Searching for the Right Place

 

Finding a family connection between five DNA matches in Australia and my paternal roots in Poland was a discovery which came, at first, with much doubt. But looking for further details uncovered possible signs to guide me further—but only for a short distance. Sure, it was encouraging to find an Anastasius Kaminski who married someone named Susanna Wojtaś—that maiden name being the key to our connection—but when I began researching their supposed son's place of birth and Susanna's place of death, I realized I had run into a big problem.

Searching for the right place may be important in building a family tree, especially when we run the risk of encountering name twins. With the case of a fairly common surname like Kaminski, I knew that name twins would be a high possibility. What I didn't bank on finding, though, was the possibility of several towns having the same name, back in Poland.

Looking at the family trees posted for those Australian DNA cousins, I noticed that there was very little shared about this ancestral link—and much of it without any supporting documentation. One tree gave Susanna's place of birth as "Dambrova." Another match's tree mentioned her son's place of birth as "Dabrowka." A copy of a passenger list—apparently typed on a machine with a malfunctioning letter "w"—showed among the displaced persons being transported from Poland to Australia after World War II Susanna's possible son Bernard, born in Dabrowka.

Well, what are the chances? I may as well check out that location by an online search, I thought. Easy, right? Until the Google AI narrative informed me,

Dąbrówka is a very common place name in Poland, so there are dozens of locations with this name. To find the correct Dąbrówka, it is important to provide more context, such as a nearby city, voivodeship (province), or county, as there are villages with this name in many different parts of the country.

Think that AI was hallucinating? Think again. Check this list of all the possible places in Poland with the place name Dąbrówka. Just picking one to start the search would mean casting off into a Sargasso Sea of genealogical listlessness. Talk about an exhaustive search.

I tried a different approach. I headed to the database on the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) to look for any transcribed records of Susanna's death in Poland. At first, I tried following the rules, entering Susanna's married name as Kaminska, according to the Polish way to designate a woman's surname. No luck.

Just in case, I also tried her name, spelled as Kaminski, and found a transcription of a death record for a Susanna Kaminski, along with the entry of her maiden name, given as Wojtas (lacking the diacritical mark over the "s"). The transcription provided a year of death as 1943, in the midst of those horrific war years. In the column which would normally have given the decedent's age, instead was provided the entry, "11.06.1870."

Could that have been Susanna's own date of birth? From another record, I had found her to be born in 1870. Assuming the European style of noting dates, that would yield a birthday on June 11, 1870.

The transcription indicated that the actual document was drawn up (or held by?) by the Catholic parish in Starogard Gdański. If I could see the Catholic record itself, it might show the specific place in the parish of Susanna's residence during her last days. Could that place have been in Dąbrówka? That's a possibility I'd like to check, if for nothing else than to determine which of more than eighty villages named Dąbrówka the Kaminskis had once called home.