Spun Around

 

Name twins can sometimes spin a researcher around in circles. Chasing one name, we may think we are following a straight trail, but all of a sudden we look up and realize we've been entangled in a mess. Retracing our steps may be even as dizzying.

I may always be on the lookout for name twins, but they are usually of the more tame, English variety, like two women born the same year in the same town with a name like, say, Mary Smith. You know, the kind of puzzles where name twins tend to marry men named John Jones.

However, this time, I've been researching names in Poland, where Smith and Jones would indeed be an oddity. The only trouble is, I'm not sure I can spot which multi-syllable surnames with diacritical marks and far too many consonants would constitute a name twin in nineteenth century Prussia. But I just spent far more time than I'd like, untangling myself from a mess that sure felt like a chase after a name twin.

It all started with my quest to trace lines of descent from my Olejniczak third great-grandparents. Right now, I'm cross checking records transcribed at BaSIA and hyperlinked to local archival holdings with records I've already added to my tree at FamilySearch.org. Systematically going through each line of descent, I find some new records and add them to both my entries at FamilySearch and my tree at Ancestry.com. 

Arriving at the family of Marianna Olejniczak, who married Wojciech Marecki (a Polish given name often written in Latin church records as Adalbertus), I thought I was proceeding as planned. Beginning with their oldest son Anton, I entered the record showing his 1921 marriage to Wiktoria Bogaczyk. She, apparently, had been widowed. While her parents' names revealed her name at birth, her marriage record to Anton showed her current surname as Paluszak.

Moving on to Anton's younger brother Jan, born only eleven months after his own birth, I saw that same surname pop up for Jan's marriage record. And then, another record reported that someone named Marianna Paluszak and Jan Marecki had lost a son, Franciszek, who was only six weeks old at the time of his 1924 death.

But wait! Sad as it was to see yet another of my Polish ancestral line lose a child at such a young age, my attention riveted to the mother's maiden name, Paluszak. Hadn't I just seen that same surname somewhere else?!

That dizzying feeling began overtaking me, as I wondered whether I had just become victim to another name twin trick. I raced back through all the records, checking Polish handwriting in the originals (hint: no, I don't know how to read Polish handwriting) to see where I lost the trail.

If it weren't for the saving grace of some marriage records in Poland including the names of each set of parents, perhaps I wouldn't have had the material from that 1921 document to reassure myself that I hadn't followed the wrong trail, after all. But still, a widowed mother marries one brother, and her daughter the other brother? Not something often seen as we trace the branches of our family trees.