DNA Directs the Way

 

Stumbling over lost leads in my quest to connect with my Olejniczak ancestors in Poland, I decided to cut to the chase and revisit my DNA connections at the several companies where I have tested. Where unavailable records prove to be no help at all back in Poland, tracing a family's genetic pathway can sometimes divulge what we can't find on paper. In one case with this Olejniczak family, DNA may well direct the way to a family connection with another immigrant descendant.

I had actually known about this DNA match a long time ago, but could never figure out the connection. Worse, there was a surname in this DNA cousin's tree which was so close to an in-law's name in my grandmother's line that it beguiled me—but to no use, despite being off by only one additional letter.

I had set aside this DNA clue years ago, long before Ancestry had created Shared Matches on their Pro Tools add-on subscription. Because the match's unlinked tree contained absolutely no other matching surnames—not even similar names—I had set aside this match, and with all the hundreds of other DNA matches calling my name, I never remembered to return and visit this one.

Now, however, I spotted one possible connection. On the match's tree, it was a great-grandparent, listed only with a given name. No maiden name was provided, though I could see what this great-grandmother's married name would have been. On the slight chance that it might lead somewhere, I decided to test out a theory.

My hypothesis was that the given name, listed in the tree as Hedwig, might actually be an anglicized version of a more traditionally Polish name. The only other details provided in this match's tree were that Hedwig was born in 1870 and that she came from Poland to America.

By virtue of this Hedwig's husband's surname, I recognized it through the years of poking around trees of other DNA matches on my paternal side. And since I've spent a couple months now, trawling through Polish records on foreign websites like BaSIA, I realized the name we know as Hedwig often was recorded in Poland as Jadwig or Jadwiga. What were the chances that my match's Hedwig might be a Jadwiga descended from my Olejniczak family?

Looking at my database, I had not only one, but two collateral relatives listed with that given name. One woman was the daughter of my own second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak, wife of Franciszek Jankowski, the very woman I'm researching this month. This entry in my own tree for Jadwiga had her year of birth, 1869, but nothing further. She had simply disappeared from records, as far as I could find.

The second entry I had for someone named Jadwiga came from an experiment I had tried years ago: to build out the family tree of this same match who, at the time, seemed to be an inscrutable DNA match. I made it back to an ancestor of this match who was entered as "Hedwig" in the 1910 census, the earliest record I could find for her. She was there in that document, along with her husband and several children, with her year of birth estimated to be 1865. Not quite 1869, but a slight possibility.

What was encouraging, in revisiting this DNA match after all these years, is to now see that she shares a match with the Olejniczak cousin I had confirmed via DNA testing just this past week. It should be a fairly streamlined task for me to return to the Polish website, BaSIA, and look for any record of this Jadwiga's marriage, if it did indeed happen prior to her emigration from Poland.

Granted, I'll also need to double check that there is no other surname in this DNA match's tree which could have been overlooked as a genetic connection, but at this point, I am not seeing anything. Then, it will be a simple matter of merging the two Jadwiga entries into one to combine Jadwiga's ancestral branch with that of the descendants in her married line.

Bit by bit, DNA is helping chip away at the mystery of what has happened to those disappearing members of my second great-grandmother's family. Those collateral lines weren't in any Polish records following their birth there because they no longer lived anywhere in the country. They had left the war-torn, poverty-stricken province in the former country of Prussia for a better life somewhere far away from the place they once called home. And in that new home, how was anyone to know what was meant by that enigmatic census entry that simply said Poland?