Hunting the Blue ThruLines Icon

 

Something unexpected popped up when I went to tabulate my biweekly progress on my family trees on Ancestry. After I noted progress on my own family's tree—it's been a slow slog, but I did add forty three Polish names on my father's side this time—I turned to my in-laws' tree. Before I could check the results on that separate family tree, though, a message popped up.

"Select an ancestor in your tree who has the blue ThruLines icon. We'll show you their descendants who may be connected to you through DNA, and help you add them to your tree."

Being susceptible to Bright Shiny Objects of the Genealogical Kind, I immediately left off progress on my planned task—noting the 38,622 names in my own tree now—and veered off the research path to check this out. Why I didn't see this notice when I first began the day's work on Ancestry.com, I can't say; maybe this was the split second it made its appearance. After all, as I checked it out, I noticed a sign indicating this was a "beta" version, so it's likely not something that every subscriber will find right away.

Since the promise of this beta test appeared on my in-laws' tree, I decided to go hunting for a blue ThruLines icon there. Pulling up the pedigree chart, I noticed every single name in the first five generations had a blue ThruLines icon attached to it. I selected my mother-in-law's great-grandfather Michael Metzger for my trial run, and clicked on his name in the pedigree chart.

Clicking on Michael's name brought up the usual profile pop-up box, with the added invitation on the bottom of the box to "add DNA matches descending from Michael." I clicked on that, which opened up a side bar instructing me to "Select a DNA match from Michael's descendants." Below that heading appeared a listing of descendants under subheadings labeled with Michael's own children's names.

I looked through the list, which had several names of DNA matches. The list was long, but hey, Michael had plenty of descendants. I had already added thirty two of those descendants to my tree, but this notice showed me that I had at least ten more to go.

From that point, I perused the list of those ten unattached Metzger matches and noticed one whose surname matched several others I already have in that tree. The next step would have been to select that DNA cousin by clicking a radio button next to her name, then clicking the blue button on the bottom of the side bar labeled, "View Connection."

Well, I pointed and clicked, but nothing happened. That is where I realized this might be an option that came to me hot off the press, so to speak. Right away, a survey popped up, and I completed it. By the time I was done, I couldn't help but go back and test my luck on another trial.

This time, I went to my own parents' tree to see if I had the same beta option there. Thankfully, I did, and my trial run on my own mother's line worked just fine. I selected my third great-grandfather James Davis, for whom I have already added nine DNA cousins and evidently have another three to go. Selecting one of those three gave me a readout on that side bar showing that cousin's line of descent.

At that point, I could select the option, "review person," which seems to allow addition of a few details before adding that name to my tree—but I am too cautious to just add someone based on any company's suggestion. I need to check out the details myself—especially including documentation—so I didn't opt for that route on the decision tree.

Instead, I clicked on the second option, which is a less obvious choice. Looking at the potential match's box in the line of descent, there is a label on the bottom right, "view match." That selection brought me to the same landing page where I would have arrived, had I gone through the usual ThruLines process before this beta test. That way, I can see a brief outline of the match's tree, and can click through to view this person's own tree on Ancestry.

Furthermore, I can open two tabs on my laptop and toggle back and forth between the match's parents (or pertinent grandparents) listed and those same names in my own family tree. I can properly enter any missing generations in my own tree, complete with documentation—several documents, in fact—to bring my tree down to the generation in question to create the right space for that entry.

I realize that seems to be a redundant approach after having been gifted with this streamlined detour by Ancestry's new beta offering. And maybe that approach will work for some people. It's just that I've learned my lesson about running into messes by copying information from others' trees—but seem to keep forgetting that lesson when newer Bright Shiny Objects of the Genealogical Kind make their irresistible appearance.

So, beta test? Sure. It seems like a great idea. I'll use it to get to the shortcut and avoid having to hunt for the ThruLines tab every time I think I'm on to something. But once I arrive at a match's drop-down menu, I'll revert to the tried and true approach that's worked for me in the past. 

Thoughts About Thanksgiving

 

With the upcoming American holiday of Thanksgiving only days away, my mind lately has turned to memories of that time period from my childhood. In fact, I've been sharing those memories in recent genealogy presentations, and all for good reason: I think the Thanksgiving holiday may be one of the prime reasons I've always wanted to learn more about my own family history.

You see, even though I grew up in the New York City metro area—I was only a thirty mile drive away from the big Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade—our family never did anything fun on that holiday. Granted, any day off from school was a day for students to celebrate, but for me, Thanksgiving didn't fall into that category. With steel-gray skies overhead and near freezing temperatures—but nothing as fun as snow yet—I'd mope around the house with the parade running on the tiny TV in our living room until I couldn't stand it any longer, and go outside, looking for friends.

No one. Up and down the street I'd look, trying to find anyone to hang out with, and give up. Sitting on our milk box on the front porch, I'd watch the planes flying overhead on their approach to Idlewild Airport, and wonder, "Where is everyone?"

That, of course, was a rhetorical question. I knew where everyone was: they were on their way to visit aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who lived somewhere else. Everyone, that is, except for me.

That was likely when I first began asking questions about our invisible extended family: who they were, where they lived, and why we didn't see them more often. Thankfully, my mother had lots of answers and was happy to oblige me on many occasions since then, though my dad hardly added anything—a testimony to my current drive to connect with my Polish paternal roots this month.

It's been many, many years since that point when I first woke up to that missing part of my life, that part about knowing my roots. I have never since stood along the parade route of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, though I know its own heritage began one hundred years ago. But I can say that now, after decades of searching for answers about my own heritage—and thankful for the stories shared with me by older siblings, cousins, and even DNA matches along the way—I have a bit more peace about knowing who my extended family has been, and where I fit in this larger family tapestry. And that's the kind of thanks I can celebrate this Thanksgiving. 

Adding Clusters

 

A little here (at this website), a little there (at another website), and pretty soon I'm adding clusters of relatives to the family tree. Admittedly, each of those clusters makes its own floating tree in my newest project to seek and record all Laskowski family members from the 1800s in Żerków, the Polish town which once was part of Prussia.

This time, I started with the 1878 death record of seventy one year old Antonina Markiewicz, who was listed as a daughter of Paul Laskowski and Marianna at the Polish website BaSIA. Checking my chart of all Laskowski entries I had harvested from the database at BaSIA, I then noticed I already had a few other entries for Antonina. I had found the 1826 marriage entry for Antonina and her husband, Franciszek Markiewicz, and two baptismal records.

From that point, same as I had done yesterday, I moved from the BaSIA website to FamilySearch.org, where in the same Żerków record set I had used previously, I now searched for any baptismal records containing the names of these parents. There, along with the couple's marriage record, I found an entry for their daughter Maryanna, born on December 6, 1838. In addition, I found subsequent baptismal records for two sons, Franciszek and Ignatius, whose much later birth dates caused me to look twice to make sure the estimated year of birth for their mother would still sustain believability that these were Antonina's sons.

Pleased with the continued progress on my experiment, I began holding out hope that perhaps there would be a way to see how all these Laskowskis connect in tiny Żerków. It may all depend on whether I can uncover further resources for documentation during that time period.

If it Isn't Here, Could it be There?

 

Looking for records of Polish ancestors has been, as I've said before, not a plug-and-play experience. Part of the documented family story I may have located through the Polish website BaSIA, but that collection's big gap in the middle of the nineteenth century, right where I need to research, hasn't been much of a help.

I got to wondering: if the records aren't accessible through BaSIA, could I find them anywhere else? I'm not prepared to fully answer that question yet, but I'm beginning my experiment to test out that hypothesis.

Yesterday, I harvested all the information I could find at BaSIA for any mention of Laskowski kin in the town of Żerków in nineteenth century Prussia. At that point, surveying all the possible connections yet lacking any way to confidently link them to my own Laskowski ancestry, I mused over the possibility of adding—and organizing—them as a "floating tree" within my own tree at Ancestry.com.

Today, I tried out that idea. Any time I do this, I always cringe when I cut the individual entry loose from its anchor in the original tree. Yes, I know that the Laskowski entry to which I linked this possible relative is not really a sibling. Nonetheless, it bothers me. But I did it.

My first victim, er, volunteer was the husband of Marianna Zaborowska. It was her 1882 death record at BaSIA which told me that this seventy six year old woman was the wife of Adalbert Laskowski. With those two names and approximate dates, I scooted off to FamilySearch to see whether I could find any records for the couple there.

Fortunately, I had already learned that Adalbert—or Adalbertus—was the way the Polish given name Wojciech would be entered in Catholic church records, which were usually drawn up in Latin. Beginning my experiment at FamilySearch, I selected "search," then chose "images," where I entered the place name for my Laskowski family in the former country of Prussia: Żerków. I estimated the date range when this couple would have had children—if they had any children—and clicked on the link for the digitized collection of baptismal records for that era.

Once that record set was selected, I clicked the little magnifying glass icon at the top of the set and entered the name of interest: Adalbert Laskowski. Five possibilities popped up, including two with Marcyanna Zaborowska's name as mother of the baptized child.

Back to my own tree at Ancestry, I began by entering Adalbert—alias Wojciech—Laskowski as if he were brother of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski. Then, I cut him loose from the supposed father and mother and let Wojciech float free, untethered in family tree outer space.

Because the FamilySearch record set for Żerków baptisms included two children for Wojciech and Marcianna—son Piotr Paweł, born in June of 1841, and son Stanisław, born in November 1842—I added their information to the free-floating Laskowski couple so that at least these four people are now connected to each other. I'll repeat this process as I compare the rest of the records I found at BaSIA with any that I can locate through FamilySearch.org's image collection.

Needless to say, I may be busy at this project for a long, long time. Just maybe, at some point, I'll figure out how these Laskowskis relate to the ones in town who belong to my family's line. If nothing else, I'll map out the connections between the families living nearly two hundred years ago in the tiny town of Żerków, Poland.

Organizing the Splat of the Data

 

So, the data's gathered. Now what?

I'm sitting here, looking at the list I've harvested from a search for Laskowski relatives documented in the tiny town of Żerków throughout the 1800s. I'm trying to figure out a way to organize the great, big splat of it all. There's a gap in the fat middle of it, of course, likely due to the inevitable destruction of some records through the centuries—or, perhaps if I'm lucky, the gap is simply owing to a backlog in uploading indexed results onto the website.

Spanning the century in my search for this one particular surname was my way of hoping to circumvent the problem of missing records. Almost as if vindicating my hunch, I did find some marriage and death records towards the end of the 1800s which provided names of parents whom I hadn't encountered back at the beginning of that century. Yet it still is hard to sift through all this information and find patterns or connections.

When I think of patterns for ancestral connections, the easiest way for my brain to recognize them is to lay out all the information in a pedigree chart. But how to connect all these disparate names? It occurred to me that using the technique of a "floating tree" might be just the answer. That way, I'd enter each of these Laskowski names into my family tree at Ancestry.com, then cut the entry lose from the tree so no relationship is implied. From that point, each time I run into that name again—say, in a subsequent marriage record, or listed as parent of a child who died later in the century—I can look it up in my index (since it is floating free from any relationships) and then add the new name and relationship to that floating individual's entry.

Eventually, I'd have several clustered cells floating around, detached in the ether of my family tree. True, they'd be disconnected still from my own Laskowski line, but I'd be holding them in reserve, in hopes that someday, more records will be added to the various digitized collections I can now access.

Looking at the Polish website BaSIA, I've noticed that each transcription is linked to the scan of the actual document held in the Polish archives. Along with the link to the scanned picture, the BaSIA entry provides the date that each entry was added to the website. I've noticed that some of those entries had upload dates early in 2012, while others were added closer to the end of that decade. I'm fervently hoping this is still a work in progress, with more indexed and scanned records to come. That gap in resources from about the 1850s through the 1880s could contain the very information I'm seeking.

It's a Small Town, After All

 

There are some research problems which leave me feeling as if I'm walking in circles. Pursuing my Laskowski ancestors in Żerków is one of those problems. The more I try to compile a listing of all the documents containing the surname Laskowski for resident of Żerków, the more I'm spotting relatives sporting the other surnames in my paternal line.

Can that be so surprising? After all, Żerków is only a town of maybe two thousand residents now. That each of the residents, over several generations, would be likely to marry spouses from the other, likely limited, families in the area should not be surprising. But I was surprised, nonetheless.

Take my new brick wall ancestor Bonawentura Laskowski. He's my third great-grandfather, so now I'm making progress, having moved into this new generation. But that's where I'm stumped. I cannot find any connections for this man who died in 1827.

I got the brainy idea that, if I couldn't make any progress on the Laskowski side of the equation, perhaps I'd find better luck looking at the other side of the family. That other side is represented by Bonawentura's wife, Orszula Wroblewska. With a name like that, I'm automatically folding in more uncertainty, because I've seen her name rendered several ways. Some records list her given name as Ursula, which would be understandable. But my doubt rises even further when I find only records spelling her maiden name as Wrobleska, not Wroblewska. Could this just be a case of simple misspelling? 

I did a search for documents on the Polish website BaSIA to see what would show up. I narrowed the search parameters to a ten kilometer area around Żerków, and lessened the similarity range to a more lenient level to capture any other possible spelling variations. 

With that, I began to pull in possibilities for this side of the family. I found a twenty six year old woman named Cunegunda Wrobleska who died in 1821, as well as a sixty year old woman named Franciszka with the same surname who died in 1818. But when I came upon the 1820 death notice for eighty year old Regina Wrobleska, something made me stop and consider.

Regina, I noticed, was apparently unlike the others with the surname Wrobleska, for this entry gave her maiden name. The record noted that she was born a Laskoska. Fortunately for whoever might be among her descendants, her parents' names were listed: Adalbertus Laskoski and Barbara. Although there was no maiden name given for Regina's mother Barbara, this was the first instance I had found in Żerków of someone this early in the century provided with parents' names.

But what was this? Besides Orszula Wroblewska, my third great-grandmother who married Bonawentura Laskowski, here was another woman whose life story also tied together these two surnames. Could there have been more?

Looking further, I also spotted another surname which has appeared in this branch of my family tree before: Gramlewicz. Only this time, instead of representing the line of Bonawentura's daughter-in-law Elzbieta Gramlewicz, this was the birth record for Laurentius Gramlewicz, son of Michael Gramlewicz and Marianna Wrobleska. Somehow, all three of these surnames are tied together in my roots—and more than once. 

Yes, Żerków is a small town, after all—so what was I to expect? Whether I can conclude that minor misspellings do not indicate entirely unrelated families, I can't yet be sure. But I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm slipping into the outer edges of some signs of endogamy in my family tree.

In Search of Polish Naming Conventions

 

Researching ancestors from an English language country is far simpler than pursuing those secret ancestors my paternal grandparents never wanted us kids to find. Yes, the cousins persevered and made discoveries, but now that I'm faced with the prospect of untangling at least eighty Laskowski ancestors from the same tiny village, I need some help.

I'm currently in search of information on Polish naming conventions, especially to help me sort out those many mentions of newborn Laskowskis in baptismal records. It occurred to me how much easier my research would be if my Polish forebears abode by some simple rules of thumb like, say, the Irish naming pattern. Or how about the pattern the Irish used for selecting godparents? If only my Polish ancestors had relied on such conventions, I'd have it made. Every time I'd spot a godparent's name, I'd know exactly how that name would fit into the family picture.

I decided to search for some answers to questions like, "How did Polish parents select godparents for their newborn babies?" Or, "Was there any naming convention Polish parents used in naming their babies after older relatives?"

Apparently, while I can find such material regarding Irish families, there are no such articles written on the subject for Polish ancestors that I can find. I did find some very generic advice, along the lines of naming children after saints, or perhaps—though apparently rare—after a godparent. But who would be the one chosen as the godparent? I have more questions than answers.

When it came to Polish naming conventions, I did find articles explaining the Polish custom of variations on surname endings, based mostly on conventions of their own language. And there was a far more modern version of information on what goes into a Polish name. I even found an article on "name days" celebrated in Poland—though I read elsewhere that that Polish tradition is losing ground in more modern times.

Still, I haven't found any naming patterns which might provide clues as to who was related to whom—which leaves me no option but guesswork at this point. Or a lot of research, and the hope that there are many more records to be found out there, somewhere.