Tree Building: Fast and Slow

 

When a key puzzle piece slips into place, that's when the work really begins. It's the wandering and searching beforehand that takes up time, but produces little in the way of tree building. Perhaps it's like investments—only we who are seeking our roots are looking for a different kind of growth.

Once the connection could be made between Stanislaus Samolewski's wife of the many monikers—Antonia, Antoinette, Antonina—and the woman by the latter given name plus the maiden name of Hilscher, I had found the right spot to add her into the family tree. And I also gained that sigh of relief that I could figure out the rest of Antonina Hilscher's personal history.

Researching Polish ancestors using limited resources that are actually available in Poland may be a great help, but it also can be frustrating when the latest of those transcriptions suddenly stops appearing in the database. For the Antonina Hilscher I found in Żerków records, born in 1868, although I could find many other children born to parents with that surname, I couldn't, at first, find Antonina—not at FamilySearch, not at my Polish resource, BaSIA, the Database of Archival Indexing System.

I had to think phonetically to retrieve any mention of Antonina Hilscher back in Poland. Despite baptismal records in the Catholic faith being recorded in Latin, the priest entering her 1868 record must have been thinking in Polish phonics, for her surname was entered with the spelling Hilczer. Easy, right? Of course a Polish person would pronounce that name as Hilscher. But anyone solely with knowledge of Latin—or even German or English—would have been stumped.

There she was, though, in the digitized records at FamilySearch: a daughter of Peter "Hilczer" and Agnes Cichocka. And it was that Cichocki connection that I knew would lead me back to the point of this month's research: the Gramlewicz family.

But not quite yet. We'll need to dig into more records before we can breathe that sign of relief. In the meantime, you can be sure I'm building out that Gramlewicz branch as fast as I can. Sometimes the work is glacially slow—just like the quest to find Antonina through the Samolewski DNA connections—but other times we race to keep ahead of the information avalanche.