Searching for John and Agnes

 

Felix Aktabowski's 1905 death certificate in New York City said his parents were John and Agnes, but you can be fairly sure this American immigrant's parents did not really go by those names. And while that same document stated that Felix came from Russia, that information conflicts with other records found in New York City. Let's just say searching for my Uncle John's father-in-law has been a quest riddled with surprises.

Take this one discovery, tossed my way by Ancestry.com's hints department: an eighteen year old immigrant arriving in New York City on August 7, 1883, reported to be from Russia. Included in the arriving passengers and crew list for the Fresia, the corresponding German record drawn up when Anton "Achtabowski" sailed from Hamburg on July 25 added one more detail: Anton was a former resident of "Plock, Russland." 

While I can't yet say whether this was our Anton—a.k.a. Felix—I do know that at about the time our Anton would have been born, the partitioned part of Poland including Płock was under Russian occupation. Thus, it would make sense to see this Polish-born man listed in government documents of the time as coming from part of Russia.

While this Anton "Achtabowski" may have resided in Płock before starting his travels, there were certainly no families documented by that surname—including its many spelling variations—in the Masovian province where Płock is located. However, records for the province to the northwest—Kujawsko-Pomorskie—where we've been looking show different results.

So what about our Felix Aktabowski's supposed parents, John and Agnes? If they were Polish residents of the area surrounding Płock, despite Russian occupation, rather than John and Agnes, their names were more likely to be Jan and Agnieszka. Add Felix's mother's maiden name—Derkowska, for the feminine version—and we might actually be able to find some information.

While the search results at Geneteka showed no one by the name Felix or Anton Aktabowski, I was able to locate four daughters of a couple by that exact name, Jan Aktabowski and Agnieszka Derkowska. There was Anna born in 1852, Weronika born in 1855, Rozalia born in 1857, and Apolonia born in 1859. While only two of the daughters were born in the same place—Wałycz—all four were born in nearby villages within the county of Wąbrzeźno.

That there was no listing for Anton or Felix could have been the result of many factors. Of course, these may not have been the right parents, despite having the same names—though I have failed to find any other provinces containing these names among their residents. Or the website Geneteka may not yet have transcribed his baptismal record. The family may have moved once again to another province, which I have yet to locate. The spelling of the surname—or the handwriting used to record it—may have been so abysmal as to mangle the entry entirely.

And yet, though I can trace no generation previous to Jan Aktabowski, Agnieszka Derkowska is a different case. For her own baptism, I've found a possible date in 1828, showing her as a daughter of Jan Derkowski and Katarzyna Unijewska. This discovery leads again to a full listing of siblings whose records are also transcribed at Geneteka in that same province.

The research project that started at the beginning of this month with a doubtful attempt at exploring the roots of Uncle John's wife, Bronisława Aktabowska, did indeed burst farther that I thought possible through some long-standing brick walls. I'm certainly not finished yet, but this month's exercise demonstrated that if we are patient and willing to revisit past research failures, a fresh look at a later date can indeed surface new material. 

 

Going—Surprise!—Straight to the Source

 

Searching for any information on Uncle John's immigrant father-in-law was difficult. Not only was the man's surname incredibly easy to mis-spell, but he seemed to switch between two very different given names, as well. In all the birth records I've been able to find for his children, he was identified as Anton or Antoni Aktabowski. But for the few official census records in which I've been able to spot him, he went by the name Felix Aktabowski.

Confusing the issue—and any hope of finding him in his homeland before immigration—was the fact that some of those records stated he was from Poland, and others from Russia. In fact, while the 1900 census stated his country of origin was Poland, tagged along with that answer was the abbreviation "Russ," possibly indicating that was the actual language he spoke. 

Missing from the records I've been able to access, either on Ancestry.com or at FamilySearch.org, was the actual copy of Felix Aktabowski's death certificate. Ancestry provided a transcription which gave his date of death as December 6, 1905, and the place as the old Kings County, New York, former name of the New York City borough now known as Brooklyn.

Of course, transcriptions never provide all the information on a document—and usually the missing part is the very detail we want to know about more specifically. Keep in mind, I had already located one province in Poland which had several Aktabowski families listed in baptismal and marriage record transcriptions at the Polish genealogy website Geneteka—but without confirmation of Felix's parents' names, that discovery is meaningless. I needed to find a way to see the actual death record—the whole record.

When I find transcriptions at Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org, I like to look at the notes for the record set to glean information on the source upon which the transcriptions were based. Going back to the notes for the Ancestry source—the New York, New York, U.S., Extracted Death Index 1862-1948—and scrolling down the page to "Source Information," I could see the original data was provided directly from the New York City Department of Records.

Even better, scrolling farther down the page to the "About" section, I spotted this note on obtaining records:

Visit the Department of Records/Municipal Archives website, www.nyc.gov/records (click on family history research) for information and instructions on how to view and/or obtain copies of death records identified in the index....

Notice those instructions included the phrase, "how to view." Yes, view—as in, possibly, actually, you know, see the document for myself. Right now. No stamped, self-addressed envelope. No waiting six weeks. And best of all: no tap dance to send some type of special check because the twenty-first century convenience of using a credit card would be future shock to government officials.

For those of you who have kept up with the victories on behalf of genealogists by the nonprofit organization, Reclaim the Records, you already know that New York City was one of their first projects. (For those who relish reading the blow-by-blow of this judicial victory, see here for the recounting.) The outcome of that effort was the release of city records up through the mid-1900s.

Including Felix Aktabowski's death certificate.

Though I had known about the victory gained by Reclaim the Records on behalf of all of us researching our roots in New York City, what I didn't realize was that, strangely prompted by the court experience, the New York City Department of Records and Information Services decided to set up their own website to share the wealth. It was there, on their own website set up for this purpose, that I was able to search for Felix's death certificate.

Though parents' names given on such documents are only as reliable as the memory of the bereaved reporting party suddenly tasked with recalling such information, I'll take the answers as a clue to guide me in further research. With that, I'm off to discover what I can find, back in Poland, for a couple by the name of John Aktabowski and Agnes Derkowski.

Code-Switching for Polish Genealogy

 

I know, I know: code-switching is a current buzz word for far more than the example I want to examine today, but bear with me. Researching Polish roots becomes an exercise in code-switching, once you realize the geo-political implications inherent in the country's history.

I'm thinking in particular of the fallout of what was once called the policy of Germanisation. In addition to changes impacting the very face of Polish cities through colonization policies and cultural changes, the names of Polish towns and cities were changed in the wave of language policies. In other words, a form of code-switching existed for Poles during that time in their history which still affects how we do genealogical research today. 

I had already realized that quite some time ago when I stumbled upon the recording error revealing Aunt Rose's foreign origin. At first, when I read the name of Rose Kober's home town in the 1920 census—"Schwartzwald"—I had taken the translation literally as the famed Black Forest region in southwestern Germany. It took me quite some time to realize that Schwarzwald was the politically correct term (at the time) for the tiny town of Czarnylas, as it is now called in Poland, which Rose once called home.

Now that I'm searching for any sign of Felix Anton Aktabowski, Uncle John's father-in-law, back in his native Poland, I'm being reminded of that need to geographically code-switch once again. Looking over the towns and church parishes I had found yesterday via the website Geneteka, I'm learning that the place names now showing in the website are not the same names that were used when government and church officials drew up the documents I'm interested in seeing from the mid-1860s. Why? It was again time to code-switch.

So Wąbrzeźno, site of one parish in which Aktabowski names appeared among baptismal and wedding records at Geneteka, would not be the name I would seek, if looking for microfilmed records at FamilySearch.org. Rather, I should look for a place called Briesen.

Fortunately, guided by results from Google searches, I discovered an entry at a website called WeRelate.org, which provided a way-finding list of microfilm numbers for specific entries in church records for Briesen—now Wąbrzeźno. Sure enough, film number 7947667, as the website mentioned, delivered just what I was looking for: records of the Katholische Kirche Briesen. Added bonus: as long as "tauten" means baptismal records, the film for the dates I'm seeking is not limited in viewing privileges at this date. I can start searching through the documents now, as soon as I set aside a chunk of time to do so.

Remembering that ever-present code switching requirement as I work my way through my Polish ancestors' history will help me identify which towns might have been their place of origin—called, back then in their lifetime, by their German place names rather than the names traditionally and currently used by their Polish families.

Will Those Wriggling Borders Ever Stop Moving?

 

What do you do when you only have a few days left to find the answer to a family history mystery? 

No, I won't panic, but I do feel like I'm striking out into the deep, or as if I'm searching for a needle in an enormous haystack. What I'm looking for is any indication of where Uncle John's father-in-law might have been born. In the process, I've already discovered there is one thing working against me: those wriggling, squirming European borders, which make it hard for me to pinpoint in time just where an American immigrant may have originated.

Uncle John's father-in-law had a surname which I thought would surely stand out in the field of Polish possibilities: Aktabowski. Of course, I needed to keep aware of all possible spelling permutations. I had found Achtabowski—a variation which seemed favored by those of this surname who emigrated to Chicago area—as well as Aktaboski, without the "w," and even Aktaba, dropping the typical -ski suffix.

On top of that search issue, Uncle John's father-in-law also appeared in various records with either the name Felix or Anton. Plus his country of origin was sometimes said, in American census records, to be Poland, while other times it was noted as Russia.

Yet, looking for any actual records produced nothing, even when I took the cue from that 1940 census error for his widowed wife Aniela, telling me she was originally from "Plotz." Checking the Polish website Geneteka, there were no births, marriages, or deaths for any residents with that surname for the province which included that city, Płock.

Still, I thought perhaps I could put the search engine at Geneteka through its paces, and struck out—this is the needle-in-haystack part—looking for the surname Aktabowski in each individual province. I wanted to see whether there were any regions in which the surname seemed to congregate.

There was, indeed, one province where I found several Aktabowskis listed, from the time period beginning about 1830--for possible marriages of Felix Anton's as-yet-unknown parents—through 1899, just in case some siblings remained behind when he made his immigrant leap across the Atlantic. That province, according to Geneteka, was called Kujawsko-Pomorskie—or, as we might say in English, the Kuyavian-Pomeranian province.

Or maybe that's not entirely so. Looking up the history of the province—you know I always need to do that—I discovered that it was formed by political edict on the first day of January, 1999. Not very long ago, to say the least. Certainly not back when Felix Anton was born. Now what?

I went back to Geneteka to check on the Catholic parishes listed on the readout for Aktabowskis in that province. For births—more likely, these were baptisms, despite the website's labeling as births—the page included not only the name of the church parish, but also the specific place where the parish was located.

That helps. Now I can consult a map and see where the town might have been situated, back when the borders were more like the political geography for 1863—when Felix Anton was likely born—than for 1999, when the currently-named province was established. I want to know a bit more about this region rich in possible Aktabowski kin. I certainly need to know just where the borders settled—if only for a moment—at the point at which Felix Anton's family acknowledged his birth.

Unfortunately, this needle-in-haystack method will not tell me much more than whether I have a high or low probability of finding any Aktabowskis in one province over another. Right now, at least according to Geneteka, the only province showing records for that surname would be the current-day Kujawsko-Pomorskie. But knowing that may point me in the right direction for my next step in discovering more about Felix Anton Aktabowski, and where he came from to arrive in New Jersey and raise his family in New York City. 

Filling in the Blanks

 

Searching for Uncle John's mother-in-law has been only a partially successful effort. While I've found some records on Aniela Zielinska and the family she and husband Felix—or Anton—Aktabowski raised in Jersey City and New York City, there are large gaps in that paper trail. Filling in the blanks has become harder than I would have expected, even given the opportunities for misspelling a surname like theirs.

For instance, while I could find transcriptions of birth records for the older Aktabowski children and a digitized copy of the 1900 census after their move from New Jersey to New York, Aniela disappeared from federal census records beyond that point until the 1940 census—and then, once again, from any mention from that time forward. Indeed, if it weren't for widowed "Nellie" Aktabowski's appearance in New York State enumerations with her remaining children in the interim, she would have vanished from my view entirely.

Vanished, that is, except for one strange detail: a New York City municipal marriage license index in 1908 for one Aniela Aktabowska and a man whose name was carefully written as Joseph Sadzriewicz.

The curious thing about a surname such as this is that I have not been able to locate it in any records digitized in a number of online resources. Instead, I've found records for Sadziewicz, or Sadzewicz, but not with that "r" inserted in the middle of the surname. In fact, though I looked in a number of newspaper archives, the only version in which I could find that surname in that time period was in a Lithuanian newspaper, Lietuva, located through the Old Fulton New York Post Cards website.

Yet, in state census records after that supposed marriage date in 1908, I could find Aniela in the enumeration for 1915, still under the name Aktabowski. Without being able to locate anything more on that 1908 marriage, I had no way of knowing the ages of the bride and groom to guide me in guessing whether this might be our Aniela, or someone much younger. This was, after all, New York City where a population of that size was sure to present many opportunities for name twins.

Still, I wasn't able to find any death record for Aniela under the name Aktabowski, either. I was stuck, not knowing whether to believe that marriage record was for our widowed Aniela or for another bride.

That's when I remembered that odd entry on the Social Security Application completed by her son Gustave. 

The form had shown Gustave's mother's name to be Nelly Sagwit—an odd entry, given that Aniela was likely born in Poland, a place where a name like "Sagwit" didn't seem to fit.

Deconstructing the information on the transcription, I already knew that some of her sons had changed their name from Aktabowski to Hark, supposedly because they were trying to market themselves as stage performers. Gustave was already using that shortened, Americanized surname by the time of the 1930 census, and certainly when he completed his World War II draft registration card in 1942. So Gustave Hark was certainly Aniela Aktabowski's son. Despite Gustave's father's surname being spelled with a "u" instead of a "w," that was not a problem, and seeing his father's name given as John instead of Felix—his dad died when he was eleven years of age—can be overlooked.

But Nelly Sagwit?? That was a puzzle—until I considered how Polish pronunciations might sound to American ears. The American treatment of the suffix "wicz," for instance, has easily been misunderstood as "witz"—which if omitting the "z" could end up as "wit." 

That's the easy part. The "Sag" might seem a bit more of a stretch. What the "dz" in Sadziewicz might have sounded like—to a less careful ear—could have been a soft "g," somewhat like the word "judge." Could some clerical worker have heard the name pronounced and interpreted the first syllable to sound like "Sadge"—but compound the problem even further by writing only the "g," which we then read as a hard consonant, literally like sag-wit?

While I considered that possibility, I popped over to FamilySearch which, as one reader has already commented here, sometimes provides more complete transcriptions of retracted documents. Sure enough, there was the typewritten version of Aniela's 1946 death record from Brooklyn, filed under the surname Sadzewicz—close enough to convince me that it was our Aniela who had married Joseph "Sadzriewicz" back in 1908.

Though the death record had provided her burial place as Holy Trinity in Brooklyn, I have yet to find any confirmation of that information—but I'll keep looking. As death records go, I'll also keep in mind that the names given for her parents—Felix and Anna Zielinski—might have mistakenly swapped the reporting party's father for that of the decedent's. But I now have far more than I did when I began this search a month ago.

And that's a start.

Just Passing Through?

 

Today is one of those days when looking—and then looking again—produced nothing of note. Now that I've found a possible birth entry for Uncle John's mother-in-law Aniela Zielinski near the Polish hometown she revealed in the 1940 census, I can't find anything further on her parents. It is almost as if they had stopped in Radzanowo to have their baby, then picked up as if they were just passing through.

You know I'd be game to search further for this Aniela's possible siblings—if, indeed, her parents were Josef Zielinski and Anna Kwiatkowska, as the transcription at Geneteka seemed to indicate. After all, finding such a cache of information only required that I repeat the search steps using the two surnames of her parents to find any likely siblings. From that point, I could fast forward a couple decades to explore census records in Jersey City where Aniela had settled after immigrating to the United States.

Search results: nothing.

Just in case this Aniela Zielinska was not our baby, I double checked this mysterious absence of any siblings by looking in the readout for deaths, both hers or possible siblings. Nothing.

Um...how about marriages for any couples named Zielinski and Kwiatkowska? Nothing related to her supposed parents, Josef and Anna.

On and on it went, conjuring up any possible searches which might reveal anything about the extended family. Any clues. Anything.

At the close of the session, besides becoming frustrated, I gained nothing...except a list of where I already had looked and what I had tried to find. That, I suppose, is valuable, if only to prevent me from repeating those searches again in the future. Or maybe trying again might work to my benefit on another day.

At least for today, I can say I may have broken out of the research rut where I had been stuck. I do have a possible family grouping for Aniela. Why the family disappeared, I can't say. I can guess that maybe the family moved somewhere else in Poland, or possibly all moved to America, or maybe all died except orphaned Aniela. There are so many possibilities, it is hard to say at this point.

However, there is one more research question I need to attempt: the question of where Aniela's husband was born. Aniela married a man whose given name has been listed alternately as Felix or Anton. The fact that his surname was unusual—Aktabowski—was counterbalanced by the difficulty of rendering that name in writing. Sometimes, the "w" was there, sometimes not. The first syllable was sometimes spelled "Ak" and sometimes "Ach." Lots of variables to play with mean that finding his roots will present another challenge—one I hope to work on in our last remaining week of this month's research project.

Before we grapple with that puzzle, though, there was one other detail about Aniela herself that I need to confirm: the possibility of a second marriage. We'll take a look at what I've found—and what's still missing—tomorrow, before heading into the Thanksgiving holiday. 

Try it Again

 

I knew this before, but it took a bit of research difficulty to remind myself that this is useful to practice: if at first you don't—yeah, I know you are saying it along with me—try, try it again.

That's what I ended up doing when I couldn't find any birth records for Aniela Zielinski, Uncle John's Polish-born mother-in-law. I couldn't tell from American records—probably gleaned without the help of a fluent translator—whether her maiden name was Zelinski or Zielinski. I couldn't tell what her year of birth might have been, since the only two census records in which I could find her didn't agree (born in 1861 versus 1869). And looking at the only Polish website I could find which offered any records for the region where she might have lived—Geneteka—gave me no options.

So I went back and looked again. 

Of course, I had inspiration. I looked at FamilySearch.org for the very microfilmed record set which Geneteka had mentioned for Płock, and realized once again how much I need to take a vacation to Salt Lake City—or at least my nearest FamilySearch Center. Finding what I thought might be the records of birth, marriage, and death for Płock—or, more specifically, the akta urodzeń, małżeństw, zgonów—I scrolled through the search results to locate Catholic Church records.

What I found was that the record set was actually, according to the notes, a civil transcription of Roman Catholic parish records. Further notes warned me that, rather than having to gear up for deciphering handwriting drawn up in Latin, the transcriptions were written in Polish—and, after 1868, handwritten in Russian.

Not to worry: scrolling down the listing of each individual microfilm, I quickly saw that lock and key icon. I couldn't have looked at the files, even if I could understand Polish or Russian.

But keeping my new mantra "try again," I kept scrolling down the list of film numbers. As I scrolled, the key icon magically gave way to several camera icons without any sign of restriction. I was free to look!

Since Aniela's death record gave her year of birth as 1871, that was the first film I took a peek at. What I saw might have been beautiful handwriting, but it was clearly not in Latin. I was pretty sure it wasn't even in Polish. I've never seen a handwritten version of Russian, but that was what I thought I was viewing. I closed the window and tried something else: thinking again. There just has to be another way.

That's when it struck me: go back and try the Geneteka website again. And I did, thankfully. First, I learned that, when a website offers the button labeled "clear," take them seriously, even if it seems redundant. Then, I tried several different ways to search the collection. I experimented with Zelinski versus Zielinski—hint: there weren't any entries for that first variation. I broadened the search to a fifteen kilometer radius. I played with the date option. I even tried looking at Aniela's married surname Aktabowski, to see if her husband had come from the same region (apparently not). 

After several iterations—and I have no explanation for this—returning to my original search terms of Zielinski and then the feminine form, Zielinska, the website gifted me with two pages of results. Why it was so generous with this iteration, I can't say, but I'm glad I tried it again. This time, out of all the entries, there was one—and only one—line containing the given name Aniela.

Born in 1865, this Aniela was the daughter of Józef Zieliński and Anna Kwiatkowska. They were from a small town called Radzanowo. Northwest of the city of Warsaw by what today would be considered a moderate commute distance, the village was within the fifteen kilometer (or nine mile) radius of Płock designated in the search terms at Geneteka.

Could this be our Aniela? I can't say for sure yet. At least on this one of many tries, it was the only option, but perhaps that is my warning to try it all again another time. However, it certainly is worth taking a closer look.

 

Exploring a New World

 

While Uncle John's in-laws may have entered a New World when they immigrated to the United States, as I trace their lines back through time, the Old World they left becomes a new world of research for me. All I have to go by, so far, is a mistaken entry in a 1940 census enumeration which tipped me off that Aniela Aktabowski—back then, known by her maiden name of Zielinska—may have come from Płock in Poland.

When I am entering a new-to-me research location, my first stop is to see what others have found as useful online resources, so to Cyndi's List I went. Indeed, under the heading for Poland's births, marriages, and deaths, I spotted a few possibilities.

While I have used Polish websites for specific branches of my father's family, I've found most of them concentrate their efforts on a specific region of the country we now know as modern Poland. For instance, there is the Poznan Project, where I found transcriptions of Uncle John's own parents' wedding in their hometown of Żerków. Then I needed to use a different Polish website to find genealogical records on my paternal grandfather's own roots in a different part of the country known as Pomerania; for that, I used the Pomeranian Genealogical Association to access transcriptions from a parish in the tiny village of Czarnylas.

Now, however, I was moving into an area I hadn't researched before. I was curious to see which websites might guide me as I looked for records in yet another region of Poland, the city of Płock in what is called the Masovian province. From Cyndi's List, I selected the website called Geneteka, and zeroed in on "Mazowieckie" on the website's map.

Fortunately, the city of Płock is also the name of the Roman Catholic diocese of the area. According to the key at Geneteka, the ample date range for births ran from 1581 through 1891, tempting me to entertain visions of pushing back multiple generations in this Zielinski line.

Not so fast, I discovered. Entering my search terms for either Zelinski or Zielinski—plus double checking with the feminine versions of each of those surnames—I found several birth records, but eleven out of the twelve possibilities were all children of one couple, Ludwik Zielinski and Małgorzata Zaleska. Worse, their most recent child was born in 1864, while our Aniela was reported to have been born closer to 1871. 

The last entry in that listing was for a child born in 1909. Even repeating the search to include nearby parishes within a fifteen kilometer radius didn't add anything pertinent. Painfully, I spotted one child's name: Bronisława, same as Uncle John's wife, but had no way to determine whether that might have been an ancestor.

Though none of the online options I found through Cyndi's List seemed to fit my current search—everything seemed geared to specific regions only, not a nationwide resource—it did require me to make several trips back and forth to Google Translate. While I can't say the steps that finally led me to find this one page—you try your hand at reading legalese in a language like Polish when you can't even understand it in your own native language—by hunting, pecking, and translating, I found a website page specific to archival records which included the city of Płock.

Scrolling down that page, what should I find at the start of the scanned images but the familiar way pointer for the typical FamilySearch.org microfilm: "Microfilmed by the Genealogical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah."

One hardly needs a translation service for a place card like that. Welcome home. Now to find whether I can locate the same records on a website I'm far more familiar navigating.

 

The Hunt and Peck Method

 

When all the usual research methods yield no answers, what's next? Two options are thinking things through, and making a methodical review of all resources already available. I call that the "hunt and peck" method, going page by page through all the available possibilities.

In the case of Uncle John's mother-in-law Aniela, I was fairly certain her maiden name was some sort of spelling variation of Zielinska. I already knew by her husband's answers to the 1900 census that the couple had been married in 1887. Since their first child, Benjamin, over the years had reported his place of birth alternately as New Jersey or New York, that answer causes us problems in trying to determine just where Felix Aktabowski might have met and married Aniela. However, second-born Bronisława, Uncle John's future wife, was born across the river in Jersey City, New Jersey, as were several others of the Aktabowski family.

I wondered whether there were any family connection to Jersey City. Was it just a job that drew Felix to move the family there, or did either he or Aniela have relatives who lived there?

I have an ulterior motive for asking such a question. If Felix married Aniela after their immigration to the United States rather than beforehand, how—and where—did they meet? The "after" scenario would also mean that Aniela would have been a single woman when she took the long ocean voyage from her native country to the New World. While there have been some exceptions, in that time period, it was far more customary for single women to travel with others, such as family members. Could Aniela have come to New Jersey with other Zielinski relatives?

I started looking in census records for Hudson County, where Jersey City is located. This is where the "hunt and peck" method comes in, because I have no idea who such relatives and traveling companions might have been. I simply entered the surname Zielinski—or, alternately, the spelling as Zelinski—and limited the search to Hudson County, paying particular attention to any families by that name living specifically in Jersey City.

Since Aniela reported arriving in America in 1886 according to the 1900 census, I was delighted to discover that New Jersey did indeed conduct an enumeration in 1895, the closest I was going to get to the date of her arrival. However, searching that record, the only name approximating her maiden name in that 1895 census was that of a Zelinsky family whose ages, best I could decipher from the record, could have made the head of household eligible to be a brother to Aniela, but without further information, it was a very tenuous link. 

The New Jersey enumeration for the next decade provided several more possible connections. There was a Zelinski family whose heads of household could well have been of an age to be Aniela's own parents. A different Zielinski couple could have represented an older brother—as could yet another couple. In fact, with a county population at that time nearing 387,000 people, with a bit over 200,000 belonging in Jersey City alone, searching for any surname by a hunt and peck method might reveal little more than vague clues, if even that.

As I stumbled along, trying to find answers from what is already available online, I did discover that the ongoing work of Reclaim the Records might have benefited me in my search for birth and marriage records in New Jersey—except that the earliest date I could find in their cache of Freedom of Information victories in that state was 1901. I'd need to push back a few years before that date to find Aniela's marriage record or Bronisława's birth record.

With that realization, I thought maybe now would be a good time to transfer my hunt-and-peck efforts across the ocean to see if I can find any possibilities in Aniela's theoretical home in Płock, Poland.

Icebergs, Disappearing Ancestors, and Bright Shiny Objects

 

What to do when an ancestor seems determined not to be found? That appears to be the case for Uncle John's in-laws, Felix and Aniela Aktabowski.

Times like this remind me of a poster I saw years ago, produced by the California Genealogical Society. It proclaimed, "Internet is just the tip of the iceberg." As the poster stated, most research is accomplished—still—in other places. It's just convenient and fortunate to find online in digitized format the document we are seeking.

Now that I'm looking for some actual paperwork assuring me of the marriage of Uncle John's in-laws, I'm beginning to think I may have to travel to Hudson County, New Jersey. Or maybe even New York City. Somewhere in that vicinity, someone holds the records for the marriage of Felix Anton Aktabowski and his bride Aniela.

Or perhaps I just need to look further online.

I began my search with a record transcription at Ancestry.com for the birth of one of the couple's many children. As it turned out, the transcription was for Uncle John's wife, Bronisława, herself—but you couldn't have figured that out from the transcription. The diacritical mark on the "l" was misread as the letter "t" and the "n" must have been written in old-style European handwriting, which appeared far more like a "u"—and, in fact, was transcribed as if it were indeed that other letter. So, only because Aniela's own name was included in the transcription, I realized the birth record was for Bronisława, not "Brouistawa."

Not to nitpick transcribed records—though I do encourage finding the actual written document, not just someone's interpretation of difficult-to-read handwriting—but I bring up this entry for one reason: the identification of the source from which the record was drawn. "FHL Film Number," the last line in the transcription above, refers to the actual identification of the microfilm I'm now seeking, which can be found by going to the catalog page on the FamilySearch.org website.

That, indeed, was my next step: to see whether that number was still a viable identifier. As it turned out—thankfully—it was, and the number brought me to an entry in the catalog for "New Jersey index to records of births, marriages, and deaths, 1848-1900."

Perfect. Now I'm in business, I thought. Clicking through that catalog entry, I reached a page with further information, including the size of the collection (279 microfilm reels) and the originating repository (the Bureau of Archives and History for the state of New Jersey). 

Right away, red letters above the fold caught my eye: "New Jersey marriages are available online, click here." Being a sucker for Bright Shiny Objects, that is just what I did, and fell down this rabbit hole. End of story: I couldn't find Felix and I couldn't find Aniela, no matter how I searched for their information, modified the spelling of their names, or experimented with wildcard characters. 

I looked further. Perhaps this was an incomplete record set, excluding the very county I was seeking. So I clicked on the box labeled, "How to use this collection" and wound up somewhere else down the rabbit hole—or perhaps whisked away to some other location in the ether. This new strange world was an entry in the FamilySearch.org wiki, explaining more about this particular record set. Scrolling way to the bottom, I discovered there were other links for marriage records, and tried my hand at clicking away on those other options for results.

For some reason, that approach didn't work, so I retraced my steps back to that original catalog page for the New Jersey births, marriages, and deaths. After all, my original purpose in coming to this resource wasn't to find marriage records, although that would be a possible step; it was to discover a way to find the birth record for Bronisława which had been indicated from that transcription I first found at Ancestry.com. (And don't say you haven't fallen down such rabbit holes, yourself!)

Wouldn't you know it, but if I had just ignored those red letters and scrolled down to the end of that original catalog entry, I would have found the entire listing for each of those 279 reels in the collection I was seeking. And while each entry bore the lock and key icon, designating them as items only viewable at the Family History Library, an affiliate library, or a nearby FamilySearch Center, it meant that I could eventually get to search through the collection to find what I am seeking on not only the marriage of Aniela and Felix, but also the births of those of their children born in New Jersey—which was most of the family.

While I am not able to get to a FamilySearch Center in the next week or so, there are some other options available to me—and certainly much less of a research wild ride down the rabbit hole. Noticing dates of arrival for this immigrant couple in that same U.S. Census for 1900 which inspired me to look for the Aktabowski marriage record, another approach could be to look for passenger records. Furthermore, since I noticed that Felix arrived in the United States about five years before Aniela did, that could mean that she stayed with relatives after her arrival in New Jersey, before her marriage to Felix. I could look for any sign of possible family members—Bronisława's grandparents, perhaps—who also lived in New Jersey during that time.

Although each of these may seem like small steps—which might also be wrought with the possibility of leading nowhere in this research trail—it is worth a try to see what might come up if I take that approach next.

Retracing Steps

 

When it turns out that no further information materializes for a brick-wall ancestor, what do you do? In my case, looking now for wedding information on Uncle John's parents-in-law, I've been drawing a blank, so now it's time to review what documents have already provided details on their lives. It's time to retrace my research steps.

One reason for this is the need to confirm Uncle John's mother-in-law's maiden name. Last week, we discovered that Aniela—or Nellie, as she preferred to call herself in later years—may have come from a city in Poland now known as Płock. While that may have been a fortunate discovery, the trouble with searching for birth records in an ancestor's home town is that, at least for searching women, I need to know what the person's birth surname might have been. In other words, I am now looking for a viable maiden name for Aniela Aktabowski.

To find this, there are two research routes I can take. One is to look at the record of Aniela's marriage to Felix Aktabowski. The other is to examine the records left by her children which might include details about Aniela's maiden name.

I can already say that the latter search option has left me with doubts. For instance, the death certificate for Aniela's daughter Theresa—the one who married an Italian immigrant who changed his surname from Cappadona to Captain—reported Aniela's maiden name to be Kordecka. However, I am fairly certain that the reporting party for that death certificate—Theresa's husband Thomas Captain—was not present at Aniela's marriage, let alone her birth, so that response is already in question.

Further convincing me that Kordecka might not have been the right answer—yet creating another puzzle—are the records left behind for Aniela's other children. A transcription from the Social Security Applications and Claims Index entry for Aniela's son Gustave reported her maiden name as Nelly Sagwit. While memory of an aging son may have been impaired if he completed his paperwork for the recently-created Social Security toward the end of his life, I suspect handwriting issues and transcription problems may have conspired to create such an unbelievable response. Thankfully, several other children's records—mostly from their birth—agreed that Aniela's maiden name was more likely to have been something like Zelinska or Zielinska, in its proper feminine form according to Polish tradition.

While I will certainly keep those other two possibilities in mind—both Sagwit and Kordecka—my next quest is to find any confirmation of a Zielinska or Zelinska in marriage records from about 1887, the year indicated in the 1900 census as the possible date for the wedding of Felix and Aniela.     

I Miss 1890 — or Maybe I Don't Have to

 

Casting about for a way to wriggle past genealogy brick walls to solve a family history research problem, I'm suddenly realizing how much I miss 1890. Not that I ever was around then, of course—my dad's Uncle John might have been, but he was long gone by the time I got here. But it might have been nice to refer to the document, even if I could have questioned Uncle John about his Aktabowski in-laws.

In 1890, John's wife Bronisława would have been a mere toddler, living in Jersey City with her parents, her older brother Benjamin and perhaps even her younger brother John, who was born early that very year. But the main point would have been to see what was said about her father, Felix, and her mother, Aniela. These parents of American-born babies were themselves immigrants from a border-morphing region sometimes described as Poland—but more often labeled Germany or Russia or even the now non-existent Prussia.

No matter how much I'd wish to see that census record which has since been charred beyond recognition, the choice is simply not mine to make. Other than some veterans' records and a few other bits and pieces, most of that extensive record of the expanding United States population at the beginning of that decade is lost, other than—wait for it!—tantalizingly, enumeration of the Jersey City residents of Hudson County, New Jersey, now preserved on roll 3 of the microfilmed surviving fragments.

You're kidding me, right? This is not the supposed only-veterans-records-were-saved message so many people have read. Talk about lucking out: the very city in which the Aktabowskis settled after immigrating here turns out to be the one place in the metropolitan area where a sliver of the lost record of 1890s America still remains. What are the chances of something like that happening?

However, considering that the fragments of the saved general population schedule include only about six thousand names, and that the population of Hudson County at that time was well over two hundred thousand people, it would still be a long shot to find my Aktabowskis within those surviving slivers. Still, it would be worth a lark to grab a copy of the index for the surviving few, itself preserved in a two-roll microfilmed set at the National Archives. Then it would only be a matter of finding a repository holding a copy of the actual microfilm to look for my Aktabowskis.

I think better of such slim chances, though, and revert back to the documents I do have. Though the 1905 New York State census—where the family had moved after those early years in New Jersey—didn't offer much clues about the family's history, the earlier national enumeration did. Reviewing that 1900 document once again, I saw that the couple reported they had been married for thirteen years, giving me a target of 1887 to research for marriage records.

Given that detail, plus the discovery last week of the over-zealous enumerator who included the city as well as the country of birth for Aniela, it's about time to dig further into local records of that time period, both for the supposed New Jersey wedding of the senior Aktabowskis, and the much-earlier birth record for Aniela herself, back in Poland.

Family research is sometimes a bit by bit process, going back to review the little details which had slipped from our view in previous forays, and using those discoveries to push forward yet another tiny step of a very long journey.

Following the Twisted Trail

 

Delving into the details on the many branches of our family tree may lead us down twisted trails, but what we find can be so helpful in unraveling the mystery of some unexplained DNA matches. Come next March, I will have been puzzling over some of those DNA cousins for ten years now. While some recent developments in tools have made the search easier, it is primarily one specific habit I have instituted which has made a great deal of difference for me: I build out my family trees with all collateral lines, including the descendants of those lines, up to the level of sixth cousin.

With my weekend project of examining all my Tilson cousins, that has been a helpful habit for identifying the multiple matches which I've finally been able to link to that line. While the process still requires confirmation with documentation—and the farther back in time I go, the harder it gets to come by such records—almost all of my Tilson matches have now found their place in my extended tree.

As a corollary, that means those family trees are ever expanding. Since I appreciate celebrating mile markers, every two weeks I've made a note of my progress. By now, after so many years of work on this task, the numbers almost seem mind boggling. I assure you though, each name has been added to its respective tree, one individual at a time, complete with several links to documents to confirm the identity of the right person for that place in the family.

Today, since I've been working on my own family tree (rather than that of my in-laws), I'm celebrating another 318 individuals added to that tree. The tree, combining the weekend work on the Tilson DNA matches with my weekday work on my father's challenging Polish roots, now includes information on 35,468 individuals. Sometimes the progress unfolds excruciatingly slowly—for instance, when I can't find a way to access Polish records—but other times, such as tracing Uncle John's in-laws once they arrived in New York, the work can move along quite quickly.

Finding the right tools for each task can make progress on this research path go much more smoothly. Revisiting my old standby research friend, the Old Fulton New York Post Cards website—how could I have forgotten that?—turned out to be a gift, now that Blanche's Aktabowski siblings have been the focus of my work. At another time, a different resource may rise to the occasion of providing answers to questions which had stymied me. Having a research bag of tricks with multiple tried-and-true resources can help move along the process.

While absolutely nothing was done on my in-laws' tree—it stands frozen in time for nearly a month now, ever since a wedding on that side of the family added a few names in mid-October—that, too, is a healthy tree, with 34,031 documented names.

Eventually, as we close out this year and look forward to new projects for the next year, I'll draw up another "Twelve Most Wanted" list for another year of research, and I'll return to working on that side of the family tree. But for now, reviewing each collateral line on the Aktabowski tree to look for further clues, and exploring new resources for Polish records online with take up the remainder of the time leading up to my next biweekly review.

That's Not What it's Supposed to Say

 

The main reason I've been poking around newspapers and documents this month for Uncle John's Aktabowski in-laws is because I'm trying to determine just where the family originated. Uncle John's wife Blanche was born in New Jersey, but where was her mother born? I've found conflicting information on Aniela—or Nellie, as she was listed in many documents after she moved to New York—so I'm trying to gain some solid confirmation of the true location of her roots.

After retracing my research steps from the first point at which I had found young mother Aniela up until nearly the point of her death in 1946, I could find little more than the conflicting information that she was born either in Poland or in Russian territory. However, it was in the 1940 census that I spotted something. At first, staring at the document, I thought, "That's not what it's supposed to say"—but then I realized how much such clerical errors have turned out to help me in the past. I remembered how I discovered my own grandmother's birth in "Posen," thanks to an error in the 1920 census, and figured it might turn out to my benefit to follow this unexpected error on Aniela in the 1940 census.

The "error" in the 1940 census was in the tiny box where the enumerator was supposed to enter the answer to the question, "In what place did this person live on April 1, 1935?" In no way could I explain why, for so many of the other residents in Aniela's neighborhood, the answer was correctly entered as "same house" and yet, for Aniela's own household, the answer was entered differently. It was almost as if the enumerator had gotten confused with the previous question—place of birth—and had followed through by asking not only the country, but the city or town of birth, as well.

That, as it appeared to be for many immigrants on the street where Aniela lived, was what had happened. There were entries for towns all across Eastern Europe on that page, when I'm fairly certain only a fraction of those respondents actually did live in those far-flung places only five years earlier.

For Aniela's widowed daughter Blanche, the "five years ago" answer was Jersey City—the same place, coincidentally, where Uncle John's wife had been born. For Blanche's unmarried daughter, also called Blanche, the answer was strangely correct: "same house" in Brooklyn, New York. But for Aniela—who was listed as born in Poland this time—the "five years ago" entry became "Plotz."

Yes, I know that's not what it was supposed to say on that line in the census form, but I'll take a mistake like that and run with it. I've already discovered that the place the enumerator referred to as the city of Plotz is actually a city in central Poland currently called Płock. The city's long history included significant roles within the Polish monarchy, annexation into the kingdom of Prussia and, in the 1800s, control by the Russian empire.

Learning that overview of the city's history helped clarify one possible reason why Blanche's parents were sometimes reported to have come from Russia, and other times from Poland. Unlike the "error" I found in the 1940 census, those reports may well have been correct representation of the changing jurisdictions of the city of Aniela's origin.

Whether that turns out to be the correct birthplace of Blanche's mother, there is one other detail about Aniela which may help me move this research project one step further: I have information on her possible maiden name.  

"But Mom, Everyone's Doing It"

 

After searching yesterday through archived New York newspapers to find any mention of Uncle John's in-laws using their assumed surname Hark, I decided to go through the whole process once more for the original surname, Aktabowski. After all, I might have missed something.

What I did miss was the sense that far more of the family had chosen to go the name-change route than those who opted to remain with tradition. Even in the families of the oldest of the Aktabowski siblings who had kept their original surname—John's wife Blanche's two oldest brothers—their own sons later decided to go with the more streamlined Hark alternate identity. There were so many who had preferred this sleeker image that I could imagine them all whining, much like complaining teenagers, "But mom, everybody's doing it!"

That, of course, meant that for each descendant, I needed to pinpoint just when the name change occurred. The problem with that plan was that I had seen very few of this family who appeared to have an official sanction permitting such a legal change. I had to go back and double check: just who can change their name, how can they do so, and where would I find such records.

In the process of this inspection, I found plenty of guidance online. There were case studies on difficult-to-trace sources of aliases. Getting closer to the crux of my own research project, I even found an article about the difficulty of tracing name changes among Polish immigrants. I found helpful tips from state archives, such as this article from the Massachusetts Archives on documents in their holdings specific to family history—especially their subheading on documents related to name changes. 

One way immigrants to the United States can officially change their name is through the naturalization process—but not all of the name-changing members of the Aktabowski family were immigrants. Many of them were native-born citizens, and had made the choice to change their name well into adulthood. The problem was, I just wasn't finding any record of such changes. 

Granted, according to the FamilySearch wiki on the topic, there are a few resources for searching through the court record index in the pertinent county location in New York. Ironically, the only Aktabowski in-law whose name change I could pinpoint to any court record was that of Uncle John's New York native sister-in-law, Theresa Aktabowski, who had married an Italian immigrant—Antonino Cappadona—who asked for a name change to Thomas Captain once his citizenship request was granted.

As for the one legal document I've been able to find referenced for any of the Aktabowskis themselves, it was through a newspaper report, just as an article at GenealogyBank had suggested. A son of the oldest Aktabowski brother had petitioned the court for a surname change to Hark. Gerard Aktabowski made that request in 1945, when he was twenty two years of age. But he didn't make it in the city in which he had been born and raised, but in Palm Beach County, Florida. If it hadn't been for that newspaper being included at Newspapers.com—and my subscription linking that service with my Ancestry account—I would never have known to look for such a record in Florida.

The fact that so many of the Aktabowski family had changed their surname made for an interesting readout when the Queens borough Daily Star published the guest list for Uncle John's daughter Frances' wedding in its August 27, 1929, edition. Uncle John's Laskowski relatives' names mixed in not only with Frances' groom's Hanlon family, but with both Aktabowskis and Harks, and even editorially-incorrect "Horks" as well. At least now that I'm working on this branch of the family history, most of those are names I can pinpoint, regardless of the way each relative chose to represent that surname.

Lithuanian Notes

 

One benefit of discovering such an archived historic newspaper resource as Fultonhistory.com is that its collection includes all those small neighborhood newspapers that family history researchers might otherwise not even know about. For instance, in searching for mentions of Uncle John's Aktabowski in-laws with their alternate identity, the Hark surname, I found some entries about social events involving several of the Hark brothers.

The location of those newspaper entries was in one interesting column, a resource I'd have hardly expected to find in any of the well-known New York City newspapers, such as The New York Times or even the Brooklyn Eagle. On the pages of the Queens Ledger, a paper devoted to only one of the five boroughs of New York City, I found a column with the title, "Lithuanian Notes."

Written by columnist Josephine Zembrosky, each edition was filled with snippets of social interest. Notes of birthday greetings mingled with reports of local bowling leagues and news of those returning home from military duty overseas. Included in that media melange for one edition in 1945 was the following entry:

Mr. and Mrs. William Hark, Jr., of 52-71 66th Street became the parents of a son, William Peter, on August 27. Grandpa William Hark, Sr., and great-grandpa George Belinski of 69th Place are busy receiving congratulations.

It was interesting to find that entry in a newspaper column for Lithuanian social notes. After all, Uncle John's heritage was Polish. That, however, did not mean that his wife's family shared that same origin. In fact, searching for Bronisława Aktabowski, Uncle John's wife, had always been challenging—and not simply because she chose to change her given name to Blanche. In census records which asked for such information, the Aktabowski heritage was represented variously as Polish or Russian, probably depending on the correct political designation of the region at the time in which that information was gathered in records regarding their family.

However, with this recent discovery of the family mentioned in a newspaper column focused on a heritage from Lithuania, was that revealing a hint as to the true origin of the Aktabowski surname? Or was it a hint of the ethnic heritage of yet another family line which had intermarried with the Aktabowski family?

I have yet to pinpoint that detail, but it is the tiny clues available in local newspapers such as this discovery of the Queens Ledger which bids me to keep searching a bit further in this record resource at Fultonhistory.com. 

Hark! Do I Hear Music?

 

It was years ago—now that I think of it, perhaps decades ago—when a fellow Aktabowski researcher shared a photograph with me. It wasn't the usual type of family portrait you'd expect to see from a fellow family historian; it was actually a shot of a theater's marquee. The main point of sharing the photo was the name on the marquee: Hark.

Hark was the surname several of the Aktabowski brothers, Uncle John's in-laws, chose to use when they reinvented themselves from children of Polish immigrants to New York City entertainers. My understanding was the reason their name merited this placement was that they were musicians. I wanted to confirm that family's music legacy.

Certainly, with such a history, the Hark names would merit placement in the typical publications reviewing the many performances around the big city. After all, the Hark brothers would have been right in the middle of the vaudeville era, I reasoned. There had to have been some mention of their act if this were indeed a valid family recollection.

Where do you go when you want to find such reportage? Since nothing had been coming up on searches through Newspapers.com, I switched to seeking answers on the obvious choice for New York newspapers: the website known for the longest time as "Old Fulton New York Post Cards." 

Now located under the more streamlined name and URL, Fultonhistory.com, this website started as the creation of one man scanning one newspaper in 1999. Since then, it has blossomed into a collection of nearly sixty million newspapers, not just from the New York area, but from all along the eastern seaboard and reaching into the midwest and even Canada. The website has merited a Wikipedia entry as well as one in FamilySearch.org's own wiki.

Because of the immensity of the site—three times the size of the Chronicling America project at the U.S. Library of Congress—experienced researchers recommend that those new to the collection review the site's FAQs page, or take the time to read other articles on tips about using the site's search engine.

With that, I launched into my search for the Aktabowski, er, Hark brothers in New York City show biz. I was, unfortunately, less successful than I hoped I would be. One early entry—in The Daily Standard Union for May 24, 1918—did include a mention of music being provided by Benjamin and Frank Hark, but the event was a farewell party at the Saint Aloysius Young Men's Association for four members being sent to train for military service at the close of the World War. While this was most likely a memorable evening for many, it was not exactly the type of music performance I was expecting.

There was one other search result which seemed promising, though. Published in Billboard on July 3, 1909, under the heading for "New York Vaudeville Notes" came a long listing of acts currently showing at several venues. By the time I reached the bottom of the column and the heading for the Fifth Avenue Theatre, unfortunately, the ink on the corner of the page faded so badly that I could only make out the name William Hark. Was that our William? It would be hard to know with just that one, nearly obliterated entry.

While I may not have found the entries I had hoped to find on the Hark brothers' show biz careers, the Fultonhistory.com website did not disappoint. I did find several articles on the Hark family members for two different generations among the hundreds of hits reviewed so far. And I am far from done. With more mundane topics such as graduations, weddings, and funerals, the entries give me substance on the full spectrum of life for family members beyond their theoretical few minutes of fame—if there ever were any such moments. We'll take some time this week to review what I've found so far.

I'm Still Listening

 

Knowing my paternal grandparents' extended families included several with musical talents, I wasn't surprised to learn that some of them considered themselves to be in the entertainment industry. After all, these were sons of immigrants who settled in New York City, where there were plenty of opportunities to hit it big with such talents.

To discover that several of Uncle John's in-laws went so far as to change their surname from the unwieldy Aktabowski to the more streamlined Hark, though, seemed an act that was a bit too corny. Still, I thought it might be worth a try to find them under their new, non-Polish-sounding surname in the city's newspapers of that time period. Result? How about hundreds of entries printed in December newspapers for church choirs singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing." Not the kind of helpful leads I had envisioned—though I'll surely keep listening for any further notes on those Hark brothers in show biz.

For my next act, I tried searching through the listings of each Aktabowski brother in the census records for their time period in the early to mid 1900s. After all, that was my research plan after I decided how to handle mid-life name changes. I needed to check the score on how many of the brothers actually went with the stage name instead of their Polish-born father's surname.

Not all of the sons made the change, it turns out. That was probably influenced by which ones were in the entertainment field, and which sought their living by more mundane methods. Eldest son Benjamin, for instance, raised a family of at least five children on the commissions he made as an insurance agent—and somehow survived in business despite keeping his Polish surname. Next eldest son John took a position as a glass blower to support his family of three children, also opting to stick with tradition. 

It wasn't until we get to son William, six years younger than his eldest brother Benjamin and long after Uncle John's wife Bronisława was born, that we begin to see family members willing to shed their traditional Polish surname for a more Americanized—or at least streamlined—model. William, who also married a woman named Bronisława who was dealing with her own Polish name issues, may have followed his wife's lead. She had reinvented herself as Bessie for the 1920 census, so it is no surprise to see the entire family listed with their brand new surname model as Hark for the 1930 census.

I kept looking at records to see if anyone else in the family followed this act. Sure enough, in that same census year, William's younger brother Gustave, though (incredibly) keeping his foreign-sounding given name, also opted to transform himself into a Hark. And yet, after that point, no one else among his brothers seemed to follow suit—with the exception of Zygmunt, who seemed to disappear so completely that I suspect he chose a more radical transformation for his own identity.

That, at least, narrows the search field for me to the two brothers—William and Gustave—who opted to liven up their act with a streamlined name. Now that we have that list narrowed to two, we can try putting our ears to the ground again and listen for any new clues about an act involving the Hark brothers.

Everything Changes

 

Last weekend, I taught a class on using social media for genealogy. While this is one of the subjects I enjoy presenting on, it is also a topic which needs frequent updating. Why? Because social media is constantly changing. In fact, just after I had updated my presentation's section on that flighty online entity now known as "X—formerly Twitter" and shared someone's, um, tweet about where that online genealogy community had migrated, what should occur but that one of the newer options had already decided to close its virtual doors, effective the beginning of this month. With social media, everything is subject to change. 

We can expect the online world to be rapidly changing; it's the nature of that universe. But this weekend, I took in an entirely different scene of change. It just so happened that I picked the most perfect weather for a getaway to the ocean. Soaking up the sun as I stared out over the mesmerizing blue of the water, I was reminded that the last time I had visited this beautiful spot, it was after a raging storm had blown waves high over the cliffs and across the shoreline road—surely a terrifying sight to the homeowners in the nearby neighborhood. It wasn't hard to spot the reminder of those sudden changes, even in this beautiful sunshine. The walking path—stairs and all—had been bitten into by a raging sea which was determined to leave its mark on land once considered safe. Everything changes, even the rocks bolstering solid land from the encroaching sea.

So here I am, struggling to sort through the changes in Uncle John's family, especially the changes in surnames for both his own and his wife's Polish immigrant relatives. And I sit here, wondering how anyone could consider changing something as immutable as a name, when it obviously happens all the time. If a business can morph from one form to another, why not an individual? If even the coastline lies defenseless against forces of the sea, why do I expect my ancestors to exist through history like some human rock of Gibraltar?

There has been a trend, lately, to view our genealogy through the lens of social history. Taking the macro history which swirls above our heads as it impacts the entire world and blending it with the micro history of our ancestors' personal timelines can give us a far different readout of what life was like for those relatives of ours as they traveled their own lifespan. Those events, whether enormous or inconsequential, became a part of the barrage of changes having an impact on our ancestors. Changing choices, changing paths, changing both big and small decisions, those swirling influences made our ancestors the people they turned out to be.

If, instead of simply picturing our ancestors through the three main lenses of vital records—birth, marriage, death—we could portray them as the living, dynamic, changing individuals they surely were, I think it would bring them to life for us, once again. If nothing else, perhaps that would allow us to understand them a bit better, especially for the choices they made—or failed to make. Given the span of an entire lifetime, surely for this we should also be encouraged to realize everything changes.  

It's a Rule

 

Uncle John may have married a daughter of Polish immigrants named Aktabowski, but that doesn't mean his young bride wished to keep her name unchanged. His wife Bronisława soon morphed into a person named Blanche, but that wasn't the only change she and her Americanized siblings underwent. Though Blanche changed her surname legally by virtue of her marriage to John Laskowski, her many brothers eventually found their birth name of Aktabowski to be too cumbersome for the lively scene in New York City entertainment. Several of them not only chopped off the last syllables of their surname, but altered the initial sound, as well: from Aktabowski to Hark.

That action, of course, presents problems for those of us trying to trace our family history. How do we record such changes? What, for instance, do we do when we have no documentation to verify the name was changed legally, but we know from personal experience that those relatives went by the preferred, newer surname? There has got to be a rule, I think, but in looking for any, I can find others who, long ago, weighed in on the dilemma, but none advocating for any one standardized rule. With that in mind, I decided to formulate my own "style sheet" (to borrow an old copy editor's term) for handling how I represent the timeline of name changes. With that plan of attack, I can now simply say, "It's a rule."

Here's how I handle such name changes through any given person's lifetime. When I find a document showing a different name than the last time in which that person appeared in records—say, moving from the 1910 census to the 1920 census—I will make a note in that person's profile page on Ancestry.com. As I attach the specific record to the person's profile page, I open up the "edit" function and actually note that this was the first time I saw that new variation appearing, and what it had morphed from.

If, for instance, I found Blanche's brother listed in the 1910 census as an Aktabowski, living at home with the other confirmed members of his family, but then find his World War I draft registration card—with that same address listed for the card as had been for the previous census record—showing a different surname, I will flag the change in comments when I attach the new record to the brother's profile page.

As for the name heading the profile page for that individual, I list that person's name at birth, much like we do when handling any woman in our family tree (entering her by her maiden name). It is the next generation at which I will carry the new surname forward, mainly if birth records show the updated, Americanized surname.

Of course, if someone actually went through the legal process of changing their surname—as some immigrants did when filing naturalization requests—that provides an actual paper trail pinpointing date as well as substance of the change. Those records, however, are sometimes hard to come by, and the only indication may be circumstantial evidence. City directories, for instance, might be great for pinpointing when a person used a specific name, but they are not legal documents. 

I have yet, for instance, to find any record of legal action regarding my own paternal grandfather's name change. Seeing so many of his brother-in-law's wife's family changing their surname opens my eyes to just how many others engaged in the same process. Everything from prejudice against immigrants—especially those, at that time, from non-western European homelands—to desire to fit in at their place of work may have been motivations for such changes. Lack of money or know-how to navigate the legal maze of accomplishing such name changes may have complicated matters. But somehow, those names got changed—and have ever since kept the rest of us descendants puzzling over just how to demonstrate the connections.

As for Bronisława, er, Blanche, we'll be following her family this month—especially the collateral lines—to trace the roots of this Aktabowski line and its related surnames. But first, let's consider what became of her many siblings after her marriage to John Laskowski.