I've always had my doubts about Thomas. Of all the Hilscher children, Thomas the immigrant seemed out to give me grief in researching his whereabouts. Yes, I eventually could locate a record of his death in New York City, confirming an anglicized version of his parents' names, but I couldn't quite sketch out much more of his life story—until, that is, I took the detour of exploring the story of what I presumed was an unrelated Polish immigrant to New York City.
That immigrant, as we've since seen, was Stanislaus Samolewski. Despite having a surname given to snares of misspelling, Stanislaus was still someone whose life trajectory I could follow. And in following his path from Żerków, Prussia, to a new life in America, I somehow also learned a few things about Thomas Hilscher.
Among the few details I had already found about Thomas Hilscher, I had managed to locate a passenger record. Traveling across the Atlantic with several family members, Thomas had arrived in New York City aboard the steamship Amerika on April 7, 1912. Among the passengers listed on that page were Stanislawa, Thomas' wife, and four children ranging in age from fourteen years down to ten months.
For two of the children, a different surname had been entered, then smudged out. A flip of the page on this record showed more information on the continuation page: that the relationship between those two teenagers and Thomas indicated he was their stepfather.
There was more to be found amidst the scrawled handwriting on those two pages of the passenger listing. In the brackets surrounding this family grouping, an encouraging note I found on the first page was that Thomas indicated his father's name. I'm sure my sign of relief was audible when I spotted the name Peter Hilscher, followed by the note that this father was from Żerków, despite the written claims of the family being from Germany, not Poland.
On the reverse of that passenger listing, however, were more details that could help me in piecing together the extended Hilscher family. For one thing, I learned that Thomas—although not anyone else in his party—had lived in the United States previously. In fact, he had been to New York twice: once in 1887, and again in 1893. At both times, he had traveled to Brooklyn, the part of New York City to which he was returning.
That second page also provided the information that the two older boys in his party were not his own children, but step-sons.
Most important, though, was the answer to the question concerning whether Thomas was "going to join a relative or friend" and, if so, what that person's name and address was. This was the family history gold for my quest to piece together the connection to my DNA matches: Thomas' answer was Stanislaus "Samolowski," noted in that passenger record to be his brother-in-law from 187 Bayard Place in Brooklyn.
In fact, something I only realized when I researched Stanislaus Samolewski's own records: Thomas Hilscher's brother-in-law was also returning home to Brooklyn on that same vessel. His own entry on the passenger list showed that he, too, had been to the United States before; in fact, by 1912, Stanislaus, traveling with his wife Antonina and two daughters on the Amerika, was returning to Brooklyn as a naturalized citizen.
Thanks to the lead provided by the scantily-documented family trees retrieved from several DNA matches, a stranger from the past with a Polish surname led me not only to more details concerning his own family history, but secured a connection to a family I was researching. Until I spotted those DNA clues, I hadn't been able to document the connection between the two Hilscher siblings, Thomas and his sister Antonina, by 1912 the wife of Stanislaus Samolewski. That discovery was enough impetus to lead me back to the rest of the ThruLines lists to seek out more Hilscher—and, ultimately, Gramlewicz—connections.
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