Collecting Zegarski Connections

 

While my great-grandfather's Puchała ancestors didn't seem to leave many descendants—at least, if I go by what can be found among my DNA matches—Thomas Puchała's in-laws certainly did. Anastasia Zegarska, my misfortune-plagued great-grandmother of the two surviving children, turned out to have many siblings, nieces and nephews who also migrated to the New World. I would never have known it, judging by the very few relatives I remember from my childhood, but there was a reason for this dearth of paternal kin. For whatever reason, while Anastasia chose to settle in New York City, her Zegarski relatives all headed for Wisconsin.

I never knew that information until just recently, after having taken my DNA test at five different genetic genealogy companies. MyHeritage was the first to pinpoint the Zegarski connections through their AutoClusters tool, but since some genealogy enthusiasts test at multiple places—and keep trees at more than one company, too—I eventually discovered one of those DNA matches also kept a family tree at Ancestry.com. 

That was a fortunate connection. Thankfully, this DNA match was quite willing to answer messages from other DNA matches. Not only that, but the information she provided was very helpful. That contact became my first baby steps into a world of genealogy research I had never tried before: researching Polish roots.

As it turns out, over time—well over a century, now—those Polish immigrants have yielded more relatives than I've been able to count. Still, I'm trying to keep track. Thanks to the ThruLines tool at Ancestry, plus the Shared Matches option from Ancestry's ProTools, I've been connecting the dots between those many unknown distant cousins and my Zegarski ancestry.

It's all adding up. And there's more to find. Sometimes, research can seem monotonous, but this repetition is forming a network of descendants I never knew existed. Perhaps I'm in awe over what can be found through DNA—at least when we have effective tools for organizing these many unknown people.

This weekend, I'll be taking time to see how many more unidentified relatives I can connect to this Zegarski line of descent, using the tools at Ancestry.com. Then, I'll turn to FamilySearch records to see whether I can spot any further collateral lines to document for each Puchała generation in Poland and the lines of their in-laws, then trace their descendants. Once equipped with further documentation on the lines of these newly-discovered descendants, on Monday, we'll see what connections can be made with the DNA matches listed at MyHeritage.