Drilling Deeper into Origins

 

So a while back, I discovered that my paternal grandfather's long-kept secret was that he was born Polish. No, no: now that I'm researching the details, I discover that the family actually came from Pomerania. I hop on over to the online database of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) and learn the names of the actual villages where family members lived, back in the 1800s, and where they got married and had their children baptized. I look up those details on a map, then find further information on those spots, and learn that they were considered to be part of an ethnic group known as Kocievians.

So which way was it? Am I Polish? Or Pomeranian? Or Kocievian? I'm still looking for that elusive family history identity, but the deeper I drill into those family origins, the more the answer recedes beyond my grasp.

I had thought it an awe-inspiring stroke of good luck when I discovered a census enumerator in 1920 had entered verbatim—and a little bit phonetically—the actual answer of my grandfather's sister, Rose Kober, regarding her history. She had originally replied "Schwartzwald" to the question of where she was born, but a supervisor struck out her answer and corrected it with "Ger" for Germany. That was the discovery which led to my search for the real Schwarzwald she had indicated, a place in what is now part of Poland.

Now that I know that Rose's native Schwarzwald is actually known in Poland as Czarnylas, I've searched for some basic information on that location. Other than the usual details we find about foreign countries—the size of the town, where it is on a map, or what the weather is like there—I noticed another fact: Czarnylas is part of an extensive region bordering the Baltic Sea, known as Pomerania.

Beyond even that, though, I found out that the eastern portion of Pomerania, historically called Pomerelia, contains what is identified as four subregions. Czarnylas, it turns out, is located within what is known as an ethnocultural region called Kociewie. And the indigenous people group known to inhabit that region? Perhaps you guessed it: Kocievians.

As I followed the church records of the various collateral lines of my Zegarski and Wojtaś paternal ancestry, I moved from Czarnylas to Pączewo to Wolental and beyond. The one unifying factor of all these villages? Did you guess it? They are all part of that ethnocultural region of Kociewie.

So am I Polish? Or Pomeranian? Or Kocievian? These are questions I would never have known to ask, let alone answer, if I hadn't had the curiosity to follow the insatiable calling to that family history rabbit trail.

Curious to see what might be reflected in the most recent DNA updates at Ancestry and MyHeritage, I went looking to see their changes. After all, the latest updates are supposed to zero in on some specific ethnic regions. We'll take a look at these tomorrow.

Finding "My People," Twenty-first Century Style

 

There's always something about finding those people with whom your words, actions, and even preferences just resonate. Some friends of mine used to joke about that as finding "my people." In the case of my recent—and feverish—chase to learn more about my Polish ancestry, I've since discovered that "Polish" might not necessarily be "my people" after all. Digging even deeper into the history of a place as foreign to me as Poland, I've learned that I might not exactly be Polish, after all. That's what we learn when we dig deeper into the concept of ethnicity.

In my case, I had first learned that my paternal roots came from a region known as Pomerania, a place with its own identity and certainly with its own history. From that point, however, I've since discovered that there may have been other separate and distinct people groups in that same region, with their own history, language, and culture.

With genealogy businesses like Ancestry and MyHeritage recently releasing updated versions of their DNA ethnicity updates, I was curious to see whether either of those companies had sniffed out the differences in these population groups from the northern portion of what is now the country of Poland. After all, using DNA testing to examine our ethnic heritage is a technique specific to the twenty first century. I wanted to see whether the refining of those reference populations might reveal anything to confirm what I was finding in the historical record for the area.

This week, as I work my way behind the scenes, building the family trees for descendants of my ancestors' collateral lines, we'll talk about those historic ethnic groups and examine the likelihood that the migrations of centuries past may have been reflected in the tale told today by DNA test results. 

Connectivity

 

If there's one thing necessary for genealogical success, it's connectivity. By that, I don't just mean the technological implications of access to online networks, but also those interpersonal connections which inspire our curiosity, power our continued determination to discover, and help bring our ancestors' stories to life. The pursuit of our family's history, after all, could never be the same without the impetus of sharing.

Reviewing my long trail of unsuccessful attempts to discover my Polish roots, this past week has reminded me of all my fellow researchers who breathed hope into what I felt was my Sisyphean burden. In case you missed it, it's been a long trail of failed attempts—as in decades long. Still, there's been a lot of material collected, not just details about ancestors (of which I still am sorely lacking) but helpful tips, guidance, articles, and resources shared over decades. Connectivity.

That connectivity, at first, came in the form of old online forums. Remember GenForum? How about the online RootsWeb Review with Myra Vanderpool Gormley? Or—now, this is stretching a ways back—the genealogy forums on Prodigy? Though those resources have gone the way of the floppy disc dinosaurs, at one point I had hoped that flourishing interest in genealogy blogging might become a newer way for researchers to connect.

At one point it was, but the heyday of blogging, in general, has waned. Except maybe for one exception, which I've lately been considering. And thanks to a tip from Canadian blogger Gail Dever in yesterday's "This week's crème de la crème" selections, I instantly hopped on over to Australian Lex Knowlton's "Knext Gen Genealogy" and her overview of the possibilities for "meaningful genealogical connections" through Substack.

Substack has been around long enough for several of the writers I follow—both in genealogy and in other fields—to have established their own niche there. It is, as Lex put it, a resource for cultivating "genuine community." Connectivity: between thinkers, writers, researchers, experimenters, and even seekers of family connections.

True, as Lex mentioned, "finding niche communities can still be hard." But we as genealogists can be—and have been—a force for redirection. We can be the ones who, by gathering together, create the very space we long to find for that necessary connectivity, whether on those now-so-nineties genealogy forums, or on social media, or by creating the next space for us to collectively gather online.

Sucking Story out of Statistics

 

The trouble with researching these formerly nameless Polish ancestors from generations past in my father's history is that they come to me devoid of any family stories. Sure, these are people who had names which went with the routine BMD dates we genealogists tend to harvest, but who were they, really?

In contrast, when I research my maternal lines, a great many of them came not only with statistical data but with stories—those precious stories passed down from generation to generation which, when it was my turn to hear them, convinced me to take my place in that long line of family historians who shared.

Sharing story was perhaps not part of the Polish tradition—not, at least, for those poverty-stricken immigrants fleeing the harsh living conditions of their homeland. I remember when I first started delving into genealogy online—in those early days of "listservs" and forums—I ran across a discussion on why those researching their Polish roots couldn't find story. The consensus, back then, was that the Polish were so desperate just to keep themselves alive that they didn't have the luxury of time to regale each other with stories of those who had gone on before them. Hard work can suck the life out of even the living.

So now I—and those countless others descended from Polish immigrants—have been left with not much more than copies of the church and government documents meant to keep count of the souls and taxpaying bodies of their charges. It is quite impossible to accurately extrapolate sparks of life from those dull, dry numbers. And, truth be told, those numbers often represented lifespans which were painfully brief, telling a story of its own, full of sickness, suffering, and sorrow.

What were these people like? I'm tempted, much like Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has done, to harness Artificial Intelligence to research the backstory of the time frames and territories where my Wojtaś and Zegarski ancestors once existed. While that might lend me some understanding of just how bad life might have been for my ancestors, I doubt it could confirm details about individual personality quirks or, say, escapades of my ancestors in their youth. But it might be worth the try. Whatever such an experiment might yield, it would certainly offer some background with which to understand these people and their choices which led them here to a life in a new land.

Tap Dancing Between Three Resources

 

No matter how fascinating it might seem to pursue those mystery family roots into antiquity, the tasks involved can often turn tedious. Right now, it may seem glamorous to think I'm tap dancing through the story of my family's past, but bouncing between three separate resources, double and triple checking each step, can become monotonous.

Starting with my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś, I'm mapping out the lines of descent for her siblings. The goal is to build a tree with collateral lines of descent, specifically to connect the dots between my DNA matches and their ancestral connection to my family. Working with Polish roots, however, means seeking records from sources other than those most familiar to North American researchers. It becomes a case of a little bit here, a little bit there. At least I'm happy about the progress, though it's not much to write home about; the going is going slowly.

As if to urge me on, among the messages in my inbox today was news that MyHeritage has just completed a major update to their Theory of Family Relativity. For international DNA matches, my best resource for Polish cousins has been MyHeritage, so I jumped over there to look for any promising new leads.

In fact, my tree at MyHeritage is so focused on those Polish lines that I only posted the paternal branch of my family tree on that website. Imagine my surprise, then, to see that most of my Theory updates were for people connecting to my mother's side of the family. There were only a few new Polish DNA matches to review, each of them seemingly standing on the opposite side of a gigantic document chasm separating us. I have yet to find many trees at MyHeritage which contain supporting documentation.

Granted, it's hard to find such documentation. Just having to tap dance between record sources to piece together this family's story has demonstrated that. I'm snagging record transcriptions from FamilySearch and from the Pomeranian Genealogical Association in Poland to piece together the picture of how those Wojtaś collateral lines fared over the generations—and even then, at some point in the early 1900s, I know even those sources will dry up.

Just in case, though, I reviewed the lines I've already put in place in my tree at MyHeritage, adding this week's updates from newly-discovered descendants from those collateral lines. Hopefully at some point, those new entries will match up with others whose trees are posted at MyHeritage. In fact, I'm already getting email alerts that MyHeritage has made some connections for me, information from researchers whom I can follow as trailblazers along this family history path in that new-to-me Polish territory.

A Road Map for the Family Tree

 

As I had discovered last summer when puzzling over the many name twins in my father-in-law's Irish family tree, a road map is an indispensable tool when mapping out the family tree. I remember my delight when I pulled up Google Maps and discovered that the program could pinpoint a specific Irish townland I was seeking. Now that I'm struggling over my paternal grandfather's secret roots in Poland, I'm seeing how that same tool helps guide the way in this new-to-me research region.

Currently, I'm straddling two different records resources: transcriptions of the digitized Polish records at FamilySearch and transcriptions at the database of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG). When I find what appears to be the right record for someone in the collateral lines of my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś, I then enter that information, including a link back to the verifying online document, in each of the trees I'm updating.

Along the way in this process, I encounter discrepancies. In a long line of baptismal records for grandchildren of Marianna's sister Franciszka Wojtaś, for instance, I find one child born to Franciszka's namesake daughter and her husband Piotr Gracz, yet the next child born into the Gracz household has a mother named Barbara. What? Did Franciszka die before that point? But no, moving on to the baptismal record of Piotr's next child, lo and behold, Franciszka has been resurrected to her position as mother in the Gracz family once again. Chalk that up to clerical error.

Some discrepancies, however, keep me wondering. The main one is finding a couple by the same name, presenting their child for baptism in a different—and unexpected—Catholic parish than the one where the family's older children had been baptized. Could there be another couple known by the exact same names? Name twins from neighboring towns?

Running into that problem more than once, I decided to return to the process I had used when researching Ireland: pull up Google Maps and see how close the two locations might be. Only this time, there was a twist: baptismal records gave the then-current location of the town, based on Prussian names for those Polish villages. In today's records, those names are different. Nevertheless, a little exploration through online searches has pointed me in the right direction for each of the village names I needed to convert from their old Prussian identities.

It is so easy to fall into the mindset that, up until our "modern" times, people stayed relatively stationary in the one village where their parents grew up, and their parents lived before them. We forget that these were the same intrepid people who birthed emigrants willing to board creaky wooden ships to sail an ocean to a foreign land where no one spoke their language. Even with their limited methods of modality two centuries ago, moving to the next village couldn't be all that hard. 

Just to be sure though, pulling up a map to measure distances between two of those quaint Polish villages helps ease my mind that perhaps with those eight to ten baptismal records from two or three different villages, I'm still following the trail of the same couple. And that that couple is indeed part of my family line, and not someone else's family. 

Advertising for Connections

 

The grunt work has begun: scouring documents and transcriptions of records at both FamilySearch.org and the database of PTG, the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. My end goal is to see how far I can go in building a diagram of all the descendants of my third great-grandparents, Marcin Wojtaś and Anna Szczygielska, now that I've actually discovered their identity. While I've already worked on my own direct line, that of their daughter Marianna, my next goal is to build the line for Marianna's sister Franciszka.

Franciszka was born in Poland about 1817, and as far as I can tell, she remained there for the rest of her life. On October 1, 1838, she became the wife of Andrzej Chmielecki in a church ceremony held in her home parish of Pączewo in the region of Pomerania.

If it weren't for the transcriptions of Pomeranian records at PTG, I doubt I would have found further information to confirm Franciszka's children. I learned through those transcriptions that the Chmielecki family eventually included five sons and six daughters. Born to them in the married couple's home parish of Czarnylas were: Marianna, Andrzej, Franciszka, Paulina, Józefina, Anastasia, Jan, Józef, Anna, Franciszek, and Izydor.

While the next genealogical step for me will be to find a way to locate actual documentation for each of those children, I also have a DNA goal to keep in mind: I want to find cousins. Thus, it is key for me to get the word out there that these people are somehow related to my Wojtaś line. How do I do that? Simple: I advertise for connections by placing those newly-discovered collateral relatives in all the public-facing family trees I have built online.

Thus begins another behind-the-scenes project of plugging in these names to multiple trees. First, on FamilySearch, to find possible documentation, allowing me to verify the names as I add them to my part of the universal tree there. From that point, adding those same document links to my notes for each individual on my tree at Ancestry.com, and adding those names and dates to my tree at MyHeritage where, hopefully, a Polish cousin and I might bump into each other digitally. And finally, I'll make a note of each connection on my mere stub of a tree at WikiTree.

Not that I've been a paragon of virtue in building those other trees; my main reason to spread myself so thin is simply to get the word out. Yes, I'm shamelessly shouting from the rooftops my one question, "Are you my Polish cousin?" If I can't travel to Poland—and face it, even if I could, who would understand this English-speaking genealogist?—advertising for connections on the digital spaces where family history fans gather will be my next option. Though it involves a tedious process in preparation, it's certainly worth the try.  

Finding the Ones who Didn't Emigrate

 

Finding DNA matches who still live in Poland puts a researcher in a tantalizing place. I want to connect with those Polish cousins from Pomerania, but how? Language barriers are a first consideration, though developments in technology may someday diminish that challenge. But the main dilemma I have right now is finding records to connect those current cousins with their ancestral past and document the path of the relationship.

In the past, I was fortunate to connect with one such Polish cousin, though it was someone on a different side of the family than the Wojtaś line I'm working on this month. Actually, this cousin had found me online and reached out to connect. Fortunately for me, this woman was able to write in English, or communication would have been next to impossible. Though I never had the chance to copy actual documents from the Polish side of our connection, I was able to send her copies of documents in New York from the branch of her family who had emigrated.

Genealogical research has advanced so much since that point—can you believe that connection was back at the turn of the century, which makes that sound so ancient—but access to more recent documentation from Poland is still beyond my reach. However, it is possible to find records from the mid-1800s, and transcriptions, while less dependable, can be found for Polish relatives up through the earliest years of the 1900s.

Right now, I'm focusing on the other children of my third great-grandparents, Marcin and Anna Wojtaś. While Marianna, my second great-grandmother, and her sister Anna had children who emigrated and ultimately raised families in the United States, they had one other sibling of whom I know very little.

That sister was known as Franciszka Wojtaś. Based on her 1838 marriage record, Franciszka was likely born in 1817, two years later than her sister Marianna. From the October first marriage ceremony, I can see from the record that Franciszka was wed to Andrzej Chmielecki, a man named after his own father. Seeing his mother's name—given as Marianna Zigorska—I wonder whether this was an unintentional spelling variant on the Zegarski line which eventually made its appearance in the extended Wojtaś family  with the marriage of Franciszka's sister Marianna.

As I work my way through church records in the region of the Ponschau parish (now Pączewo) where Franciszka was married, I'm beginning to find baptismal records of her children. These I'll enter into the Wojtaś branch of my family tree, and follow those lines as far as I can, to see whether those family members ended up emigrating, or remaining in their homeland. Eventually, this will point up possible family lines which did not die out, but may be represented among the DNA matches I've found on MyHeritage now.

Bit by bit, we'll piece this story of our DNA cousins together, one document at a time.

Finding the Family Connections

 

DNA testing can point us back to the ancestral place where we had previously failed to locate records and confirm the connections we cannot yet see. Better yet—at least in my experience—DNA testing can lead us to see the family connections we previously had no idea even existed. That certainly was the case with my paternal grandfather's roots.

Last week, I mentioned finding the baptismal record for Marianna Wojtaś, my second great-grandmother. Of course, that was a name I would never have known if it weren't for clustering DNA matches at MyHeritage, where I apparently have a good number of Polish cousins. But it wasn't even the Polish cousins who had shown up in that AutoClusters readout I had tried, now so many years ago; at first it was the cousins from Milwaukee who at first had had me stumped, but then led me to the truth about my grandfather's secret origin.

Now, moving forward, I've placed most all of those DNA cousins in their proper place in my family tree, but reconstructing the roots of these collateral lines still challenges me. For one reason, I can look at records from one online resource, and discover that there is no comparable document listed at another online resource for the same geographic area.

Having found the baptismal record for Marianna Wojtaś, I learned she was likely born sometime in June of 1815. After all, with the prevalence of infant deaths during that era, parents didn't dally in getting their children baptized. Marianna's record showed the sacrament was performed on June 29 in a parish then called Ponschau, but now known as Pączewo in Poland. The church record also noted the Wojtaś family's home to be located in nearby Wolental.

However, when I went to the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) to cross-check the records of Marianna's possible siblings, while I could find other children of Martin and Anna, there was no listing for Marianna, herself.

Still, I decided to pursue these other siblings, starting with the Wojtaś sibling whose many children ended up emigrating far from their home in Poland: Marianna's sister Anna.

From the transcription at PTG, I learned that Anna was baptized at Pączewo in 1821. FamilySearch.org became my next stop, where I learned Anna was married on January 17, 1848. The marriage was conducted not in Pączewo, but in Schwarzwald (Czarnylas), perhaps because, by that point, Anna's sister Marianna was living there with her own growing family.

I've been able to find several baptismal records for the children of Anna Wojtaś and her husband, Jan Krzewinski. It was several of the children, rather than Anna herself, who moved away from their native Poland to settle in the United States, in the city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin.

Though Anna's sons Piotr and Andrzej became Peter and Andrew in their new American identities, all of Anna's emigrating children—Izydor, Marianna, Piotr, and Andrzej—kept their Polish surnames up until their deaths during the era of the first World War. While some of their children or grandchildren opted for more Americanized surnames in subsequent generations, I've been able to connect their lines of descent with the many DNA cousins I've found through testing at all the major DNA companies working with genealogists.

Finding those DNA connections, first through the AutoClusters program at MyHeritage.com and then exploring the connections through matches at other companies, has been quite an experience. Yet, confirming those discoveries was also aided by the relative ease with which we can retrieve historic records in this country.

What about researching those Polish DNA matches who didn't descend from Wojtaś family members who immigrated to Wisconsin? That's the challenge I'll be working on this week. 

Pruning the Family Tree

This month, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet. Well, more to the point, now that I've regained functionality on my "merge with duplicate" button at Ancestry.com, these past few weeks have left a lot of carnage out in the genealogical ether; I've been vanquishing doubled profiles in her tree, left and right. Since today is the time for my biweekly count, let's see just how many duplicates my mother-in-law's "endogamy lite" family yielded. 

Before the beginning of this project, I had closed out the previous biweekly period with 41,826 individual profiles in my in-laws' tree. My pruning project, over this subsequent two week period, has apparently made a sizable difference: the tree now contains 41,717 relatives. I've ended up with 109 less people than where I started, two weeks ago. I'd say that's a lot of pruning.

This month, I've been focusing on my own father's Polish roots, facing an entirely different research challenge. While most of the time, I'm poring over Catholic Church records from the Prussian villages where my father's paternal grandmother's extended family once lived, I'm also paying keen attention to the DNA matches connected to this line—and to their shared matches, especially those I haven't been able to place in the family tree up to this point.

As I add these matches into my tree, slowly but surely, that branch has been blossoming. Over the past two weeks, that work has yielded 105 new entries. The challenge now, especially for those DNA matches who still live in Poland—or even in nearby European countries—is to find documentation to support their contention that we share these same Puchała, Zegarski, or Wojtaś lines. For the most robust records resource, I've looked mostly to FamilySearch.org, but I'm also thankful for the transcriptions from the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, which has been providing me with a research roadmap to guide the way to documents.

Granted, in past biweekly periods, I've experienced greater progress than I have this time—not to mention the reversed count for my in-laws' tree!—but the challenges of this month's research goal require a slower and more careful pace. Given that the Polish roots of my father's family will be my research focus through the end of this year, I anticipate a more sedate report for the next three biweekly periods as well, before we close out this year and move on to next year's Twelve Most Wanted.

Evading Those Glaring Exceptions

 

I was reminded yesterday about a saying I had stumbled upon almost two decades ago when struggling with my Polish forebears. I had thought, when I located it in an article back then, that it would be useful to keep in mind:

Almost anything you say that is correct most of the time can have glaring exceptions.

I rediscovered that sentiment yesterday while collaborating with a distant cousin. We had beed discussing a shared DNA match whose account name did not match the paternal surname from which this match had supposedly descended. The surname and the family tree didn't seem to line up logically. Noticing the match's name ended in -czyk, I wondered whether that might be a Polish suffix with a particular meaning, so I looked that up.

The inquiry led to that article I mentioned, written twenty five years ago by someone named Fred Hoffman, which had been reprinted in the Polish Roots website. Sure enough, that -czyk suffix could indeed signify something—specifically either a diminutive version of a given name, or the idea of "son of"—but by the time I discovered my answer, I had already fallen down a different rabbit hole. Now I wanted to know why the name Fred Hoffman has persisted for so many years in my searches for Polish genealogical research tips.

I remember running across that name in various online resources, even back before that twenty five year mark I mentioned. Somehow those twenty five years seemed a bit more persistent than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. I had seen that name in nascent online genealogy forums researching Chicago roots, for instance, or surnames, or a variety of other topics related to Polish roots for years. 

Who was this guy? I could hardly believe he was still around, after all these years, so I googled him. Sure enough, in addition to the reprint I had stumbled upon in answering my own question about the name suffix, I found other details still online.

I found a bio for Fred Hoffman on the website of a publishing company, Langline, the Language and Lineage Press. I found an "about me" page on his own website, complete with several useful hints regarding Polish genealogical research. And I located the first of a four-part interview done with him by Donna Pointkouski on the blog What's Past is Prologue.

All came with that simple, casual way of clarifying the more confusing aspects of Polish genealogical research so that it all makes sense and gives us the confidence to tackle the mess our relatives made sure to keep secret from us. Granted, some rules of thumb may end up having "glaring exceptions," as Fred Hoffman cautioned, but at least grasping the concepts helps give a hand up to a place where we can see our once-hidden past a bit more clearly.

Lingering on Newfound Ancestors

 

If, in a matter of one mere week, I've already discovered the names of my second great-grandmother's parents, what is the next step? Obviously, the quest in family history is always to push back another generation, but in this case, I'm not going to be so greedy about this month's research goal. For one thing, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep up this momentum through the generations, given the difficulty in accessing some Polish records. But there is another reason to take my time and linger on this new discovery about Marianna Wojtaś' parents' generation.

That reason is simple: it has to do with DNA testing. But not any kind of DNA test. I'm specifically thinking of my matches at one genealogy company: MyHeritage.com. The reason is simple. While Ancestry, whose tree-building system and record access I prefer, provides me with plenty of Wojtaś  descendants among my DNA matches, they are mostly descended from the family members who chose to immigrate to the United States—specifically to Wisconsin. MyHeritage, on the other hand, has a more international reach for their DNA testing program, which is handily demonstrated by my matches who still live in Poland, or at least live in a country far closer to that homeland than Wisconsin.

I would like to know how those foreign DNA matches connect to my branch of the Wojtaś family. And there may only be one way to do that: build the family tree back to Marianna's parents, then reverse direction and trace all the descendants of each of her siblings.

In many cases, I've found that challenge is not as daunting as it sounds. Sadly, for those Catholic families claiming many children, many of them laid their children to rest in the church cemetery not long after their birth. There were so many childhood deaths, and if not then, often a loss of life in early adulthood. But for the few who lived a full life, it's time for me to build out those collateral branches and document their descendants.

The easiest step will be to select the one sibling who had children who also migrated away from their Polish homeland. We'll begin next week by reviewing what I've discovered about that one specific Wojtaś  collateral line, thanks to DNA testing.

Step by Step — and Stumbling Upon

 

Standard genealogical advice is always to go step by step, but how many times do we find ourselves "stumbling upon" an accidental discovery? Perhaps that is just the way genealogical research sometimes progresses.

Discovering the identity of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś was not that difficult, once I remembered the standard advice for starting a family tree. I started from what I knew—my great-grandmother Anastasia, whose maiden name was Zegarska—and moved step by step back a generation. That way, I learned that Anastasia's father was named Jan Zegarski (or Johann in Catholic records), and that he married a woman named Marianna Wojtaś.

This Zegarski family was the one I stumbled upon only thanks to DNA testing. All I had known of my great-grandmother before that point was that her maiden name was supposed to be Zegar. It was all those DNA matches with roots leading back to the Zegarski surname who convinced me to take that critical spelling detour in researching documents on my roots.

In that discovery, I suddenly was gifted with what seemed like a multitude of Zegarski aunts and uncles, for Jan and Marianna had at least thirteen children that I could find. Anastasia was almost right in the middle of this spread of siblings. This gave me ample opportunities to find versions of their mother's name, whether spelled as Marianna Wojtaś, or Woitas (for daughter Pauline), or other variations.

Knowing those spelling variations helped, as my first stop in researching this Pomeranian family was the website hosted in Poland by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. By using their database, I found transcriptions of records for many of the Zegarski children. The family was living in a town called Schwarzwald by the Prussians in the 1800s, but now known as Czarnylas in Poland. That was a great start, but I still wanted to know more—especially about previous generations.

Last January, when I was outlining my research plans for the 2025 Twelve Most Wanted, I had wondered who Marianna's parents might have been. Knowing how difficult researching these Polish roots could be, I decided to name just that as my goal for this November. Silly me: I already have found my answer within a week, thanks to some records microfilmed years ago by FamilySearch.org. Though I still will need to go to a FamilySearch Center to view the documents, I am currently working with the same level of assistance as I was for PTG: transcriptions.

This week, I have now discovered who Marianna's own parents were. Finding the record of her baptism on June 29, 1815—an actual digitized document this time—I discovered her father's name was entered in Latin as "Martino" and her mother listed as Anna. It is challenging to read Marianna's baptismal entry because the date was overwritten, and her mother's maiden name somewhat mangled, but by enlarging the record image, it appears to be spelled Szczygielska.

As best I can tell, Marianna was likely born in the village of Wolental, and baptized in the Catholic parish known in Prussia as Ponschau—or, now, called Pączewo. Whether Marianna moved as a bride to live in Czarnylas or whether her parents moved there during her childhood, perhaps I'll be able to tell when we find information on her actual marriage. Through the transcriptions at PTG, however, I found the year of 1896 given as the date of Marianna's death in Czarnylas, complete with her "family name" given as Wojtaś. 

One Name; Several Spellings

 

When it comes to searching for a specific ancestor, having one name to seek can provide the assurance that we're chasing the right person. But several different names? That starts plaguing me with doubts whether I've found the right person.

With this month's research goal—to find more about my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś—I discovered it was possible to find someone. But that someone named Marianna often appeared with a different spelling to her surname. Sometimes, it was Woytas. Or it could just as likely appear as Wojtasz.

Were these different people? That could be a reasonable question, especially for someone unfamiliar with researching Polish surnames. Having a basic understanding of Polish phonics, however, helped fortify my confidence that I was following the right trail, despite all those spelling variations.

Years ago—once I discovered that my paternal roots grew toward Poland and not the greenery of the Irish coast my grandfather claimed—I decided it was time to brush up on Polish phonics. The diacritical marks had me stumped, for one thing, and I don't feel comfortable with simply ignoring ignorance.

Beyond educating myself on, say, the use of the "ł" for my paternal grandfather's surname Puchała, I did a quick tour of the universe of Polish phonics. If nothing else, I wanted to know how to pronounce those surnames. After all, they are part of my heritage.

Since then, I've kept those resources close at hand, cheat sheets to remind me how to handle what otherwise would look like tongue-twisters. Names like Blaszczynski, for instance, no longer have me stumped.

So when it comes to entries like my second great-grandmother Marianna's maiden name, Wojtaś, I now understand why the multitude of record keeping officials—German-speaking Prussian government workers and Catholic priests rendering records in Latin—sometimes come up with different results. All of those results are variations on how the name was pronounced, but each one is a possible representation of the same sounds: "y" for "j" or "sh" for "sz" or even the diacritical "ś." 

With that understanding, let's launch into what can be found about Marianna Wojtaś and her years in the Pomeranian region of Poland.   

The Eleventh Ancestor

 

When I chose the eleventh ancestor out of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, it was not an easy choice. This was not because several others were clamoring for my attention; this was more a matter of wondering whether I would be able to find anyone. 

The way I plan out my research for the upcoming year is to set aside a season to devote to each of four branches of my family tree. For two quarters of the year, I work on members of my in-laws' families. For one quarter, I have ample material to pursue on behalf of my mother's roots. But for my father's line during the last quarter of each year, I always know I'll be stumped for yet another year, no matter which ancestor I select for the designated month's struggle.

This November's ancestor, I decided, would be a natural outgrowth of my research project for the previous month. In searching for what became of my great-grandfather Thomas Puchała, I would likely need to trace the migration path of his wife, Anastasia Zegarska. Thus, for this coming month, I reasoned it would make sense to move back one more generation and research Anastasia's mother, Marianna Wojtaś. 

All I could find about the Zegarski family centered around a small town now known as Czarnylas in the Polish region of Pomerania. As I noted last year in planning this month's research project, 

Just even finding the identity of that hometown took years to accomplish, so I need to take that as a reminder that some research projects take time—like years—to evolve into a shape roughly comparable to an actual answer. If I arrive at the end of this coming November without an answer to my question about Marianna's parents and siblings, I know I can return to this puzzle again in a future year—and that, eventually, more records will help guide me through the maze and point me in the right direction for my next step.

Thankfully, that hopeful wish has already turned out to bear fruit. I have indeed found more records which will be of great use. We are at least set for a smooth launch into a month of exploring the life of Marianna Wojtaś, my second great-grandmother, whose life spanned nearly the entire nineteenth century in the Polish region of Pomerania. We'll start tomorrow with an overview of some details which can help us navigate Polish genealogical research.

November, Doubts, and Needles in Haystacks

 

Back at the beginning of this year when I was deciding which of my Polish ancestors to research in November, I had just broken free from those hindering doubts—the kind which prod people with the rhetorical question, "Why try?" After all, Polish records—or more accurately, Prussian records—are not exactly the forte of my primary genealogical resource, Ancestry.com. Finding such records at FamilySearch, where admittedly they could be in the collection, was akin to snatching up the proverbial needle in the haystack. Only this haystack had billions upon billions of strands of information.

The one resource which shook me loose of my doubts last year was an obscure website hosted in Poland. In English, it is listed as the site of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, but its web address beginning with "ptg" hints of the name by which it is known in its home country: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne.

If you can read—and understand!—Polish, the home page of that website offers up helpful articles on researching Polish ancestors, specifically from the region known as Pomerania. Alas, I am a mere mortal and can only understand one language, and it certainly isn't Polish, let alone any regional dialects. But I try.

Embedded within that maze of helpful Polish material on the PTG website is the capability to search through a database of transcribed vital records from the region of Pomerania. And yes! That can indeed be done in English, provided you first click on the flag for the corresponding language translation.

That is how I found the 1896 entry in the index of local death records for my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś Zegarska. It was Marianna who was the mother of my unfortunate great-grandmother Anastasia Zegarska whom we studied last month. Thankfully, that index of Polish records included Marianna's "family name" in their readout. Despite that clue, however, I've yet to find a digital copy of the document which, presumably, provided that detail.

Finding the PTG website was indeed encouraging because it turned around my despondent concern that I would never find anything more about my Polish roots. With that transcribed and translated entry from one small website, I was encouraged to try to find more information. That is what inspired me to name Marianna Wojtaś as my November selection for the Twelve Most Wanted this year. I may indeed be able to discover more about this branch of my paternal ancestry this month, thanks to the availability of resources from this northern Pomeranian region of what is now the country of Poland.  

Taking the Long View

 

How often we discover one record, one document, one slip of paper, and assume in the victory of locating it that we have found the whole of an ancestor's story. In the case of several of my ancestors—especially those women of previous centuries—that simply isn't so. An example like that serves to remind us all to take the long view when documenting an ancestor's life story.

I had mentioned that problem in reviewing the research difficulties concerning one paternal ancestor, my grandfather's sister, whom the New York family called Aunt Rose. Rose went by three different married names, in addition to the name under which she had been recorded at birth, back in Poland.

To my horror, in trying to add Rose to the FamilySearch.org universal family tree, I discovered there were actually three different women entered instead of the one woman I knew by three married names. Only by demonstrating through documentation will I be able to rectify that situation and blend the three identities into one. Unfortunately, some of those documents are still beyond my grasp.

A situation like this, however, is not isolated to the irregularities of my Polish immigrant ancestors, who, to begin with, were quite reticent about revealing their true identity. Just the other day, as I experimented with a new-to-me research tool at Ancestry.com, I alluded to another example where it takes more than one document to tell the whole of a woman's story.

In eliminating duplicate entries on my in-laws' tree, I ran across several such women whom I had entered twice in that same family tree. As I reflect over the cause for some of these double entries and worked through the documentation to confirm the right display in my tree, it became obvious that following women through name changes due to multiple marriages takes time, patience—and a chain of record keeping. 

For instance—and this is a relatively easy example—my mother-in-law's great-grand aunt, Sarah Mooter, showed in one part of my tree under her maiden name with a marriage to someone named Gibson. In a separate entry, she was mother of a child with a surname of Ebner. How did all that connect? It took piecing together several documents to verify what I suspected: as often happened in that time period, a widow with children remarried, starting a second family.

While we can surmise such an expected outcome, we still need to put together the confirming paper trail. Instead of "filling in the blank," we need to insert documentation to fill in several blanks or the story is not completely told. Sometimes the fill-in-the-blank format of pre-designed genealogical programs doesn't seem to lend itself to this reality of researching our ancestors. Messy lives can't really be contained in a simple fill-in-the-blanks format. I know the still-missing parts of Aunt Rose's story are keeping me from telling her whole story. I suspect I'm not the only one whose family has such a history.

The Trial and Error of Collaboration

 

Yesterday, I mentioned getting together with a newfound cousin to compare family trees. We met at a coffee shop where we could spread out, equipped with two laptops and notebooks. This was not just a social get-together; this was a working session. We were on a mission.

Because we both are also involved in a locally-inspired continuing education program (similar to OLLI), we realized the possible application to future classes of what we were doing—the trial and error effort of collaborating to answer our own research question. We began discussing whether we could use that same approach for a small group learning project in genealogy.

Aside from the limitations of finding a hospitable space for several people and their laptops, such a workshop would need to begin with an agreement: that we'd be willing to be patient enough for the process to unfold organically as each member frames a research question or goal, and we collectively explore ways to resolve impasses.

As I mentioned last week, I believe that this part of the process is actually where learning begins. Not in sitting through lectures. Certainly not in studying for tests. But in the application of techniques as, by trial and error, we learn what works for our particular problem—and what doesn't work.

Launching such a program without testing it first would not be a good idea. It's an experiment; of course it would be messy. In our discussion of the possibilities last week, we talked about giving it an informal trial run. It's just a matter of gathering a few volunteers (and their laptops, of course) at a coffee or sandwich shop with wifi connection, seeing what works best for everyone. Even with just a few willing members from our local genealogical society, we should be able to try that—and then ask everyone what works best for them. What helps people make a breakthrough on their brick wall research problem?

Just hearing one person make a suggestion like this was validating. I've been teaching for a long time and frankly, it can be very disheartening to feel like a lesson is no more than so much "blah, blah, blah." The key is to find what makes a difference for the learner—and every learner is different. It is encouraging for the teacher and empowering for the learner to engage in an approach that becomes a catalyst to successful outcomes. I'm hoping we can find such a catalyst through this project.

Double, Double

 

Sometimes it helps to take a research break. To change things up in between two months of poring over Prussian documents, I thought I'd use this week leading up to Halloween for a different type of double, double, toil and trouble: I used the Ancestry ProTools to purge my in-laws' duplicate entries. Yep, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet.

This particular family line is the one which inspired me to label it "endogamy lite." Over the generations, cousins from many branches of her family married other relatives, all within a specific geographic area. Since the extended family only has been in that region for the last two hundred years, it doesn't quite approach the technical term of endogamy, but I'd say the resultant family network is much more interrelated than mere pedigree collapse.

A while back, puzzling over my mother-in-law's ancestor Simon Rinehart and the will he left in Perry County, Ohio, the scorecard left from that ongoing courtroom battle between half-siblings prompted me to expand the collateral lines of that family in my own database. Well, that might sound like an easy project, but keeping in mind my second purpose in doing so—to help place DNA matches in the family tree—it was a task that took me months of work behind the scenes.

The problem with such tasks is that growing a family tree in both directions can result in duplicate entries. That's where the "double, double" comes in.

However, with a recent update to Ancestry.com graphics, I discovered that, just as I realized I needed it, I could no longer access the ability to "merge with duplicate" from the tools tab. Clicking on "Tools" simply jerked the profile page to the then-newly-added minimized header of the subject's name.

I waited. I tried again. I signed out and signed in. I updated every whizbang computer gizmo I could think of. I talked with chatbots. I complained. Twice. Nothing changed.

This week, I met with a fellow genealogical society member to follow up on the discovery that "Relatives Around Me" on FamilySearch.org's app thinks we are cousins. (Granted, we're actually seventh cousins twice removed, but hey, who's counting?)

We got together at a coffee shop, both lugging our laptops there to see if we could break through our respective brick walls to uncover just how this was possible. While I waited for my newfound cousin to locate a specific record on her computer, I couldn't resist poking on that malfunctioning "Tools" tab at Ancestry to see whether, after all this time, it might have started working again.

Surprise, like magic, it did. 

I promised myself then that I would take the next available free time to start clearing out my mother-in-law's double entries on the family tree—all those cousins who are cousins in more ways than one, complete with a different profile page for each direction in which they connect to the family.

That task, as the original ditty from Shakespeare implied, brewed toil and trouble. For each double entry thrown into the cauldron, the corresponding merge invoked more duplicates. Parents, spouses, children, and siblings seemed to multiply. Each time I clicked "merge" for one set of duplicates, it multiplied others.

I started out with a list forty three pages long of duplicate entries, but over the rest of the week, I've vanquished most of them. Along the way, though, I had to consult documents to confirm, say, that the single son of the couple in one profile was indeed the parentless spouse showing in another profile with no further details. Sometimes, it felt like I was adding more than I was taking away.

The tale will be told the next time I do my biweekly count, but in the meantime, it was a relief to attend to a task which long needed to be finished.  

Launch Pad for Next Research Go-Round

 

Sometimes, I just need to send a research problem deep into the future. That's when I write a note to my future self, explaining what I need to do the next time I grapple with this ancestral brick wall. For Thomas Puchała, today is that day. I'm packaging up my Puchała roots and putting them on the launch pad to send into a future year. Here's what I need to remember for next time.

First, patience is in order, if only for the frustration of searching for a name containing diacritical marks. Puchała, as I've discovered, is a name that comes packaged in many forms, thanks specifically to the "ł" as written by Prussian governmental drudges and Catholic priests from many European backgrounds who nevertheless must record their flock's life passages in the quite-dead Latin language. For this, I've found the Puchała surname rendered as Puchata—or even Puchatta—as well as variations on Puchała without the diacritic designation, such as Puchala and Puchalla. All this, combined with many search results serving up transcriptions of the actual records; to see them with my own eyes might reveal the original was written correctly all along.

I did, however, manage to find some records for Thomas' father, whom I suspect his fellow countrymen called Jan, though church records listed as Johann. Along with that, I found three sisters and two brothers for Jan. The next time the Puchała family becomes a focus of my Twelve Most Wanted, I need to pursue whether any of those siblings did indeed survive to adulthood, marry, and have children—descendants whose progeny might be among my Polish and European DNA matches at MyHeritage. While at this point, it seems most of those siblings died in childhood, it may be possible that at least his sister Marianna was married. Though one record's transcription indicated her age at marriage was fifteen, I noticed the ceremony was conducted in 1858, later in the same year in which her father had died. Perhaps that was a move of desperation for the bereft family.

Still missing is any record of what became of Thomas, himself. With a birth year of about 1844, it is certainly safe to say the man is deceased—but when, I can't determine. It is likely after my grandfather's birth in 1876, but I can't really be sure. If this man was indeed my grandfather's father, he could even have died toward the end of 1875. Whatever the actual date of death was, it is certain his widow Anastasia married again. Though I have no record for either of her supposed subsequent marriages, it is clear that she represented herself by two additional surnames, at least when she emigrated from her home in Poland to the United States.

Also on my to-do list for this family will be clarifying the three marriages for Thomas' daughter Rosalia. Along with that goes writing a proof statement so others can follow that chain of events in her life, including re-organizing the entries for the various names of Rose in the FamilySearch universal tree.

Someone needs to tell these stories. They are tales which take more than one paragraph to explain—and certainly several documents to piece together the full story. Rose's tale is not unusual; tomorrow, I'll explain another such research twist I've been following from another project, where it takes piecing together several records to identify the same woman through the name changes in her life. 

With that, we'll launch Thomas Puchała's research questions into the future for a subsequent try. Hopefully, by then, more records will be digitized and accessible on the Polish end of the equation, enabling Thomas and his forebears to be discovered and documented. And with the arrival of a new month, next week we'll step from one of my father's ancestors to someone on another branch of his family. 

Not Exhausted Yet

 

Well...let me amend that. The search possibilities have not yet been exhausted for finding our Anna and Rose in either immigration or marriage records—but I am! 

Finding Rose's second marriage documentation yesterday, which revealed that she considered her maiden name to be Krauss and not her birth name, Puchała, gave me a new impetus to search for other records listing her as Rose Krauss. Though I hoped to find documentation for her first marriage to a Mr. Miller—why couldn't she have chosen an eligible young bachelor with an unusual name?—using this newfound discovery of the alternate surname usage, I found nothing.

So far.

Likewise, trying to find Rose's mother Anna living in New York City with someone named Julius Krauss proved unsuccessful...so far. Not that there weren't any men by that name, mind you, but just none who lived with anyone named Anna. And considering how Rose always lived with her mother (or vice versa), that also provided us with a null set.

I'd like to say I'll keep trying for the remainder of this month. After all, the goal in locating marriage records for these two women was to help me find whatever became of Rose's birth father—and Anna's first husband—Thomas Puchała. At some time in the future, hopefully search engines or AI assistance may point me to those missing documents. But for the remaining few days this week, it's likely better to return to the Puchała line and wrap up what we know about Thomas and his ancestors, then draw up a plan for the next time I revisit this research puzzle.

Proving Rose is Rose

 

It's no wonder there are three different identities for Anastasia Zegarska's daughter Rosalia Puchała on the FamilySearch.org universal tree. Just locating all the records I've placed on Anastasia's timeline, mostly showing her relationship to and residence with her daughter, shows me that both Anastasia and Rosalia went by different identities at different times.

Take their names. In Poland, they were known as Anastasia and Rosalia. In America, they became Anna and Rose. Besides the changes in their married names, however, there were some other details that didn't seem quite right. For instance, consider the marriage certificate for Rose's second marriage in New York City. Though I can see, by following a cluster of documents concerning Rose and her mother, that I was trailing the same woman, I need a way to demonstrate that Rose was Rose was Rose. I need to compose a proof argument for these women's identities.

Let's take a look at that 1915 marriage record in Brooklyn, New York, as searchable through the Historical Vital Records Project via the website of the New York City Municipal Archives.

First, we learn the full name of the groom, George Washington Kober, and discover that, although this was his first marriage, he was already forty three years of age. Named after his father, the groom's mother was listed as Pauline Hutton. He was born in the borough of Manhattan.

Rose, on the other hand, had previously been married, then divorced. Her name on the license was listed as Rose Miller, though I still have no idea what the first husband's given name was, nor when that first marriage ceremony was conducted or ended. Her age was given as forty, which would yield a year of birth as 1875, not far from the September 1872 baptismal record I have for her from Schwarzwald.

From that point, the details veer toward the unexpected. Though I did note in yesterday's timeline that Anastasia Zegarska's married name was sometimes recorded as Anna Krauss (or spelling variations), I had never found any document I could ascertain tied the right Anna with the right Mr. Krauss. Yet on her daughter's marriage record, Rose gives her maiden name as Krauss, not Puchała as we'd expect it to be.

The possible gift that comes with this confusion is that her "father" was listed as Julius Krauss on this Kober-Miller marriage record. Admittedly, on the next line, Rose's mother was entered as Anna Zegar, not Zegarska, and even the entry of the maiden name Krauss was on a line only meant to be completed in the case of the bride being a widow, not a divorcee. But amidst these unexpected entries, perhaps we can extrapolate a few search terms which might help us, in turn, figure out a bit more about Anna, herself.

Granted, some of this involves speculation, but I have noticed that children who refer to a step-father as their "real" father often had that man enter their life at an early age. This might guide us in our search for widow Anna Puchała's second marriage. And of course, since this marriage license gives us our first glimpse of Anna's husband's given name, we now can search for someone named Julius Krauss, a most helpful balancing act when faced with multiple spelling variations of the common surname Krauss.

Then, too, if Rose considered her maiden name to be Krauss, perhaps that is the name under which she entered this country, helping to narrow the search for her appearance as well as Anna's in passenger records.

The main point, once having located such records, is to use them all together to tie up the three identities for Rose in the FamilySearch tree into one person, telling the whole of Rose's story under one heading. One document alone could never tell the whole of a story such as hers. 

Turning to Timelines

When puzzling over a brick wall ancestor, it sometimes helps to turn to timelines to ferret out the missing information. In Anastasia Zegarska's lifetime saga of many married names, I'm still trying to determine when she married which husband, and when the previous husband might have died. After all, I've run into some conflicting reports concerning her daughter Rosalia, giving me doubts about which husband came last—not to mention which husband's name Anastasia used when she left her home in Pomerania to sail for America.

In brief, today's my day to lay out the dates, with links back to the appropriate documents, where available. After we sort out the mess, tomorrow we'll take a hard look at the one document which has me all confused. There may be an explanation...if we can find some missing documents.

So, for Anastasia, a.k.a. Anna, here we go.

• 1848: Anastasia born in Schwarzwald (Czarnylas, Poland), as estimated from her marriage record
• 1868: Anastasia married Thomas Puchała in Schwarzwald
• 1872: Anastasia mentioned in baptismal record of daughter Rosalia in Lubichowo
• 1910: Anastasia entered as "Annie Kusfkr" in the Brooklyn, New York, household of daughter Rose Muller in U.S. Census
• 1915: Listed as Anna Krausse in Brooklyn household on Knickerbocker Avenue with daughter Rose Miller in New York State census enumerated on June 1
• 1915: November 15 marriage record of George W. Kober and Rose Miller identified Rose as a divorced woman for whom this was her second marriage; document identified Rose's current address in Brooklyn as Knickerbocker Avenue, but states her maiden name was Krauss and her mother's maiden name was Anna Zegar
• 1920: Anna "Krouse" was listed in the U. S. Census as mother-in-law in the household of George W. Kober and his wife Rose, now living at 729 96th Street in Woodhaven, part of the Borough of Queens in New York City
• 1921: A newspaper report of her death in The Brooklyn Standard Union on September 29, 1921—including the right house address and city (but not street) of the Kober household—listed her name as Anna "Kraus"
• 1921: Her death certificate listed her name as Anna Kusharvska on the front of the document, yet on the reverse, spelled that surname as Kusharvoska; with her daughter listed as "Mrs. Geo. W. Kober" and the place of death given as 729 96th Street in Richmond Hill 

There, like a sandwich, we have documents in both the earlier and latest segments of Anastasia's life in America listing her surname as some variation on what seems to be the unusual surname of Kusharvska. Yet, other records seem to hint that Anna went by the name Krauss in the earlier years of her residence in New York City. 

My main goal in ferreting out Anna's married names is not only finding the identity of these two men in her later life, but determining what name she chose to represent herself when entering this country as an immigrant. Her second and third marriage record plus that record of her passage to America would be useful to find. It may all come down to which surname she went by—and how she, or those officials documenting her identity, might have spelled it. 

Cousin Connections

 

Despite when work seems to barely move forward on family history discoveries, groundwork for the most significant discoveries may actually be happening behind the scenes. That, at least, is what I'm hoping as I review the progress made on my paternal grandfather's ancestors.

These past two weeks have all been about making cousin connections. The first goal in that arena has been to review my grandfather's maternal Zegarski line, of which those who left their roots behind in Poland also left an abundant family heritage in the United States. With quite a few DNA matches at both Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com, this Zegarski line has provided me with ample opportunities to reach out and make cousin connections.

In the process of adding those lines of descent to my family tree—ninety five new entries in the past two weeks—my tree has grown to 40,395 documented individuals. Most of those newly added names represent American children of the immigrants, the less challenging of this month's Zegarski quest.

Still to come will be children of the Zegarski siblings who remained in the Pomeranian villages of Lubichowo and Czarnylas back in the 1880s and beyond. That effort will be more challenging, for the search removes us from government documents recorded in English to church records in Latin or Prussian governmental records in old German script. With only one week remaining for this month's research challenge, I may need to return to this task in a future year.

Though I only gained three new DNA matches over the past two weeks, I now have 2,686 matches who are my fourth cousin or closer. From this total number, I'm still on the search to identify each Zegarski cousin and link them to their proper place in my family tree. At the same time, I've reached out to one cousin match who is also a prolific researcher, and we have begun collaborating on this Zegarski line of questions. Collaboration often accelerates research progress, so I am looking forward to reaping more discoveries with this process.

Since my focus has now been on my father's side of the family tree, it will probably come as no surprise to learn that my in-laws' tree only grew by thirteen additional documented profiles in the past two weeks. Still, that tree now holds 41,826 documented profiles from my husband's ancestors. I will likely not return to work on that tree until next spring, but there are the occasional discoveries, questions, or cousin contacts which prompt me to step to that side of the family branches and add some information. This biweekly report brought me one such time.

There are still several Zegarski cousins to plug into this family tree from my list of DNA matches, so that will be the task this next week holds for me, as we wrap up another month of seeking one of my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors from the paternal side of my family.

Documenting Anna and her Daughter

 

Now, as I'm turning back to create a timeline of name changes for both Anastasia Zegarska and her daughter Rosalia, I'm reminded of how thankful I am to be able to access online versions of such documents. The fact that I can, despite being on a business trip far from home this past week, pull up virtual copies of hundred-year-old records from New York City for both Anna and her daughter is all thanks to the efforts of one nonprofit organization called Reclaim the Records.

If you have been following their ten-plus year saga—yes, Reclaim the Records received some of the first fruits of their labor from the city almost exactly ten years ago, on October 14, 2015—you know there have been several updates, as well as setbacks. But eventually, they won.

And so did we: with several ways to access government records concerning our ancestors living in New York City.

The other day, in my new ongoing collaboration with another Zegarski researcher, I noticed this cousin mention accessing these historical vital records via a New York City website. Sure enough, I could jump right on that latest research goal to harvest the details from the digital copies of marriage and death records for my New York City ancestors. Sure, I could wait until I got home and pull out the paper copies I had paid for—but this is now, and I didn't want to wait to start the review. Patience, apparently, is no longer a virtue for an online research project.

With that, I'm beginning to construct that name-change timeline for both Anastasia and Rosalia—or, as they were known in New York, Anna and Rose. And all the while, I'm appreciating some intrepid attorneys back in the Big Apple who wouldn't take "No!" for an answer.

Tracing Rose to Find Anna

 

What if a family member's life story is too long to fit into those neat little boxes on a family tree? That's the problem I'm facing as I consider how to follow Anastasia Zegarska through her three marriages, the death of at least six children and the life of her surviving two: my father's Aunt Rose and his own father, Rose's brother.

It was a snap to determine that tracing Aunt Rose was one sure way to spot her mother through the decades in which they lived in New York City. I'm presuming the same may be the key to finding the family's immigration records, and possibly even the documentation on Anastasia's second and third marriage record. But when I try to share that paper trail on the one publicly-accessible free family tree used internationally by so many, I run into a problem: there is not one single entry for Aunt Rose.

There are three.

The story, as we've already partially discovered, spans decades and involves several documents, each of which cannot be added to my Rose without extracting them from the "other" Rose. On top of that, a careful reading of Rose's first married name—clearly written as Muller, according to the 1910 census—was somehow revised to show as Miller for her second marriage license to George Kober. How do I know that was the same Rose? Simple: her mother was still living with her in the next census.

To complicate matters, that same Kober marriage record for Aunt Rose gave a different maiden name: Krauss. This opens my eyes to some possible complications. Could the original Rose I found, baptized in Poland as Rosalia Puchała, be one of the six children her mother Anastasia lost? Could this Rose be a child born after her mother's marriage to the second husband named Krauss? But if that were so, then my grandfather, four years younger than Rose, would also have been a Krauss, rather than keep any variation on the Puchała name, as he did well into his adult years. Yet that could be a hint as to when Anastasia married this second husband: most likely when her children were still young enough to consider Mr. Krauss as their surrogate father.

The trouble with facing complicated extractions from the FamilySearch tree is that I just would rather throw up my hands and walk away. After all, I have that information all documented on my other online family trees. It's just that, considering the international reach of FamilySearch, I'm still hoping someone back in Poland might also be researching that family line and spot it on that publicly-accessible website. And reach out to connect. Collaboration can be very helpful.

There is, however, more to be accomplished with Rose's mother, Anastasia. Knowing, first, that in America Anastasia went by the shortened name Anna helps guide the process. But I still lack any proof of Anna's subsequent marriages to anyone called Kusharvski, let alone someone else named Krauss. It was only in the shock of the moment of discovering her mother's suicide that Rose blurted out the name Kusharvski to emergency personnel; I hadn't even known of it before finding that death record. I still can't find Anna's burial marker. And though, in retrospect, that bungled entry for immigrant Anna in 1910—her name spelled Kusfkr by the enumerator that year—seems to indicate she was once known as Anna Kusharvski, it isn't exactly a document; it's merely an error-ridden notation.

The best thing to do at this point is go back and re-assemble all the documents I have for this family, including both front and back of each record, for some details are handwritten on the reverse and in the margins.

Then, I need to put them in date order for one reason: I need to see the gaps in each person's story. Creating a "timeline" of name changes may help, despite not having the actual documents. I can infer from each surname's appearance when it might have become part of the family's story. Even now, as I begin this process, I'm spotting some details in the flow of information that may rearrange my own understanding of the history. We'll see, first, what we can unearth by putting that process to use on the American side of the equation, then create a timeline hypothesis to test.

Widowed, Times Three

 

Some ancestors present more twists and turns to their life story. Anastasia Zegarska was one of those hard-to-trace ancestors. But it was her husband, Thomas Puchała, who lost me as I tried to trace his own life story. With that, I was left with following the only family members remaining to him: his widow, Anastasia, and her two surviving children, Rosalia and Teodor.

Even then, finding Anastasia and her two children in any further Polish records—not to mention, her disappearing husband Thomas—has been, so far, an unsuccessful pursuit. Obviously, though, the three surviving family members did show up in New York, but the gap between their last written appearance in what was then Prussia and their discovery in New York City cost me the years between 1872 and (possibly) 1910. In the meantime, Anastasia appeared in records with two additional surnames: Kusharvski and Krauss (also recorded as Krouse). To count it all up, when looking for Anastasia, we are looking for a woman who was widowed three times. Where are the records?

It would be nice to find those missing marriage records, of course, but what would be even more helpful would be to find Anastasia as she moved from 1870s "Schwarzwald" in Prussia through her immigration passage to New York City. The search would also cement details not only about the two other men she called her husband, but would also help to narrow down the year and location of her first husband's death. If those records are even still in existence and not a casualty of a subsequent war, it would be helpful to find solid documentation of this widow's life trajectory.

Checking the Mundane Details of Life

When I wake up, my morning routine often includes grabbing my phone and checking the upcoming day's weather. After all, it can become a helpful guide in cementing the day's plans. It occurred to me that, hungry as I am to know more about what my Polish ancestors' day to day life was like, I could try checking the same mundane record sets for them, so I pulled up my weather report and entered Lubichowo, Poland, to add to my weather site.

Yes, it's a first step, and only a tiny one. I could see that there was a slight chance of rain this morning, and more to come for the following four days. Seeing their high temperatures in the fifties (Fahrenheit) in Lubichowo and overnight lows trailing not far behind, I could compare their weather with mine—it was colder but milder, and far more humid there—and spot differences in other details. Sunrise came later in the morning and sunset about an hour earlier than ours, reminding me that Lubichowo was in a location much more to the north than my current home.

I thought I'd do a bit more exploration of local details. For a town as small as Lubichowo, it is not easy to find many resources about that location in English, although I suspect if I used Google Chrome for translation services, I'd discover more detailed information. Still, I could see that Lubichowo is in a rural part of Pomerania, as the local administrative district includes twenty four villages and "settlements" which combine to represent a total population of under six thousand people. In contrast, just one of the cities in the rural county where I live includes over three hundred thousand people.

I did discover that the territory is a low-lying area, with altitude somewhere between one hundred and three hundred feet above sea level. The ground is said to be poor, sandy soil, so it makes sense to learn that the principal crops there are potatoes or such cereal grains as wheat, barley, oats, or rye. Some small family farms also raised livestock. Perhaps this is as it was when my ancestors called that place their home.

Since I discovered Lubichowo lies on the fifty third parallel north, I decided to take a whirlwind tour of the world to see which other locations are as far north as my Puchała ancestors' native village. Of course, sections of the Netherlands, Wales, and England are located just as far north as Lubichowo is. Surprisingly, Lough Derg, the lake so close to my father-in-law's Tully ancestral home, also is on that parallel. Across the Atlantic, Newfoundland and Labrador lie on that same northern pathway, and the parallel runs through the city of Edmonton in the province of Alberta. The closest that parallel comes to touching the United States is among the Alaskan islands in the Bering Sea, a considerable distance north of my current home.

To begin to understand more of what life was like for my Puchała and Zegarski forebears, I suppose I could conduct some experiments with Artificial Intelligence like fellow genea-blogger Randy Seaver has done concerning his own ancestors, such as the narrative about his third great-grandmother who lived in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada, in 1845. But I suspect a more useful tool for me would be a system which could find resources in Polish, then accurately translate them into English so I could assemble the details into my own narrative.

Mostly, what I'm curious about is, first, what made these family members choose to leave their homeland, and next, why did this one lone branch of the family head for New York when everyone else went to Wisconsin? Surely, there is a story that I am missing.  

Friends in the Family

 

When it comes to reconstructing what life was like for the ancestors we are researching, those who lived in the same country as we do likely present little trouble for us in accessing the answers we seek. We can simply look up historic details about our location and find ample resources in our own language. Researching ancestors who emigrated from a foreign country, however, presents us with challenges, especially if the people in the originating country spoke a language different than ours.

Oftentimes in those cases, I turn to friends within the extended family for help. Older relatives can sometimes infuse a family history with stories of their own lived experience, adding insight—and sometimes even humor—into the genealogical narrative.

When it comes to my Puchała and Zegarski roots from Poland, however, I run into roadblocks. For one thing, my paternal grandfather made sure no one among his descendants would have any idea of his Polish roots—at least, that's the story from my older siblings and cousins who knew him personally.

So who can I turn to among those living relatives to find any inside observations about these Polish forebears? There certainly weren't any relatives from the Puchała side of the family to consult—at least, none that I have discovered so far. But the Zegarski side? Now, that's a different matter.

Thanks to DNA testing, I've discovered a number of third cousins on that side of the family. The first one I had found, years ago, was the one who pointed me to online resources in the country of Poland, which gave me a great head start. But this month, I've been wondering whether I could find anyone who actually knew any of those immigrant Zegarskis, or at least remembered their children or grandchildren. I've been on a hunt to connect with a recipient of the stories from the old country.

I noticed one distant relative (and DNA match) whose research kept popping up online, so I reached out to see if I could glean any insight on this extended family. While in 2025, the time is too distant to find anyone who personally remembered any of the immigrant Zegarskis, this researcher and I have started collaborating, an encouraging step. 

It's often beneficial to make friends from among the members of the extended family. These second and third cousins are not people I've ever met, but we have a common goal to learn about what our ancestors were really like. Yes, the hurdle of messaging someone who is essentially a stranger can seem daunting—after all, what if he or she doesn't answer?—but if we don't reach out and try to connect, we'll never attain our goal.

Granted, some people who take DNA tests only do so for specific, limited reasons—to learn about their ethnic roots, for instance, but if we look more closely at potential contacts from among our DNA matches, we can identify the most likely candidates who'd potentially respond to our message or, even better, collaborate with us.

If, in our brief introductory message to such candidates, we can identify the specific family line we are curious about, it helps to make a connection. But if we also scope out that individual's research history on that same website, we can get a better idea about who has been at this work consistently over time. Researchers who take the time to not only add documentation to their family tree, but to go out of their way to upload specific family mementos—photographs, or a letter written by an ancestor, for instance—show us the care they take to pursue those mystery roots. Unless people like these turn out to be proprietary about their research—the "don't touch my stuff" types who are, unfortunately, also out there—they may become the perfect research partner for delving into the unknown about our family history together.

Back before we had the wealth of documentation available to us online now, we used to rely far more upon connecting with other researchers. Queries on the forums of the past were full of people searching for anyone else who knew something about their brick wall ancestor. Friends in the family, back then, became a valuable research tool. With the abundance of records now at our fingertips with a click of the mouse, we seem to have forgotten the utility of reaching out and connecting with our own relatives who are seeking the same family history answers. I'm hoping that making an about-face on this trend may recharge this lagging search effort.

Overreach

 

"Bit off more than I can chew" would be something my parents might use to rebuke me for overreaching on those grandiose plans. But when I decided, last Friday, to wrap up my work in a tidy basket—complete the work of connecting all my Zegarski DNA matches at Ancestry.com, then harvest all the Zegarski documents I could find on FamilySearch.org—and be done over the weekend, well...yeah, overreach. 

Update: I'm far from finishing the DNA match connection process at Ancestry. The more DNA cousins I find there, the more I realize I need to update the Zegarski branch on my family tree. Considering how prolific that Wisconsin branch of this immigrant line has been, I'd say this will call for far more work than a weekend's diversion.

Regardless, I went exploring at FamilySearch.org as well. My goal has been to trace the line of descent for all the collateral lines of my Puchała roots. After all, I've got several Polish DNA cousins over at MyHeritage for whom I'd love to establish a connection. Finding the documentation between my ancestors in 1840s Pomerania and current generations across the European continent might be a challenge, but—talk about overreach—I'll give it a try.

In the meantime, I started trying another approach. Put this one in the "oldies but goodies" category: I'm reaching out to those distant Zegarski cousins who are researching the same family lines. Maybe one of them knows more about what the people in our ancestry were like than what we can find from dull, dry documents.

Grunt Work and the Genealogy Guinea Pig

 

You know me: the genealogy guinea pig. I'll try anything to burrow around an ancestral brick wall. Many of those attempts lead to dead ends, but for some, I come out in victory. Experiment successful!

With experiences like that, you might not be surprised to hear that I spend a lot of time helping others wander through their own genealogical maze, hunting for the ancestral big cheese. Some of that time is in formal classroom settings and through teaching lessons on specific topics, but other times, I'm just as likely to be meeting one on one with friends at a coffee shop (with a decent wifi connection, of course) or even via online sessions, chasing our ancestral mysteries.

Considering that, I was rather crestfallen to see a Substack article recommended by other bloggers on "Why Most Genealogy Advice Wastes Your Time." Well, I certainly hope my advice doesn't waste others' time; if it does, it wastes my time, also. 

I had to give that one some thought. During that same week, it so happened that I ended up involved with  several such advice-giving sessions, not just in genealogy, but in other realms as well. I met with a fellow researcher one on one to tackle some problems, held an online DNA special interest group meeting, joined with other researchers in a family history writing group, made a presentation to members of a genealogy society, and led my own society's meeting, in addition to wandering around the back corners of Polish records at FamilySearch.org.

But did that help anybody? That's the key question I glean from the Substack article posed by Denyse Allen. I've got to admit, after all the genealogical effort of the past week—in addition to observing a class taught by someone else—I have to concede she has a point. But not, perhaps, in the exact way she means it.

Over this weekend, I watched someone else teach a class on self-improvement which was free to attend. Being held on a sunny Saturday morning, perhaps it was no surprise to see the event was sparsely attended. I watched as people sat, taking notes, and wondered how many would take a look at those notes again, let alone actually put the advice into practice. I think we've all been dulled by the traditional classroom experience, lulled into listening, then thinking the end of class equates with reaching the finish line.

On the contrary, it's just the beginning. It's what we do next that determines whether we've learned or not.

Stepping back and taking a sweeping view of the evolution of educational techniques—at least for adult learning styles—we are far more suited to collaborative attempts at problem solving. The main reason for this, though, is not that we thrive on chaos, but that we can coach each other as we move, step by step, through that dark tunnel towards the light at the end.

We don't, as it turns out, learn as much from massive data dumps—where our brains hardly get the space to burp—as we do from incremental experiments in progress. We try this, test it out. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't—and then we try something else to solve that same problem.

We're guinea pigs at work, testing the limits of our hypotheses, one by one, to follow the trail to the answer we seek. As I've mentioned in the past when explaining my position as unofficial genealogy guinea pig, learning can be awkward, especially when it is observed in real time. After all, to make progress, you have to admit you don't know something. That's the realization where learning begins.

I've often wished I could change the format of some of the teaching sessions I've done for genealogy. If I could have my way—meaning space to experiment, and resources to make it possible—I'd much prefer putting learning into an engaging environment. A place where we had the luxury of testing ideas out and failing—and then taking the time to make adjustments and try again.

Traditional learning has one assumption baked into the formula: you learn in class; where you apply it is on you, at some other time. Just not now.

Whether I can replicate the genealogy guinea pig in such an experimental classroom, I don't know. It does, for instance, call for participants who are willing to take the time to try new things in real time, right there while we're meeting. And then share, reflecting on what went wrong, and what can be done instead—always moving forward.

Maybe that type of experimental lab needs to not be called a classroom. Nor should the session be called a class. Workshop, maybe. Or perhaps something entirely new. Whatever it turns out to be, hopefully it will be the catalyst to get people out of that listening-only mode into a doing mindset.

Genealogy, after all, can truly turn out to be grunt work. And we all need some encouragement to get through those rough spots in the genealogy puzzle. But on the other side, finding that answer! That's the reward which inspires the genealogy happy dance, and we really need someone to share that moment with us. Why not the people who've been working through the process with us all along?