Seeking Signs of Sam

When several DNA matches serve up a sign that we might be connected through an ancestor named Samolowski, I'm game to chase that clue. After all, as DNA cousins go, the several I found through Ancestry's ThruLines listing for my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz didn't provide me much more information in their abbreviated family trees than that one Polish surname, Samolowski. If I wanted to learn more, I'd have to become my own sleuth.

I spent some time looking for documents in New York City, where this Polish immigrant apparently settled, and discovered a few promising signs. First was the helpful revelation that his name might actually be Stanislaus Samolewski, not Samolowski. Perhaps owing to transcriptions of sloppy handwriting, the incorrect lead was understandable, but searching for the correct spelling might be more effective than chasing a wrong lead. I was glad to have that updated input.

Locating mention of a likely death certificate in an index provided by Ancestry.com, I noted the certificate number, then turned to the New York City Municipal Archives website to enter that number in my search for the actual document for "Stanislaw" Samolewski's 1941 death. From that point, I gleaned the names of Stanislaus' parents.

The death certificate noted those names to be William and Josephine. No maiden name was given for Stanislaus' mother. And it was a sure bet that, given he was born in Poland, his father's given name wouldn't exactly be William.

If Stanislaus was the likely candidate to connect me with those several DNA matches, what was the chance that he came from the same place as my second great-grandmother? I decided to try my luck at searching through the Samolewski baptismal records at the Catholic Church my ancestors attended in Żerków. After all, I had been searching through that record set for my Gramlewicz collateral lines, and already had the link saved; all I had to do was change the surname in the search parameters and I'd be on a roll.

Sure enough, there were plenty of entries for members of the Samolewski family there. From the baptismal records, I spotted children of a couple whose names—in Latin, of course, since they were in church records—were entered as Guilhelmus and Josepha.

I'd buy that Guilhelmus as Latin for the William in an American death certificate, and maybe we could slide by with Josepha instead of Josephine. Added bonus: the records provided Josepha's maiden name as Sierseniewska, or sometimes Sierszeniewska. The down side was that none of the documented children of this couple was named Stanislaus.

Granted, this could still be the right couple, but that one child could have been baptized elsewhere—perhaps a firstborn who was returned to his mother's home church for the honors in the presence of his maternal grandparents.

I had been expecting to see that mother's maiden name as one from my own direct family line. Scratch that hope—but I did think of one more possibility: Stanislaus' own wife's maiden name. The trouble was, I couldn't be sure of even that. In many of the entries I found online for a man named Stanislaus Samolewski, the wife's maiden name was given as another very long, Polish-sounding surname. But going back to his own death record, his wife's name—indeed, the informant on his death certificate—was listed as Antonina, not the "Antoinette" I had seen in other records. 

Perhaps, I figured, my DNA connections could have come through Antonina's own line, since Stanislaus' mother's maiden name didn't seem a likely connection. My next goal was to determine Antonina's own identity. The search was now on for her own maiden name.