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.
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