted to preparing for the next holiday celebration which, from my vantage point at the close of a too-short month, will be here all too soon.

There is, however, something else which I am grateful for during this final weekend of November. Since the close of one month means wrapping up that month's research project, I often end with a to-do list of what needs to be completed next in my continuing struggle to discover my family's roots.

For the last three months of each year, those research projects do indeed signify a struggle, for that is the time I devote to pushing against the brick wall of my paternal grandparents' heritage. My patriline, in particular, has been a challenge, but in reality, I've struggled with all four of my paternal grandparents' parents. 

To think that, when I began this quest decades ago, I dutifully searched in the direction I was told: that my father was Irish. After all, his surname certainly sounded Irish—but that was because I didn't know my immigrant paternal grandfather changed his name.

It's been a long, plodding journey filled with twists and turns—and mostly dead ends. Polish records are not as accessible for the regions I've discovered for my paternal lineage, but with DNA—and cousins helping cousins—that journey has become a step-by-step process. And just this past week, I believe I've made a significant step on this Polish line with the surprising discovery of some DNA matches in Australia.

When I awoke at the beginning of this holiday weekend, the thought hit me how long it has taken to get to this point—and that the work is now actually leading to a clearer picture of my paternal ancestors' story. For those who stayed behind in Poland, it certainly wasn't a happy one, true, but at least now I know. For once, as I close out a month's work, I can look forward to continuing on this line for a future year's Twelve Most Wanted.

For now, I have two more days to wrap up this month's search by summarizing what I've discovered on my great-grandmother Anastasia Zegarska's mother's Wojtaś family. Over this holiday, every time I think about it, another wave of gratefulness washes over me. This breakthrough has been a long time coming.

Here's to Thanksgiving

 

Here's to the holiday which first got me wondering about all those ancestors who made up my (very) extended family. To the ones whose stories I knew—and the ones whose stories I hadn't yet heard. More than that, here's to those family members as yet so completely unknown that it may take years more to even discover their names, let alone their life story.

That, in a nutshell, is what Thanksgiving did for me. Oh, of course I take time to recall all the good times for which I'm grateful—and there have been plenty of those blessings to inspire giving thanks. But sometimes, in the loneliness, in the struggle, in the disappointment, there is just that spark which, though nearly invisible at first, eventually sets in motion a series of events which we couldn't have anticipated—maybe even couldn't have interpreted as it first unfolded.

Thanksgiving isn't really the great meal hours in the preparation for the holiday's featured event. Nor is it the big game, or even the parade televised from miles away. It's really about being together, and being grateful for that togetherness—even if right now, there is more yearning for that togetherness than actual physical closeness. Sometimes the glass half empty can turn into the glass half full. For that, I can be thankful. 

Searching for the Right Place

 

Finding a family connection between five DNA matches in Australia and my paternal roots in Poland was a discovery which came, at first, with much doubt. But looking for further details uncovered possible signs to guide me further—but only for a short distance. Sure, it was encouraging to find an Anastasius Kaminski who married someone named Susanna Wojtaś—that maiden name being the key to our connection—but when I began researching their supposed son's place of birth and Susanna's place of death, I realized I had run into a big problem.

Searching for the right place may be important in building a family tree, especially when we run the risk of encountering name twins. With the case of a fairly common surname like Kaminski, I knew that name twins would be a high possibility. What I didn't bank on finding, though, was the possibility of several towns having the same name, back in Poland.

Looking at the family trees posted for those Australian DNA cousins, I noticed that there was very little shared about this ancestral link—and much of it without any supporting documentation. One tree gave Susanna's place of birth as "Dambrova." Another match's tree mentioned her son's place of birth as "Dabrowka." A copy of a passenger list—apparently typed on a machine with a malfunctioning letter "w"—showed among the displaced persons being transported from Poland to Australia after World War II Susanna's possible son Bernard, born in Dabrowka.

Well, what are the chances? I may as well check out that location by an online search, I thought. Easy, right? Until the Google AI narrative informed me,

Dąbrówka is a very common place name in Poland, so there are dozens of locations with this name. To find the correct Dąbrówka, it is important to provide more context, such as a nearby city, voivodeship (province), or county, as there are villages with this name in many different parts of the country.

Think that AI was hallucinating? Think again. Check this list of all the possible places in Poland with the place name Dąbrówka. Just picking one to start the search would mean casting off into a Sargasso Sea of genealogical listlessness. Talk about an exhaustive search.

I tried a different approach. I headed to the database on the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) to look for any transcribed records of Susanna's death in Poland. At first, I tried following the rules, entering Susanna's married name as Kaminska, according to the Polish way to designate a woman's surname. No luck.

Just in case, I also tried her name, spelled as Kaminski, and found a transcription of a death record for a Susanna Kaminski, along with the entry of her maiden name, given as Wojtas (lacking the diacritical mark over the "s"). The transcription provided a year of death as 1943, in the midst of those horrific war years. In the column which would normally have given the decedent's age, instead was provided the entry, "11.06.1870."

Could that have been Susanna's own date of birth? From another record, I had found her to be born in 1870. Assuming the European style of noting dates, that would yield a birthday on June 11, 1870.

The transcription indicated that the actual document was drawn up (or held by?) by the Catholic parish in Starogard Gdański. If I could see the Catholic record itself, it might show the specific place in the parish of Susanna's residence during her last days. Could that place have been in Dąbrówka? That's a possibility I'd like to check, if for nothing else than to determine which of more than eighty villages named Dąbrówka the Kaminskis had once called home.

Minding the Gap

 

In 1950, a thirty four year old Polish blacksmith from "Dabrovka" arrived at port in Fremantle, Australia. Along with several other single men, this passenger had departed from the Displaced Persons Camp in Fallingbostel in what was by then the British zone of post-World War II Germany. Listed under the name Bernard Kaminski, he reported himself to be Roman Catholic and unmarried, and provided his date of birth as August 8, 1916.

For a Polish person born in 1916—especially one who possibly could be related to my Zegarski or Wojtaś family lines in Pomerania—it might be possible to find transcriptions of baptismal records at the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG). After all, that group of avid genealogists has been working hard to make local records findable by the rest of the worldwide Polish diaspora.

What I've been minding, however, has been the gap between available dates of baptismal records at PTG and dates like those of refugees of World War II. There is a considerable gap between what can be found online in documents and what is still needed to be available. 

While subsequent records painted a clearer picture of just who this "displaced person" might have been, the one document I was keen on finding was any record of his death. There, hopefully, I'd discover the name of this refugee's parents, the one means of bridging the gap between records of a new life in Australia and the war-torn life of his younger years in Europe. I've been minding that gap with many of the collateral lines in my Polish heritage.

There was, thankfully, a transcribed Australian death index at Ancestry.com which included someone by that same name of Bernard Kaminski, with parents' first names given as "Anastasia" and "Suzzana." At first, I was stumped when I saw the father's name listed as Anastasia—until I realized that there was a Polish version of that name for men: Anastazy. When looking for baptismal records, though, I knew the Latin version of the name would be Anastasius.

Realizing that the PTG database has expanded to include some records from as late as the 1930s, I hoped for the best in searching for anyone named Bernard. No such luck in this case, however—but I did find something else which caught my eye: an 1895 baptismal record for someone named Anastasius Kaminski.

The place was close to being just right: Pączewo in Pomerania, a Catholic parish where I had found records for children of other collateral lines. But even better was one detail: this Anastasius' parents were identified in this Latin record as Anastasius Kaminski and Susanna Wojtaś.

Whether this 1895 newborn would, in twenty one years, turn out to be the father of our Bernard, I can't yet determine. Perhaps he might be a much-older big brother to Bernard.

Even if neither of those scenarios turns out to be correct, I'm now fixated on one detail: how does that Susanna connect to my own family's Wojtaś line? After all, this whole chase began with the clue of five DNA matches down under, each of whom connects with my other Zegarski and Wojtaś cousins. Hopefully, the rest of the details I'll need won't be swallowed up in that frustrating records gap.

Even Farther Away From Home

 

If we put ourselves in our immigrant ancestors' shoes, we can see how long a trip those family members endured to arrive on our shores in America. Specifically, I'm thinking of my great-grandmother, Anastasia Zegarska Puchała, who traveled far from her home in the Pomeranian village of Czarnylas to the bustling shores of New York City.

Even farther away from home, as I discovered through the DNA matches descended from Anastasia's immigrant siblings, were those distant cousins whose Zegarski and Wojtaś ancestors traveled to Milwaukee in Wisconsin. But the story uncovered by my latest discoveries on this family line goes even farther away from home than that: I have some DNA matches who claim Australia as their home.

Wondering how a branch of my Polish family could have opted for such a direction, I had to seek out some explanations. In a more macro search concerning Polish immigration, I asked specifically for details on just who these Polish immigrants might have been who headed in that opposite direction.

To my surprise, there have been Polish immigrants arriving in Australia since the mid-1850s. While the Australian gold rushes might seem like a reasonable draw—and there were Poles among other Europeans seeking gold in Victoria, especially—the Polish arriving in Australia during that decade were noted to have established themselves in South Australia in a settlement now known as Polish Hill River. 

It is more likely, however, that any of my Polish relatives would have arrived in the subsequent century with the much larger group of displaced Polish people in the aftermath of the Second World War. This was a time period when the Australian population burgeoned with Polish immigrants, leaving their mark on the country's multicultural composition. Even last year, the estimated population in Australia of people who had been born in Poland was 47,680.

For those immigrating to Australia from Poland after World War II, we can now add their children and grandchildren who subsequently were born in that recently-adopted homeland—including those five DNA matches I've found who currently live there.

While that exploration of Australia's immigration history gives us a macro view of the Polish connection down under, what about the specifics of those five DNA cousins? If they descend from a Polish ancestor who was related to either my Zegarski or Wojtaś family lines, it may be difficult to construct the actual paper trail to document that connection.

While I can access transcriptions of Polish birth, marriage, and death records up to the first quarter century of the 1900s, nothing more recent has become available online for me to trace the connection. This may mean I'll need to rely on communicating in person with at least one of those DNA cousins to compare notes on the micro aspect of the more traditional paper trail of how we might connect.

However, I might have a plausible idea....

Connecting and Counting

 

It's been slow going through these Polish ancestral branches of my father's family tree so far this month, but it's so necessary in order to find the ancestral nexus with my DNA matches. However, while I know that effort means I'm making progress, it always seems to feel more like progress when the ancestral count rises faster.

Take these past two weeks. Back at the beginning, I started with 40,500 documented individuals in my family tree. Bouncing back and forth between Polish records sources and my trees at Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch, finding documents and plugging in the URL for each document in each Polish ancestor's profile page—times three—meant I only found sixty six new identities to add to that tree in that time period. 

It seems so slow. But then I keep in mind I'm trailblazing into new territory, both in a country for which I'm unfamiliar with research resources—not to mention the language!—and into generations previously unknown to my own family. I'm drilling down to unfamiliar details, true, but the reward is making new discoveries. In addition to providing me the working diagram to help place those DNA cousins, that advance into previous generations of the family, alone, should seem encouraging.

There are other ways to grow a family tree, of course. As for my in-laws' tree, I shouldn't be working on their side of the family for another five months, but I found myself adding seven new names to that tree this past week. Why? Someone reached out to me online with a question regarding those same family roots.

In order to answer that message, I needed to do some additional research. That, in turn, led to adding more collateral lines to my in-laws' tree. And now, that tree has grown, ever so slightly, to include 41,724 ancestral names. When we connect, we can't help but learn more about our own family, even while we are helping out someone else. 

Sharing Ideas, Sharing Resources

It is always enlightening to see what other genealogical societies are doing—at least, from a perspective such as mine, leading my own countywide genealogical organization. Our organization uses social media to get out the word about our own offerings, but we also share news about nearby societies. After all, sometimes those groups just down the road may be sharing the very resources or presentations that might be of interest to our own members. We don't see that as competition, but rather as enrichment in helping members find the information we need.

This past week, our group was hosting a speaker who is a librarian working at a facility over one hundred miles away from us. Her topic for our online meeting was examining the experience of Dust Bowl emigrants in settling in our local agricultural region—what she called a fascinating yet heartbreaking story.

Meanwhile, I had been promoting an event on our social media which was hosted by an association located nearly one hundred miles away from us in a different direction. In reviewing the material before posting it, I noticed several other details about this group's offerings.

What really caught my eye was the fact that not only does this group have the same "problem" most other genealogical organizations have—members donating their used family history books to us—but they had gone one step beyond in resolving the overflow engulfing their storage shelves. They found a way to catalog those books and offer them to the public for a modest donation in such a way that people could find that information and access the offering: they posted their list online.

Calling their collection by a simple, point-blank moniker—"excess books"—this group created a spreadsheet and uploaded it to their website. And I, knowing I would be traveling through that area this past week, put in a bid to pick up three books, including one written by a distant cousin of mine.

The process was simple, and the volunteer society member kind enough to work with my travel schedule made it possible to accomplish my goal. I was elated to snatch up these out-of-print books for such a bargain basement price.

Fast forward to this past week's society meeting for my own organization. Our speaker—remember, she is a librarian specializing in genealogical research—mentioned her own local organization's difficulty in dealing with so many donated books. Fresh off the high of my recent purchase, I mentioned the ease I had in obtaining some titles I had long wanted to buy (for the right price).

I think a light bulb went off in that librarian's mind, and I noticed she quickly jotted down the name of the society which offered the spreadsheet online. Perhaps now there will be another genealogical society offering an easily-accessible list of reasonably priced family history volumes for bargain-shopping genealogists.

In case you're wondering, the book I was seeking was History of Old Pendleton District, written by Richard Wright Simpson (1840-1912), cousin to my second great-grandfather Thomas Taliaferro Broyles. Where I found the book listing was when I scrolled to the very bottom of the landing page for the website of the Santa Clara County Historical and Genealogical Society. Clicking on the words "Click here" brought me to the spreadsheet listing their available used books. From that point, all I needed to do was follow the instructions to email them and show up at the agreed-upon time to claim my books.

Granted, you may be reading this post from halfway around the world from Santa Clara, California, so this might not be helpful information for you. But how many local societies in your area have the same excess books problem? Thinking about ways to get the word out and share our resources using the updated tools at our disposal now is key.

I'm planning to share this one small idea with the other local societies in my area. Just mentioning it to others, I can see how simply hearing it sparks more ideas in other people's minds, too. We're all stronger when we share helpful ideas and resources.

A Detour Down Under

 

As if trying to trace my New York ancestors back to a specific region in Pomerania isn't enough, now I discover that this paternal line of mine might also have DNA cousins in Australia.

Australia? How did that happen?!

I'm used to researching DNA matches from "down under" who are linked to my father-in-law's Irish roots, but finding Polish DNA matches living in Australia was a total surprise. In fact, though I have made the connection between most of my Zegarski and Wojtaś DNA cousins within my family tree, there were five matches I had at Ancestry.com whom I couldn't place, no matter how hard I tried—until I looked at their profiles.

Surprise! Four out of the five puzzling DNA matches turned out to be cousins who listed their location as Australia. No wonder I couldn't place them! Working from the descendants of the collateral lines in my tree, most all of them could claim ancestors who moved from Pomeranian villages in Poland to Milwaukee, Wisconsin—far, far from any location in Australia.

Of course, I want to know the backstory to how this branch of the family moved so far away. And they are all closely related to each other, as I discovered by using the Ancestry ProTools option to view Shared Matches. Someone in the three generations represented by this cousin cluster hopefully will not only have some information to share, but be willing to correspond with me via Ancestry's messaging system so we can figure out our connection.

Beyond the call of my curiosity, though, I'd love to discover someone among these five matches who might have personal documentation connecting that group back to Poland. There is, after all, a big gap in what I can find from documents available in Poland from the early 1900s onward. Connecting with these unknown Polish cousins in Australia may be the very resource to provide such guidance. 

Not Hither, Not Farther

 

DNA testing may have opened our eyes to multiple ancestral possibilities, but genetic genealogy's tools still have some growing room. As I explore my paternal roots, based on the tried and true paper trail relied upon by traditional genealogy, I've discovered that at least my paternal grandfather's mother's roots—Zegarski and Wojtaś families—were documented in villages in northern Poland apparently considered to be part of Pomerania. More to the point, their villages were located in a specific subregion called Pomeralia—not Hither, and not Farther Pomerania, as one website warns me—containing a specific ethnocultural location called Kociewie.

Yet, when I went looking for any mention of those ethnic regions in my DNA test results, despite recent updates at some companies, I don't quite see any mention to that fine a degree of specificity. Yesterday, we looked at ethnicity updates at Ancestry.com, where it seems we are now closer to such a possibility. But what about MyHeritage?

When puzzling over my Polish heritage, I prefer relying on DNA matches I've found at MyHeritage, given their worldwide reach. Indeed, I already have found several European DNA cousins with Polish roots through that company. But is there any mention of further ethnicity refinement to their DNA results, based on this year's update?

The MyHeritage update had been long in coming. They beta-tested the release of an update in 2024 to a select sampling of current customers, but felt the response merited more work on their part. The update has apparently been live since earlier this year, but was offered in an opt-in format. 

While the revision represents a reference set of seventy nine ethnicities worldwide versus forty two in the previous version, my report still amassed my paternal results into general regions, such as East European, Germanic, and Baltic. Only by independently researching the broad history of the Pomeranian and Pomeralian subsets do I see migration patterns over centuries which may explain my minor percentages attributed to, for instance, Danish or Balkan roots.

There is a second subset of ethnicity discussions at MyHeritage which I looked to in hopes of seeing them drill down deeper into my family history. That separate tab is labeled "Ancient Origins." From that tab, I can select points on a timeline: Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman Era, and Middle Ages. Yet, examining the results by selecting "Middle Ages," I still am left with broad categories: Germanic and Slavic.

True, as MyHeritage noted in the readout for their ethnicity estimates section, not all ethnic roots in my own heritage will be passed down through multiple generations to me. Inheritance patterns vary, due to the randomness of recombination from generation to generation. Then, too, a significant aspect of each update depends on the reference panels used in each revision.

The greater the specificity, the larger the number of assembled reference populations, the more the DNA company can zero in on smaller regional variations representing the inheritance of these older groups, such as the original West Slavic tribe known as Pomeranians, who settled by the Baltic Sea in that northern region of what is now Poland in the fifth to sixth century.

Perhaps results that drill down that deep to such specific ethnic groups will mean a long wait for me, but at least I now have the paper trail to confirm that geographic origin in my paternal heritage.  

Pursuing Precise Origins Through D N A

 

Family history is not only a pursuit of names and dates to enter in a pedigree chart, but a quest to determine where our roots originated. Given the broad sweep of history, complete with the rise and fall of civilizations coupled with the ever-on-the-move migration of people groups, that can be a tricky question to answer.

However, we now have DNA testing capabilities and the tools to begin exploration of that question. Since discovering that I might not be simply Polish, but possibly an ethnic variation indigenous to a specific subregion of what is now the modern nation of Poland, I thought I'd take a look at the latest DNA updates at various genetic genealogy testing companies in search of any such mention of these sub-regions.

Since Ancestry released their update back in October—boasting the inclusion of well over three thousand places around the world, including sixty eight regions specific to Europe—let's first take a look at my results at that company today, and follow up tomorrow with the more recent results provided by MyHeritage.

Since my research this month led me to realize that my paternal ancestors might not "just" be Polish but claim roots in an ethnocultural location in Pomerania known as Kociewie, I was curious to see whether such a designation would show up in my "origins" results with this latest update. 

In short: no.

However, there is more to the story. Perhaps such a result would be too granular for this pass through the data. When I drill down through the results from this latest Ancestry update, one of the highest ranking "ancestral regions" for me is listed as North Central Europe. Quite a generic label, I admit, but if I scroll down that page, below that heading of North Central Europe, I see a headline stating, "People with this region often share these journeys."

The journey listed for me is Gdansk Pomerania.

Now we're getting closer. From there, clicking "Timeline," I find in the segment labeled 1850-1875 a tiny mention of one group listed separately from Poles: Kashubians. While Kashubia is not exactly Kociewie, it is a neighboring sub-region, so we are getting closer to seeing those northern Polish regions being recognized as their own separate entities.

For this revision of the Ancestry DNA update, shading on the maps of these newly-expanded regions has a significance: the more brightly-colored the region, the higher the percentage of reference panel members who lived in that specific location on the map. While my Zegarski and Wojtaś ancestors appear to have lived on the northeastern edges of that more brightly-colored region in the Gdansk Pomerania regional map, this definitely puts them within the realm of possible regional connection—just no specific reference to Kociewie. Yet.

Drilling Deeper into Origins

 

So a while back, I discovered that my paternal grandfather's long-kept secret was that he was born Polish. No, no: now that I'm researching the details, I discover that the family actually came from Pomerania. I hop on over to the online database of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) and learn the names of the actual villages where family members lived, back in the 1800s, and where they got married and had their children baptized. I look up those details on a map, then find further information on those spots, and learn that they were considered to be part of an ethnic group known as Kocievians.

So which way was it? Am I Polish? Or Pomeranian? Or Kocievian? I'm still looking for that elusive family history identity, but the deeper I drill into those family origins, the more the answer recedes beyond my grasp.

I had thought it an awe-inspiring stroke of good luck when I discovered a census enumerator in 1920 had entered verbatim—and a little bit phonetically—the actual answer of my grandfather's sister, Rose Kober, regarding her history. She had originally replied "Schwartzwald" to the question of where she was born, but a supervisor struck out her answer and corrected it with "Ger" for Germany. That was the discovery which led to my search for the real Schwarzwald she had indicated, a place in what is now part of Poland.

Now that I know that Rose's native Schwarzwald is actually known in Poland as Czarnylas, I've searched for some basic information on that location. Other than the usual details we find about foreign countries—the size of the town, where it is on a map, or what the weather is like there—I noticed another fact: Czarnylas is part of an extensive region bordering the Baltic Sea, known as Pomerania.

Beyond even that, though, I found out that the eastern portion of Pomerania, historically called Pomerelia, contains what is identified as four subregions. Czarnylas, it turns out, is located within what is known as an ethnocultural region called Kociewie. And the indigenous people group known to inhabit that region? Perhaps you guessed it: Kocievians.

As I followed the church records of the various collateral lines of my Zegarski and Wojtaś paternal ancestry, I moved from Czarnylas to Pączewo to Wolental and beyond. The one unifying factor of all these villages? Did you guess it? They are all part of that ethnocultural region of Kociewie.

So am I Polish? Or Pomeranian? Or Kocievian? These are questions I would never have known to ask, let alone answer, if I hadn't had the curiosity to follow the insatiable calling to that family history rabbit trail.

Curious to see what might be reflected in the most recent DNA updates at Ancestry and MyHeritage, I went looking to see their changes. After all, the latest updates are supposed to zero in on some specific ethnic regions. We'll take a look at these tomorrow.

Finding "My People," Twenty-first Century Style

 

There's always something about finding those people with whom your words, actions, and even preferences just resonate. Some friends of mine used to joke about that as finding "my people." In the case of my recent—and feverish—chase to learn more about my Polish ancestry, I've since discovered that "Polish" might not necessarily be "my people" after all. Digging even deeper into the history of a place as foreign to me as Poland, I've learned that I might not exactly be Polish, after all. That's what we learn when we dig deeper into the concept of ethnicity.

In my case, I had first learned that my paternal roots came from a region known as Pomerania, a place with its own identity and certainly with its own history. From that point, however, I've since discovered that there may have been other separate and distinct people groups in that same region, with their own history, language, and culture.

With genealogy businesses like Ancestry and MyHeritage recently releasing updated versions of their DNA ethnicity updates, I was curious to see whether either of those companies had sniffed out the differences in these population groups from the northern portion of what is now the country of Poland. After all, using DNA testing to examine our ethnic heritage is a technique specific to the twenty first century. I wanted to see whether the refining of those reference populations might reveal anything to confirm what I was finding in the historical record for the area.

This week, as I work my way behind the scenes, building the family trees for descendants of my ancestors' collateral lines, we'll talk about those historic ethnic groups and examine the likelihood that the migrations of centuries past may have been reflected in the tale told today by DNA test results. 

Connectivity

 

If there's one thing necessary for genealogical success, it's connectivity. By that, I don't just mean the technological implications of access to online networks, but also those interpersonal connections which inspire our curiosity, power our continued determination to discover, and help bring our ancestors' stories to life. The pursuit of our family's history, after all, could never be the same without the impetus of sharing.

Reviewing my long trail of unsuccessful attempts to discover my Polish roots, this past week has reminded me of all my fellow researchers who breathed hope into what I felt was my Sisyphean burden. In case you missed it, it's been a long trail of failed attempts—as in decades long. Still, there's been a lot of material collected, not just details about ancestors (of which I still am sorely lacking) but helpful tips, guidance, articles, and resources shared over decades. Connectivity.

That connectivity, at first, came in the form of old online forums. Remember GenForum? How about the online RootsWeb Review with Myra Vanderpool Gormley? Or—now, this is stretching a ways back—the genealogy forums on Prodigy? Though those resources have gone the way of the floppy disc dinosaurs, at one point I had hoped that flourishing interest in genealogy blogging might become a newer way for researchers to connect.

At one point it was, but the heyday of blogging, in general, has waned. Except maybe for one exception, which I've lately been considering. And thanks to a tip from Canadian blogger Gail Dever in yesterday's "This week's crème de la crème" selections, I instantly hopped on over to Australian Lex Knowlton's "Knext Gen Genealogy" and her overview of the possibilities for "meaningful genealogical connections" through Substack.

Substack has been around long enough for several of the writers I follow—both in genealogy and in other fields—to have established their own niche there. It is, as Lex put it, a resource for cultivating "genuine community." Connectivity: between thinkers, writers, researchers, experimenters, and even seekers of family connections.

True, as Lex mentioned, "finding niche communities can still be hard." But we as genealogists can be—and have been—a force for redirection. We can be the ones who, by gathering together, create the very space we long to find for that necessary connectivity, whether on those now-so-nineties genealogy forums, or on social media, or by creating the next space for us to collectively gather online.

Sucking Story out of Statistics

 

The trouble with researching these formerly nameless Polish ancestors from generations past in my father's history is that they come to me devoid of any family stories. Sure, these are people who had names which went with the routine BMD dates we genealogists tend to harvest, but who were they, really?

In contrast, when I research my maternal lines, a great many of them came not only with statistical data but with stories—those precious stories passed down from generation to generation which, when it was my turn to hear them, convinced me to take my place in that long line of family historians who shared.

Sharing story was perhaps not part of the Polish tradition—not, at least, for those poverty-stricken immigrants fleeing the harsh living conditions of their homeland. I remember when I first started delving into genealogy online—in those early days of "listservs" and forums—I ran across a discussion on why those researching their Polish roots couldn't find story. The consensus, back then, was that the Polish were so desperate just to keep themselves alive that they didn't have the luxury of time to regale each other with stories of those who had gone on before them. Hard work can suck the life out of even the living.

So now I—and those countless others descended from Polish immigrants—have been left with not much more than copies of the church and government documents meant to keep count of the souls and taxpaying bodies of their charges. It is quite impossible to accurately extrapolate sparks of life from those dull, dry numbers. And, truth be told, those numbers often represented lifespans which were painfully brief, telling a story of its own, full of sickness, suffering, and sorrow.

What were these people like? I'm tempted, much like Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has done, to harness Artificial Intelligence to research the backstory of the time frames and territories where my Wojtaś and Zegarski ancestors once existed. While that might lend me some understanding of just how bad life might have been for my ancestors, I doubt it could confirm details about individual personality quirks or, say, escapades of my ancestors in their youth. But it might be worth the try. Whatever such an experiment might yield, it would certainly offer some background with which to understand these people and their choices which led them here to a life in a new land.

Tap Dancing Between Three Resources

 

No matter how fascinating it might seem to pursue those mystery family roots into antiquity, the tasks involved can often turn tedious. Right now, it may seem glamorous to think I'm tap dancing through the story of my family's past, but bouncing between three separate resources, double and triple checking each step, can become monotonous.

Starting with my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś, I'm mapping out the lines of descent for her siblings. The goal is to build a tree with collateral lines of descent, specifically to connect the dots between my DNA matches and their ancestral connection to my family. Working with Polish roots, however, means seeking records from sources other than those most familiar to North American researchers. It becomes a case of a little bit here, a little bit there. At least I'm happy about the progress, though it's not much to write home about; the going is going slowly.

As if to urge me on, among the messages in my inbox today was news that MyHeritage has just completed a major update to their Theory of Family Relativity. For international DNA matches, my best resource for Polish cousins has been MyHeritage, so I jumped over there to look for any promising new leads.

In fact, my tree at MyHeritage is so focused on those Polish lines that I only posted the paternal branch of my family tree on that website. Imagine my surprise, then, to see that most of my Theory updates were for people connecting to my mother's side of the family. There were only a few new Polish DNA matches to review, each of them seemingly standing on the opposite side of a gigantic document chasm separating us. I have yet to find many trees at MyHeritage which contain supporting documentation.

Granted, it's hard to find such documentation. Just having to tap dance between record sources to piece together this family's story has demonstrated that. I'm snagging record transcriptions from FamilySearch and from the Pomeranian Genealogical Association in Poland to piece together the picture of how those Wojtaś collateral lines fared over the generations—and even then, at some point in the early 1900s, I know even those sources will dry up.

Just in case, though, I reviewed the lines I've already put in place in my tree at MyHeritage, adding this week's updates from newly-discovered descendants from those collateral lines. Hopefully at some point, those new entries will match up with others whose trees are posted at MyHeritage. In fact, I'm already getting email alerts that MyHeritage has made some connections for me, information from researchers whom I can follow as trailblazers along this family history path in that new-to-me Polish territory.

A Road Map for the Family Tree

 

As I had discovered last summer when puzzling over the many name twins in my father-in-law's Irish family tree, a road map is an indispensable tool when mapping out the family tree. I remember my delight when I pulled up Google Maps and discovered that the program could pinpoint a specific Irish townland I was seeking. Now that I'm struggling over my paternal grandfather's secret roots in Poland, I'm seeing how that same tool helps guide the way in this new-to-me research region.

Currently, I'm straddling two different records resources: transcriptions of the digitized Polish records at FamilySearch and transcriptions at the database of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG). When I find what appears to be the right record for someone in the collateral lines of my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś, I then enter that information, including a link back to the verifying online document, in each of the trees I'm updating.

Along the way in this process, I encounter discrepancies. In a long line of baptismal records for grandchildren of Marianna's sister Franciszka Wojtaś, for instance, I find one child born to Franciszka's namesake daughter and her husband Piotr Gracz, yet the next child born into the Gracz household has a mother named Barbara. What? Did Franciszka die before that point? But no, moving on to the baptismal record of Piotr's next child, lo and behold, Franciszka has been resurrected to her position as mother in the Gracz family once again. Chalk that up to clerical error.

Some discrepancies, however, keep me wondering. The main one is finding a couple by the same name, presenting their child for baptism in a different—and unexpected—Catholic parish than the one where the family's older children had been baptized. Could there be another couple known by the exact same names? Name twins from neighboring towns?

Running into that problem more than once, I decided to return to the process I had used when researching Ireland: pull up Google Maps and see how close the two locations might be. Only this time, there was a twist: baptismal records gave the then-current location of the town, based on Prussian names for those Polish villages. In today's records, those names are different. Nevertheless, a little exploration through online searches has pointed me in the right direction for each of the village names I needed to convert from their old Prussian identities.

It is so easy to fall into the mindset that, up until our "modern" times, people stayed relatively stationary in the one village where their parents grew up, and their parents lived before them. We forget that these were the same intrepid people who birthed emigrants willing to board creaky wooden ships to sail an ocean to a foreign land where no one spoke their language. Even with their limited methods of modality two centuries ago, moving to the next village couldn't be all that hard. 

Just to be sure though, pulling up a map to measure distances between two of those quaint Polish villages helps ease my mind that perhaps with those eight to ten baptismal records from two or three different villages, I'm still following the trail of the same couple. And that that couple is indeed part of my family line, and not someone else's family. 

Advertising for Connections

 

The grunt work has begun: scouring documents and transcriptions of records at both FamilySearch.org and the database of PTG, the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. My end goal is to see how far I can go in building a diagram of all the descendants of my third great-grandparents, Marcin Wojtaś and Anna Szczygielska, now that I've actually discovered their identity. While I've already worked on my own direct line, that of their daughter Marianna, my next goal is to build the line for Marianna's sister Franciszka.

Franciszka was born in Poland about 1817, and as far as I can tell, she remained there for the rest of her life. On October 1, 1838, she became the wife of Andrzej Chmielecki in a church ceremony held in her home parish of Pączewo in the region of Pomerania.

If it weren't for the transcriptions of Pomeranian records at PTG, I doubt I would have found further information to confirm Franciszka's children. I learned through those transcriptions that the Chmielecki family eventually included five sons and six daughters. Born to them in the married couple's home parish of Czarnylas were: Marianna, Andrzej, Franciszka, Paulina, Józefina, Anastasia, Jan, Józef, Anna, Franciszek, and Izydor.

While the next genealogical step for me will be to find a way to locate actual documentation for each of those children, I also have a DNA goal to keep in mind: I want to find cousins. Thus, it is key for me to get the word out there that these people are somehow related to my Wojtaś line. How do I do that? Simple: I advertise for connections by placing those newly-discovered collateral relatives in all the public-facing family trees I have built online.

Thus begins another behind-the-scenes project of plugging in these names to multiple trees. First, on FamilySearch, to find possible documentation, allowing me to verify the names as I add them to my part of the universal tree there. From that point, adding those same document links to my notes for each individual on my tree at Ancestry.com, and adding those names and dates to my tree at MyHeritage where, hopefully, a Polish cousin and I might bump into each other digitally. And finally, I'll make a note of each connection on my mere stub of a tree at WikiTree.

Not that I've been a paragon of virtue in building those other trees; my main reason to spread myself so thin is simply to get the word out. Yes, I'm shamelessly shouting from the rooftops my one question, "Are you my Polish cousin?" If I can't travel to Poland—and face it, even if I could, who would understand this English-speaking genealogist?—advertising for connections on the digital spaces where family history fans gather will be my next option. Though it involves a tedious process in preparation, it's certainly worth the try.  

Finding the Ones who Didn't Emigrate

 

Finding DNA matches who still live in Poland puts a researcher in a tantalizing place. I want to connect with those Polish cousins from Pomerania, but how? Language barriers are a first consideration, though developments in technology may someday diminish that challenge. But the main dilemma I have right now is finding records to connect those current cousins with their ancestral past and document the path of the relationship.

In the past, I was fortunate to connect with one such Polish cousin, though it was someone on a different side of the family than the Wojtaś line I'm working on this month. Actually, this cousin had found me online and reached out to connect. Fortunately for me, this woman was able to write in English, or communication would have been next to impossible. Though I never had the chance to copy actual documents from the Polish side of our connection, I was able to send her copies of documents in New York from the branch of her family who had emigrated.

Genealogical research has advanced so much since that point—can you believe that connection was back at the turn of the century, which makes that sound so ancient—but access to more recent documentation from Poland is still beyond my reach. However, it is possible to find records from the mid-1800s, and transcriptions, while less dependable, can be found for Polish relatives up through the earliest years of the 1900s.

Right now, I'm focusing on the other children of my third great-grandparents, Marcin and Anna Wojtaś. While Marianna, my second great-grandmother, and her sister Anna had children who emigrated and ultimately raised families in the United States, they had one other sibling of whom I know very little.

That sister was known as Franciszka Wojtaś. Based on her 1838 marriage record, Franciszka was likely born in 1817, two years later than her sister Marianna. From the October first marriage ceremony, I can see from the record that Franciszka was wed to Andrzej Chmielecki, a man named after his own father. Seeing his mother's name—given as Marianna Zigorska—I wonder whether this was an unintentional spelling variant on the Zegarski line which eventually made its appearance in the extended Wojtaś family  with the marriage of Franciszka's sister Marianna.

As I work my way through church records in the region of the Ponschau parish (now Pączewo) where Franciszka was married, I'm beginning to find baptismal records of her children. These I'll enter into the Wojtaś branch of my family tree, and follow those lines as far as I can, to see whether those family members ended up emigrating, or remaining in their homeland. Eventually, this will point up possible family lines which did not die out, but may be represented among the DNA matches I've found on MyHeritage now.

Bit by bit, we'll piece this story of our DNA cousins together, one document at a time.

Finding the Family Connections

 

DNA testing can point us back to the ancestral place where we had previously failed to locate records and confirm the connections we cannot yet see. Better yet—at least in my experience—DNA testing can lead us to see the family connections we previously had no idea even existed. That certainly was the case with my paternal grandfather's roots.

Last week, I mentioned finding the baptismal record for Marianna Wojtaś, my second great-grandmother. Of course, that was a name I would never have known if it weren't for clustering DNA matches at MyHeritage, where I apparently have a good number of Polish cousins. But it wasn't even the Polish cousins who had shown up in that AutoClusters readout I had tried, now so many years ago; at first it was the cousins from Milwaukee who at first had had me stumped, but then led me to the truth about my grandfather's secret origin.

Now, moving forward, I've placed most all of those DNA cousins in their proper place in my family tree, but reconstructing the roots of these collateral lines still challenges me. For one reason, I can look at records from one online resource, and discover that there is no comparable document listed at another online resource for the same geographic area.

Having found the baptismal record for Marianna Wojtaś, I learned she was likely born sometime in June of 1815. After all, with the prevalence of infant deaths during that era, parents didn't dally in getting their children baptized. Marianna's record showed the sacrament was performed on June 29 in a parish then called Ponschau, but now known as Pączewo in Poland. The church record also noted the Wojtaś family's home to be located in nearby Wolental.

However, when I went to the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) to cross-check the records of Marianna's possible siblings, while I could find other children of Martin and Anna, there was no listing for Marianna, herself.

Still, I decided to pursue these other siblings, starting with the Wojtaś sibling whose many children ended up emigrating far from their home in Poland: Marianna's sister Anna.

From the transcription at PTG, I learned that Anna was baptized at Pączewo in 1821. FamilySearch.org became my next stop, where I learned Anna was married on January 17, 1848. The marriage was conducted not in Pączewo, but in Schwarzwald (Czarnylas), perhaps because, by that point, Anna's sister Marianna was living there with her own growing family.

I've been able to find several baptismal records for the children of Anna Wojtaś and her husband, Jan Krzewinski. It was several of the children, rather than Anna herself, who moved away from their native Poland to settle in the United States, in the city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin.

Though Anna's sons Piotr and Andrzej became Peter and Andrew in their new American identities, all of Anna's emigrating children—Izydor, Marianna, Piotr, and Andrzej—kept their Polish surnames up until their deaths during the era of the first World War. While some of their children or grandchildren opted for more Americanized surnames in subsequent generations, I've been able to connect their lines of descent with the many DNA cousins I've found through testing at all the major DNA companies working with genealogists.

Finding those DNA connections, first through the AutoClusters program at MyHeritage.com and then exploring the connections through matches at other companies, has been quite an experience. Yet, confirming those discoveries was also aided by the relative ease with which we can retrieve historic records in this country.

What about researching those Polish DNA matches who didn't descend from Wojtaś family members who immigrated to Wisconsin? That's the challenge I'll be working on this week. 

Pruning the Family Tree

This month, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet. Well, more to the point, now that I've regained functionality on my "merge with duplicate" button at Ancestry.com, these past few weeks have left a lot of carnage out in the genealogical ether; I've been vanquishing doubled profiles in her tree, left and right. Since today is the time for my biweekly count, let's see just how many duplicates my mother-in-law's "endogamy lite" family yielded. 

Before the beginning of this project, I had closed out the previous biweekly period with 41,826 individual profiles in my in-laws' tree. My pruning project, over this subsequent two week period, has apparently made a sizable difference: the tree now contains 41,717 relatives. I've ended up with 109 less people than where I started, two weeks ago. I'd say that's a lot of pruning.

This month, I've been focusing on my own father's Polish roots, facing an entirely different research challenge. While most of the time, I'm poring over Catholic Church records from the Prussian villages where my father's paternal grandmother's extended family once lived, I'm also paying keen attention to the DNA matches connected to this line—and to their shared matches, especially those I haven't been able to place in the family tree up to this point.

As I add these matches into my tree, slowly but surely, that branch has been blossoming. Over the past two weeks, that work has yielded 105 new entries. The challenge now, especially for those DNA matches who still live in Poland—or even in nearby European countries—is to find documentation to support their contention that we share these same Puchała, Zegarski, or Wojtaś lines. For the most robust records resource, I've looked mostly to FamilySearch.org, but I'm also thankful for the transcriptions from the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, which has been providing me with a research roadmap to guide the way to documents.

Granted, in past biweekly periods, I've experienced greater progress than I have this time—not to mention the reversed count for my in-laws' tree!—but the challenges of this month's research goal require a slower and more careful pace. Given that the Polish roots of my father's family will be my research focus through the end of this year, I anticipate a more sedate report for the next three biweekly periods as well, before we close out this year and move on to next year's Twelve Most Wanted.

Evading Those Glaring Exceptions

 

I was reminded yesterday about a saying I had stumbled upon almost two decades ago when struggling with my Polish forebears. I had thought, when I located it in an article back then, that it would be useful to keep in mind:

Almost anything you say that is correct most of the time can have glaring exceptions.

I rediscovered that sentiment yesterday while collaborating with a distant cousin. We had beed discussing a shared DNA match whose account name did not match the paternal surname from which this match had supposedly descended. The surname and the family tree didn't seem to line up logically. Noticing the match's name ended in -czyk, I wondered whether that might be a Polish suffix with a particular meaning, so I looked that up.

The inquiry led to that article I mentioned, written twenty five years ago by someone named Fred Hoffman, which had been reprinted in the Polish Roots website. Sure enough, that -czyk suffix could indeed signify something—specifically either a diminutive version of a given name, or the idea of "son of"—but by the time I discovered my answer, I had already fallen down a different rabbit hole. Now I wanted to know why the name Fred Hoffman has persisted for so many years in my searches for Polish genealogical research tips.

I remember running across that name in various online resources, even back before that twenty five year mark I mentioned. Somehow those twenty five years seemed a bit more persistent than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. I had seen that name in nascent online genealogy forums researching Chicago roots, for instance, or surnames, or a variety of other topics related to Polish roots for years. 

Who was this guy? I could hardly believe he was still around, after all these years, so I googled him. Sure enough, in addition to the reprint I had stumbled upon in answering my own question about the name suffix, I found other details still online.

I found a bio for Fred Hoffman on the website of a publishing company, Langline, the Language and Lineage Press. I found an "about me" page on his own website, complete with several useful hints regarding Polish genealogical research. And I located the first of a four-part interview done with him by Donna Pointkouski on the blog What's Past is Prologue.

All came with that simple, casual way of clarifying the more confusing aspects of Polish genealogical research so that it all makes sense and gives us the confidence to tackle the mess our relatives made sure to keep secret from us. Granted, some rules of thumb may end up having "glaring exceptions," as Fred Hoffman cautioned, but at least grasping the concepts helps give a hand up to a place where we can see our once-hidden past a bit more clearly.

Lingering on Newfound Ancestors

 

If, in a matter of one mere week, I've already discovered the names of my second great-grandmother's parents, what is the next step? Obviously, the quest in family history is always to push back another generation, but in this case, I'm not going to be so greedy about this month's research goal. For one thing, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep up this momentum through the generations, given the difficulty in accessing some Polish records. But there is another reason to take my time and linger on this new discovery about Marianna Wojtaś' parents' generation.

That reason is simple: it has to do with DNA testing. But not any kind of DNA test. I'm specifically thinking of my matches at one genealogy company: MyHeritage.com. The reason is simple. While Ancestry, whose tree-building system and record access I prefer, provides me with plenty of Wojtaś  descendants among my DNA matches, they are mostly descended from the family members who chose to immigrate to the United States—specifically to Wisconsin. MyHeritage, on the other hand, has a more international reach for their DNA testing program, which is handily demonstrated by my matches who still live in Poland, or at least live in a country far closer to that homeland than Wisconsin.

I would like to know how those foreign DNA matches connect to my branch of the Wojtaś family. And there may only be one way to do that: build the family tree back to Marianna's parents, then reverse direction and trace all the descendants of each of her siblings.

In many cases, I've found that challenge is not as daunting as it sounds. Sadly, for those Catholic families claiming many children, many of them laid their children to rest in the church cemetery not long after their birth. There were so many childhood deaths, and if not then, often a loss of life in early adulthood. But for the few who lived a full life, it's time for me to build out those collateral branches and document their descendants.

The easiest step will be to select the one sibling who had children who also migrated away from their Polish homeland. We'll begin next week by reviewing what I've discovered about that one specific Wojtaś  collateral line, thanks to DNA testing.

Step by Step — and Stumbling Upon

 

Standard genealogical advice is always to go step by step, but how many times do we find ourselves "stumbling upon" an accidental discovery? Perhaps that is just the way genealogical research sometimes progresses.

Discovering the identity of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś was not that difficult, once I remembered the standard advice for starting a family tree. I started from what I knew—my great-grandmother Anastasia, whose maiden name was Zegarska—and moved step by step back a generation. That way, I learned that Anastasia's father was named Jan Zegarski (or Johann in Catholic records), and that he married a woman named Marianna Wojtaś.

This Zegarski family was the one I stumbled upon only thanks to DNA testing. All I had known of my great-grandmother before that point was that her maiden name was supposed to be Zegar. It was all those DNA matches with roots leading back to the Zegarski surname who convinced me to take that critical spelling detour in researching documents on my roots.

In that discovery, I suddenly was gifted with what seemed like a multitude of Zegarski aunts and uncles, for Jan and Marianna had at least thirteen children that I could find. Anastasia was almost right in the middle of this spread of siblings. This gave me ample opportunities to find versions of their mother's name, whether spelled as Marianna Wojtaś, or Woitas (for daughter Pauline), or other variations.

Knowing those spelling variations helped, as my first stop in researching this Pomeranian family was the website hosted in Poland by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. By using their database, I found transcriptions of records for many of the Zegarski children. The family was living in a town called Schwarzwald by the Prussians in the 1800s, but now known as Czarnylas in Poland. That was a great start, but I still wanted to know more—especially about previous generations.

Last January, when I was outlining my research plans for the 2025 Twelve Most Wanted, I had wondered who Marianna's parents might have been. Knowing how difficult researching these Polish roots could be, I decided to name just that as my goal for this November. Silly me: I already have found my answer within a week, thanks to some records microfilmed years ago by FamilySearch.org. Though I still will need to go to a FamilySearch Center to view the documents, I am currently working with the same level of assistance as I was for PTG: transcriptions.

This week, I have now discovered who Marianna's own parents were. Finding the record of her baptism on June 29, 1815—an actual digitized document this time—I discovered her father's name was entered in Latin as "Martino" and her mother listed as Anna. It is challenging to read Marianna's baptismal entry because the date was overwritten, and her mother's maiden name somewhat mangled, but by enlarging the record image, it appears to be spelled Szczygielska.

As best I can tell, Marianna was likely born in the village of Wolental, and baptized in the Catholic parish known in Prussia as Ponschau—or, now, called Pączewo. Whether Marianna moved as a bride to live in Czarnylas or whether her parents moved there during her childhood, perhaps I'll be able to tell when we find information on her actual marriage. Through the transcriptions at PTG, however, I found the year of 1896 given as the date of Marianna's death in Czarnylas, complete with her "family name" given as Wojtaś. 

One Name; Several Spellings

 

When it comes to searching for a specific ancestor, having one name to seek can provide the assurance that we're chasing the right person. But several different names? That starts plaguing me with doubts whether I've found the right person.

With this month's research goal—to find more about my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś—I discovered it was possible to find someone. But that someone named Marianna often appeared with a different spelling to her surname. Sometimes, it was Woytas. Or it could just as likely appear as Wojtasz.

Were these different people? That could be a reasonable question, especially for someone unfamiliar with researching Polish surnames. Having a basic understanding of Polish phonics, however, helped fortify my confidence that I was following the right trail, despite all those spelling variations.

Years ago—once I discovered that my paternal roots grew toward Poland and not the greenery of the Irish coast my grandfather claimed—I decided it was time to brush up on Polish phonics. The diacritical marks had me stumped, for one thing, and I don't feel comfortable with simply ignoring ignorance.

Beyond educating myself on, say, the use of the "ł" for my paternal grandfather's surname Puchała, I did a quick tour of the universe of Polish phonics. If nothing else, I wanted to know how to pronounce those surnames. After all, they are part of my heritage.

Since then, I've kept those resources close at hand, cheat sheets to remind me how to handle what otherwise would look like tongue-twisters. Names like Blaszczynski, for instance, no longer have me stumped.

So when it comes to entries like my second great-grandmother Marianna's maiden name, Wojtaś, I now understand why the multitude of record keeping officials—German-speaking Prussian government workers and Catholic priests rendering records in Latin—sometimes come up with different results. All of those results are variations on how the name was pronounced, but each one is a possible representation of the same sounds: "y" for "j" or "sh" for "sz" or even the diacritical "ś." 

With that understanding, let's launch into what can be found about Marianna Wojtaś and her years in the Pomeranian region of Poland.   

The Eleventh Ancestor

 

When I chose the eleventh ancestor out of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, it was not an easy choice. This was not because several others were clamoring for my attention; this was more a matter of wondering whether I would be able to find anyone. 

The way I plan out my research for the upcoming year is to set aside a season to devote to each of four branches of my family tree. For two quarters of the year, I work on members of my in-laws' families. For one quarter, I have ample material to pursue on behalf of my mother's roots. But for my father's line during the last quarter of each year, I always know I'll be stumped for yet another year, no matter which ancestor I select for the designated month's struggle.

This November's ancestor, I decided, would be a natural outgrowth of my research project for the previous month. In searching for what became of my great-grandfather Thomas Puchała, I would likely need to trace the migration path of his wife, Anastasia Zegarska. Thus, for this coming month, I reasoned it would make sense to move back one more generation and research Anastasia's mother, Marianna Wojtaś. 

All I could find about the Zegarski family centered around a small town now known as Czarnylas in the Polish region of Pomerania. As I noted last year in planning this month's research project, 

Just even finding the identity of that hometown took years to accomplish, so I need to take that as a reminder that some research projects take time—like years—to evolve into a shape roughly comparable to an actual answer. If I arrive at the end of this coming November without an answer to my question about Marianna's parents and siblings, I know I can return to this puzzle again in a future year—and that, eventually, more records will help guide me through the maze and point me in the right direction for my next step.

Thankfully, that hopeful wish has already turned out to bear fruit. I have indeed found more records which will be of great use. We are at least set for a smooth launch into a month of exploring the life of Marianna Wojtaś, my second great-grandmother, whose life spanned nearly the entire nineteenth century in the Polish region of Pomerania. We'll start tomorrow with an overview of some details which can help us navigate Polish genealogical research.

November, Doubts, and Needles in Haystacks

 

Back at the beginning of this year when I was deciding which of my Polish ancestors to research in November, I had just broken free from those hindering doubts—the kind which prod people with the rhetorical question, "Why try?" After all, Polish records—or more accurately, Prussian records—are not exactly the forte of my primary genealogical resource, Ancestry.com. Finding such records at FamilySearch, where admittedly they could be in the collection, was akin to snatching up the proverbial needle in the haystack. Only this haystack had billions upon billions of strands of information.

The one resource which shook me loose of my doubts last year was an obscure website hosted in Poland. In English, it is listed as the site of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, but its web address beginning with "ptg" hints of the name by which it is known in its home country: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne.

If you can read—and understand!—Polish, the home page of that website offers up helpful articles on researching Polish ancestors, specifically from the region known as Pomerania. Alas, I am a mere mortal and can only understand one language, and it certainly isn't Polish, let alone any regional dialects. But I try.

Embedded within that maze of helpful Polish material on the PTG website is the capability to search through a database of transcribed vital records from the region of Pomerania. And yes! That can indeed be done in English, provided you first click on the flag for the corresponding language translation.

That is how I found the 1896 entry in the index of local death records for my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś Zegarska. It was Marianna who was the mother of my unfortunate great-grandmother Anastasia Zegarska whom we studied last month. Thankfully, that index of Polish records included Marianna's "family name" in their readout. Despite that clue, however, I've yet to find a digital copy of the document which, presumably, provided that detail.

Finding the PTG website was indeed encouraging because it turned around my despondent concern that I would never find anything more about my Polish roots. With that transcribed and translated entry from one small website, I was encouraged to try to find more information. That is what inspired me to name Marianna Wojtaś as my November selection for the Twelve Most Wanted this year. I may indeed be able to discover more about this branch of my paternal ancestry this month, thanks to the availability of resources from this northern Pomeranian region of what is now the country of Poland.  

Taking the Long View

 

How often we discover one record, one document, one slip of paper, and assume in the victory of locating it that we have found the whole of an ancestor's story. In the case of several of my ancestors—especially those women of previous centuries—that simply isn't so. An example like that serves to remind us all to take the long view when documenting an ancestor's life story.

I had mentioned that problem in reviewing the research difficulties concerning one paternal ancestor, my grandfather's sister, whom the New York family called Aunt Rose. Rose went by three different married names, in addition to the name under which she had been recorded at birth, back in Poland.

To my horror, in trying to add Rose to the FamilySearch.org universal family tree, I discovered there were actually three different women entered instead of the one woman I knew by three married names. Only by demonstrating through documentation will I be able to rectify that situation and blend the three identities into one. Unfortunately, some of those documents are still beyond my grasp.

A situation like this, however, is not isolated to the irregularities of my Polish immigrant ancestors, who, to begin with, were quite reticent about revealing their true identity. Just the other day, as I experimented with a new-to-me research tool at Ancestry.com, I alluded to another example where it takes more than one document to tell the whole of a woman's story.

In eliminating duplicate entries on my in-laws' tree, I ran across several such women whom I had entered twice in that same family tree. As I reflect over the cause for some of these double entries and worked through the documentation to confirm the right display in my tree, it became obvious that following women through name changes due to multiple marriages takes time, patience—and a chain of record keeping. 

For instance—and this is a relatively easy example—my mother-in-law's great-grand aunt, Sarah Mooter, showed in one part of my tree under her maiden name with a marriage to someone named Gibson. In a separate entry, she was mother of a child with a surname of Ebner. How did all that connect? It took piecing together several documents to verify what I suspected: as often happened in that time period, a widow with children remarried, starting a second family.

While we can surmise such an expected outcome, we still need to put together the confirming paper trail. Instead of "filling in the blank," we need to insert documentation to fill in several blanks or the story is not completely told. Sometimes the fill-in-the-blank format of pre-designed genealogical programs doesn't seem to lend itself to this reality of researching our ancestors. Messy lives can't really be contained in a simple fill-in-the-blanks format. I know the still-missing parts of Aunt Rose's story are keeping me from telling her whole story. I suspect I'm not the only one whose family has such a history.

The Trial and Error of Collaboration

 

Yesterday, I mentioned getting together with a newfound cousin to compare family trees. We met at a coffee shop where we could spread out, equipped with two laptops and notebooks. This was not just a social get-together; this was a working session. We were on a mission.

Because we both are also involved in a locally-inspired continuing education program (similar to OLLI), we realized the possible application to future classes of what we were doing—the trial and error effort of collaborating to answer our own research question. We began discussing whether we could use that same approach for a small group learning project in genealogy.

Aside from the limitations of finding a hospitable space for several people and their laptops, such a workshop would need to begin with an agreement: that we'd be willing to be patient enough for the process to unfold organically as each member frames a research question or goal, and we collectively explore ways to resolve impasses.

As I mentioned last week, I believe that this part of the process is actually where learning begins. Not in sitting through lectures. Certainly not in studying for tests. But in the application of techniques as, by trial and error, we learn what works for our particular problem—and what doesn't work.

Launching such a program without testing it first would not be a good idea. It's an experiment; of course it would be messy. In our discussion of the possibilities last week, we talked about giving it an informal trial run. It's just a matter of gathering a few volunteers (and their laptops, of course) at a coffee or sandwich shop with wifi connection, seeing what works best for everyone. Even with just a few willing members from our local genealogical society, we should be able to try that—and then ask everyone what works best for them. What helps people make a breakthrough on their brick wall research problem?

Just hearing one person make a suggestion like this was validating. I've been teaching for a long time and frankly, it can be very disheartening to feel like a lesson is no more than so much "blah, blah, blah." The key is to find what makes a difference for the learner—and every learner is different. It is encouraging for the teacher and empowering for the learner to engage in an approach that becomes a catalyst to successful outcomes. I'm hoping we can find such a catalyst through this project.

Double, Double

 

Sometimes it helps to take a research break. To change things up in between two months of poring over Prussian documents, I thought I'd use this week leading up to Halloween for a different type of double, double, toil and trouble: I used the Ancestry ProTools to purge my in-laws' duplicate entries. Yep, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet.

This particular family line is the one which inspired me to label it "endogamy lite." Over the generations, cousins from many branches of her family married other relatives, all within a specific geographic area. Since the extended family only has been in that region for the last two hundred years, it doesn't quite approach the technical term of endogamy, but I'd say the resultant family network is much more interrelated than mere pedigree collapse.

A while back, puzzling over my mother-in-law's ancestor Simon Rinehart and the will he left in Perry County, Ohio, the scorecard left from that ongoing courtroom battle between half-siblings prompted me to expand the collateral lines of that family in my own database. Well, that might sound like an easy project, but keeping in mind my second purpose in doing so—to help place DNA matches in the family tree—it was a task that took me months of work behind the scenes.

The problem with such tasks is that growing a family tree in both directions can result in duplicate entries. That's where the "double, double" comes in.

However, with a recent update to Ancestry.com graphics, I discovered that, just as I realized I needed it, I could no longer access the ability to "merge with duplicate" from the tools tab. Clicking on "Tools" simply jerked the profile page to the then-newly-added minimized header of the subject's name.

I waited. I tried again. I signed out and signed in. I updated every whizbang computer gizmo I could think of. I talked with chatbots. I complained. Twice. Nothing changed.

This week, I met with a fellow genealogical society member to follow up on the discovery that "Relatives Around Me" on FamilySearch.org's app thinks we are cousins. (Granted, we're actually seventh cousins twice removed, but hey, who's counting?)

We got together at a coffee shop, both lugging our laptops there to see if we could break through our respective brick walls to uncover just how this was possible. While I waited for my newfound cousin to locate a specific record on her computer, I couldn't resist poking on that malfunctioning "Tools" tab at Ancestry to see whether, after all this time, it might have started working again.

Surprise, like magic, it did. 

I promised myself then that I would take the next available free time to start clearing out my mother-in-law's double entries on the family tree—all those cousins who are cousins in more ways than one, complete with a different profile page for each direction in which they connect to the family.

That task, as the original ditty from Shakespeare implied, brewed toil and trouble. For each double entry thrown into the cauldron, the corresponding merge invoked more duplicates. Parents, spouses, children, and siblings seemed to multiply. Each time I clicked "merge" for one set of duplicates, it multiplied others.

I started out with a list forty three pages long of duplicate entries, but over the rest of the week, I've vanquished most of them. Along the way, though, I had to consult documents to confirm, say, that the single son of the couple in one profile was indeed the parentless spouse showing in another profile with no further details. Sometimes, it felt like I was adding more than I was taking away.

The tale will be told the next time I do my biweekly count, but in the meantime, it was a relief to attend to a task which long needed to be finished.