Even Farther Away From Home

 

If we put ourselves in our immigrant ancestors' shoes, we can see how long a trip those family members endured to arrive on our shores in America. Specifically, I'm thinking of my great-grandmother, Anastasia Zegarska Puchała, who traveled far from her home in the Pomeranian village of Czarnylas to the bustling shores of New York City.

Even farther away from home, as I discovered through the DNA matches descended from Anastasia's immigrant siblings, were those distant cousins whose Zegarski and Wojtaś ancestors traveled to Milwaukee in Wisconsin. But the story uncovered by my latest discoveries on this family line goes even farther away from home than that: I have some DNA matches who claim Australia as their home.

Wondering how a branch of my Polish family could have opted for such a direction, I had to seek out some explanations. In a more macro search concerning Polish immigration, I asked specifically for details on just who these Polish immigrants might have been who headed in that opposite direction.

To my surprise, there have been Polish immigrants arriving in Australia since the mid-1850s. While the Australian gold rushes might seem like a reasonable draw—and there were Poles among other Europeans seeking gold in Victoria, especially—the Polish arriving in Australia during that decade were noted to have established themselves in South Australia in a settlement now known as Polish Hill River. 

It is more likely, however, that any of my Polish relatives would have arrived in the subsequent century with the much larger group of displaced Polish people in the aftermath of the Second World War. This was a time period when the Australian population burgeoned with Polish immigrants, leaving their mark on the country's multicultural composition. Even last year, the estimated population in Australia of people who had been born in Poland was 47,680.

For those immigrating to Australia from Poland after World War II, we can now add their children and grandchildren who subsequently were born in that recently-adopted homeland—including those five DNA matches I've found who currently live there.

While that exploration of Australia's immigration history gives us a macro view of the Polish connection down under, what about the specifics of those five DNA cousins? If they descend from a Polish ancestor who was related to either my Zegarski or Wojtaś family lines, it may be difficult to construct the actual paper trail to document that connection.

While I can access transcriptions of Polish birth, marriage, and death records up to the first quarter century of the 1900s, nothing more recent has become available online for me to trace the connection. This may mean I'll need to rely on communicating in person with at least one of those DNA cousins to compare notes on the micro aspect of the more traditional paper trail of how we might connect.

However, I might have a plausible idea....