A Road Map for the Family Tree

 

As I had discovered last summer when puzzling over the many name twins in my father-in-law's Irish family tree, a road map is an indispensable tool when mapping out the family tree. I remember my delight when I pulled up Google Maps and discovered that the program could pinpoint a specific Irish townland I was seeking. Now that I'm struggling over my paternal grandfather's secret roots in Poland, I'm seeing how that same tool helps guide the way in this new-to-me research region.

Currently, I'm straddling two different records resources: transcriptions of the digitized Polish records at FamilySearch and transcriptions at the database of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG). When I find what appears to be the right record for someone in the collateral lines of my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś, I then enter that information, including a link back to the verifying online document, in each of the trees I'm updating.

Along the way in this process, I encounter discrepancies. In a long line of baptismal records for grandchildren of Marianna's sister Franciszka Wojtaś, for instance, I find one child born to Franciszka's namesake daughter and her husband Piotr Gracz, yet the next child born into the Gracz household has a mother named Barbara. What? Did Franciszka die before that point? But no, moving on to the baptismal record of Piotr's next child, lo and behold, Franciszka has been resurrected to her position as mother in the Gracz family once again. Chalk that up to clerical error.

Some discrepancies, however, keep me wondering. The main one is finding a couple by the same name, presenting their child for baptism in a different—and unexpected—Catholic parish than the one where the family's older children had been baptized. Could there be another couple known by the exact same names? Name twins from neighboring towns?

Running into that problem more than once, I decided to return to the process I had used when researching Ireland: pull up Google Maps and see how close the two locations might be. Only this time, there was a twist: baptismal records gave the then-current location of the town, based on Prussian names for those Polish villages. In today's records, those names are different. Nevertheless, a little exploration through online searches has pointed me in the right direction for each of the village names I needed to convert from their old Prussian identities.

It is so easy to fall into the mindset that, up until our "modern" times, people stayed relatively stationary in the one village where their parents grew up, and their parents lived before them. We forget that these were the same intrepid people who birthed emigrants willing to board creaky wooden ships to sail an ocean to a foreign land where no one spoke their language. Even with their limited methods of modality two centuries ago, moving to the next village couldn't be all that hard. 

Just to be sure though, pulling up a map to measure distances between two of those quaint Polish villages helps ease my mind that perhaps with those eight to ten baptismal records from two or three different villages, I'm still following the trail of the same couple. And that that couple is indeed part of my family line, and not someone else's family.