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.