Finding Family, the Next Generation

 

When it comes to finding family to research, pressing backwards in time to the next generation gets harder and harder. Couple that dilemma with research in locations such as Ireland, and the lack of available records can bring research to a standstill.

Still, as I push through my Twelve Most Wanted for each year, microscopic breakthroughs do happen—occasionally. Even that sense of "getting closer" to a breakthrough is enough to encourage a researcher to press onward.

As I select the last of my three ancestors from my father-in-law's line for research in 2026, I was actually torn between two family lines. Each of these lines represents ancestors for whom I may actually identify the next generation. One choice was the line of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery from County Tipperary, Ireland. The other choice was his Falvey line from County Kerry.

While I worked on each of these family lines as selections for last year's Twelve Most Wanted, it was on the Falvey line that I experienced more success, tentatively identifying the parents of his great-grandmother Johanna Falvey. 

I say "tentatively" because I'm not quite confident about the records I've found, and whether I haven't simply stumbled upon what might turn out to be name twins. So this coming September, I'll name Johanna's tentative parents, Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming, as my selection for the ninth of this year's Twelve Most Wanted.

This task will involve three aspects. One will be to scour available records in Ireland, where Johanna was born, raised, and married in County Kerry. The second approach will be to examine all possible DNA matches linked to this Falvey line—especially since I see many more added to the list since I last visited this research question in 2025. And—spoiler alert—since several of those matches currently live in either Australia or New Zealand, I'll explore what can be learned in general about family history research in those two countries, especially as it regards immigrant records.

With this bulging to-do list for September's research project, we'll be quite busy, indeed. Though the task will be international in scope, it will all point back to one small location in Ireland, where the Falvey family once called a rural townland in County Kerry their home. 

Searching for the Right Place

 

Finding a family connection between five DNA matches in Australia and my paternal roots in Poland was a discovery which came, at first, with much doubt. But looking for further details uncovered possible signs to guide me further—but only for a short distance. Sure, it was encouraging to find an Anastasius Kaminski who married someone named Susanna Wojtaś—that maiden name being the key to our connection—but when I began researching their supposed son's place of birth and Susanna's place of death, I realized I had run into a big problem.

Searching for the right place may be important in building a family tree, especially when we run the risk of encountering name twins. With the case of a fairly common surname like Kaminski, I knew that name twins would be a high possibility. What I didn't bank on finding, though, was the possibility of several towns having the same name, back in Poland.

Looking at the family trees posted for those Australian DNA cousins, I noticed that there was very little shared about this ancestral link—and much of it without any supporting documentation. One tree gave Susanna's place of birth as "Dambrova." Another match's tree mentioned her son's place of birth as "Dabrowka." A copy of a passenger list—apparently typed on a machine with a malfunctioning letter "w"—showed among the displaced persons being transported from Poland to Australia after World War II Susanna's possible son Bernard, born in Dabrowka.

Well, what are the chances? I may as well check out that location by an online search, I thought. Easy, right? Until the Google AI narrative informed me,

Dąbrówka is a very common place name in Poland, so there are dozens of locations with this name. To find the correct Dąbrówka, it is important to provide more context, such as a nearby city, voivodeship (province), or county, as there are villages with this name in many different parts of the country.

Think that AI was hallucinating? Think again. Check this list of all the possible places in Poland with the place name Dąbrówka. Just picking one to start the search would mean casting off into a Sargasso Sea of genealogical listlessness. Talk about an exhaustive search.

I tried a different approach. I headed to the database on the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG) to look for any transcribed records of Susanna's death in Poland. At first, I tried following the rules, entering Susanna's married name as Kaminska, according to the Polish way to designate a woman's surname. No luck.

Just in case, I also tried her name, spelled as Kaminski, and found a transcription of a death record for a Susanna Kaminski, along with the entry of her maiden name, given as Wojtas (lacking the diacritical mark over the "s"). The transcription provided a year of death as 1943, in the midst of those horrific war years. In the column which would normally have given the decedent's age, instead was provided the entry, "11.06.1870."

Could that have been Susanna's own date of birth? From another record, I had found her to be born in 1870. Assuming the European style of noting dates, that would yield a birthday on June 11, 1870.

The transcription indicated that the actual document was drawn up (or held by?) by the Catholic parish in Starogard Gdański. If I could see the Catholic record itself, it might show the specific place in the parish of Susanna's residence during her last days. Could that place have been in Dąbrówka? That's a possibility I'd like to check, if for nothing else than to determine which of more than eighty villages named Dąbrówka the Kaminskis had once called home.

Minding the Gap

 

In 1950, a thirty four year old Polish blacksmith from "Dabrovka" arrived at port in Fremantle, Australia. Along with several other single men, this passenger had departed from the Displaced Persons Camp in Fallingbostel in what was by then the British zone of post-World War II Germany. Listed under the name Bernard Kaminski, he reported himself to be Roman Catholic and unmarried, and provided his date of birth as August 8, 1916.

For a Polish person born in 1916—especially one who possibly could be related to my Zegarski or Wojtaś family lines in Pomerania—it might be possible to find transcriptions of baptismal records at the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association (PTG). After all, that group of avid genealogists has been working hard to make local records findable by the rest of the worldwide Polish diaspora.

What I've been minding, however, has been the gap between available dates of baptismal records at PTG and dates like those of refugees of World War II. There is a considerable gap between what can be found online in documents and what is still needed to be available. 

While subsequent records painted a clearer picture of just who this "displaced person" might have been, the one document I was keen on finding was any record of his death. There, hopefully, I'd discover the name of this refugee's parents, the one means of bridging the gap between records of a new life in Australia and the war-torn life of his younger years in Europe. I've been minding that gap with many of the collateral lines in my Polish heritage.

There was, thankfully, a transcribed Australian death index at Ancestry.com which included someone by that same name of Bernard Kaminski, with parents' first names given as "Anastasia" and "Suzzana." At first, I was stumped when I saw the father's name listed as Anastasia—until I realized that there was a Polish version of that name for men: Anastazy. When looking for baptismal records, though, I knew the Latin version of the name would be Anastasius.

Realizing that the PTG database has expanded to include some records from as late as the 1930s, I hoped for the best in searching for anyone named Bernard. No such luck in this case, however—but I did find something else which caught my eye: an 1895 baptismal record for someone named Anastasius Kaminski.

The place was close to being just right: Pączewo in Pomerania, a Catholic parish where I had found records for children of other collateral lines. But even better was one detail: this Anastasius' parents were identified in this Latin record as Anastasius Kaminski and Susanna Wojtaś.

Whether this 1895 newborn would, in twenty one years, turn out to be the father of our Bernard, I can't yet determine. Perhaps he might be a much-older big brother to Bernard.

Even if neither of those scenarios turns out to be correct, I'm now fixated on one detail: how does that Susanna connect to my own family's Wojtaś line? After all, this whole chase began with the clue of five DNA matches down under, each of whom connects with my other Zegarski and Wojtaś cousins. Hopefully, the rest of the details I'll need won't be swallowed up in that frustrating records gap.

Even Farther Away From Home

 

If we put ourselves in our immigrant ancestors' shoes, we can see how long a trip those family members endured to arrive on our shores in America. Specifically, I'm thinking of my great-grandmother, Anastasia Zegarska Puchała, who traveled far from her home in the Pomeranian village of Czarnylas to the bustling shores of New York City.

Even farther away from home, as I discovered through the DNA matches descended from Anastasia's immigrant siblings, were those distant cousins whose Zegarski and Wojtaś ancestors traveled to Milwaukee in Wisconsin. But the story uncovered by my latest discoveries on this family line goes even farther away from home than that: I have some DNA matches who claim Australia as their home.

Wondering how a branch of my Polish family could have opted for such a direction, I had to seek out some explanations. In a more macro search concerning Polish immigration, I asked specifically for details on just who these Polish immigrants might have been who headed in that opposite direction.

To my surprise, there have been Polish immigrants arriving in Australia since the mid-1850s. While the Australian gold rushes might seem like a reasonable draw—and there were Poles among other Europeans seeking gold in Victoria, especially—the Polish arriving in Australia during that decade were noted to have established themselves in South Australia in a settlement now known as Polish Hill River. 

It is more likely, however, that any of my Polish relatives would have arrived in the subsequent century with the much larger group of displaced Polish people in the aftermath of the Second World War. This was a time period when the Australian population burgeoned with Polish immigrants, leaving their mark on the country's multicultural composition. Even last year, the estimated population in Australia of people who had been born in Poland was 47,680.

For those immigrating to Australia from Poland after World War II, we can now add their children and grandchildren who subsequently were born in that recently-adopted homeland—including those five DNA matches I've found who currently live there.

While that exploration of Australia's immigration history gives us a macro view of the Polish connection down under, what about the specifics of those five DNA cousins? If they descend from a Polish ancestor who was related to either my Zegarski or Wojtaś family lines, it may be difficult to construct the actual paper trail to document that connection.

While I can access transcriptions of Polish birth, marriage, and death records up to the first quarter century of the 1900s, nothing more recent has become available online for me to trace the connection. This may mean I'll need to rely on communicating in person with at least one of those DNA cousins to compare notes on the micro aspect of the more traditional paper trail of how we might connect.

However, I might have a plausible idea....