In the Encouragement Department

 

Trying to find a way around a brick wall ancestor can be discouraging, especially when, failed attempt after failed attempt, the frustrated researcher still comes up empty-handed. That miserable series of disappointing results, as I've experienced with my Polish ancestors' cases, only serves to make the arrival of a document discovery all the sweeter. With this past month's focus for my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2025—the siblings and parents of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś—I'd say last week's discoveries did just nudge me across the threshold into the encouragement department.

Thanks to the records available online through FamilySearch.org, I was quickly able to locate the June 29, 1815, baptismal record for Marianna from her Catholic parish in what is now the Pomeranian village of Pączewo. That, of course, revealed her parents' identity: in Latin, their names were written as Martino Wojtaś and Anna Szczyglieska.

From there, I easily located Marianna's 1833 marriage record in the same parish, confirming her parents' names, as well as the identity of her husband—Johann Zegarski in Latin, but Jan in Polish.

Jumping to Marianna's parents' generation, I began searching for her siblings. So far, I've been able to identify three: two sisters and one brother. Based on my discovery of those five DNA matches in Australia whose trees point me to an ancestor named Susanna Wojtaś, I'm eyeing that one brother, also named Johann, to see whether he had any daughters by that name.

There are likely other children in the family of "Martino" and Anna beyond the ones I've already found records for. I suspect some of them will lead me to more DNA matches, so this will be a family line I'll look forward to pursuing in upcoming years. But for now, at the close of this month, I'll button up my pile of documents and handwritten notes and diagrams and prepare to move on to December's Twelve Most Wanted challenge, another of my father's Polish ancestors.