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.
No comments:
Post a Comment