Proving Rose is Rose

 

It's no wonder there are three different identities for Anastasia Zegarska's daughter Rosalia Puchała on the FamilySearch.org universal tree. Just locating all the records I've placed on Anastasia's timeline, mostly showing her relationship to and residence with her daughter, shows me that both Anastasia and Rosalia went by different identities at different times.

Take their names. In Poland, they were known as Anastasia and Rosalia. In America, they became Anna and Rose. Besides the changes in their married names, however, there were some other details that didn't seem quite right. For instance, consider the marriage certificate for Rose's second marriage in New York City. Though I can see, by following a cluster of documents concerning Rose and her mother, that I was trailing the same woman, I need a way to demonstrate that Rose was Rose was Rose. I need to compose a proof argument for these women's identities.

Let's take a look at that 1915 marriage record in Brooklyn, New York, as searchable through the Historical Vital Records Project via the website of the New York City Municipal Archives.

First, we learn the full name of the groom, George Washington Kober, and discover that, although this was his first marriage, he was already forty three years of age. Named after his father, the groom's mother was listed as Pauline Hutton. He was born in the borough of Manhattan.

Rose, on the other hand, had previously been married, then divorced. Her name on the license was listed as Rose Miller, though I still have no idea what the first husband's given name was, nor when that first marriage ceremony was conducted or ended. Her age was given as forty, which would yield a year of birth as 1875, not far from the September 1872 baptismal record I have for her from Schwarzwald.

From that point, the details veer toward the unexpected. Though I did note in yesterday's timeline that Anastasia Zegarska's married name was sometimes recorded as Anna Krauss (or spelling variations), I had never found any document I could ascertain tied the right Anna with the right Mr. Krauss. Yet on her daughter's marriage record, Rose gives her maiden name as Krauss, not Puchała as we'd expect it to be.

The possible gift that comes with this confusion is that her "father" was listed as Julius Krauss on this Kober-Miller marriage record. Admittedly, on the next line, Rose's mother was entered as Anna Zegar, not Zegarska, and even the entry of the maiden name Krauss was on a line only meant to be completed in the case of the bride being a widow, not a divorcee. But amidst these unexpected entries, perhaps we can extrapolate a few search terms which might help us, in turn, figure out a bit more about Anna, herself.

Granted, some of this involves speculation, but I have noticed that children who refer to a step-father as their "real" father often had that man enter their life at an early age. This might guide us in our search for widow Anna Puchała's second marriage. And of course, since this marriage license gives us our first glimpse of Anna's husband's given name, we now can search for someone named Julius Krauss, a most helpful balancing act when faced with multiple spelling variations of the common surname Krauss.

Then, too, if Rose considered her maiden name to be Krauss, perhaps that is the name under which she entered this country, helping to narrow the search for her appearance as well as Anna's in passenger records.

The main point, once having located such records, is to use them all together to tie up the three identities for Rose in the FamilySearch tree into one person, telling the whole of Rose's story under one heading. One document alone could never tell the whole of a story such as hers.