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."
It is fascinating how the DNA matches lead us in unexpected directions sometimes.
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