Step by Step — and Stumbling Upon

 

Standard genealogical advice is always to go step by step, but how many times do we find ourselves "stumbling upon" an accidental discovery? Perhaps that is just the way genealogical research sometimes progresses.

Discovering the identity of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś was not that difficult, once I remembered the standard advice for starting a family tree. I started from what I knew—my great-grandmother Anastasia, whose maiden name was Zegarska—and moved step by step back a generation. That way, I learned that Anastasia's father was named Jan Zegarski (or Johann in Catholic records), and that he married a woman named Marianna Wojtaś.

This Zegarski family was the one I stumbled upon only thanks to DNA testing. All I had known of my great-grandmother before that point was that her maiden name was supposed to be Zegar. It was all those DNA matches with roots leading back to the Zegarski surname who convinced me to take that critical spelling detour in researching documents on my roots.

In that discovery, I suddenly was gifted with what seemed like a multitude of Zegarski aunts and uncles, for Jan and Marianna had at least thirteen children that I could find. Anastasia was almost right in the middle of this spread of siblings. This gave me ample opportunities to find versions of their mother's name, whether spelled as Marianna Wojtaś, or Woitas (for daughter Pauline), or other variations.

Knowing those spelling variations helped, as my first stop in researching this Pomeranian family was the website hosted in Poland by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. By using their database, I found transcriptions of records for many of the Zegarski children. The family was living in a town called Schwarzwald by the Prussians in the 1800s, but now known as Czarnylas in Poland. That was a great start, but I still wanted to know more—especially about previous generations.

Last January, when I was outlining my research plans for the 2025 Twelve Most Wanted, I had wondered who Marianna's parents might have been. Knowing how difficult researching these Polish roots could be, I decided to name just that as my goal for this November. Silly me: I already have found my answer within a week, thanks to some records microfilmed years ago by FamilySearch.org. Though I still will need to go to a FamilySearch Center to view the documents, I am currently working with the same level of assistance as I was for PTG: transcriptions.

This week, I have now discovered who Marianna's own parents were. Finding the record of her baptism on June 29, 1815—an actual digitized document this time—I discovered her father's name was entered in Latin as "Martino" and her mother listed as Anna. It is challenging to read Marianna's baptismal entry because the date was overwritten, and her mother's maiden name somewhat mangled, but by enlarging the record image, it appears to be spelled Szczygielska.

As best I can tell, Marianna was likely born in the village of Wolental, and baptized in the Catholic parish known in Prussia as Ponschau—or, now, called Pączewo. Whether Marianna moved as a bride to live in Czarnylas or whether her parents moved there during her childhood, perhaps I'll be able to tell when we find information on her actual marriage. Through the transcriptions at PTG, however, I found the year of 1896 given as the date of Marianna's death in Czarnylas, complete with her "family name" given as Wojtaś.