Taking in the Broad View

 

Sometimes the research task bids us keep our nose close to the ground, sniffing out every hint, gobbling up every clue. When our focus gets that nearsighted, it helps to pick up our head to reorient ourselves with the broader picture. At the close of this month's research project, I did just that. I needed to take in the broad view—and it was worth the encouragement I gained. 

The last task for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025 was to learn all I could about my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz and her family. I can say that I almost certainly did confirm her parents' names—Andrzej (Andreas) Gramlewicz and Katarzyna Nowicka—though I did encounter some rough spots concerning her mother's true identity.

From there, I reverted to that necessary step for connecting the dots with all those unidentified DNA matches: I worked through each collateral line and documented that person's descendants back toward the present time, as far as I could go through the generations.

That's when I decided to lift up my head and take in the broad view. Using my family tree at Ancestry.com, I constructed a vertical tree with Andrzej and Katarzyna as the head couple. From there, I added all available children listed in my tree, clicking through as far as I could go through the generations.

Though I have a long way to go before I finish adding to my tree all the descendants for each branch of this Gramlewicz family, one thing I spotted was worth the effort to draw up this chart: for some lines of the family, I have already charted down to the sixth great-grandchildren of Andrzej and Katarzyna. I had no idea there were this many generations documented in my tree for this couple.

Included in this month's goal was my quest to figure out just how Annie Gramlewicz was related to my second great-grandfather Anton Laskowski, Elżbieta's son. Though I did plot her ancestry to about the same generation as Andrzej Gramlewicz, I could not document any familial connection, despite both families living in the same small town of Żerków in what is now part of Poland. And yet, there were ample records available online to allow me to chart Annie's family tree from her own ancestral couple down to the present time.

One thing I noticed, whether tracing my own Gramlewicz line or that of my mystery cousin, was the availability of online records for most of the 1800s. That enabled me to build out both trees. Records from the earliest years of the subsequent century are also starting to make their appearance, so one step to take the next time I revisit this research project is to see how many of the subsequent generation I can add to my records.

A sticking point in following these generations is whether they remained in Poland or emigrated. For those who settled in North America, it was far easier to find their records than it had been to trace family members in the war-torn years of the 1900s in Europe. And a surprise lesson learned from the ravages of those same years was that a number of survivors in Poland took up the offer to be relocated to Australia, a detail I hadn't known anything about prior to discovering Gramlewicz DNA cousins in that country this month.

Hopefully, more records of Polish heritage will be added to online collections, whether by American genealogical organizations or by researchers in Poland. I'm especially keen to find records predating the 1800s, my current brick wall era. I keep thinking it will be "just one more" generation and then I'll find my answer concerning the connection between Anton Laskowski and his "niece" Anna Gramlewicz. Perhaps given a year or so to add to the collections, whether here or overseas, and I'll know. 

Cleaning Up the Loose Ends

 

Sometimes, what's left after a big discovery—or even a small but significant one on the family tree—is nothing more than a big list of loose ends to clean up. As I'm wrapping up this last month's challenge from my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, that is exactly what I'm seeing.

I realized early on in researching my brick wall second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, that if I were to make any progress on her branch of the family, it would most likely come through some careful examination of records for her collateral lines. And yet, encountering documents for several of her siblings, I also noticed what must have been a stark reality of life in mid-1800s Prussia: a lot of childhood mortality.

With Elżbieta's line, only two of her siblings lived to adulthood—and even one of them, Apolonia, apparently died in childbirth, losing her infant daughter as well. The remaining sibling who lived to adulthood, Katarzyna, had several children with husband Wincenty Cichocki, yet I'm still pursuing the twists and turns of this family through online records in Poland.

At this late date, I have one more day to continue that task of cleaning up the loose ends on Elżbieta's sister's line, then I'll need to draw up research plans for the next time I revisit this research question. At that point, even if I do make any significant discoveries, there will only be time to write down those conclusions as a springboard to launch us into a future year's efforts on pursuing this Gramlewicz family.

Then, we'll be on to some time for celebrating the holidays, after which we'll grab those "twelve days of Christmas" to plan for next year's research challenges.

Closing Out the Year

 

It seems like only a few days ago when I was mourning the passing of summer, and here we are, staring 2026 in the face. In just a blink, Christmas will be here. Those who are celebrating Hanukkah are even now just about to put a close on the eighth night of their Festival of Lights. And today? Well, this will be the last of my biweekly counts for 2025.

This month has turned out differently than I had expected. Encouraged by increased access to Polish records online—at least, now that I've got the hang of deciphering old German script and breaking the Polish-to-English code—I thought perhaps I'd make more headway than I did. True, the month is not yet over, but I still need to reserve some time for a few holiday posts before I launch into selecting my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 during the twelve days of Christmas.

Mostly on account of wanting to cross-check any discoveries I've made, I've spent lots of time jumping between BaSIA, the Database of Archival Indexing System, which provides transcriptions of Polish records, and their hyperlinks to specific documents at governmental archives, as well as old scans of church records at FamilySearch.org. In the spirit of this season of giving, I've been making a list and checking it twice—if not more than that, as I continue searching for those Gramlewicz and Laskowski connections on paper and through DNA testing services.

So how did things go in the past two weeks? Faster than I thought, but not as fast as I'd hoped. I managed to add 127 new documented individuals to my tree, mostly either Gramlewicz descendants who had emigrated from Poland, or branches of that family still residing in their hometown back in Żerków. Those new additions to the tree either connected to Elżbieta Gramlewicz's line or were ancestral connections to her son Anton Laskowski's supposed "niece" whom he took in as a teenager after she returned to New York from traveling with her own Gramlewicz family members to Poland. All told, those two Gramlewicz branches boosts my tree count to a total of 40,744 documented relatives.

Though I don't plan to work on my in-laws' tree again for quite some time, every now and then a surprise discovery pops up, beguiling me to turn my attention to my husband's roots. Such was the case this past week, when a surprise DNA match I noticed simply demanded to be placed in the right spot in that family tree.

You know how that goes: you can't just plug in a name and not give any reasons for why that name deserves that space. And suddenly, seven more individuals were documented and added to my in-laws' tree, upping that tree's total a modest amount to 41,731. 

While I'll soon be diverting my attention to planning next year's research projects, I'll still be working on those Gramlewicz research questions for this last month of the year. Floating branches on a family tree may be one way to solve the documentation issue when we don't quite know where to plug in a relative, but they still beg a resolution. It's likely I'll be working on this for quite some time—and revisiting the issue in a future year, as well. 

Anna's Father

 

Tracing the ancestry of Anna Gramlewicz, the young woman who showed up in my great-grandfather Anton Laskowski's New York City apartment in 1915, might have seemed an easy task—at first. When Anna was born in New York, it was easy to trace her father in American records. Moving back past the year of his immigration, however, was not quite as easy.

Anna's father, Mieczyslaw, was born and baptized in Żerków, the same small town where so many of my paternal grandmother's ancestors once lived. Mieczyslaw's December 27, 1863, entry in the baptismal register showed his father's name as Laurentius Gramlewicz, most likely the Latin version of the Polish given name Wawrzyniec.

Knowing that, however, does not solve my problem of finding the connection to Anton's own mother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. If there is a connection in the Gramlewicz family, we will need to reach back farther than just one generation.

There was, however, another point to glean from Mieczyslaw's baptismal record: the name of his own mother. Right on the same line in that baptismal register, we find another possible connection. Mieczyslaw's mother's maiden name was Marianna Laskowska—or, apparently, "Marie" for short. Remember that women's surnames in Poland are modified to reflect their gender, thus rendering Marianna's brothers' surname as Laskowski, but her sisters' maiden name as Laskowska.

This discovery opens up another possibility for why Anton would claim Annie Gramlewicz as his niece. Could he have been related to her through a Laskowski family member?

Finding Marianna's own 1888 death record among the online archival holdings in Żerków, I noticed one thing right away. If Mieczyslaw's arrival in New York, according to census records, was said to have been in 1889, perhaps his mother's passing was the impetus for him to leave his homeland and seek his fortune in a land of promise. 

It was interesting to see that, though he was among the youngest of his parents' children, he was the reporting party named in Marianna's death record. According to his report, his mother's parents were listed as Adelbert Laskowski and Rosalie Damerska. A note inserted in the text indicated an alternate name for Adelbert: Wojcieck.

Neither of those names helps in our quest to discover the nexus between Anton Laskowski and his "niece" Anna Gramlewicz. This is not even because Anton's parents' names were different than the Laskowski connection from Mieczyslaw's records. The difficulty comes in realizing that, as far as I can access them right now, online records for the region where Żerków is located in Poland simply do not go back that far in time.

While I can't go back, page by page in time, there may still be another way. That way is by slipping through the side door of DNA testing—but only if we are fortunate enough to discover someone from those families has already taken a DNA test, and that the relationship is not so distant as to be too tiny to detect the connection. Looking backward in time by following the trail of a DNA match's ancestry can sometimes present a perspective we couldn't have otherwise found.

Anton's Niece Annie

 

Some branches of a family tree seem to twist and turn—and ultimately lead us nowhere. Such was the case with the relative who showed up in my great-grandfather's 1915 New York City household. My great-grandfather, Anton, told the census enumerator that she, Annie, was his niece. And that was the end of the explanation.

Who, exactly, Annie was has been a puzzle I've yet to figure out. At first, I took the clue at face value (though I subsequently learned to take that relationship label with a huge grain of salt). And can you blame me? Annie's surname was Gramlewicz, same as the maiden name of Anton's own mother, Elżbieta.

By the time I was able to access the type of records genealogists demand, I could see that simple claim made to a passing census worker wasn't quite what it should have been. As tempting as it was to make the assumption based on that Gramlewicz surname, the more I looked through records, especially in Poland, the less sure I was of the claim's veracity.

Now that we've found a useful stash of records from the old dominion of Prussia, that part of modern-day Poland where the Gramlewicz and Laskowski families originated, it's possible to take a second look. While I'm thankful for expanded access to Old World records, I'm still stumped by the claim of niece. Let's take a look at what we now know about Annie, then move backwards through the generations, if possible, to find the connection.

What was obvious from that 1915 New York State census record was that Annie was not born in Poland, as was Anton and his wife Marianna, but she was actually born in New York City. In fact, according to the 1900 census, the three siblings in the Gramlewicz household along with Anna were also born in New York. Yet their parents—whose names were listed with horribly mangled spelling—were both said to have been from Germany, most likely Prussia.

Anna's parents' names, more accurately spelled, would be Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz and Jozefa Byczyńska.  According to that same 1900 census, the couple had been married for seven years. We also learn from that census that Mieczyslaw had been in the United States since 1889, while Jozefa trailed him by two years.

Though Anna was born in New York, and thus a United States citizen, an entire chapter in her personal story is revealed by her return trip from Poland in 1913, aboard the SS Friedrich der Grosse. The passenger record provided her date of birth as June 24, 1897, and her place of birth as Brooklyn. She was apparently traveling alone on the same ship on which she had traveled with the rest of her family, who had chosen to return to their hometown in Żerków in 1908.

With the information on her father's name and hometown in Poland, the next step is to trace his line through the generations until we find the nexus with Anton's own mother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. The only problem is that it isn't as easy as that might seem. 

DNA Matches: Not Always on the Genetic Genealogy Menu

 

When the discovery of one DNA match leads to useful family history revelations, it's natural to want to find more. Finding useful leads, however, is not something to instantly order up from some genetic genealogy menu. It takes two to make a match, and we can't simply guarantee that the right family member will step up to fulfill that match-making role.

Right now, I'm wrapping up my Twelve Most Wanted research goal for the last month of the year. I've been focusing on my Polish second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz in hopes of locating details about her parents' true identity and discovering information on which of her siblings survived to adulthood. More than just that, I'm also hoping to learn which Gramlewicz descendants opted to leave their homeland and migrate to the United States, where records are far more easily accessible (at least for English-speaking researchers). 

The more I review my DNA matches, the more I locate who descend from this same line I've been working on in the past two weeks. I anticipate working on that set of DNA matches behind the scenes for the rest of this month. That line contains descendants of Elżbieta's sister Katarzyna Gramlewicz, who married Vincent (or Wincenty) Cichocki.

The more I look, the more DNA cousins I find who connect to Katarzyna's line. In my case, this is an encouraging sign, since I originally had my doubts that the two women were sisters. But surely there are other siblings from this family who apparently married and had children who could possibly be the beginning of other lines of Gramlewicz matches. It's just a matter of finding them.

Among the possibilities are Elzbieta's sister Apolonia. As I mentioned yesterday, though Apolonia's life was cut short by a possible untimely death when she was still in her twenties, she had married Paweł Zakrzewicz, that surname which kept on popping up in family records, sometimes unexpectedly. I have found records indicating that Apolonia had two daughters before her death, although at least one had died in infancy.

Of the rest of Elżbieta's family, most seemed to die in childhood, if not in infancy. Even the youngest of the siblings—Piotr Paweł Gramlewicz—died in adolescence, leaving the possibilities for future DNA matches quite slim indeed.

While it is true that I hadn't been able to find a birth or baptismal record for Elżbieta, herself, suggesting there might be another sibling still not accounted for, it might be time to lay this puzzle to rest and move on to examine that other Gramlewicz family's records—the one whose descendant called Elżbieta's son Antoni her "uncle." 

You Can't Have Just One

 

I learned a long time ago that when it comes to documenting family relationships, you can't rely on just one document to confirm ancestral connections. In looking at the Prussian death record for Catharina Cichocki, I was reminded of how many times I've seen mistaken reports of the deceased person's parents' names—especially that of the mother's maiden name. When it comes to confirming relationships through documentation, it helps to look twice.

Finding Catharina's 1887 death record, now held at the Polish archival collection at Żerków (see scan number nine), I saw that her maiden name was Gramlewicz, and that her father's name was Andreas Gramlewicz. After providing that information, the record stated that her mother was also named Catharina, with the surname Zakrzewicz.

Wait, I thought: didn't I have records with differing assertions for that mother's maiden name? Perhaps my second great-grandmother Elżbieta and Katarzyna were not full siblings, after all. I went back to the other record I had for the supposed sisters' parents: the 1810 marriage record for Andreas and Catharina. Sure enough, there in that record, the bride's maiden name was given as Nowicka. Not Zakrzewicz. 

Of course, I thought, perhaps Andreas had been married twice. Since daughter Catharina was born about ten years before Elżbieta, perhaps Catharina's mother had subsequently died and Andreas married a second Catharina, surnamed Zakrzewicz. It was a possible scenario.

And yet, when I looked for documents on another Gramlewicz sibling—Apolonia, baptized in 1820—her record, too, indicated the mother's name as Catharina "de Nowickie." (Ironically, Apolonia's godfather was listed as a Zakrzewicz, and years later, she ended up marrying someone else with that surname, Paweł Zakrzewicz.)

Checking for younger brother Piotr Paweł, his baptismal record, despite using the Polish form of the participants' names, also noted his mother to be Katarzyna Nowicka.

Looking at Elżbieta's own death record didn't help matters. While I claim no expertise in reading old German handwriting, I can clearly see that her father was listed as Andreas Gramlewicz. Included in that record was mention of Elżbieta's husband, listed as "Matheus" Laskowski, and her son, Anton. No mention that I can find in the verbiage indicates the identity of her mother.

From all this, we can see that Elżbieta's older and younger siblings were mentioned in records identifying their mother as Catharina or Katarzyna Nowicka—the same woman identified in Andreas' own marriage record. Perhaps I'll never learn why Elżbieta's own death record doesn't appear to include mention of her mother's maiden name—at least, as best I can tell with limited knowledge of old German script.

Perhaps, considering the DNA matches I've found who descended from Elżbieta's presumed sister Katarzyna, it would help to examine the expected range of centiMorgans for a full-parent relationship versus a half-sibling situation. It's probably time to go looking for other Gramlewicz descendants in my DNA matches again. 

Connecting the Dots to Connect the Family

 

It sometimes seems like a roundabout journey, connecting many dots before we can put together the family tree. In the case of my research focus this month, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, I had wanted to discover more about her siblings—and, ultimately, her parents. Problem: there wasn't exactly a straight line leading me from my second great-grandmother to her parents.

We've just returned from wandering through the records to connect Antonina, the wife of Stanislaus Samolewski, with one of her siblings, Thomas Hilscher. Why, you might ask, does that Hilscher discovery mean so much to me? I realize there may be some missing steps in the tale of why I'm ecstatic to have found those documents in the past few days.

Knowing that siblings Antonina and Thomas were children of Peter and Agnes—likely Piotr and Agnieszka in their native tongue—helped in a big way. Not only did that knowledge reveal how several DNA matches related to me, but since I already had the Hilscher line in my tree from previous research, I could see the next generational step.

That next generation came through Piotr's wife, Agnieszka, who was born a Cichocki. Her 1839 baptismal record shows her own parents as Vincent Cichocki and Katarzyna Gramlewicz.

Back at the beginning of this month's research project, I had mentioned the lack of any document to show my second great-grandmother's relationship to this Gramlewicz family. There were indications that Elżbieta and Katarzyna were sisters, but I couldn't locate a baptismal record for Elżbieta. 

Katarzyna, however was another matter. I could find several documents mentioning her name—up to the 1887 record of her death in Żerków, Poland, which detailed the names of her parents. In a record on May 2, 1887, "Catharina" was noted to be the daughter of "Andreas" Gramlewicz and "Catharina" Zakrzewicz. Along with that detail, the record included mention of Katarzyna's husband, "Vincent" Cichocki, and her daughter "Agnes"—with Agnieszka's married surname, spelled following Polish phonics, as Hilszer for Hilscher.

With that connection between Katarzyna, mother of Agnieszka Cichocka Hilscher, and grandmother of Thomas and Antonina, the fact that among Katarzyna's descendants are several of my DNA matches points to the strong possibility that Katarzyna and Elżbieta were sisters. Of course, lacking the actual documentation indicating such a relationship suggests that they could also have been another close relationship, perhaps cousins. In my book, while it appears that I'm closer to the truth, it still means I simply need to keep looking further.

Document above: May 1887 death record for Catharina Cichocka courtesy of the State Archives in Kalisz, Poland, from the Civil Registry Office at Żerków, scan number 109.  

Letting Doubts Give Way to Documents

I've always had my doubts about Thomas. Of all the Hilscher children, Thomas the immigrant seemed out to give me grief in researching his whereabouts. Yes, I eventually could locate a record of his death in New York City, confirming an anglicized version of his parents' names, but I couldn't quite sketch out much more of his life story—until, that is, I took the detour of exploring the story of what I presumed was an unrelated Polish immigrant to New York City.

That immigrant, as we've since seen, was Stanislaus Samolewski. Despite having a surname given to snares of misspelling, Stanislaus was still someone whose life trajectory I could follow. And in following his path from Żerków, Prussia, to a new life in America, I somehow also learned a few things about Thomas Hilscher.

Among the few details I had already found about Thomas Hilscher, I had managed to locate a passenger record. Traveling across the Atlantic with several family members, Thomas had arrived in New York City aboard the steamship Amerika on April 7, 1912. Among the passengers listed on that page were Stanislawa, Thomas' wife, and four children ranging in age from fourteen years down to ten months.

For two of the children, a different surname had been entered, then smudged out. A flip of the page on this record showed more information on the continuation page: that the relationship between those two teenagers and Thomas indicated he was their stepfather. 

There was more to be found amidst the scrawled handwriting on those two pages of the passenger listing. In the brackets surrounding this family grouping, an encouraging note I found on the first page was that Thomas indicated his father's name. I'm sure my sign of relief was audible when I spotted the name Peter Hilscher, followed by the note that this father was from Żerków, despite the written claims of the family being from Germany, not Poland.

On the reverse of that passenger listing, however, were more details that could help me in piecing together the extended Hilscher family. For one thing, I learned that Thomas—although not anyone else in his party—had lived in the United States previously. In fact, he had been to New York twice: once in 1887, and again in 1893. At both times, he had traveled to Brooklyn, the part of New York City to which he was returning.

That second page also provided the information that the two older boys in his party were not his own children, but step-sons.

Most important, though, was the answer to the question concerning whether Thomas was "going to join a relative or friend" and, if so, what that person's name and address was. This was the family history gold for my quest to piece together the connection to my DNA matches: Thomas' answer was Stanislaus "Samolowski," noted in that passenger record to be his brother-in-law from 187 Bayard Place in Brooklyn.

In fact, something I only realized when I researched Stanislaus Samolewski's own records: Thomas Hilscher's brother-in-law was also returning home to Brooklyn on that same vessel. His own entry on the passenger list showed that he, too, had been to the United States before; in fact, by 1912, Stanislaus, traveling with his wife Antonina and two daughters on the Amerika, was returning to Brooklyn as a naturalized citizen.

Thanks to the lead provided by the scantily-documented family trees retrieved from several DNA matches,  a stranger from the past with a Polish surname led me not only to more details concerning his own family history, but secured a connection to a family I was researching. Until I spotted those DNA clues, I hadn't been able to document the connection between the two Hilscher siblings, Thomas and his sister Antonina, by 1912 the wife of Stanislaus Samolewski. That discovery was enough impetus to lead me back to the rest of the ThruLines lists to seek out more Hilscher—and, ultimately, Gramlewicz—connections.

The Long Slide Down to the Present

 

Disappearing relatives from the meager collection of digitized or transcribed records from 1800s Prussia all become the brick walls I wonder about. Did those children find an untimely death due to rampant infection or the ravages of wars? Or did they successfully make it to adulthood, marry, and raise families of their own, still living in Poland—but beyond the time frame of Polish records I can access online? Finding the rest of their stories in immigrant records in the United States refreshes my energy, and with discoveries like that,  only then can we move on to trace their line through subsequent generations.

Now that I've connected Antonina Hilscher, a descendant of a collateral line related to my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz, to her married identity in New York City, it's time to begin that long slide down the family tree to the present generation, adding and documenting each descendant in the family line. Why? I'm on the hunt to discover possible DNA cousins who can confirm my genetic connection to this collateral Gramlewicz line.

There's a reason I'm keen on finding such DNA matches. You see, Elżbieta's birth and parentage have caused me grief when it comes to documentation. I've had some hints that she was sister to Katarzyna Gramlewicz, but I haven't been satisfied with any solid record sources. Knowing that Katarzyna married Wincenty Cichocki and became the mother of several children, including daughter Agnieszka (Agnes in Latin church records), brightens the path leading me to this newfound connection with DNA matches descended from Stanislaus Samolewski.

You see, Agnieszka married Piotr Hilscher, and the path between those Samolewski DNA matches and I now becomes much clearer. Their daughter Antonina stands out as a bright Exhibit A, but that is not the only Hilscher child who migrated to America. There was one other child, named Thomas, who also opted to move to New York City. And following Thomas' own name through several documents led me to some handwritten notes scrawled on the back of passenger records which, had I not looked at the actual documents—and then flipped the page to look at the reverse side—I would have missed. 

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at that genealogical gold that gilded this story of the Gramlewicz DNA connections. 

Tree Building: Fast and Slow

 

When a key puzzle piece slips into place, that's when the work really begins. It's the wandering and searching beforehand that takes up time, but produces little in the way of tree building. Perhaps it's like investments—only we who are seeking our roots are looking for a different kind of growth.

Once the connection could be made between Stanislaus Samolewski's wife of the many monikers—Antonia, Antoinette, Antonina—and the woman by the latter given name plus the maiden name of Hilscher, I had found the right spot to add her into the family tree. And I also gained that sigh of relief that I could figure out the rest of Antonina Hilscher's personal history.

Researching Polish ancestors using limited resources that are actually available in Poland may be a great help, but it also can be frustrating when the latest of those transcriptions suddenly stops appearing in the database. For the Antonina Hilscher I found in Żerków records, born in 1868, although I could find many other children born to parents with that surname, I couldn't, at first, find Antonina—not at FamilySearch, not at my Polish resource, BaSIA, the Database of Archival Indexing System.

I had to think phonetically to retrieve any mention of Antonina Hilscher back in Poland. Despite baptismal records in the Catholic faith being recorded in Latin, the priest entering her 1868 record must have been thinking in Polish phonics, for her surname was entered with the spelling Hilczer. Easy, right? Of course a Polish person would pronounce that name as Hilscher. But anyone solely with knowledge of Latin—or even German or English—would have been stumped.

There she was, though, in the digitized records at FamilySearch: a daughter of Peter "Hilczer" and Agnes Cichocka. And it was that Cichocki connection that I knew would lead me back to the point of this month's research: the Gramlewicz family.

But not quite yet. We'll need to dig into more records before we can breathe that sign of relief. In the meantime, you can be sure I'm building out that Gramlewicz branch as fast as I can. Sometimes the work is glacially slow—just like the quest to find Antonina through the Samolewski DNA connections—but other times we race to keep ahead of the information avalanche. 

Antonina's Identity

 

Unraveling a family history mystery seldom takes a direct path; we may follow a wandering trail before we can even pick up the scent of a possible lead. In following the DNA hint of several descendants of Polish immigrant Stanislaus Samolewski to his adopted home in New York City, it turns out the connection to my DNA cousins might not be from him, after all, but from his wife.

Who this wife was, I couldn't tell at first. It was time to determine her true identity. Several signs pointed to someone named Antoinette, and other reports claimed her maiden name was one of those classical—and lengthy—Polish surnames. The main problem was that this Antoinette's profile was not fitting my family tree parameters at all. How, then, did we connect?

Fortunately, researching Stanislaus more closely despite realizing he wasn't the connecting link to my DNA matches helped uncover some useful clues. For some of them, though, I had to wander through records of a subsequent generation, and take care to read both the front and the back of pages of records scrawled in illegible handwriting. Such is the genealogical life, as we all have experienced.

If one of the first of those documents I had examined had been Stanislaus' own death certificate, it would have saved me some steps. Of course, having two different spellings for his surname meant looking for both name variants, plaguing me with concerns that I might be following the trail of an unrelated name twin. After all, New York City's population was big enough to guarantee a high probability of running into that snare.

Adding to the confusion, a passenger record seemed to indicate the "Samolowski" family's arrival in New York in 1912—until a closer look revealed this was not their first journey to America. That reassured me that finding a "Somelesky" family in the 1905 New York State census might not be far off from the family I was seeking, especially since daughter Zofia (or Sophia) showed in both records.

Besides mention of that daughter, I was still left with the variants of Stanislaus' wife: Antonia or Antoinette in census records, yet Antonina in the passenger record. Such an inconsistency as that continued through the other records I had found as I traced all signs of Stanislaus' existence in his new home. That's why finding the actual digitized version of his death record helped.

Just as much as Stanislaus' wife's name varied, reports of her maiden name presented the same puzzle. At the bottom of a page in the New York State Death Index, I found the entry for Antonina Samolewski's own passing: April 1, 1956—though following that discovery with the search for her obituary brought me once again to that alternate identity of Antoinette Samolewski.

That April 6 obituary in the Brooklyn Greenpoint Weekly Star, headlined "A. Samolewski," thankfully spelled out her name. Despite a deceptive start in that article with her name listed as "Antoinette," the obituary provided her maiden name. This was the key: Antonina, born in Poland, was a Hilscher.

Just to be sure, I located a second confirmation in a transcription of the Social Security Applications and Claims Index for one of the Samolewskis' daughters. For daughter Josephine Annette, born apparently just after her parents returned to New York from a trip back to Poland, her record provided the maiden name of her mother as Hilsher.

Discovering the name was Antonina Hilscher was good news. I already had a name like that in my own family tree. It was time to take a closer look and see if I could find records on the other side of this story to confirm her whereabouts back in Poland.

  

 

Seeking Signs of Sam

When several DNA matches serve up a sign that we might be connected through an ancestor named Samolowski, I'm game to chase that clue. After all, as DNA cousins go, the several I found through Ancestry's ThruLines listing for my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz didn't provide me much more information in their abbreviated family trees than that one Polish surname, Samolowski. If I wanted to learn more, I'd have to become my own sleuth.

I spent some time looking for documents in New York City, where this Polish immigrant apparently settled, and discovered a few promising signs. First was the helpful revelation that his name might actually be Stanislaus Samolewski, not Samolowski. Perhaps owing to transcriptions of sloppy handwriting, the incorrect lead was understandable, but searching for the correct spelling might be more effective than chasing a wrong lead. I was glad to have that updated input.

Locating mention of a likely death certificate in an index provided by Ancestry.com, I noted the certificate number, then turned to the New York City Municipal Archives website to enter that number in my search for the actual document for "Stanislaw" Samolewski's 1941 death. From that point, I gleaned the names of Stanislaus' parents.

The death certificate noted those names to be William and Josephine. No maiden name was given for Stanislaus' mother. And it was a sure bet that, given he was born in Poland, his father's given name wouldn't exactly be William.

If Stanislaus was the likely candidate to connect me with those several DNA matches, what was the chance that he came from the same place as my second great-grandmother? I decided to try my luck at searching through the Samolewski baptismal records at the Catholic Church my ancestors attended in Żerków. After all, I had been searching through that record set for my Gramlewicz collateral lines, and already had the link saved; all I had to do was change the surname in the search parameters and I'd be on a roll.

Sure enough, there were plenty of entries for members of the Samolewski family there. From the baptismal records, I spotted children of a couple whose names—in Latin, of course, since they were in church records—were entered as Guilhelmus and Josepha.

I'd buy that Guilhelmus as Latin for the William in an American death certificate, and maybe we could slide by with Josepha instead of Josephine. Added bonus: the records provided Josepha's maiden name as Sierseniewska, or sometimes Sierszeniewska. The down side was that none of the documented children of this couple was named Stanislaus.

Granted, this could still be the right couple, but that one child could have been baptized elsewhere—perhaps a firstborn who was returned to his mother's home church for the honors in the presence of his maternal grandparents.

I had been expecting to see that mother's maiden name as one from my own direct family line. Scratch that hope—but I did think of one more possibility: Stanislaus' own wife's maiden name. The trouble was, I couldn't be sure of even that. In many of the entries I found online for a man named Stanislaus Samolewski, the wife's maiden name was given as another very long, Polish-sounding surname. But going back to his own death record, his wife's name—indeed, the informant on his death certificate—was listed as Antonina, not the "Antoinette" I had seen in other records. 

Perhaps, I figured, my DNA connections could have come through Antonina's own line, since Stanislaus' mother's maiden name didn't seem a likely connection. My next goal was to determine Antonina's own identity. The search was now on for her own maiden name.

Finding Friends and Neighbors

 

Who would have thought that a puny segment of DNA could connect me with a very distant cousin whose ancestor lived, coincidentally, in the same village as my ancestors in Poland, six thousand miles away from my home. How we connect, I don't yet know. It's only a matter of thirty one centiMorgans binding us together in the family tree. How else we connect, I have no idea. Yet.

Face it: anyone living in that ancestral home of Żerków, a small Polish town where my Gramlewicz family lived, with a population in the 1800s of less than two thousand people, had a good possibility of being a relative. Distant, but some sort of family. Considering the closeness of those living in such a town, if I couldn't pinpoint the exact relationship, there would be a high likelihood that such a match's ancestor and mine would at least be friends or neighbors—and, as small villages sometimes go, eventually become family. It would just be a matter of figuring out how far back the connection happened—and if there were any records still in existence to confirm the link.

I found this DNA match while using the same approach I had mentioned yesterday. I started with the Clusters function and the ThruLines listings at Ancestry.com for my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, then examined the Shared Matches listed by Ancestry's ProTools, looking for other DNA matches who mutually connected me with those Gramlewicz descendants.

After those first four successes yesterday, I branched out to a more distant connection to my roots, whose name sounded far more American than Polish. For this iteration, the Shared Matches contained a vastly different set of names than I had seen with the last four I had processed. Other than one third cousin among these matches whom I had placed in my tree years ago, and one new one I had entered after yesterday's efforts, all the Shared Matches for this latest discovery were new names to me.

The fascinating detail about this match with the very American-sounding name was that several of the Shared Matches contained one or another form of the name "Sam" in their own moniker. I picked one of those "Sam" matches and repeated my process, looking at this next match's closest DNA relatives. I continued until I found enough details on a potential ancestral link to move to the next step of researching documents for more details.

The whole process led me to a man named Stanislaus Samolowski, an immigrant from Poland to New York City. Sailing from Hamburg with his wife and two daughters, the family arrived on the aptly-named ship Amerika in 1912. 

My next question, of course, was whether this man or his wife were related to my Gramlewicz family back in Żerków, that tiny town in Poland which a branch of my paternal family once called home. I did a cursory peek, enough to tell me that further research was warranted, so we'll take a closer look at the possibilities tomorrow. At this point, all I know is that the Samolowskis and Gramlewiczes were at least neighbors, possibly even friends in that same Polish town. If we go back far enough in a place that tiny, they might possibly turn out to be family, after all.

Testing the Theory

The theory seemed sound enough: pick a DNA match linked to the ancestor I'm researching this month, then filter the cousin's test results through the various tools available at each place where I've tested to build a more robust tree of that family's collateral lines. So I began with my DNA matches at Ancestry.com to test that theory. After all, I couldn't possibly consider myself the genealogy guinea pig if I didn't test my own theories.

At Ancestry, thanks to their ProTools, I not only had "Shared Matches" at my disposal, but I could test out their "Matches by Cluster" tool, as well. The clustering device was what I began with, selecting paternal results only, so that I could narrow down the results from my universe of 2,692 matches who are fourth cousins or closer.

Looking at the results, I noticed three separate clusters. One cluster obviously belonged to the paternal branch of my family which we had researched last month—my Wojtaś and Puchała lines—so I moved on to the next cluster in the graph. This second cluster contained only six matches, cousins whom I had already placed in my tree.

However, that step was only the first one in my plan. I then wanted to combine that resulting list with a second collection of matches, drawn from the ThruLines results for my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. This was a list which obviously would also contain the names from the first list I had composed from the cluster approach.

That combined list became my working list. From each of the DNA matches contained in that combined list, I then wanted to view the Shared Matches list for each of the matches in those results. Reviewing each name on the list of each Gramlewicz cousin, I'd then inquire about that person's Shared Matches, working my way from those whom I had already placed in my tree to those who still needed to be linked to the tree.

There were issues to watch out for in that process. The more distant the relationship between me and the specific match I was focusing on, the deeper into the gray areas of accuracy I'd wander. While I started out examining specifically my paternal matches, towards the bottom of each list, I'd find myself encountering matches which Ancestry had labeled maternal rather than the paternal lines I was seeking. Either I had found a match so distant as to coincidentally have been related to me on both sides of my family, or Ancestry's Parent 1/Parent 2 determinations don't always make the right call.

Then came the grunt work of going, specimen by specimen, through the results of this sorting process. Granted, this effort also relies on the luck of the draw. I do far better at identifying unknown matches and placing them in the correct spot in the family tree if another close family member had already tested. Clicking on a puzzling moniker and discovering that match was a child of another DNA match is an immense help. Finding a match whose closest other match is, say, a third cousin, could involve hours of searching before plugging that match into the tree.

So, how did I do so far? With an hour's work, I did manage to place four matches in their rightful spot in the paternal side of my family tree. While I had hoped for better results, that did gain me some ground. Now that I've gathered the names of potential Gramlewicz matches, I should gain a bit more speed as I continue to tackle this task tomorrow.

While connecting these DNA matches to the Gramlewicz side of my family tree doesn't necessarily help me find the answer to my original question for this month—finding Elżbieta Gramlewicz's parents and siblings—it may expose me to possible connections from descendants of her siblings. I've always found that, when paralyzed in my push back through the generations, collateral lines can often be my end run around that frustrating genealogical brick wall.

Taking a List, Checking it Twice

 

When stuck on a research project, it isn't a bad idea to go back and check all that work twice. I know, I know: it's a lot of drudgery. But so is getting stuck.

For my Twelve Most Wanted for each year, I take a whole month to focus on one specific ancestor, typically someone who presents me with a research problem, a.k.a. "brick wall." Sometimes, I end up repeating the same featured ancestor in subsequent years. After all, I've been doing this routine for years now, and sometimes a solid month of research still won't get me unstuck. So I revisit some of those challenging ancestors.

This month's challenge—reviewing my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz and her connection to a Gramlewicz woman who ended up in New York City in Elżbieta's son's household—involves some relatives I've researched before. When I finish out a month without achieving my research goal, I write up the details describing where I'm stuck, complete with suggestions about where to look next, as well as a review of what I've already accomplished.

When I covered a related family last winter, I made a note to return once again to do a thorough search in one particular record set I had found on FamilySearch.org. I saved not only the link to the specific collection, but the URL preserving my specific search terms for the Gramlewicz family in their home town of Żerków, Poland. I make it a practice to save such notes in an electronic file, so I can easily return to the spot where I left off last time.

That specific note from 2024 allowed me to zero in on a collection at FamilySearch.org labeled "Germany, Prussia, Posen, Catholic and Lutheran Church Records, 1430-1998." While the label may seem too broad for my specific purposes, setting up the parameters I needed allowed me to narrow down the search from 34,601 hits to entries for one surname only: Gramlewicz.

I had made a note last year telling me precisely which page to return to in the results, for the next time I visited this problem. And this year? I clicked through to that specific link and did exactly that.

Now that I've made my way through all Gramlewicz entries in that list of baptisms, I'll next check in that same record set for the surname that Elżbieta married into: Laskowski. From that point, I'll review all the collateral lines added to my family tree based on this search, and repeat the same process for each of those other surnames.

The main reason for reaching out to these collateral lines is that somewhere down through the generations there are descendants who decided to take a DNA test. And I suspect a good number of these matches don't even know they are related to a Gramlewicz ancestor. Thus, neither they nor I have any idea why we show up as DNA matches. By examining these collateral lines from the generations of my great-grandparents and their parents, I'm hoping to clarify the path that connects us. This week, we'll hopefully make some discoveries through that process.

Some Things Just Take Time

 

There are some times, when it comes to my biweekly checkup, that I just seem to race through the records, finding new relatives to add to the family tree at every turn. That usually means I'm working on my mother-in-law's intermarried Catholic families from Pennsylvania and Ohio, where including collateral lines in their tree means adding eight to twelve children per each relative family. This time, however, I'm uncovering the secret of my own father's roots, a process shrouded in records illegible—if they can be found at all. 

Looking at the numbers after the last two weeks of searching for records in a country which once was known as Prussia reminds me: some things just take time. And researching any branch of my father's family is going to bring me face to face with that dilemma.

For instance, over the past two weeks I've only been able to add fifty one new names to my family tree. Most of those are collateral lines descended from siblings of either this month's research focus—Elżbieta Gramlewicz—or my search at the end of last month for siblings of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś. That's a far cry from the hundred or so new names I could glean by focusing on my in-laws' missing relatives. This kind of search means cranking through many records that turn out to be false leads.

Still, that tree includes 40,617 researched individuals. I can't lose sight of that. It's progress, day by day, over years of effort that can add up to a substantial—and encouraging—amount. Looking solely at the numbers for a two-week effort will never tell the story over the long haul. Genealogy takes patience, and progress is simply something we can see only when we keep at the effort with diligence.

If there was somehow a magic potion I could pour over the archives which once held the records naming my father's ancestors, I'd love to see those disintegrated papers reappear for the benefit of all of us who have Polish roots. But it simply isn't going to happen. Diligent inquiry, alertness to new record sources, willingness to explore new resources in other countries which may hold those missing records of Polish ancestors, and the ability to draw inferences from what we can find is all that is left to us. Knowing this, it is sometimes surprising to see that I've been able to find even fifty relatives to add to my tree over that two week period.

There's Always Time for a Detour

 

Just blame that beguiling email notice from Ancestry.com. It's almost like they said, "Pssssst! Here's a hint about your brick wall ancestor." Only in this case, it was a message telling me that they found a hint about my own mother—quite a detour from the person I've been planning to research this month.

Well, what's there to learn about one's own mom, right? You think you know everything about the parents you grew up with. But no, this message was too beguiling. I clicked through to discover my mother's entry in the New York City Voter Registers from the years when the high school graduate had arrived fresh from Ohio to seek her fortune in the Big Apple. 

I knew about her dreams, after attending acting school, to break into stardom somehow—stage, radio, movies. I knew about the various venues where she had worked. But cashier at a shop at Rockefeller Center? That entry in the official record wasn't in the plans she had recited to me. Perhaps when she registered to vote, she had run into a dry spell. Everyone has to make a living somehow.

While it was fun to see which party was named in her voter registration, or map out the route from her apartment on Lexington Avenue to her job at Rockefeller Center, the bigger gift of receiving that emailed hint from Ancestry was knowing that I now had access to the actual digitized registers, not just a transcription of key fields skimmed off the pages. Since this month's focus is on one branch of my Polish ancestors, I could now search through that same record set for the entries of all my other New York relatives, both direct ancestors and all their collateral lines from 1915 through 1958. A lot of work, to be sure, but what a treat for my researching curiosity.

While this record set is a new discovery for me, the treat is in the full access to the record, versus being begrudgingly satisfied with the mere transcription. Exploring the full record set allows me to satisfy my need to be nosy about my ancestors, to suck out the marrow of their daily lives' minutiae to somehow build a clearer picture of what was important to them in their day's routine.

New York has always been a difficult place for me to research, mostly on account of the long-time inaccessibility of their records. Both New York State and the city itself have been a problem for many other researchers, as well. I've got plenty of company when, for instance, I once again have an opportunity to cheer the Freedom of Information Act victories at Reclaim the Records, such as the searchable New York State Death Index, now available free online.

Every new addition accessible for free online is a plus for all of us. In this case, a little detour through the records of New York State now available online is a personal treat for me, even though it is a detour from my research plans for this month. Even though my research is now generations removed from that point, there's always time to go back and add more details to the profiles I've long since created for the closest of my near relatives.

A Direct Route

 

Researching the generations of our family whose life spans reached across the chasm of two world wars presents a challenge. Especially for those who lived in Europe during those years, the documents detailing their key life passages were sometimes blown up in the ravages of war. As I'm trying to piece together the chain of events reaching from my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz to the descendants of her siblings, I'm now plunging into that gap in the paper trail.

There is, however, one direct route to provide assurances that I'm on the right track: DNA testing. Even that, though, can present roadblocks. For instance, if I use my results at Ancestry.com, all the ThruLines results for my Gramlewicz ancestors point me to American cousins whom I already know—or whom I can adequately research. Searching through the entire collection of my DNA matches for others whose tree includes that surname—Gramlewicz—points me to only four of those same familiar cousins.

However, if I turn my attention to my results at MyHeritage.com, I can search through all my DNA matches for trees containing the surname Gramlewicz and get some promising results—matches who themselves may still be living in Poland, or have immigrated to another European location. Yet it is a rare tree at that company which includes linked documentation. It's all a mixed bag.

Still, adhering to my two-step shopping model, I can use the best of two different resources—or more, if I add in the generous collection of digitized Polish documents made available at FamilySearch.org. From what I've observed from my matches at MyHeritage, it is generally their parents and grandparents whose records seem to be missing from the FamilySearch collections—that same era of time blasted from the paper trail of those war-torn localities where my ancestors once lived. And, as most people personally knew their own parents and grandparents, ascertaining our connection could be as simple as connecting through an online message.

Contacting such cousins might be easy enough, if they were matches who spoke the same language as I do. But the majority of these matches do not. This means finding a way to create brief messages in a language I don't speak, and with the necessary cultural sensitivities appropriate to uninvited conversations between strangers. Somehow, I sense that protocol is an invisible aspect to cross-cultural communication that I'll need to consider.

Before I leap, crossing that chasm is one which will take thought, not just for logistics, but in the hope of making useful connections. DNA may seem to automatically connect us with "cousins" but it takes much more to bridge that gap between strangers than simply assuming we are both family.

Two Stop Shopping

 

When it comes to Internet resources for researching Polish roots, the typical places Americans use—with the exception of FamilySearch.org—have few Polish resources. For those willing to brave the strange world of websites composed in foreign languages, there is one resource for genealogical information from what was once the Prussian region called Posen: a website called the Database of Archival Indexing System, or BaSIA for short.

I've been there before, and hopefully, that website, combined with the other ones I usually use, will help out once again in my two-stop-shopping approach to searching for ancestors from the small Polish village of Żerków.

BaSIA is volunteer operated, with a long list of contributors who serve as transcribers of records from the region. Though the website, based in Poland, includes an option to select the language in which to view the material, even using that feature only covers a few basic entries in the system.

Perhaps I've just moved into a stage in my research requiring reliance upon not just one website, but a tap dance through a combination of many resources. For me, one-stop genealogy is dead. While I've learned to spot the few key Polish words that are of most interest to genealogists, I've also gotten used to cutting and pasting phrases from their "English language" version of the website into Google translate to guide me.

For instance, take their statement on the website's landing page. There are a few headings in English, but the text below each readable header is obviously not in my native tongue. For instance, look at the subtitle, "About the Project." Understandable enough—until you begin reading the text below that headline. No, your eyes are not deceiving you; you don't need to get a stronger prescription for your reading glasses. The rest of the article is in Polish. But if I run that foreign language statement through a translation system online, here is what our Polish friends behind this useful website are telling us:

The BaSIA project, or 'Archival Indexing System Database', was created for a wide range of genealogists and researchers of the history of Greater Poland from the 18th to the 20th centuries (although it also contains older information). Through a user-friendly interface, it provides users with a database containing indexes compiled by volunteers, derived from materials stored in state and church archives, among others. It allows users to find the names of people they are searching for, links to scans, vital records, and other information that helps identify families, places, and basic facts from their history. The database is created using the ASIA application ('Automatic Archival Indexing System'), which primarily allows for user-friendly indexing of archival records and simultaneously acts as an intermediary in the process of indexing and making the results available online.

As they've expanded over the years at BaSIA, they have included links to the state archive in Poznań, so that you can click through on a specific transcribed record and be led to the actual document from which the transcription was drawn. Thus, I can pull up the actual death record for Elżbieta Gramlewicz Laskowska, drawn up following her April 1886 passing.

What is helpful in this specific case is that the record provides the names of several people related to Elzbieta's family, including the name of her father, given in the document as Andreas Gramlewicz. What I can't yet decipher is what follows the "und" after Andreas' name is entered. It's Elżbieta's mother's name, I'd presume—but what is it? Even the transcriber couldn't decipher the entry.

One for the Price of Two

 

When supposed relatives don't quite fit into the family tree the way we thought, we can sometimes find ourselves building out what turns out to be two trees. In the case of "Uncle" Anton Laskowski and his "niece" Annie Gramlewicz, I may have to do twice the amount of work, just to figure out how she was related to Anton's mother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. It may turn out that, for my answer, I'll get one tree—but for the price of two.

According to the 1900 census, Annie, who was born in New York, was living with her parents in Brooklyn. She remained in the New York City area until her immigrant parents, Mieczyslaw and Jozefa, decided it was best for them to return to their homeland. Annie may have reluctantly acquiesced to her parents' request that she go back to Poland with them, but it wasn't long until she came back to the place where she was born. The most likely reason? Shortly after appearing in the 1915 New York State census in Anton Laskowski's household, she was married.

Tracing Annie's family back in Poland meant finding the parents for Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz. Tentatively, I've found a likely couple: Lorenz Gramlewicz and Marianna Laskowska. But how Lorenz connects with Anton's mother and her Gramlewicz roots, I have yet to discover. Mieczyslaw's mother's Laskowski roots are also tantalizing, but I've yet to figure out how—or if—Marianna is related to Anton's own Laskowski line.

Looking at FamilySearch.org is often helpful—and often the only recourse for English-speaking researchers seeking Polish documents—because of the huge number of international records accessible through their website. However, for records located in what used to be the region known as Posen in Prussia, there is a Polish website which may come to my rescue. We'll take a look at that resource tomorrow.

When "Uncle" Isn't Entirely Accurate

 

I should have caught on to this detail sooner, but my mind was thinking too literally. When I heard the term "uncle," I took it to mean exactly that: a parent's brother, or perhaps even a parent's brother-in-law. Gone from my mind was any remembrance of the parade of visiting adults in my childhood home whom I dutifully called "uncle" and "aunt" upon my parents' prompting. It was simply a term of respect, not relationship.

If not through that childhood memory, I should have realized that detail through my immigrant acquaintances from various ethnicities, especially when I was introduced to their many "aunts" and "uncles." I once asked a friend from India just how many aunts she had—to which she laughed and explained that whether they were family or friends, if older than she was, they were greeted with that deferential term of respect.

And how many of my friends in California would speak of their "tia" or "tio" and never once give up the detail that there was no relationship? Terms like aunt or uncle, while taken literally by genealogists, can so often mean otherwise.

So when I encountered the 1915 New York State census entry for my great-grandfather Anton Laskowski, listing Annie Gramlewicz among his household residents, I assumed she was indeed what he said she was: his niece.

Anton Laskowski, after all, was my source for his own mother's name. His death certificate reported her maiden name to be Elżbieta Gramlewicz. It would stand to reason that Annie Gramlewicz, logically, would be the daughter of Anton's mother's brother.

How wrong I was. When I did, years later, receive a message from a great-grandniece of Annie, she provided the rest of the family's story, which I've recounted here years ago. From that online contact, I was able to build out Annie's tree for a few more generations—and in that process, though not finding the correct Gramlewicz connection, I did discover a marriage between Annie's direct line Gramlewicz ancestor and another Laskowski relative.

The plot thickens.

Do you suppose that Laskowski ancestor would neatly fit into Anton's patriline? Of course not—not, at least, as far as I've been able to determine through limited access to Polish documentation. In the end—meaning the last time I worked on this puzzle—I set up Annie's side of the Gramlewicz family as a floating branch in my tree, still waiting to be connected to the rest of my Polish ancestry.

Just exactly how Annie could call Anton her uncle is my guiding motivation for selecting the Gramlewicz family as the focus of this month's Twelve Most Wanted. I want to discover more about Elżbieta's parents and siblings, yes, but this chase may go for generations beyond that, depending on just what prompted Anton to call Annie his niece.

. . . And Elżbieta Makes Twelve

 

Welcome to December, the last month of the year, filled with holidays and celebrations. In my case, I hope to celebrate some discoveries about my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, her siblings and parents.

I named Elżbieta the last of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025. As I outlined in my research plans nearly a year ago, I hope to learn more about not only Elżbieta herself, but her siblings and parents, as well.

Before we begin this month's search, though, here's an overview of what I've already uncovered about this Polish ancestor. Like many family history researchers, I first learned of Elżbieta's name courtesy of the 1935 New York City death certificate of her son, Antoni Laskowski.

Though I had sent for my immigrant great-grandfather's death certificate the old "SASE" way years ago (if you know, you know), it wasn't until recently that I've been able to retrieve further family information through online means, both in New York City and back in Poland, the land Elżbieta never left. Thanks to FamilySearch.org, I can now view her January 22, 1844, marriage record to Mateusz Laskowski in their home parish in Żerków. 

According to that Żerków marriage record, Elżbieta was noted to be twenty four years of age, putting her estimated year of birth at 1820. However, I have yet to locate any baptismal or birth records for her. The only other detail I've been able to find is courtesy of one website in Poland, which then pointed me to online records from a Polish archive, confirming Elżbieta's 1886 death in the same town where she was married.

To find Elżbieta's siblings will mean locating that birth or baptismal confirmation to first uncover the names of her parents. These details will help me to confirm a number of DNA matches, both at Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com especially, due to the latter's high number of customers from European countries. That puts this as job number one for this coming week, but while I'm looking for further details on this Gramlewicz family behind the scenes, we do need to talk about the one connection I had made with this family, back in New York City, the same place where Elżbieta's name first appeared during my earliest search for her identity.