Same People, Different Place

 

Name twins are always lurking in research shadows, putting family historians on high alert. The trouble with researching ancestors like my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak is that I've run into that same name in different residences. Do both records pertain to the same person in such cases? I've had to put Google Maps through its paces to ensure that, in such cases, I'm dealing with the same people—it's just that they've moved to a different place.

In the instance of my Polish forebears, there is another step to add to the verification process: records for my second great-grandmother's lifespan were drawn up when the places where she lived belonged to a different country: Prussia instead of Poland. With the change of government often came a change in geographic names.

Take this example of Franciszka's marriage record. On February 13, 1854, Franciszka became the bride of Franciszek Jankowski. The document noted the place where this occurred: Jaratschewo in Jarotschin, part of the Prussian province of Posen. That, of course, is not what the place is called today, so I checked to see whether I could learn the Polish name for that old Prussian village.

In this case, the revision was predictable, basically incorporating Polish phonics instead of German: Jaraczewo. But then, not satisfied to leave it at that one marriage record, I went looking for a birth record. After all, Franciszka's marriage record gave the name of her parents, so I assumed I'd have additional help in finding her birth record. 

Sure enough, there was a baptismal record for Franciszka, giving her date of birth as January 22, 1836. Along with the baby's name, parents' names were included. Granted, this was a church document, so the information was given in Latin, not Polish (or even German). But there was one slight problem: those parents' names in the baptismal record didn't quite match up to the wedding record. Close, but not exact.

For the wedding record, I already had learned that Franciszka's parents were Nicolai Oleyniczak and Josephae Grzegorczyk, but when I came to the earlier church record, the names appeared as Nicolaus Olajniczak and Josepha Grozegorski.

I wasn't too concerned about these differences as much as I was about the fact that each document gave a different location. What if these two Olejniczak children were simply name twins?

To the maps I went, on the theory that if the one town was within walking distance of the other town, I still had a chance that each represented the same person. Once again, for this baptism location, I needed to translate the Prussian town name to its current designation in Poland. Jezewo in Kreis (county) Gostyn in the province of Posen during Prussian rule became, simply, Jeżewo. Because this was such a small village, though, I needed to check for the nearby town of Borek Wielkopolski. (In fact, though I can find a Wikipedia entry on Jeżewo, it is offered only in Polish with translation into French and a couple other languages, but not English. Of course, it is possible to run the text through a translation service, but even if you don't, you can still enjoy the pictures.)

Having checked all that and entered the two locations on Google Maps, asking for directions for those traveling on foot told me that the distance between the two event locations was a little over seven kilometers. In other words, Google estimated that a person could make that hike in an hour and forty minutes.

Having checked all that eased me into thinking that perhaps bride Franciscam and baby Francisca were the same individual, and that spelling her maiden name of Olejniczak had stumped at least two different priests. Father of the bride Nicolai was likely one priest's approximation of the Polish name Mikołaj, and the baby's father Nicolaus was far more likely to be a Latin version of the same.

But mother Josephae? Though this could be the key to providing me with information on the generation preceding Franciszka, the mother's maiden name provided in one document was far too removed from the other version. This surname was one to check into more deeply.