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 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.