Susanna's Siblings

 

For anyone wishing to find distant cousins useful in pointing to a specific shared ancestor, DNA is the best bet. However, where those cousins live and where they tested may signify the best possibility for testing companies. In my second great-grandmother Susanna's case, unless I find any more emigrants among her Polish siblings, the best likelihood for discovering distant cousins would be the most international of the major genetic genealogy companies. Hence, I'll be spending a lot of time at MyHeritage, scouring the match lists for descendants of Susanna's siblings—if, that is, those siblings lived to adulthood and had children of their own.

One dismaying detail about researching the collateral lines for my newly-discovered Polish ancestors was seeing how many of those family members died young. After reviewing the multiple tragedies of loss experienced by Susanna, herself, I braced myself in preparation for looking to the children of the previous generation. The 1850s, at least, were a rough decade for Susanna's family. What more could go wrong in the generations preceding that?

From what I'm seeing at this point, I may yet discover some distant cousins descending from that generation of the Radomski family. Though I am not yet done documenting Susanna's siblings, so far I've found transcriptions of baptismal records for Katarzyna ("Catharinam") in 1821, Susanna's younger brother Simon (likely Szymon) in 1826, Francisca (Franciszka in Polish) in January of 1828, and her apparent twin, Anna, also baptized at that same date. 

Bracing myself for the inevitable—after all, Susanna's own children didn't fare too well in that rural northern region of Poland known as Pomerania—I expected to find each sibling's baptism followed soon afterwards with a record of the baby's burial. So far, no. In fact, I'm finding some marriage records for those siblings, as well. Not only that, but I believe I've found a marriage record for Susanna's own parents in 1814.

Now to move on to mapping out the possible descendancy of those collateral lines. There may be a DNA match from among my Polish cousins, after all.