Back Home With the Jankowskis

 

I probably wouldn't have known much about my second great-grandfather Franciszek Jankowski if it weren't for his daughter marrying and then leaving home with his three remaining grandchildren. That his daughter Marianna didn't suffer the fate of so many young people growing up in the old Prussian town of Żerków was unusual enough. I'd already noticed the finality of multiple extended family members having laid their young children to rest. Though it might have seemed young, Marianna's marriage at age sixteen may have been her ticket away from the doomed future which befell so many of her family members.

When Marianna left home to follow her much older husband to New York City, she left behind the small town of her parents' generation. By the time of her 1889 departure, her father would have been closing in on sixty years of age. Her mother, Franciszka, would have been in her early fifties. The Jankowskis' youngest child, Marianna's sister Antonina, would barely have turned eleven.

Thankfully, when Marianna's parents were married, marriage records of that time period included information on the parents of both Franciszek and his wife Franciszka. Though I have yet to access the actual document at a FamilySearch Library, the main details from that February 13, 1854, marriage record tell me several details about Franciszek.

For one thing, his age given in the marriage record provided the estimate of a year of birth in 1830. More helpful than that was the provision of his parents' names, likely Jan Jankowski and Anna Stajeska in their native Polish tongue. Franciszek's wife, Franciszka, was the daughter of Nicolai (likely Mikołaj in Polish) Olejniczak and his wife Josepha. Franciszek's mother-in-law came with a bona fide Polish tongue twister for a maiden name: Grzegorczyk (though that run of consonants only serves to puzzle those who haven't taken the time to learn how to pronounce Polish phonics).

All told, I've been able to account for nine children for this couple, though as far as I can tell, many of them died in infancy or early childhood. Tracing documents for these family members requires not only relying on the digitized records available at FamilySearch.org, but also by venturing out online to websites in Poland, where volunteers dedicate themselves to posting transcriptions of digitized records from Polish archival sources.

Documenting who those many children are will require bouncing between three or four websites, juggling with verbiage in two different languages (neither of which are Polish), and posting those sources in all the places where I keep family trees.

As I mentioned earlier this year when I set up my research plans through my Twelve Most Wanted program, my main goal in zeroing in on Franciszek Jankowski is to trace the lines of all survivors in the hopes of pinpointing the shared ancestral couple linking me with several DNA matches I have at the major genetic genealogy websites. Expanding the Jankowski branch of my family tree may be challenging, especially for those descendants remaining in what eventually became war-torn Europe in the 1900s. As research resources become more available online, helpful tools may make this more of a possibility than in years past.