Minding the Gap

 

In 1950, a thirty four year old Polish blacksmith from "Dabrovka" arrived at port in Fremantle, Australia. Along with several other single men, this passenger had departed from the Displaced Persons Camp in Fallingbostel in what was by then the British zone of post-World War II Germany. Listed under the name Bernard Kaminski, he reported himself to be Roman Catholic and unmarried, and provided his date of birth as August 8, 1916.

For a Polish person born in 1916—especially one who possibly could be related to my Zegarski or Wojtaś family lines in Pomerania—it might be possible to find transcriptions of baptismal records at the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG). After all, that group of avid genealogists has been working hard to make local records findable by the rest of the worldwide Polish diaspora.

What I've been minding, however, has been the gap between available dates of baptismal records at PTG and dates like those of refugees of World War II. There is a considerable gap between what can be found online in documents and what is still needed to be available. 

While subsequent records painted a clearer picture of just who this "displaced person" might have been, the one document I was keen on finding was any record of his death. There, hopefully, I'd discover the name of this refugee's parents, the one means of bridging the gap between records of a new life in Australia and the war-torn life of his younger years in Europe. I've been minding that gap with many of the collateral lines in my Polish heritage.

There was, thankfully, a transcribed Australian death index at Ancestry.com which included someone by that same name of Bernard Kaminski, with parents' first names given as "Anastasia" and "Suzzana." At first, I was stumped when I saw the father's name listed as Anastasia—until I realized that there was a Polish version of that name for men: Anastazy. When looking for baptismal records, though, I knew the Latin version of the name would be Anastasius.

Realizing that the PTG database has expanded to include some records from as late as the 1930s, I hoped for the best in searching for anyone named Bernard. No such luck in this case, however—but I did find something else which caught my eye: an 1895 baptismal record for someone named Anastasius Kaminski.

The place was close to being just right: Pączewo in Pomerania, a Catholic parish where I had found records for children of other collateral lines. But even better was one detail: this Anastasius' parents were identified in this Latin record as Anastasius Kaminski and Susanna Wojtaś.

Whether this 1895 newborn would, in twenty one years, turn out to be the father of our Bernard, I can't yet determine. Perhaps he might be a much-older big brother to Bernard.

Even if neither of those scenarios turns out to be correct, I'm now fixated on one detail: how does that Susanna connect to my own family's Wojtaś line? After all, this whole chase began with the clue of five DNA matches down under, each of whom connects with my other Zegarski and Wojtaś cousins. Hopefully, the rest of the details I'll need won't be swallowed up in that frustrating records gap.