"How Far Back Can You Go?"

 

In researching ancestors, I've generally preferred chasing after those family members who lived in North America, especially when it comes to those who were alive in the 1700s and even 1600s. American records can reliably help us push back through the generations far more reliably than I've experienced for the homelands of those immigrant ancestors whose arrivals dated in later centuries.

Now that I'm working on my father's Polish great-grandparents' lines, I frankly haven't held out too much hope for making progress back through earlier generations. But since Randy Seaver recently asked, in a comment, "How far do the records go back?" I thought it might be an interesting diversion to actually take a look.

For a quick and dirty sketch of possibilities, I turned to the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association—or, as they put it in their native Polish, Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne. (You can see why I call it PTG for short.) Granted, the bulk of that website, as far as I can see now—there are several articles on that site for which there are no translations into English—involve volunteers transcribing records held at regional archives. Searching their database produces results from their transcriptions.

At the PTG website, I simply constructed a search using as wide open a request as possible. Basically, I repeated the search I had done the other day, asking for all records for the shortened surname "Radom." I didn't select any specific regions, nor delimit the results by date.

My very simple search provided an overload of information: 2,602 birth records (most of them, I suspect, being baptisms), 780 marriages, and 1,039 deaths. Naturally, not having set stricter parameters, it was then up to me to scroll through the results. Fortunately, the database arranged itself by date, allowing me to quickly answer Randy's question.

The earliest records noted, by that search method, were for births from Chełmno, a town about sixty five kilometers south of Lubichowo, a journey in my great-grandparents' time of about fourteen hours, so not likely a location featuring any of my ancestors. And that search was additionally limited by the use of one surname, while previous generations might yield results by checking the as-yet-unknown maiden name of an ancestor's mother.

Still, one never knows. After all, those earliest records from Chełmno dated back to 1683. If I am so lucky as to find such old records for any of my ancestors, I'd say I'll be making quite a bit of progress on my brick wall Polish kin.

If, however, I employ the specific field labeled "Civil Registry Office/Parish" and select "Lubichowo kat." for the Catholic Church records of the village where I found the Radomski family, the earliest date available was for births in 1801. Marriages in that village ranged from 1828 through 1941 for that "Radom" surname search, introducing the possibility of reaching for more recent descendants of collateral lines in hopes of figuring out those Polish mystery DNA matches I've found at MyHeritage.com. The deaths entries for this surname stub ranged from the mid to late 1800s, an uninspiring option for expanding that family line.

Of course, if any of my father's Pomeranian ancestors moved to Lubichowo from neighboring villages, perhaps there would still be a chance for me to push through that stalled scrimmage line and gain new ancestral territory. That will remain a puzzle for me to ponder for the rest of this month's research task.