Another Father Provides Some Clues

Perhaps it is no surprise that when they came to this country, my Polish immigrant great-grandparents settled near a spot in Brooklyn, New York, later known as Little Poland. It was there, too, that my great-grandfather, Anton Laskowski, played host—not to mention uncle—to an eighteen-year-old returning to her native New York City after her parents left America to bring the family back to Poland.

Trying to determine the exact connection between that niece, Annie Gramlewicz, and her uncle, whose mother's maiden name was also Gramlewicz, might seem to be a slam-dunk exercise.

Think again. I've had to reconstruct the entire Gramlewicz population of the small town of Żerków, in the former Prussian province of Posen, in my attempt to arrive at an answer—and I'm still stumped. But I've learned ever so much more about those Gramlewicz kin in the effort.

It's been an effort of several years. Along the way, I ran into bits of information which seemed, at the time, to be inconsequential—but which, after discoveries years later, took on a new light.

Way back then, when I searched for newspaper reports with the name "Gramlewicz," I kept coming up with stories about a man who was not only a fellow Polish immigrant, but a Catholic priest. Not being aware of any relationships which included a priest, I was sure that, despite the rare surname, there was no family connection. And moved on.

Now, I'm finding out differently. Thanks to expanded online newspaper archive resources, that name keeps popping up as I continue my quest to outline those Gramlewicz connections. Included in those many references were the same details I had observed the last time I explored this possible connection: that Father Ignacy Benevenuto Gramlewicz had pastored a church in Pennsylvania—though inexplicably would stop by in Brooklyn on his travels back to his Nanticoke parish—and that he was somehow embroiled in Polish-American disputes which sometimes labeled him as controversial.

Perhaps in researching our roots, it is not only critical to find the information we seek, but to find it in the right sequence and at the right time. This month, finally, provided that right time.

I found the one newspaper article which divulged Father Gramlewicz's own roots. And, thanks now to all the research I've done this month, I have those people organized in my family history records.

At the time of Father Gramlewicz's passing, several local Pennsylvania newspapers published tributes to the man. One of the lengthiest, published June 6, 1910, in The Wilkes-Barre Record, revealed (albeit with the usual editorial deficiencies) enough about his origin for me to place him within the Gramlewicz family back in Poland.

 

It was no surprise that the priest had been born in Żerków; I had already suspected that from the other newspaper articles I had stumbled upon over the years. As for "Blazious," let's adjust that to Blasius. And that mother's maiden name? Forget all about Krukowski. Thankfully, the priest's death certificate set that record straight: it was Pawełkiewicz.

As for how I knew that, though, we need to rely on deductions based on other details provided in the Wilkes-Barre Record because of one small problem: going back to the records in Żerków only helps if you are looking for documents pre-dating 1829. From that year, there is a gap through 1873—right through the point where Blasius Gramlewicz and his wife would have been welcoming infants into their growing family.

That series of connections, of course, will take some time to explain—beginning tomorrow. 

Image above: Excerpt from June 6, 1910, memorial in The Wilkes-Barre Record upon the passing of Father Ignacy Benevenuto Gramlewicz; image courtesy Newspapers.com.

About Those Tight-Lipped Ancestors

 

The virtue of finding cousins through DNA testing is that we often get to connect and discuss those brick wall relatives who've kept us stymied. Having now found about a dozen unsuspecting cousins linked to the ancestry of my mystery paternal grandparents, I haven't missed any opportunities to talk with such potential resources. I ask them such things as, "Well, did they tell you anything about their past?"

In my case, the few relatives I did know on my paternal side recall their parents refusing to talk at all about their roots—going so far as to deny their ethnicity. 

Being the ever-curious sort that I am, I still am not willing to take no for an answer, even to my childhood questions, so when I found those DNA cousins, I saw that as my way around those tight-lipped relatives. I asked if they had heard anything about their Polish immigrant ancestors' remembrances of the "old country." My newfound cousins put it this way: nice people, but tight-lipped.

There was clearly something to this sort of story. Why did none of these immigrants ever want to talk about their past?

Perhaps it takes being faced with a genealogical brick wall to inspire us to take any research detour which could potentially lead us to answers. Since I haven't been able to glean a direct lead, I've tried everything, including taking the broader approach of learning Polish phonics (in case I could discover a new way to incorrectly spell those challenging Polish surnames), and informing myself of the timeline of Polish history.

It was in the process of examining the history of the area once known as west Prussia that I've begun to gain an appreciation for why people might never, ever, ever want to remind themselves of such a past: it may have been too traumatic a memory to relive.

As far as my Gramlewicz connections went—the surname from my family tree I had set as my research goal for December—there was one person claiming that name who kept surfacing in my research for years. I could never quite figure out why he kept showing up when I researched those distant Gramlewicz relatives in Brooklyn—that niece Anna and her family who returned to Poland—but this time, finally, I may have found a connection. If not to my line, at least it is a connection which ties together one branch of that family in a way I can document and verify.

It doesn't hurt to realize this was a person well-known enough to have been mentioned occasionally in newspaper reports spanning a few decades. Apparently, he was considered controversial in his circles. No matter the cause for such controversy, eventually everyone dies, and this man was no exception. Thankfully, noted as he was in his life's calling, his passing was also noted in regional newspapers, including a mention about his origin in Poland and the names of family members.

You can be sure I was on that one, once I discovered it—and despite the tenuous resource of a newspaper article, we'll see this week what connections we can make back to that tiny village both he and my Polish kin once called home: Żerków.

Baby Steps

Where to begin in reconstructing the immigrant saga of my own grandfather? I can't start from his landing place in New York City; I've already combed the records there with little results. Despite providing a date of arrival in May, 1884, even his naturalization papers fail to mention the name of the ship on which he arrived. Perhaps that was because Theodore J. Puhalski was not quite eight years of age when he arrived. Or perhaps it was owing to a more deliberate omission, when he completed the immigration process later in life. I can't be quite sure.

It wasn't as if this were the only omission my paternal grandfather had made, in the few times he opened up to reveal a clue about his origin. I've managed to assemble those scattered hints over years of research in a joint effort with my siblings and cousins. But they still didn't add up to anything as productive as the hint I gained when one—and then five more—DNA matches showed up last summer in the various testing sites I've used in the past six years. Starting from those matches' trees, I'm gaining a clearer glimpse at what my grandfather's origins might actually have been.

Today, we'll start with what I know about the surnames these matches have in common with each other. That will lead to a possible nexus with my grandfather's own sparse tree—only a possibility, mind you, as I haven't yet been able to locate verifying documentation. Those are baby steps lying before us, and we need to consider each step slowly and carefully.

The surname which seems to be held jointly by all those DNA matches—or at least connected to their lines—is Michalski. Not that that means I am related to that line, myself, but that in each of those family trees, there is likely a surname which can explain their connection to each other—and to my grandfather. That extended Michalski line, though originating in Poland, mostly seemed to settle in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

If you are realizing that Milwaukee is a far distance from New York City, you are an astute observer. However, many of these DNA matches, in relation to me as test taker, are anywhere from second to fourth cousins. We have plenty of time between the late 1880s until our current twenty-first century to draw the lines of connection between families in these two distant locations.

That line of connection, at least in 1890s Milwaukee, starts with two Michalski relatives. One, named Piotr—conveniently Americanized to Peter by the time of the 1905 Wisconsin state census—arrived in the United States with his young family sometime around 1888. The other, a man named Józef—or, in American style, Joseph, at least according to the 1900 census—arrived here in 1886.

How the two Michalski men are related, I cannot yet tell. However, there was one detail held in common between these two Michalski men in Milwaukee: they both had married wives back in Poland whose maiden names were Czechowska. As it turned out, it was that surname I needed to follow more closely, for one main reason: it might somehow connect with the unfortunate mother of my own father's Aunt Rose.

Above: Finding the naturalization records of Theodore J. Puhalski was an encouraging discovery—until I realized his 1905 documentation inconveniently skipped over any mention of the ship on which he arrived in New York; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

A Sister Where a Shadow Used to Be

It may have been a surprise to discover that my great-grandfather, Anton Laskowski, had a brother, but it wasn't a surprise to learn he had any siblings at all. That clue came to me early in my quest to uncover my paternal origins. And though it was an unexpected discovery, it occurred in the very regular process of checking all documents which contained the names of my grandparents and their family.

My habit, as I work through each person in my pedigree chart, is to attach every document pertinent to that individual in the individual's "sources" column at Ancestry.com, where I keep my online version of each family tree. That would mean, for Anton and Mary Laskowski, for each year they appeared in the census, I would link that digitized image to their individual profile.

In Anton's case, since he arrived in the United States sometime in the 1880s and died in 1939, that means I have a link to his entry for the 1900 census as well as that for 1910, 1920, and 1930. Then, too, because that Polish immigrant family settled in New York City, it also meant having the additional reference of each New York State census—for those available in 1892, 1905, 1915, and 1925.

It was in those state enumerations that I discovered most of the surprises for my father's family. It was there, for instance, that I discovered my father's original surname was something like Puhalaski, not the surname I grew up claiming. It was also in those state records that I learned about a possible sibling for Anton.

In Anton's household on North Eighth Street in Brooklyn, long after his daughter—my grandmother—and her young family had moved out, there appeared in the 1915 census another woman by the name of Annie Gramlewicz. Gramlewicz was a name similar to a surname I had already seen mentioned concerning this family: on Anton's 1939 death certificate, his mother's maiden name was written as Granlewicz.

The census also reported that Annie was eighteen years of age, born in the U.S., and was working as a saleslady. Most importantly, I learned from that census that Annie was Anton's niece. Of course, it could be possible that Annie was related to the Laskowskis through Anton's wife Mary, rather than through Anton, himself, but technically, census instructions indicate that relationships are to be designated in relation to the head of the household.

If Annie was single—and there was no way of telling from this state enumeration—with a surname different than her uncle's, that would mean she was related to him through a sister, not a brother. Somewhere, then, there was a Laskowski daughter in the previous generation who had married a Gramlewicz. Though I didn't yet know her name, at least now I knew there was such a relative.

The chase was on to find any record of a Gramlewicz family related to a Laskowski family—or at least a Gramlewicz daughter born in the United States around 1897. Almost all references, on Ancestry.com at least, seemed to point to one family: that of Mecislaus and Josephina—or similar spelling variations, depending on the year of the enumeration. In that household, Annie was listed as having been born in June of 1897, according to the 1900 census, and though her age seemed to vary unevenly with each subsequent census, the family constellation remained mostly the same.

Miecyslaus—or, as he was listed in the 1905 state census, John—and his wife actually had at least seven children during their years in New York City, though several of them died in childhood. The constants among those names listed in census records were four daughters: Anna and her older sister Helen, and then two very much younger daughters named Wanda and Marta.

Identifying that potential family unit helped me locate more information on the Gramlewicz connection between Annie and her uncle Anton Laskowski, though I didn't find documentation until many years after this initial discovery of Annie in her uncle's household. All I could figure, at that point, was that Annie must have been related to a sister—as yet unnamed—of Anton.

Long before I discovered those online resources in Poland to help pinpoint names and dates for my ancestry in Żerków, however, I got a surprise online message from someone who had found some of my cousin bait, and wrote to tell me the rest of the story about the Gramlewicz connection.

Above: Just when I wasn't expecting it, I stumbled upon a clue implying another branch of my mystery great-grandfather's family tree through a niece living in his household, according to the 1915 New York State census. This is the entry that got me started searching for any clues about Anton Laskowski's implied sister. Image courtesy Ancestry.com.

First Sightings

In seeking an ancestor who is leading the researcher on a merry chase, my initial tendency is to look at where we can first find him. In the case of my paternal grandfather, that is not so easily done. His first appearance was in the 1905 New York State census in the borough of New York City known as Brooklyn. At that point, he just happened to be living in the household of his father-in-law, an only slightly less aggravating ancestor to research.

There he was, although listed under a surname spelled Puhalaski and—why stop at one error?—re-entered under the "corrected" given name of Thomas. Still, the inclusion of his wife, Sophie, and his four month old son—that would be my father—helped tip the scales in our favor when combined with the Anton Laskowski household.

Jumping forward to the 1910 federal census would allay any concerns about those household listings—Theodore, then listed correctly, was still in the Laskowski household in Brooklyn, along with his wife Sophie and, by then, their two children, just as I've always known the family constellation to be. But the point of today's exploration is to see how far back in time I can go and still find any listing of Mister Mystery, Theodore Puhalski. Answer: not far, as it turns out.

If, instead of looking ahead to the 1910 census from that 1905 state census vantage point, we worked backwards in time, we could find my paternal grandmother's family alright, but no sign of Theodore. After all, he and Sophie were supposedly married in 1904, although I have yet to find any marriage record for the couple, despite diligent hand-cranking through microfilmed records of New York City marriages (yep, including every one of the boroughs, just in case).

There was another twist I needed to learn about, just to locate Sophie Laskowska's census entry for 1900, however. That was the fact that the family experimented with shortening their surname to sound less "foreign"—something I only learned when looking up my grandmother's obituary, where her younger brother Michael was listed under that shortened version. The entry for the entire Laskowski family in the 1900 census was under the surname Lasko.

Going back before that point, the only other census in which I could find the Laskowski family was in the New York State enumeration of 1892—thankfully! Before then, the 1880 census would have done me no good; the Laskowskis did not arrive in New York until after that point.

But where was Theodore Puhalski? The Laskowskis had other young men staying with them in the 1905 and 1892 enumerations, but even looking over the entire page where their household was entered, I saw no sign of any family with a surname spelled either Puhalski or Puchalski, the two variants I've already found.

It might have been a stretch, but I even recalled that early photos of my father and his family included one with a woman called "Aunt Rose." On my grandfather's death certificate—a document deserving a wary eye in attempts to use it as a genealogical guide—his mother's maiden name was given as Anna Krouse. I did discover there was a woman named Rose whose mother had that very name (although spelled Krauss), but you know I've already attempted every research contortion I could conjure up, without any results.

And so, the best I've been left with is the earliest mention of Theodore Puhalski's name in the 1905 New York State census record, when he was said to have been an alien of twenty nine years of age. With no discoverable marriage record, no appearance in earlier census records, no passenger records providing his date of arrival on American shores (despite his declaration on his naturalization papers giving a date), the man was basically swallowed up in history.

...until. Until a few DNA matches showed up which didn't seem to connect with my Laskowski side. They seemed to have something in common—all, for instance, arising from an immigrant who arrived not in New York but in Wisconsin, of all places. With no paper trail to follow into the past from my grandfather's life story, perhaps this would be the way to learn just who the man really was, and where he came from.

No: The One Answer I Hate to Get

Fresh with the hope that, in building out the family trees of my Polish ancestors' in-laws I might just find some current-day volunteers for my DNA testing quest, I tried finding my grandmother Sophie Laskowska's cousins via New York City records and newspapers.

This was not easy going. New York has had a way of extracting every last dollar possible from those researchers desperate to find their immigrant ancestors at the point of their arrival in the New World. There are work-arounds, though, and I tried every one I was aware of, in my attempt to trace the Giernatowski family—my grandmother Sophie's paternal aunt Agnes and her husband Ignatz.

Although I was certain that if I actually managed to find the Giernatowskis I would have located the right ones, the trick was to discern exactly which way to put the spelling of that surname. With a spelling as likely to be mangled as theirs was, it was no wonder I had had no success locating Agnes and Ignatz in the 1910 census, although I had tracked them down by 1915 in Brooklyn, New York. It was their one daughter by three names—or was it their three daughters with roughly the same birthday?—whom I wanted to pursue further, but by the 1925 state census, she had disappeared.

I tried finding her in the death index provided in one of my longtime favorite websites, the Italian Genealogical Group. There, I tried finding not only Blanch—or Pauline or Pleshia, or whatever her name really was—but her parents, as well. Could I find them? Answer: no. Not in the death index from the New York Municipal Archives. Not in the birth records. Not even in the marriage records.

Thanks to some judicious placement of wildcard symbols, I did find a death record for an Agnes Giernatowski. It was tempting to think that it was our Agnes—but the age wasn't quite right for the April 23, 1926, record. However, I'll tuck that tidbit away for further inquiry. After all, those Reclaim the Records conquests may someday provide access to the New York City death records, just as it has done for their marriage records.

I also managed to find yet another spelling variation to add to the collection, thanks to the hard working wildcard symbols at IGG: Gernatouski. As if I didn't have enough variations to juggle already.

After that, it was on to the newspaper accounts to try my hand at finding a wedding announcement. Or at least an obituary.

At NewspaperArchive.com? Nope.

How about GenealogyBank.com? Nada.

Maybe one of the free archives might not have lost their touch. I ambled over to the New York Public Library's Brooklyn Newsstand. Zilch.

Oh please, oh please Old Fulton New York with a Postcard on top? Not even there.

It was as if the entire Giernatowski family had simply disappeared after that last showing in the 1925 census. Not a trace of them could I find after that point. It made me wonder if, like Sophie's cousins the Gramlewiczes, they had decided to pack up and move back to Poland.

Not to be undone with all those negative search results on the Giernatowskis, I remembered I had yet another branch of this Polish family which had surfaced in American census records. Maybe this time, I'd find some descendants remaining here until the twenty first century.

Above: "The Resting Place," 1894 painting by Polish artist, Kazimierz Alchimowicz; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Dreaming of More Cousins

There is a reason why I was so delighted at the possibility of finding cousins for Sophie. Of course there was. You knew that already—I don't need to recount how many unsolved DNA test matches are lying, unclaimed, at the bottom of my pile of genetic genealogy mysteries.

In fact, out of all my matches, only a small proportion are linked to this side of my family. How do I know that? Easy. I asked a specific member of my family if he would be willing to participate in DNA testing at a company which not only does autosomal but also Y-DNA testing. By earmarking those test results as part of the paternal side of my family, all matches in common with his belong to the paternal side of our mutual family constellation.

Right now, that means there are twenty two matches in my account which descend from this Polish heritage. Most of them are at the range of second to fourth cousin—or beyond. Since I can't reach beyond Mateusz Laskowski and Elżbieta Gramlewicz—my second great grandparents—I'd be hard pressed to identify the common ancestors for matches beyond third cousins.

If I could identify any lines of descent from these Polish family members, it would help leaf out some bare branches on my father's family tree—and maybe identify some likely surnames for DNA matches to latch on to. At least, that was my thinking while I toyed with possibilities that these Polish relatives found via the Poznań Project actually had made the move to America like the Laskowskis had done.

That's why I explored the possibilities with Ignatz and Agnes Giernatowski, the couple who had moved to Brooklyn. One reason: they had a daughter—although, once again, I had to wonder whether I was seeing double, or just finding two different names for the same child. The 1900 census showed the "Gernatofski" daughter as Blanch, born in New York in April, 1889. I couldn't find the family at all for the 1910 census—who knows how their name was mangled for that enumeration. In the 1915 New York State census, the girl—now listed as a twenty five year old woman—was named Pauline, but by 1920, in the same household on the same street but (you knew this) with an entirely different spelling for their surname, the daughter's name was now rendered as Pleshia.

Three daughters? Or one? And what became of her, after the 1920 census? For, with the upcoming state enumeration in 1925, the household at that same location contained only Ignatz and Agnes. If their daughter had moved out—and, more specifically, mothered children of her own—I would never know without discovering her married name.

I wince to think of searching for a surname like Giernatowski in the New York City newspapers, but if I'm to uncover any further surnames to help in discerning possible DNA matches, it looks like that is the next reasonable step to take.

Above: "Summer Day" by Polish artist Kazimierz Alchimowicz; courtesy Wikipedia; this 1878 painting is now in the public domain.

Double Double

Finding my paternal grandmother's Polish family names included in the marriage listings at the Poznań Project was indeed encouraging. I couldn't resist the temptation to follow the trail on the others I found in the little town of Żerków, where my grandmother was born. The website had a search option to include specific surnames for the parents of bride and groom. I put that option to work, endlessly.

Soon, I was able to construct a partial family constellation for relatives of my grandmother Sophie's Laskowski and Jankowski relatives—not to mention, the Gramlewicz aunts and uncles whose surname sent me looking in the first place.

It was inevitable that I would try my luck with a reverse search, seeing if I could find anything on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org with the surnames I was finding in this marriage collection. I picked a family member at random who, in this case, turned out to be Sophie's paternal aunt Agnes—which I suppose, if the English translation option weren't engaged, would be rendered in Polish as Agnieszka.

According to the civil record, when Agnes married Ignatz Giernatowski in 1887, she was the thirty six year old widow of a man named Szumski. Thankfully, the civil registry included the name of her parents, or I would never have been able to place her in my great grandfather Anton's family.

I decided to try my hand at finding more records for the newlywed Giernatowskis at Ancestry. I thought my chances were slim at finding any further mention of them, as the Polish collection at Ancestry seems rather focused on select regions and ethnicities—mine excluded. I, however, was thinking Polish, when Ancestry had something entirely different in mind: an Agnes and Ignatz Giernatowski in none other than Brooklyn, New York!

Admittedly, I did have to make allowances for variations in spelling—after all, what is an English speaking census enumerator to do with all those Polish consonants, right? Most of them would be considered extraneous—and a few vowels, to boot.

Still, I was surprised to find an Agnes and Ignatz in any American census record, let alone someone by the given name Ignatz coupled with anything approximating Giernatowski.

The 1900 census wasn't exactly the same spelling, but it came close with a decent phonetic approximation as Gernatofski. The census gave Ignatz's birth as being in June, 1858, and Agnes' as January of 1852—not far off from the marriage record, which showed respective years of birth as 1857 and 1851. They stated they were married for twelve years as of 1900, which meant in the year 1888 as opposed to 1887. Still, these details were considerably close.

The census record stated the couple arrived in America in 1887, which was still reasonable, considering they could have married and left for the New World in a romantic gesture of never-ending honeymoon—or in a more reality-wise quest to seek a better life for themselves.

One clue to that better hope was the indicator that Agnes was mother of four children—or, who knows, as the number didn't appear distinctly, perhaps seven children—but the devastating fact was, no matter the number, it had been reduced to one. That one was their eleven year old daughter, Blanch, born in New York in 1889.

Prepared to be flexible with alternate phonetic renderings of that Polish surname, I decided to head to the Castle Garden website to see if I could find any passenger records to corroborate the Giernatowskis' immigration report. Nothing showed up with my attempt to enter their name literally, so I resorted to asterisks for those letters which might be wobblers—the "i" in the first syllable, the "w" for a possible "f" or "v" and the final "i" as a "y."

Something came up. But it didn't really help. It was a confusing double entry—one for Ignatz Gernatowski, and one for...Ignatz Gernatowski.

I almost thought I was seeing double, until I spotted the different ages: twenty two and thirty one. Both arrived in New York on the same date—22 March 1888.

Trying to locate the actual digitized record in another collection in vain (the ship's lists were available at both Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild for 1885 and the Gjenvick-Gjønvik Archives for 1890, but no record for 1888), I clicked through to see what was transcribed at the Castle Garden website. My hunch was that perhaps Agnes was entered under her husband's name, but no: both entries were for males, even though they both arrived on the same ship, the S.S. Eider, sailing from Bremen.

This seeing double malady was not about to leave me after that one foray into further Giernatowski records. I was beginning to doubt my own eyesight when I pulled up the Ancestry file for their possible New York State census record for 1925. There, in the transcription, the former Ignatz and Ignatz were entered as Agnes and Agnes.

Thankfully, at least here I could pull up the actual digitized copy of the record—and with one long, hard look at the thing, I convinced myself it was actually for "Ignes" and Agnes.

Still, the record had the approximately correct age spread between them—Ignatz was about six years younger than his wife—and the thirty three years they were, by then, in the States was almost at the more likely thirty seven.

If, of course, all this seeing double is not tricking me into mistaking two entirely different couples for one and the same family.


Above inserts: Transcription of Ignatz and Agnes Giernatowski's wedding record courtesy the Poznań Project; search results for the couple are shown from the Castle Garden website; and the excerpts regarding the 1925 New York State census are as found at Ancestry.com. 
  

The Little Surprise of the Family

If Anton Laskowski had reported a niece by the name of Gramlewicz in his household for the 1915 New York State census, that must have meant he had a sister who married a man by that surname. It only stands to reason. After all, each relationship reported in census records was to be given in reference to the head of the family, and that was indeed my great grandfather Anton.

And yet, when I was first contacted by my Polish cousin, she knew of no such occurrence. She clearly outlined for me her family tree—the maiden name of the woman her father had married, then that of her father's father's wife. Not one Laskowska in those women's family names.

Of course, there was always that possibility that Anna Gramlewicz wasn't really Anton's niece. She could be his grand-niece. She could have been staying in the home of a relative so distant, the only culturally appropriate thing to do might be to call him "uncle" out of deference for his age, or his role in her life. Worse, there could be absolutely no relationship between them at all, and I was fooled into researching this line merely because someone was afraid a fellow countryman's vulnerable daughter might be deported when she so strongly wished not to be.

As it turned out, though, I had another reason to support the bloodline connection between the Laskowskis and the Gramlewiczes: Anton's death certificate revealed his own mother was a Gramlewicz.

Contemplating that sort of relationship connection became too messy for me. I opted to believe—for research sanity's sake—that Anna had to be related to Anton, and went with the married sister theory.

But who could it have been? It was already abundantly clear—thanks to New York City birth certificates for the Gramlewicz's many children—that Anna's mother's maiden name was spelled in one of several variations which, I decided with help from Polish genealogy forum members who spoke the language, should correctly be rendered as Zyczynska. That's a far cry from Laskowska.

Complicating the matter was my Polish cousin's report that her grandfather's name was Hieronym. I had no record of any such son in the household of the Gramlewiczes, as late as I could find them in the census records—which happened to be in 1910.

I later found out why I couldn't find any sign of the Gramlewicz family after that 1910 census: according to Anna's sister, they had returned to Poland in November, 1912.

I also discovered why I never found any record of a son by the name of Hieronym: he was supposedly born in that very same year. But not in New York; in Poland.

Of course, I now realize I'm burdened with yet another discrepancy: the date I have for the family's return to Poland occurs after the date my Polish cousin provided for her grandfather's birthday (September 30, 1912).

The date I have for the family's return to Poland was provided, thanks to a verbal report to the officials filling out the passenger list for Anna's sister Helen's return trip to New York in 1920. Perhaps she got the date wrong. Even governmental records can be no better than the information provided to them by mere mortals.

Just as had many families from, likely, the beginning of time, with Hieronym's appearance in 1912, Mieczyslaw was presented by Jozefa with a little surprise: a baby boy when she had turned forty two and her husband was over fifty years of age. This became not only the caboose of the family, but the only Gramlewicz son to survive to adulthood.

Hieronym, in turn, married a woman by the name of—remember, we're back in Poland now—Wanda Jastrzebska, and had two sons of his own. The younger of those two sons became the father of the woman who contacted me, out of the blue many years later, and announced that she and I are distant cousins from that same Gramlewicz family.

While my Polish cousin didn't share much with me about her grandfather Hieronym, she did remember her grandmother, Wanda. Although she didn't know where the family had settled, once they returned home from New York, she did know one thing: upon Wanda's death in 1994, she was buried in a little Polish town called Żerków—the very location for which I'd been receiving so many confirmations.

As it turned out, thanks to a link shared in a comment by fellow blogger Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry, I discovered Żerków was indeed a good place to inspect for further signs of the Gramlewicz family.

Above: "Première tentative de navigation" (first launch), undated (before 1922) oil on canvas by Évariste Carpentier; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Someone Else's Aunt Anna

Perhaps it is owing to the commonness of the given name Anna that so many people can say they have an Aunt Anna. I do. My Polish cousin's father obviously did, for even though Anna Gramlewicz Jablonski was far removed from her family in Poland, she regularly sent letters back home and kept up on the family news.

It was thanks to a genealogy forum almost ten years ago that I discovered yet another person who could call this same Anna her Aunt Anna. Unlike my Polish cousin, this woman was descended from the little brother of Vincent Jablonski, Anna's husband. Anna was actually her mother's aunt; her mother grew up in the same apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, in which Anna had lived after Vincent died in 1943.

I got the first note from this Jablonski relative after she had seen my forum post on what was then genealogy.com. Of course, I was ecstatic to connect with someone who said Anna Gramlewicz was her own mother's Aunt Anna. Although the forum concept is so helpful, it was not often that a legitimate response materialized from one of my forays on these online sites.

Because this woman's mother grew up in the same housing complex as her cousins—the children of Vincent and Anna Jablonski—she likely was quite close to those relatives. Subsequent emails came well stocked with details on Anna's children and grandchildren. There was even a little bit on the great-grandchildren of one branch in Anna's tree. She provided me with current addresses of those who were still living, so I had up to date locations of where Anna's descendants had settled, as recently as seven years ago.

This other researcher, as it turns out, had also begun putting her records in a family tree online at Ancestry.com, so I've been able to see details as she adds them. And most recently, she mentioned considering doing DNA testing, although because we do not descend from the same common ancestor, it wouldn't reveal any helpful information for Anna's side of the family.

She even shared an old photograph of her side of the Jablonski family, which I loved seeing, even though it didn't include any members of my side of the family. It was still fun seeing how handsome Vincent was, and wondering if that was where his daughter Irene got her own classic facial features that were so photogenic in her engagement announcement, back in 1940.

With every little bit of detail added by these fellow researchers who found me online, the story of our immigrant ancestors grows clearer. I'm certainly thankful for everyone who has been willing to share their part of the family saga.

There was one more member of this Gramlewicz family who didn't share that immigrant part of the story: Anna's baby brother Hieronym. Born somewhere in Poland after his parents decided to leave New York City for good in 1912, his was the part of the family story which eventually provided the connection with my Polish cousin whose initial email to me in 2005 got this whole research project started in the first place.

Above: Undated photograph of the Jablonski family. Standing in the top row, from left to right, are Sigmond, Vincent (Anna's future husband), their mother, Marianne, and Mae; seated in the front row are Bertha, Viola, their father Alexander, Stephen and Lottie. Photograph courtesy Beth Galyon from the family's private collection; used by permission.

Getting to Know Anusia

It wasn't until I had met my Polish cousin, thanks to an online genealogy forum, that I learned the woman I had discovered in my great-grandparents' Brooklyn apartment was known, across the ocean, as Anusia.

Of course, if I hadn't discovered Annie Gramlewicz in the 1915 New York State census and seen her relationship listed as niece, I probably would have been oblivious to the existence of the entire Gramlewicz family connection. Each discovery after that one opened the door to further revelations about this Gramlewicz family—but each new fact emerged only gradually, over a span of years.

In addition, each revelation came courtesy of the help of others. First, it was with the help of the Polish cousin who tracked me down online and was willing to take up an email correspondence that spanned nearly a decade. After that, with the help of other genealogical researchers who realized they and I were searching for the same ancestors. But even before all that, it was thanks to the power of online outlets that I was able to reach out and meet others—and have others reach out and connect with me. It's that receptivity to community effort which has made such "serendipity" we experience in our research possible—something we need to never forget.

While I eventually learned, thanks to the hundred year old documents which sprung me on my path of discovery, that Anna Gramlewicz married Vincent Jablonski in Brooklyn and had two children, it was what I couldn't learn without the input from others that helped bring her story to life.

Take, for instance, Anna's nickname. Remember, Anna was the older sister of the man who became my Polish cousin's grandfather. While Anna returned to New York after going back to Poland with her family, the rest of her siblings remained somewhere in Poland. Because Anna and her older sister Helen were nearest in age of all the surviving siblings, of course they were close and kept in touch. Over the years, despite what was happening around them as the world's tragic history unfolded, Helen and Anna exchanged letters across the ocean.

What was interesting to learn from this Polish cousin is that Anna was not remembered by the family as Anna, or even Annie. Her sister Helen called her Anusia—and that was the only name the younger members of the family remembered ever hearing.

What the family in Poland did know about Anusia was that she was married and had children. She apparently wrote letters to not just Helen, but also to her baby brother's wife—this Polish cousin's grandmother—throughout her life. Although this cousin thinks Anusia never came to Poland—which I subsequently discovered was not so—she was aware of the letter exchange, which continued "with somebody from USA" until "the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s" but "we never asked about it."

Considering this Polish cousin and her siblings would have been very young, that is not a surprise to learn. Unfortunately, the one who last sent the replies back from Poland was this cousin's grandmother, who died in 1994, so even if the current generation wanted to, they no longer can ask any questions. The last remaining relative from that generation is now gone.

Somewhere in her father's home is a photograph of his grandparents and their family—Mieczyslaw, Jozefa and their children—made in Brooklyn before the Gramlewiczes returned to Poland. I can't tell you how I wish I had a copy of that photograph! I am sure, however, that that is not the only copy of that family portrait. Somewhere, back in New York, there are other members of Anusia's family—the branch of the Gramlewicz family which chose to remain in the United States—and I happened to get in touch with a distant relative of theirs who is also researching that family line.

Just as I mentioned earlier that genealogy is often a crowdsourced exercise, it turned out that researching this unusual surname has been the same. A little corroboration via email confirmed the details I had discovered, thanks to online documentation, and allowed me to make another—albeit distant—family connection once again.

Above: "En villégiature" (At the Resort), oil on canvas by Évariste Carpentier circa 1890; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Born in America, Died in Poland

Though I haven't found any passenger lists showing just which of the members of the Gramlewicz family chose to leave the U.S.A. in November of 1912, it's simple enough to deduce who in the family might have been part of that traveling group, based on the most recent census record.

The federal enumeration, taken only two years earlier, showed the household of Mieczyslaw and Jozefa Gramlewicz to include four daughters: Helen, Anna, Wanda and Martha. Helen, at the time of the census, was fourteen years of age. Martha had just been born within that very year.

The gap between twelve year old Anna and her three year old sister Wanda was a silent testament to the members of the family who were no longer with them: oldest son Boleslaw dying earlier that very year, Jan Ferdinand—or "Fred," according to the 1900 census, the only American document other than his birth record on which I can find evidence of his existence until his death record in New York City in early September of that same year—and their sister Sophie, who slipped in and out between those census records in barely a year's time from 1905 to 1906.

According to my Polish cousin, Helen, Wanda and Martha spent most of the remainder of their lives in Poland. Even this cousin's family wasn't aware of that recently-discovered one-year stay Anna made in Poland, the year her family made that return journey.

My Polish cousin, being too young to remember these relatives, had consulted with her father, once she and I started exchanging email letters. Of course, she and her family were delighted to learn there was still a family connection in the U.S., no matter how remote. And I got to learn what became of those returning sisters, Helen, Wanda and Martha.

Helen, the oldest, we already learned had returned to the United States once again in 1920, visiting her by-then married sister Anna and brother-in-law, Vincent Jablonski. My Polish cousin told me, at the time we started corresponding, that Helen's name on her birth certificate (or perhaps baptismal record) was actually Sewerina Helena Gramlewicz, born December 27, 1895 in Brooklyn. She even provided me with Helen's passport number. Helen was undoubtedly considered as, and treated as, a United States citizen.

If only there was a way to know what Helen's intentions were—or even some paper trail of records from which to deduce her life's timeline. My cousin did tell me that Helen married a man called Jan Sotomski, but didn't tell me where the two had met, or where, even, they married. I have not been able to locate any marriage records here—but, of course, not everything is revealed online. Without any clue as to which jurisdiction to zero in on, though, it would be quite a wild chase to search for the marriage documentation, despite the unusual names.

She did tell me that Helen and Jan came back to Poland in the 1960s—but from where? And that after their return to Poland, Jan died in Warsaw. I did try Googling that name, which yielded only a few hits for one specific individual. His profile seems so unusual that I can't be sure it would fit this husband for Helen, for whom I have such little identifying material.

My Polish cousin did tell me that Helen and Jan had no children, and that Helen herself died in Warsaw on April 19, 1987.

Next after Helen among those in the Gramlewicz family who had returned to Poland was their sister Wanda. All my correspondent could tell me about Wanda is that she died in Poland in 1950.

The youngest sister, Martha, was identified by my Polish cousin as Marta. Actually born May 13, 1909, in the Queens borough of New York City, Marta likely remembered nothing of her native land, traveling with her parents to Poland shortly after she turned three. Like her older sister Helen, she also had no children, though she was married twice. The first husband's surname was Rychlewski. Marta's second husband was named Meller. Both marriages were in Poland, so I have no dates or further details...yet.

Though Mieczyslaw and Jozefa had lost their two sons Boleslaw and "Fred," in New York, that was not the end of the story for the couple. They did, after all, have a son who grew to adulthood, carrying on the Gramlewicz surname, as you may have surmised by my astute cousin's desire to contact someone—anyone—researching that very surname. It was that one bearer of that surname who brought it forward to the next generation with two sons of his own—but he was not one of the siblings who had been born in the United States before the family's reverse migration. His story, however, we'll reserve for later, for first we need to spend time on the one remaining Gramlewicz child who was born in New York: Anna.

Above: "La laveuse de navets," (The Turnip Washer), 1890 oil on canvas by Belgian Impressionist painter, Évariste Carpentier; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Putting Your Name on the Map

As I discuss what became of my paternal grandmother's shirttail relatives in Brooklyn, New York—Anna Gramlewicz and her family—it may have struck you as presumptuous that I decided finding their location in Poland would point me directly to my forebears.

I have a reason for that hunch. It simply has to do with the odds of running into a surname like Gramlewicz. I have lots of support for this conjecture, but of course the support came later. First came that wild assumption. And the rationalization to support it.

My thinking was this: unlike researching Smith, or Jones or any number of unfortunately widespread surnames—hats off to you, for instance, if you are seeking Miller or Brown; I have a few of those, too—a name like Gramlewicz comes with its own set of challenges.

For one thing, a name like Gramlewicz is sometimes difficult to research, not because there are too many of them, but because there are too few. To be of any benefit, rarity needs to strike a happy balance between these two extremes.

If—and that is the key qualifier: if—a surname finds itself nestled in the precise sweet spot of that delicate balance, tools for surname mapping come in quite handy. And that is exactly the position in which I found myself.

On face value, it seemed like surname mapping might work for my Gramlewicz quest. First of all, just looking around—at census records, city directories, newspaper archives and other searchable records—quickly revealed that Gramlewicz was indeed the rare hit I thought it might be.

Though this might be a technique sure to backfire on some, if it would work anywhere, that "looking around" gimmick would work in New York City. At least, that's what I thought at first. After all, that's where the Gramlewicz family landed when they emigrated from Poland; if I was to find them anywhere, their landing spot would make the most sense.

Secondly, since many immigrants arrived in the new country to follow in the footsteps of those they knew from the old village, if Anna's family was joining up with any relatives, Brooklyn would be the place where those other Gramlewicz family and friends would be. Yet, not finding many with the same surname might indicate its relative rarity.

Reversing that examination and realizing that many immigrants came from villages where their parents and grandparents before them might have been born, raised, and died, any point of concentration of that surname might lead me to an ancestral homeland.

Might.

Of course, I was willing to try. After all, surname mapping is considered by some genealogical researchers to be "a useful technique" which can "reveal the origin of the family name." That, of course, was precisely my goal.

Starting out in the United States revealed very little, though, if you consider what I found on Ancestry.com's name distribution chart for Gramlewicz: "Sorry, we couldn't find geographic distribution information for the Gramlewicz last name."

Great start.

Moving out of my secure research cocoon of North American resources, however, yielded much better results. It did, however, require the assistance of people who understood Polish, for one thing—aided, over the years before the advent of Google Translate, by helpful participants in online genealogical forums—and the discovery of international websites with the data I was seeking.

I didn't do all this work over one weekend, of course. And to explain how I got to the details that clinched it for my unsubstantiated hunch will take more than a few moments. So, to share it all with you, with tomorrow's post, I'd like to begin a wandering tour through the process in the hopes that you may find some of this material helpful in your own research quandaries, as well.


Map above on the Gramlewicz surname distribution courtesy Ancestry.com's surname distribution and family history resource; similar mapping and explanation on Ancestry can be retrieved for any other surname by adjusting the URL to substitute the surname you wish to research after the equal sign in the address. For instance, to retrieve Ancestry's information on the Lewis surname, adjust this same address to read http://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=lewis

Why Did They Return?

In researching the stories of immigrant families, it is customary to assume that, though they faced nearly-insurmountable difficulties in getting themselves to our shores alive and well, most immigrants to North America were here to stay, once they made the journey. Granted, adjustments to life in an entirely different culture must have been challenging—but we assume our ancestors faced those problems with the usual aplomb of survivors.

When I discovered that Anna Gramlewicz' immigrant parents opted to return to Poland, I saw they were definitely going against the flow. To think that, shortly after their return to their homeland—with their American-born children in tow—they would be plunged into some of Europe's darkest hours seems an unfortunate twist of fate. To realize that they had brought their children right into the midst of not one war, but two, makes me wish I could have know what they were thinking, once those events began unfolding.

The scenario that played out in my mind for their one child whom I found in Brooklyn after their departure was that Anna had wanted so badly to remain in America that her parents relented and found her a safe place to stay with relatives—my great grandparents, Anton and Mary Laskowski.

How wrong I was in making that assumption! I discovered my error at about the same time as when the Ellis Island Foundation established its website with the searchable passenger lists.

One day, I sat down to the early version of that website and entered the surname Gramlewicz, to see how many people by that name might have been included in those lists. It turned out there were five people, spanning the years from 1907 to 1920. Of course, Anna's sister Helen was the one returning to New York in 1920, as we've already seen. Besides Helen, there were Gramlewiczes named Hedwig, Piotr and Stanislaw—none of which names I recognized as family. In addition to Helen's departure point of Antwerp, Belgium, one ship had arrived from Rotterdam; the rest sailed from Bremen, Germany.

There was one other Gramlewicz in that list, though, that surprised me: Anna, herself, had returned from Poland! She hadn't, after all, stayed behind in New York when her family had left for Poland in November, 1912.

This, of course, makes me wonder all the more: what made her decide to leave family and return, alone, to Brooklyn? My mind flies through all sorts of scenarios. Did she already know she wanted to marry a school sweetheart? Was she returning to an arranged marriage? If so, why didn't any of the other daughters do so, as well? Especially considering Helen's return later in 1920, this would make me wonder whether the same scenario was unfolding itself for Anna's older sister (though I could never find any indication that that became so).

Unlike the wonderful discoveries found scribbled in the margins of Helen's passenger list entry, there was nothing unexpected in Anna's readout. It revealed that she had traveled on the S.S. Friedrich der Grosse, sailing from Bremen on November 22, 1913, and arriving in the port of New York on December 3. The routine questions asked of passengers confirmed that Anna was born in Brooklyn on June 24, 1897, and that her residence address in New York was to be in Greenpoint, Long Island, one of the northernmost neighborhoods in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

What I find most interesting about those details is that Anna returned to Brooklyn almost exactly one year after she had left it. Perhaps her parents cajoled their reluctant teenager into returning home with them to Poland with the idea, "Try it for one year and see if you like it." If so, I suspect Anna knew well before that one year was up what she preferred to do.

There are all sorts of dilemmas we face in retrospect as we try to intuit just what our ancestors were thinking when they disappeared from their presumed trajectory and resurfaced far afield from our assumptions. Sometimes, a wider appreciation for what was happening in the big picture of history helps to second-guess our disappearing ancestors.

Sometimes, however, even though I wish I could, there is just no figuring out why these people chose to do what they did.

Above: Anna Gramlewicz' entry in the passenger list for the S.S. Friedrich der Grosse, bringing her back to her birthplace from Poland in 1913; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

The Only Family in the Entire Country

If Anna Gramlewicz became the only one in her entire family opting to remain in the United States, what became of her after her family left in 1912? After all, even though her sister Helen returned from Poland in 1920, insisting that she was going to stay here in the land of her birth, I found nary a sign showing that she followed through on that intention. The only one of the Gramlewicz family I could find, year after year, in census records, newspaper reports and city directories, was Anna.

Anna, like many girls of that era, was married at a fairly young age—nineteen. Her fiance was the twenty three year old son of Polish immigrants Alexander and Mary Jablonski. Like my own paternal grandfather, Vincent Jablonski was a machinist at a print shop in New York City, from the time he married Anna in 1916 up until the point of his early death in 1943.

Vincent and Anna had two children. The oldest they named Irene Martha. She was followed by a son who, depending on which record you believe, was named Henry or Zenon. Lest you presume that Zenon was Henry's middle name, it was more likely one named after his father—Vincent—for in his burial records (as in his military records), he was listed as Henry V. Jablonski.

I know very little about Henry, other than that, as had his dad, he died relatively young—at age fifty six in 1975. Thanks to an announcement of their engagement in the Long Island City Star Journal in 1943, I learned that Staff Sergeant Henry V. Jablonski was to become the husband of his high school sweetheart, Harriet Pardon. However, considering this was still in the midst of war years, I have no idea when—or even if—the wedding took place, and whether the couple ever had any children.

Society pages being the favored realm of the fairer sex, it was no surprise that Henry's sister merited a larger spread in the society page than he had enjoyed. Irene's wedding announcement in the Long Island Daily Press may have been modest, but a becoming photograph accompanied her engagement announcement in the Daily Press on October 3, 1940.

Irene's intended was Benjamin McLarty, of which very little was mentioned in the society reports—other than that his mother was Mrs. August Reisdorf. Since the wedding occurred October 12, 1940—far past the date for the 1940 enumeration—I'll have to await the release of the 1950 census before I can tell anything of the newlywed McLarty's family. The only thing I know beyond that, I gleaned from Irene McLarty's obituary in 1999, which mentioned one lone daughter, Veronica, and two grandchildren. Apparently, just as had befallen her own father and brother, Irene's husband had also died young—at age forty nine in 1961—so it was a very little family left to her, indeed.

Such was all that I could find on Anna Gramlewicz's legacy here in the States. After the death of her husband, her son-in-law, and then her son, Anna herself passed away in New York City in 1976. With her passing likely ended those letters sent across the ocean to her family who had returned to Poland.

It doesn't, however, end the story of our quest, for there are several more questions burning in my mind about the Gramlewicz story. Uppermost in my mind, of course, is to find out where, exactly, it was that the family returned to when they returned to Poland in 1912. Along with that answer, of course, comes many more details which, in their own turn, engender more questions. But before we can turn our attention to those, there is one more detail that I need to discuss about Anna, herself: the fact that she, too, had returned from Poland to America.

Above: The Brooklyn Bridge, circa 1895, as captured by amateur photographer Edgar S. Thomson; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Not a Moment Too Soon

Finding that mention of the marriage of Helen Gramlewicz' sister Anna in her passenger records was a serendipitous discovery. I'm not sure I would have figured out what Anna's married name might have been, had I not stumbled upon that handwritten note added to Helen's records.

Still, discovering Anna's married name—Jablonski—wasn't enough to find any documentation of the marriage. True, I could, with the tip off of the name, find their entries in subsequent federal and state census enumerations, allowing me to discover the names of the next generation of Gramlewicz descendants in the United States. With the newfound knowledge that Anna's firstborn daughter, whom she named Irene Martha, arrived in 1917, it was a safe bet to assume Anna and Vincent Jablonski were married around 1916. But as to the wedding, itself, there wasn't much documentation to be found.

I tried, of course, to find any record online. The search for any Jablonski marriage records at FamilySearch via the New York, New York, Marriage Index spanning 1866 through 1937 yielded absolutely nothing. Of course, there was, theoretically, the possibility that young Anna and her beau had slipped away to be married outside the five boroughs comprising New York City. But who was there to elope from? Her parents and siblings had all left for Poland in 1912. The only family members remaining in the country were her aging uncle and aunt, with whom she shared their Brooklyn apartment.

There was another way around this search dilemma, of course: public notices published in local newspapers. While the Brooklyn Daily Eagle yielded nothing, it was the Old Fulton New York Post Cards website that came to my rescue.

Sort of.

You see, while I was able to find a mention of a marriage license issued to Vincent and Anna in the Brooklyn Standard Union, the unfortunate fact was that the genealogical patron saint behind that quirky website had somehow scanned that very page in such a way as to cut off the heading, which essentially meant that the issue's date was scrubbed from the digitized image. All I can go by is the search result entry which indicated—at least—that it was an edition published in 1916.

However, this is not the time to bemoan such a research quandary. There is a way out of this dilemma—if, that is, I am willing to wait a while. For not a moment too soon, we—at least, those of us who are researching our New York City roots—have been snatched from the fate of having to expend the time and money to head to the lower reaches of Manhattan and the city's archives there and personally crank through the microfilms in hopes of finding that very date.

On the same day I was pondering how I was going to resolve the absence of the marriage date I'm seeking, an email arrived in my inbox, trumpeting the news: "WE WON!" Apparently, the New York City Marriage Index—in this case, a later segment than the one I'm currently seeking—will just now become "free and open data." However, in the same email, the group making it so—Reclaim the Records—explained that the Index for the years 1908-1929 has now been digitized, thanks to the help of FamilySearch.org, and uploaded to the activist group's site at Internet Archive, where they can all be accessed freely.

Well, make that a little too freely. The data is there, all right. But you have to go find the specific names you are seeking. A little too daunting a task for me.

It occurred to me that, rather than hunting through the digitized file for the 1916 marriages in Brooklyn, New York, as found in the Internet Archive file, since FamilySearch was the one doing the grunt work, perhaps they got the benefit of also keeping a copy of the file.

True, they did show a file with a similar name on their own website. But remember, putting the file through its paces with a search for both Vincent Jablonski and Anna Gramlewicz yielded me nothing.

According to the Reclaim the Records email, they are working with others to get "some kind of standalone searchable version of that CSV data thrown together online" in the near future. My choice at this point: either wade through the data in hopes of finding Vincent and Anna, wait for those "genealogy nerds" to create the search mechanism, or try to hack through it all, myself.

Maybe I'll just opt for wandering around the data, myself. What gets poked and still doesn't explode can't hurt me.

Above: From the Brooklyn, New York, Standard Union in an undated 1916 edition: "Marriage Licenses...Vincent Jablonski, 23, of 149 Grand street, and Anna Gramlewicz, 19, of 137 North Ninth street."

"Always"

The assumption, in the case of most immigrants, is that they make their incredible journey to a new homeland with the intention of never again leaving. It is, after all, a hazardous enterprise to have crossed an ocean in search of a suitable place to call home, especially in previous centuries.

When Annie Gramlewicz's parents came to the United States in the 1890s, they knew exactly what it was like to take the cheapest passage possible for the long journey from Europe. One could presume that was a trip people seldom wished to repeat.

Annie and her siblings, having been born in New York City, knew nothing of the sacrifices their parents made to come to America. But they also knew nothing of what Mecislaus and Josefa remembered of the homeland they had left behind.

Apparently, the call of those memories overcame the lure of any opportunities the Gramlewicz elders might have enjoyed in their new life in New York. There was a reason why I couldn't find any trace of the Gramlewicz family in census records after 1910—and why their one daughter Annie had had to find a home with a relative by the time of the 1915 state census: the family had decided to return to Poland.

Until I received confirmation from my Polish cousin, whom I met online years ago, that the Gramlewicz family had returned to Poland, I didn't really know what had happened. Only when passenger lists started showing up in online databases was I able to piece together the story. Even then, the document I'm sharing today was a more recent discovery. Thankfully, it confirms the story, owing in great deal to the handwriting added to the image—which never, incidentally, would have shown up if the record was offered only as a transcription.

It was the journey of Annie's older sister Helen in December, 1920, which provided the most complete snapshot of the family's odyssey. Arriving in the port of New York on December 13 of that year, the S. S. Zeeland, sailing from Antwerp, had brought Helen back to the city of her birth.

The passenger list was full of questions that had to be answered, thus providing us, nearly one hundred years later, with a glimpse of Helen's plans, once she disembarked at the end of her voyage. We learn that Helen Gramlewicz reported her age, at that time, as twenty four, and that she was a single woman. She declared her occupation to be bank clerk. In addition to being able to read and write Polish, she could also do so in both German and English. Despite having been born in New York, Helen considered Poland to be the country to which she owed her allegiance, but intended that her future permanent address would be in New York City.

It was at this point on the passenger list that we are provided with the information pertinent to the question of what became of Helen's parents. She listed her last residence address to be in the city of Zerkow, Poland, and specifically indicated that that was where her parents resided at the time.

The second page of the passenger list provided more confirmation of Helen's story. She explained that she had been born in New York City and—this is the important, handwritten note that would have been omitted from any transcription—that her family had left New York in November of 1912.

Of course, there were more mundane—yet interesting—details on the form. We learn that Helen was five feet, three inches tall, with a fair complexion and blue eyes. Everything from the condition of her physical and mental health to her personal opinions about anarchy and polygamy were questioned as part of the routine screening on the second page of that form.

Interestingly, though she had left New York for Poland with her family in 1912, the passenger questionnaire revealed that Helen's purpose in coming to the United States was to never return to Poland, but this time, to "become a citizen of the United States." As to the question, "Length of time alien intends to remain in the United States," Helen declared, "always."

The one thing that proved the most pertinent to my search, though, was the detail of just where Helen planned to proceed, once cleared from questioning at the port of entry. According to the typed entry on the form, her next stop was going to be 1730 Stefan Street, Brooklyn—home of her brother in law.

Thankfully, someone had written in yet another note providing me, through that shared image, with the lead for what had happened to Helen's sister Anna. Next to the typed "brother in law" was scrawled the note, "and sister, Anna Jablonski."

Above: Sunset Over the Sea, 1887 oil on panel by American landscape painter, George Inness; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.