The Wife's Side of the Story

 

Using Y-DNA to uncover more about my great-grandfather's patriline may not have revealed much, as we mentioned yesterday, but what if we looked at the story revealed by his wife's DNA? Thomas Puchała, being my great-grandfather, was a close enough relative to be identified through autosomal DNA matches. But when I looked at my DNA matches using Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, both Thomas and his wife, Anastasia Zegarska, yielded me only two matches. Problem: I know them both. This is no revelation.

Yet, if I move back one more generation and, rather than looking at the DNA matches showing for Thomas' father Jan—no surprise here, just the same two I already know—I look at Thomas' wife Anastasia Zegarska's parents, suddenly that match count jumps. For that couple, my second great-grandparents Jan Zegarski and Marianna Wojtaś, I now have twenty four DNA cousins to research. And twenty four more advocates for examining our jointly-held roots.

In this case, the exercise serves to provide one more data point to zero in on just who the Puchała men were. Granted, using autosomal DNA to track Thomas' wife's siblings' descendants—hint: these were the families who mostly emigrated from Poland to Wisconsin in the United States—did find me some cousins in the current generation. After spending a lifetime feeling like I had hardly any relatives, I like that sense of familial connection.

But tracing Thomas' in-laws did unearth one puzzling question. Having found a few documents on the two families, Puchałan and Zegarski, I now had the name of two villages of origin in Poland. Problem: entering that information on a map told me that the two families lived approximately 185 miles apart from each other. Not exactly a quick stroll to the marketplace.

That's simply not a likely scenario for courtship, 1860s style. Obviously, I need to turn back to those maps, add some additional information, and get a solid picture of where, exactly, the two towns were actually located. A distance like that might be a deal-breaker for a budding Polish romance in that century—not to mention, the accuracy of a pedigree chart.