The Long Slide Down to the Present

 

Disappearing relatives from the meager collection of digitized or transcribed records from 1800s Prussia all become the brick walls I wonder about. Did those children find an untimely death due to rampant infection or the ravages of wars? Or did they successfully make it to adulthood, marry, and raise families of their own, still living in Poland—but beyond the time frame of Polish records I can access online? Finding the rest of their stories in immigrant records in the United States refreshes my energy, and with discoveries like that,  only then can we move on to trace their line through subsequent generations.

Now that I've connected Antonina Hilscher, a descendant of a collateral line related to my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz, to her married identity in New York City, it's time to begin that long slide down the family tree to the present generation, adding and documenting each descendant in the family line. Why? I'm on the hunt to discover possible DNA cousins who can confirm my genetic connection to this collateral Gramlewicz line.

There's a reason I'm keen on finding such DNA matches. You see, Elżbieta's birth and parentage have caused me grief when it comes to documentation. I've had some hints that she was sister to Katarzyna Gramlewicz, but I haven't been satisfied with any solid record sources. Knowing that Katarzyna married Wincenty Cichocki and became the mother of several children, including daughter Agnieszka (Agnes in Latin church records), brightens the path leading me to this newfound connection with DNA matches descended from Stanislaus Samolewski.

You see, Agnieszka married Piotr Hilscher, and the path between those Samolewski DNA matches and I now becomes much clearer. Their daughter Antonina stands out as a bright Exhibit A, but that is not the only Hilscher child who migrated to America. There was one other child, named Thomas, who also opted to move to New York City. And following Thomas' own name through several documents led me to some handwritten notes scrawled on the back of passenger records which, had I not looked at the actual documents—and then flipped the page to look at the reverse side—I would have missed. 

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at that genealogical gold that gilded this story of the Gramlewicz DNA connections.