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.