There is something special about coming to the end of a sequence. Whether it is the closing night of a theater performance, or completing the last exam before finishing the degree, it is a time to celebrate. Thus, when I get to the last of these Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2025, I want to go out with a shout. And I think I've found the perfect research project to celebrate: it has to do with a cousin connection with whom I've actually had the pleasure of personally exchanging notes.
For the last three months of each research year, I focus on the brick wall Polish ancestors of my father. This side of the family has always been the most frustrating for me, thanks to my paternal grandfather taking most of what he knew about his family with him to the grave. For whatever reason, his origin was a closely held secret.
It has taken decades of work by siblings and cousins in my generation to break through this brick wall—with one exception: the discovery in a census record of a young woman by the surname Gramlewicz who had, for a brief time, lived with my father's maternal grandparents.
That surname, it turns out, has shown up in other documents for family members. I still don't know the exact connection, but I had, over the years—and I do mean back to the 1990s—written about this unusual surname. So much so, that someone by that same name sent me an unexpected reply to one of my forum posts. That began an exchange of emails as we both tried to piece together the story of how our families had connected, so many generations before.
I thought I had figured out that puzzle—until, that is, I began examining what record transcriptions I could find from 1800s Prussia. It turns out I may have presumed a cousin was actually a sibling. Now that I know where to find the actual digitized records for the area in question (and not just the transcriptions), I want to go back and retrace my steps. Better yet, I want to rebuild the entire family constellation for those family members related to my father's great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz.
This time around, I'll look for the collateral lines for Elżbieta as well as those of her parents—tentatively identified now as Andrzej Gramlewicz and his wife Katarzyna Nowicka. I'll be examining records from Żerków in present-day Poland, the same place we had studied for my father's ancestors this past October and November, when I found further resources for digitized records.
Because I want to identify DNA matches to this line, I'll also be building out the Gramlewicz tree through their descendants, as far as the paper trail will allow me to go. Hopefully, at the close of this year, I'll be better prepared to determine just how I relate to my distant Gramlewicz cousin who had found me online so many years ago—and that will be something I can shout about!
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