You Can't Have Just One

 

I learned a long time ago that when it comes to documenting family relationships, you can't rely on just one document to confirm ancestral connections. In looking at the Prussian death record for Catharina Cichocki, I was reminded of how many times I've seen mistaken reports of the deceased person's parents' names—especially that of the mother's maiden name. When it comes to confirming relationships through documentation, it helps to look twice.

Finding Catharina's 1887 death record, now held at the Polish archival collection at Żerków (see scan number nine), I saw that her maiden name was Gramlewicz, and that her father's name was Andreas Gramlewicz. After providing that information, the record stated that her mother was also named Catharina, with the surname Zakrzewicz.

Wait, I thought: didn't I have records with differing assertions for that mother's maiden name? Perhaps my second great-grandmother Elżbieta and Katarzyna were not full siblings, after all. I went back to the other record I had for the supposed sisters' parents: the 1810 marriage record for Andreas and Catharina. Sure enough, there in that record, the bride's maiden name was given as Nowicka. Not Zakrzewicz. 

Of course, I thought, perhaps Andreas had been married twice. Since daughter Catharina was born about ten years before Elżbieta, perhaps Catharina's mother had subsequently died and Andreas married a second Catharina, surnamed Zakrzewicz. It was a possible scenario.

And yet, when I looked for documents on another Gramlewicz sibling—Apolonia, baptized in 1820—her record, too, indicated the mother's name as Catharina "de Nowickie." (Ironically, Apolonia's godfather was listed as a Zakrzewicz, and years later, she ended up marrying someone else with that surname, Paweł Zakrzewicz.)

Checking for younger brother Piotr Paweł, his baptismal record, despite using the Polish form of the participants' names, also noted his mother to be Katarzyna Nowicka.

Looking at Elżbieta's own death record didn't help matters. While I claim no expertise in reading old German handwriting, I can clearly see that her father was listed as Andreas Gramlewicz. Included in that record was mention of Elżbieta's husband, listed as "Matheus" Laskowski, and her son, Anton. No mention that I can find in the verbiage indicates the identity of her mother.

From all this, we can see that Elżbieta's older and younger siblings were mentioned in records identifying their mother as Catharina or Katarzyna Nowicka—the same woman identified in Andreas' own marriage record. Perhaps I'll never learn why Elżbieta's own death record doesn't appear to include mention of her mother's maiden name—at least, as best I can tell with limited knowledge of old German script.

Perhaps, considering the DNA matches I've found who descended from Elżbieta's presumed sister Katarzyna, it would help to examine the expected range of centiMorgans for a full-parent relationship versus a half-sibling situation. It's probably time to go looking for other Gramlewicz descendants in my DNA matches again.