Sometimes, it seems near impossible to connect collateral lines of our ancestors with stray DNA matches on our list of results. That's the way it's been, working with my second great-grandmother Franciszka Olejniczak's brother's family. Despite knowing that Franciszka's brother Bartłomiej had at least six children, I could only find marriage records for five of them. And when it came to tracing grandchildren, only four of those couples appeared in birth records for their own children.
One son of Bartłomiej in particular, Jan—the one whom his 1869 Catholic Church baptismal record had listed as Joannes—seemed to have disappeared from view entirely. Not even a death record could I find for the child.
As I've worked through each of my Polish ancestors, the understanding that some of those many untraceable children may have "disappeared" because they actually headed to America was first on my mind. After all, once such a relative made a move like that, it might be far easier to research that branch of the family in American documents rather than Prussian or Polish records.
Such a hope would bring with it some research hazards. Prime among those would be the possibility that the immigrant chose to blend in by adjusting a Polish-sounding surname to sound more American. While many family history researchers have laid to rest that tired explanation that their ancestor's surname was "changed at Ellis Island," there is still the possibility that, at some point after arrival, an immigrant might make such a choice. Then how could we trace them?
Even though I already knew my own grandmother's brother had made such a choice with his surname, I entirely doubted a DNA match that popped up in my ThruLines results at Ancestry. After all, that match linked me with a supposed family member by the slimmest of connections: a puny seven centiMorgans shared between us.
The sticking point, though, was the surname that was supposed to be similar to mine. Granted, Olejniczak might be a mouthful of consonant soup to someone not acquainted with handling Polish phonics, so I can understand the desire to make it a surname more easily called to mind—or at least less likely to be misspelled. But I could also see that resultant changed name stand on its own as a separate Polish surname. I had presumed it was a coincidental connection.
The thought has ever since nagged at me, so now that I'm working on this Olejniczak branch of my father's family, I decided to check it out afresh. After all, now that I have the BaSIA website with its resources linked to actual archival records, I had been going through each of Bartłomiej's children and grandchildren carefully, looking up each Prussian document, squinting at the German handwriting and hoping my rudimentary understanding of how to read the script was not leading me astray.
Still, after all of that, no sign of Jan after his baptismal record.
Fast forward to my DNA match in, of all places, Ohio. Besides not expecting any of my Polish relatives to have chosen to head to Ohio—New York was more my family's tendency—I knew I had to work on that similar surname choice for the immigrant in question.
This is where looking at every document that can be found for a specific person becomes important. Especially with a surname like Olejniczak, which has spelling made to stump even the most careful of us, it turned out that I could trace the evolution of Jan's name from Olejniczak to the eventual form that it took.
Included in that change was the first, unsurprising, incorrect transcription of the 1920 census. In looking at the actual handwriting on the document, it appears the enumerator might have gotten the spelling correct at Olejniczak, but the effort was somewhat mangled, possibly overwritten. Still, it provided information on Jan—now listed as John—along with his wife, three foreign-born children, and the following three, all born in Ohio.
That census provided valuable help in giving a timeline of the Olejniczak family's travels, based on the birth of those last three children. It also indicated that the family arrived in America in 1905, and that they were naturalized in 1913.
Tracing the family from that point forward illustrated how the surname morphed to its final appearance. What was more valuable, though, was looking back, based on that 1920 census, to locate naturalization records. A Form 1-IP from the U.S. Naturalization Service, found at FamilySearch, summarized John's legal process in becoming a U.S. citizen, with the only discrepancy being a date of birth matching his baptismal record in every respect except the month—July instead of June.
I certainly wouldn't have considered a DNA match based on a connection as small as seven centiMorgans, but combined with multiple records over the length of this immigrant's lifetime convinced me that this John was one and the same as Jan Olejniczak, son of Bartłomiej—and that Jan's own grandson was indeed a DNA cousin.
If only the DNA matches who stayed in Poland would present research trails as easy to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment