If He Were Here, We'd Call Him Frank

 

If I were researching my mother's ancestry, I'd have a multitude of records housed in America to reach all the way back to colonial times. Not so with my father's lines. Both his parents came to the United States as children. Right away, researching those roots means immersing myself in what it means to be Polish: to be from a place with a distinct culture, language, and heritage attached to a land which often belonged to someone else.

To begin with, the records I seek for these ancestors were not drawn up in English. Nor, for the most part, were they written in Polish. So when I introduce my focus for November's Twelve Most Wanted, my second great-grandfather, I'm introducing someone whose birth record in Latin likely identified him as Franciscus—or, thanks to the Latin syntax recording his 1854 marriage, as Franciscum. Back in his hometown of Żerków in the old Prussian province of Posen, his neighbors probably called him Franciszek  But if he were to migrate to New York, like his daughter Marianna did, we'd probably just call him Frank.

Franciszek never made it to New York, though he lived long enough to see two of his daughters leave home for the New World. Marianna, my great-grandmother, married at sixteen, and became mother to four children. She followed her husband to New York after their youngest child, a son, died in infancy like so many other children in their extended family during that time period.

My grandmother was three months shy of her fourth birthday upon that journey from Hamburg to New York. If she remembered her grandparents at all, it would be with the dim memory of childhood. Any stories that might have been told about family members left behind apparently have not been passed down to any of my older relatives—at least, not that they've been able to recount to me.

It is into this void that I push through to find any token of Franciszek Jankowski's life through the scant documentation left behind as acknowledgement that he ever existed. Far more than a connect-the-dots challenge, we'll need to rely on records of the area's history and geography to re-imagine what life must have been like for the relatives who were left behind when Marianna, her two sons, and her daughter Sophie took that final journey so far away from home.