A Mother's Maiden Name

 

Finding a mother's maiden name can become a challenge for family historians. In this month's case of researching my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak, however, I've already found records where people were all too glad to divulge that information. In fact, I've managed to glean two options for that valued detail.

As we reviewed two different records for Franciszka, it was possible that her mother's name had been recorded in error in one of those two documents. In Franciszka's baptismal record, her mother was identified as Josepha Grozegorski, while Franciszka's marriage record showed her mother as Josephae Grzegorczyk.

I'm not too concerned with the variations in the given name. After all, church records are supposed to be written in Latin. Josephae was probably right, given the context and the syntax required in the document's wording. And Josepha in the baptismal record was probably a similar Latin version, as actually the Polish form would have been Josefa. But the surnames? That's a different matter.

Still, we have to cut these clerics some slack—as well as remember that, until I can get to a FamilySearch center in person, I'm working from transcriptions. Remembering how miserable it sometimes is to read other people's handwriting—to say nothing of sloppy handwriting of prior centuries—I'm quite satisfied to give the benefit of the doubt, at least until I can see those documents for myself.

But which one would the actual maiden name be? As incredible as it might be to an English-speaker's mind, I tend to go with the consonant mash up, Grzegorczyk.

There are some reasons for this. First, having spent considerable time trying to make my peace with Polish phonics, I already know how to pronounce the not-unusual suffix "-czyk." Then, the first part of that surname, "Grzegorz" forms the Polish man's name for which the English equivalent would be Gregory.

I did a simple search online for information on the Polish surname Grzegorczyk. Wikipedia, incredibly, offered a small blurb on the surname. Ancestry.com, of course, provided some perspective, not only explaining the origin and the suffix, but offering two options for that surname. One version of the surname, as it appears in records I've found, is Grzegorczyk. The other, with the entry providing far more information, is for the spelling Grzegorzyk.

All that to say, Grzegorczyk is a patronymic surname. In other words, Josefa's patrilineal ancestor somewhere back in history was likely named "Gregory" and all that followed in that family were known as "son of Gregory."

It is highly unlikely I'll ever be able to trace such a theory through records. I'm having a hard time locating Polish records that reach back to the time of Franciszka's mother in the early 1800s. But having learned a bit of the surname's history, no matter how unpronounceable that consonant soup appears to be on paper, I'm feeling more confident that the priest writing out her baptismal record probably paused to ask, "Now how do you spell that?!"