Brother Bartholomew

 

Any time we expand our family history research to include collateral lines, you know that can lead to solving questions about our mystery DNA matches. That's exactly my aim in pushing backwards in time to discover the parents of my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak.

In fact, though I've been questioning the various entries for Franciszka's mother's maiden name, just testing those versions on document searches at FamilySearch.org and Polish websites led me to identify another child born to the couple, Nicolaus (or Mikołaj in Polish) Olejniczak and Józefa Grzegorczyk (or possibly Grozegorski). That child, born in 1838 and baptized that year on August 19, was Franciszka's younger brother, Bartholomew.

That, of course, would be the brother's name in English. The baptismal record, written in Latin for this Catholic family, listed his name as Bartholomaeus. I suspect that, having been born to a Polish family in what was then considered part of the country of Prussia, his family likely called him Bartłomiej at home.

The beauty of finding this document is that it corroborates one of the two maiden names I've already found listed for Franciszka's mother: Grzegorczyk. Granted, that could be a second priest misspelling the surname in the same erroneous way, but it does help point me towards that variation for future searches.

My quest to discover DNA matches descending from this Olejniczak family may already have paid off, with one DNA cousin who has that same surname in his tree. Whether that tree is correct, I can't yet say. First, we need to check what can be found about this Bartholomew—a.k.a. Bartłomiej—in the Polish resources we've already begun using, something to explore this coming week.