Coming From a Large—and I Mean Really Large—Family

 

I think the prime reason I took an interest in genealogy was owing to the size of my own family: it was small. Like, really small. I often wondered, where are all the relatives? Unlike all my neighborhood friends, I had only one set of grandparents, and since they lived over six hundred miles away, I didn't see them often. My mother's only sister never married. My father's sister had two children, but since she and my father were nearly in their fifties when I was born, their children were old enough to be my parents. It was their children who seemed more like my cousins—and there were only a few of them.

Fast forward several decades until someone gets the brainy idea that we can use DNA analysis to determine family relationships, and suddenly my puny family tree sprouts a new branch. And it's not just an average sized branch; this one is huge. I have no idea how it connects with me, but the DNA tells me it has something to do with my paternal line, and leads me back to one particular person: my paternal grandfather's mother.

That woman, whom I only knew on paper as Anna Krauss, turned out to have many siblings, back in her homeland in Poland. Of course, I never knew anything about that Polish homeland because that fact was well hidden from my family by my paternal grandfather. And yet, that DNA points back to a family named Zegarski from a small town in the region of Pomerania known as Czarnylas.

With the help of another family researcher whom I met online, thanks to DNA-led discoveries, I began exploring a Polish website devoted to genealogical information for that specific region of Pomerania. Just searching for Zegarski ancestors in Czarnylas, I was able to zero in on the family of one couple. That led to discovering that the woman I knew only as Anna Krauss came from a big family. Like, really big. Consider this:

 

This is the results of a search at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association website for all the children born in Czarnylas to a father named Zegarski and a mother named Marianna. I set the parameters wide for that search between the years 1830 and 1870, and used those specific terms because the father was sometimes entered as "Jan" and other times as "Johann," depending on who was drawing up the record. Likewise, the mother, Marianna, had her maiden name spelled differently, depending on how the various clerks decided to render the pronunciation.

Despite spelling variations—not to mention the size of the family—I feel certain this readout represents just one family unit. This helps guide us as we review yesterday's list of marriages for each of those Zegarska sisters, to confirm their relationship to each other. This is necessary, in sorting out those DNA matches, since those matches lead back to different Zegarska sisters.

For instance, when I started this process, my first match led me to a Milwaukee family with the surname Michalski. That, in turn, connected me with an ancestor's maiden name of Czechowska, which ultimately brought me to the oldest Zegarska sister in the list above, Pauline.

In contrast, another line leading to a Milwaukee DNA connection claimed as their Zegarska ancestor Pauline's youngest sister, Anna. Born in 1859, according to marriage transcriptions at that same Pomeranian website, Anna eventually married a man by the name of Tomasz Gracz. Together, they welcomed their firstborn daughter into the world in Poland in 1880, naming her Rosalia. Two years later, Rosalia was followed by a brother, named after his father, Tomasz.

Just after the next Gracz infant arrived, the family was on their way to a new world—but not via the customary route. Tracing the Gracz family led through a different research route, not only because they traveled first to Canada, but because of the way their surname was rendered on records. Their 1884 crossing to Halifax, Nova Scotia, showed the family under the name Gratz rather than Gracz. That passenger entry also provides the clue that son Tomasz must have died before the family's decision to emigrate, but it also adds the name of a third Gracz child, Angelka.

While the next document in which the Gracz family appeared was not recorded until 1900—thus missing both Rosalia and Tomasz, with no explanation to help us conclude we are looking at the same family—that census record did include the note that, of Anna Gracz's twelve children, two had already died before the enumeration. One was most certainly their son Tomasz. But Rosalia? Perhaps as thanks for surviving whatever befell the family in Poland, plus the long crossing to North America, firstborn Rosalia became Sister Mary Atalia of the Notre Dame Convent in Elm Grove, Wisconsin—likely before 1900.

Those, however, were not the only complications in following this immigrant family through the generations after settling in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As did many other immigrant families from Poland, some of the Gracz descendants chose to default to habitual spelling permutations—such as Gratz—requiring careful attention to tracing each line through to the present era of DNA testing. Other family members have mentioned to me that another surname variation was Grace.

Bottom line, though, is that at least one descendant of Tomasz and Anna turned out to be my DNA match—and for no other reason that I can ascertain than this Zegarska connection. For this match, Anna Zegarska Gracz turns out to be a second great-grandmother, thus leaving her parents to be the most recent common ancestor we share. With that third great-grandparent set in common, that indicates our relationship as fourth cousins, still quite reasonable for the thirty five centiMorgans we share, according to our DNA tests.

The only problem with this particular connection in that Zegarski family was the name of the very woman I thought would be sibling of my great-grandmother: they both claimed the name Anna. However, when I looked through the twelve siblings listed on the family's baptismal records for Czarnylas, I spotted some others whose name could have been shortened to Anna. There was Marianna, Susanna, and Anastasia. The question was: could I trace any of the others to North America as well? And if so, were there any DNA connections leading back to that ancestral "Anna," too? 

Before That Leap of Faith

 

Do you ever get to the point, despite hours and hours of due diligence in your genealogical research, of doubting that you had done "enough"?

Wrapping my head around the six hundred names I've now added to a new family tree, dubbed "Michalski DNA Link," you'd think I'd feel confident the pedigree has enough built-in support. After all, I'm the one who can't just do "quick and dirty" trees like my Search Angel friends who work with adoptees. I had to make sure each name in that family tree had census records, marriage records, death records and obituaries, and (mostly for those born in the 1900s) birth records attached to the corresponding individual.

The key, though, is the nexus between the originating ancestors in that family tree: sisters from a small town in Poland who all claimed a maiden name of Zegarska. Somehow, those sisters connected to a woman whom I never met, and whose name wasn't quite the same as Zegarska, but close enough. From just one certificate from my own family's collection, I have a paper which claimed her maiden name was Zegar. 

Close. But close enough?

It's at this point I felt the need to retrace my steps from that beginning point, back in the town where the Zegarska sisters originated: Czarnylas, in the Polish region known as Pomerania.

Fortunately, there is a website focused on the genealogy of that region, providing a searchable database with transcribed records from the time period I'm seeking: working from my paternal grandfather's date of birth around 1876 backwards through baptismal and marriage records.

Specifying a broad range of dates, I was able to pull up all records for Czarnylas involving marriages for women whose maiden name was Zegarska.

 

From that, having the name of each woman's husband, it was easy to recognize some of those married names as surnames I had spotted on the pedigrees of several of my growing list of DNA matches from that corresponding branch of my own family tree. It was, for instance, Czechowski which was the name of two daughters of "Pauline"—who probably was named Apolonia as her Polish name—who immigrated to Milwaukee in the early years of their marriage. Likewise for the tongue-twisting surname Krzewinski, along with Gracz, which I also spotted in some DNA matches' trees.

Likewise, I checked on births recorded (via transcriptions of baptismal records) in that same website, to see which couples welcomed children into their families before beginning that long immigration journey to America. That step helped guide me to ensure that I had located the right families in Milwaukee—especially for those families which later changed their identity (and surname). Thankfully, those oldest of their children still appeared to confirm I was working with the right family constellation.

 

The DNA link tree I'm building is for one purpose: to connect those present-day descendants who match my own DNA with their Zegarska roots in a well-documented tree...and then to hope that is enough proof for me to steel myself and actually pull the trigger to shoot that whole tree into my father's own tree. And say we are all one big—albeit long-lost—family. Humor me with the patience to retrace our steps on those Czechowski, Krzewinski, and Gracz lines this week while I build up my courage to take that final leap of faith and instantly expand my dad's family tree with an additional six hundred family members I've never met.

 

Images are courtesy the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, with the first image representing marriages extracted from the database for the maiden name Zegarska, and the second image being of births to women with that same maiden name. 

Reinventing that Name

 

Did your immigrant ancestor ever do this?

I have a relative who was born outside the country in which we all now live. This relative happened to be born into a family for which English was not their native language. The name this family bestowed upon him at his birth happens to be one which presents pronunciation difficulties for those who originate in other countries for which those phonetic sounds are not included in their vocabulary.

Fast forward to the present. In this relative's adopted homeland, introducing himself to new business associates can sometimes present problems. For instance, when this relative invites prospective clients to go golfing with him at his club, should those guests have as their native tongue, say, Japanese, it is well nigh impossible for them to wrap their tongue around my relative's name. Big problem when it's important to make comfortable first impressions.

Solution? My relative just tells them his name is "Jack."

Now, let's move that same scenario to a different time and a different city. Two sisters, with the unwieldy surname—at least to English speakers—of Czechowska marry two Polish men by the name of Michalski and all decide to move from the small town of Czarnylas in the region of Pomerania to a big city in the midwestern United States. In their new home in Milwaukee, they are sometimes fortunate to encounter American officials with whom they share their native Polish tongue—but sometimes they don't. For their many children born in Wisconsin, the variety of spellings for the same surnames—not to mention, for the Polish given names their parents naturally preferred—is a record-keeping wonder of inventiveness.

Some of those creative spelling approximations stuck, but sometimes, the challenge became wearying, and the end result was that quite a few of those Czechowska and Michalski descendants decided that the path of least resistance was to resort to a version of claiming "Jack" as their name. Sometimes, that attempt simply meant chopping off the last few syllables, or the last string of consonants from a surname. Other times, the surname didn't look much at all like the Polish version originally appeared. It was far easier to "fit in" than to wear someone's patience thin with un-American spelling conventions.

Working my way forward in time, researching these family lines, makes tackling that reinvention convention much easier, because I can clearly follow dates of birth, home addresses, and other telltale signs that confirm Name X is indeed the same as Person Y. But when I trace a DNA match backward in time, it isn't always as clear-cut a research path. Seeing someone with a clearly Anglo-sounding surname doesn't necessarily reveal the fingerprints of what once was a Polish surname in that match's heritage.

For those whom I can trace back through the several generations between our current times and the 1880s arrivals of these founding immigrant families, there is one particular detail to keep in mind. Those two Czechowska sisters led to one valuable clue in tying their descendants to my own DNA results: their mother had almost the same maiden name as my own mystery grandfather's mother, the woman I had found in New York City listed as Anna Krauss. While I can't be sure from the few items of documentation I could locate, her maiden name had been reported on just one record—her son's death certificate—as Zegar. 

The two Czechowska sisters happened to claim a mother surnamed Zegarska. While that is not an exact match to my Anna's possible maiden name of Zegar, could it have been yet another instance of someone just succumbing to that immigrant desire to fit in by shortening that name to a less-foreign length?

Perhaps all it takes now, given the confirmation of those DNA matches, is to just make the move and plug them in to my family tree. I'm building out the Michalski and Zegarska tree, and I don't see any other possible way those descendants of the two Milwaukee immigrants connect to my New York kin. And yet...I hesitate while I try to find just one more token that maybe, maybe this is as right as it seems to be. When we're trained to base our genealogical conclusions upon documentation, it seems so tenuous to decide something when we aren't holding the security blanket of a piece of paper. 

 

A Tentative Conclusion

The saying that our tree is never done may apply in more ways than one. Those who gloat, "My tree's finished" may not realize there is always—always—more to push back in those generations. But what I'm also seeing is that the research conclusions we come to may not be done deals, either.

Take my struggle to pin my paternal grandfather into the trees of my six—no, now seven—DNA matches which obviously link to his side of the family. But where? I have no information from this tight-lipped ancestor about his origins. All I knew—and that, thanks only to relatives who still remember these vague stories from their childhood—was that this grandfather was somehow connected to a woman the family called Aunt Rose. And that Aunt Rose once had a mother, a widow whose name was Anna Krauss.

The only other blessed clue I could unearth from New York City documents was a one-time mistake by a 1920 census enumerator, who entered for Rose's place of birth the term "Schwartzwald." After the gift of those DNA matches, I finally realized where this Schwarzwald really was: a village in Poland now called Czarnylas.

With that comes a very long line of ifs. If Aunt Rose was really my father's aunt and not just a family friend, and if her place of birth really was Schwarzwald, and if the entry on my grandfather's death certificate was correct in stating his mother's maiden name was Zegar, and if he was continuing his mission to keep his roots hidden by claiming that maiden name was Zegar and not Zegarska, and if all those DNA matches to both myself and my brother (who is actually my half-brother on my father's side) are not, somehow, false positives or related to us in another way we've yet to discover—if all this, then perhaps I can assume my grandfather's mother was really that Anastasia Zegarska from Czarnylas, Poland.

If.

Let's take a look at how all this information stacks up. If we assume that Anna Zegar of New York City was really Anastasia Zegarska of Czarnylas who married Tomasz Puchała, her son would be Theodor and her daughter Rosalia.

Anastasia, in turn, would be daughter of Jan Zegarski and Marianna Woitaś, who among other children, had an older daughter named Pauline. This is the woman who married Andrew Czechowski and had the two daughters—Walerya and Weronika—who married Michalski men and moved to Milwaukee.

From Walerya's line come two DNA matches: a third cousin once removed who was descended from her son Francis Michalski, and a third cousin twice removed who was descended from her daughter Mary Martha Michalski Maciolek.

From Weronika's line come three DNA matches. One is from her daughter Anna and her husband Anton Ullenberg, producing a third cousin once removed. The second is from Weronika's son John, and is also a third cousins once removed. The final match from this line descends as a third cousin twice removed from Weronika's daughter Marianna, who married Anton Yeash.

There are two other DNA matches connected to this line. And difficulty reconciling records. These two matches happen to connect to a Marianna Zegarska who married someone named Johann or Jan Krzewinski. There are two problems with this information. First, as small as the village of Czarnylas was, it apparently contained two women named Marianna Zegarska; the transcribed records at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association website do not indicate names of a bride's parents, so I can't determine which Marianna is my relationship. Then, if we look further at the children baptised in this town with the father's surname of Krzewinski, none of them show Marianna Zegarska as their mother.

Of course, this couple could have left for America, shortly after their 1879 wedding—and I can find a John and Mary Krzewinski in, of all places, Milwaukee...but the dates of birth don't align nicely with either Marianna's date of baptism, or the Polish marriage record.

Bottom line: while DNA tests tell us that someone on my paternal side connects with a Krzewinski for two of those matches, I can't yet be sure what the exact connection is.

Collateral Chaos Calling

What do you do when you try to do an end run around your latest research brick wall using collateral family lines, only to discover you are in a bigger mess, pursuing those collateral lines?

I've had great results with this technique in the past when following, say, my mother's nicely colonial lines back through the generations in the familiar research territory of America. Not so, my father's side. Of course, my paternal grandfather is the stumbling block here, with his adamant refusal to reveal much—if anything at all—about his roots.

The gift I received last summer of six DNA matches who seem to point to no one else in my heritage than that same mystery grandfather tells me I need to pay attention to the roots of those six people's Michalski and Czechowska lines in Czarnylas, Poland. So I dug as far back as I could, until I found both Czechowska lines ended with a mother whose maiden name was Zegarska. I looked further, using the website for the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, to discover this woman's parents' names: Johann Zegarski and Marianna Wojtaś.

Thankfully, that same Polish website contained transcriptions for baptisms, and I searched for every child listed in Czarnylas naming these same two parents. Then, I composed a quick family tree for this Zegarski family, and started working my way down from the oldest—a daughter named Paulina, the one we've already met as mother of the two Czechowska daughters who immigrated to Milwaukee—and ended up with the youngest, a woman named Anna.

One by one, I considered each of these children of Johann and Marianna. I looked for any who were listed in the marriage records, twenty years later. I looked to see if any were listed as parents of children in the next generation. I composed as much detail on each of the next generation's family as possible. And looked especially to see if there was any corresponding immigration information that correlated, in other online resources, with this record set.

The youngest Zegarski daughter, Anna, was an easy one to spot. Anna married Tomasz Gracz in 1879. Their marriage took place in Czarnylas. According to baptismal records for that same village, the couple had a daughter they named Rosalia in 1880, followed by a son, Tomasz, in 1882, and another daughter, Helena, in 1883. After that, I could find no further transcriptions with their name in the village of Czarnylas.

Switching the search from the Pomeranian website to Ancestry.com, I picked up the trail with a passenger list in Hamburg which seemed to match the same couple—although not the exact listing of children. While the surname was rendered with a more German-sounding Gratz, rather than Gracz, there was one encouraging note: their former place of residence was listed, in German style, as Schwarzwald—the Germans' preferred label for Czarnylas, as we've already discovered.

It was 29 March, 1884, and Anna and Tomasz and their three year old daughter Rosalie were departing from Hamburg for "Nordamerika" via Liverpool. Only problem with this record was that there was no sign of their son Tomasz, nor their baby daughter Helena. Instead, this family included an infant they called Angelka.

Whether this was one and the same family as the Gracz family I had found in Czarnylas, I couldn't yet be sure, but I continued the search to see what else could be associated with this immigration journey. Two weeks later on 14 April, 1884, a Canadian document recorded the arrival of a ship from Liverpool at Halifax in Nova Scotia, showing the exact same family constellation: Thomas—surname again spelled Gratz, not Gracz—along with his wife Anna and two daughters, Rosalie and Angelka.

From there, the travel itinerary went dark, keeping us from seeing the rest of the trail from Poland to Milwaukee, but by the time of the 1900 census, an enumerator with impeccable handwriting recorded a Thomas and Anna Gracz family in Milwaukee. Only trouble was, now, the oldest daughter showed as a seventeen year old Helen, and all the children born after that point arrived once the family had settled in Wisconsin. Where was Rosalie?

Tracing every document from that point onward revealed one reassuring note about the surname aberration: it would be alternately rendered as Gracz or Gratz. In fact, some future generations succumbed to the inevitable and just claimed the latter spelling as their true surname. And yet, after one record spelled as Gratz, a later one would surface with the spelling as Gracz.

And then, there was the case of Rosalie. She, herself, went by an alternate name—but for good reason: she had made her first vows in 1901 to become part of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and was known as Sister Mary Atalia to her pupils at Saint Casimir school in Milwaukee. Because she was born in Poland, by the time of the second world war, she must have found reason to complete naturalization papers.

Although those records do not include the name of her parents, her Petition for Naturalization does provide her birth name: Rosalia Gracz. We also glean her date of birth—September 1, 1880—and receive the bonus of her actual place of birth and last residence in Poland, a place called Pelplin.

Pelplin, of course, is not Czarnylas, so I rushed to find out just how close the two might have been to each other. Reassuringly, it was in the same historic region as Czarnylas—Pomerania—and was a much larger town (currently having a population of eight thousand). Could it be that Sister Mary Atalia had given this larger town name as her birthplace, simply because more people would be able to locate it on a map than tiny Czarnylas? Or does this reveal a clue about where else to look for records on her family before they left Poland?

This tiny piece of information may turn out to be useful for another record set: that of death records. Remember, we are still missing Rosalia's baby brother Tomasz, and we are also lacking any explanation of why the baby sister was sometimes called Helena, and other times Angelka. And yet, returning to the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, I find that the repository for many of the death records are coupled with names of locations other than Czarnylas. I'm not yet familiar enough with geographic designations—or the record-keeping customs in this foreign-to-me country—to know whether this was the Polish equivalent of Americans' habit of filing death certificates in the county of the occurrence, not the actual city where it occurred.

Bit by bit, I'm learning the ropes for researching these Polish ancestors—and being eyewitness to the contortions imposed upon Polish surnames in their English-speaking adopted homeland. To be sure, I'll need a lot more information on the extended Zegarski family before I feel confident that I'm following the right collateral lines, so I'll see what else can be found about any of Anna Zegarska Gracz's siblings who chose to follow the same path to Wisconsin.


Above: Insertion of details on Thomas Gratz family from Hamburg passenger list for British steamship Argo provided courtesy of Ancestry.   

Tracing an Immigrant Family

Up, up the family-tree-in-the-clouds I've climbed this past week, seeking the telltale Most Recent Common Ancestor to connect my mystery grandfather with the six DNA matches whose ancestry leads us back to Poland. Much as an adoptee might have done, building "quick and dirty" trees in finding a birth parent, I have been piecing together the family trees of two Czechowska sisters who married Michalski men who all immigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My hypothesis is that their joint ancestor—a woman named Paulina Zegarska—could be related to the Anna Zegar (among many other surnames claimed) who was supposedly mother of the woman my dad and his sister knew as Aunt Rose.

The next step—at least for this researcher, wanting to find her way out of that jungle in the clouds—is to see if any of the other people connected to that Zegarski family in Czarnylas, Poland, also migrated to the United States, whether along with the Michalskis to Milwaukee, or to another location closer to New York City, where my paternal grandfather settled.

So, there I was, last week, feverishly constructing possible family trees for all the descendants of Paulina Zegarska's parents—Johann and Marianna Wojtaś Zegarski, if I have that information right. Some of the names I found, through searches at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, seemed to lead nowhere—a factor of lack of American resources which access Polish records, I suspect—but a few others did lead me to American shores.

It was interesting to follow those trails and pick up the path, once the family landed in North America. I say "North America" for a reason: it wasn't always in the United States where these immigrant families landed. One family, for instance, I discovered in a catalog of Canadian passenger records landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia—not surprisingly as, after all, they were headed to a city accessible by the Great Lakes, making the route a feasible guess.

What was interesting in tracing the routes of these maybe/maybe-not relatives was to see what other records could be found for their immigration saga. In tracing one particular family, I found not only their records from that Canadian passenger listing, but also from their point of departure in Germany—and, years later, verification through their eldest daughter's own naturalization application. The details in those documents, as we'll explore beginning tomorrow, help corroborate the extended family's story of immigration to Milwaukee—and hopefully shed some light on connections with my own family, as well.

For now, though, it is too early to tell whether the end result will benefit my own search for my grandfather's true identity. By using a "quick and dirty" process, I can speed through someone else's immigration saga until I can get to the point where details may shed light on clues which hit closer to home. Tomorrow, then, we'll begin the immigration saga of the family of Tomasz Gracz—alias Gratz—and his wife, the former Anna Zegarska.

Building Castles in the Air

You may have heard the advice against building castles in the air. Today, we'll consider the wisdom of building family trees in the air. It may turn out to be attached to the same sage warning, but I'm still tempted to explore the possibilities.

Here's the situation. I've received word that there are six DNA matches, all of whom contain the surname Michalski with an ancestral connection to a woman with a maiden name so similar to one in my mystery grandfather's roots—Zegar—as to present too tempting a connection to ignore. All these DNA-match families lead back, in the late 1800s, to a tiny village in Poland called Czarnylas. And records for these few hundred souls—baptismal, marriage, and death—happen to have their transcriptions resident in one freely-accessible website hosted by a group known, in English, as the Pomeranian Genealogical Association.

Granted, a lot could go wrong, relying solely upon transcriptions of handwritten records. The handwriting could be read incorrectly. Or copied carelessly. Or transposed with half the information from the next record in the set. Without being able to see the documents for myself, I can't really be sure all the information was transcribed accurately. Or that the information given is all that was provided—there might be even more notes that could further help my research, if only I could see them.

But hey, there it was: a treasure trove of data from a tiny village which even now has less than five hundred people. What are my chances that I'd pick the wrong Paulina Zegarska married to Andreas Czechowski? We're surely not talking the Polish equivalent of Smith here.

So I took my chances. I started first with what I knew, and looked up Walerya and her older sister Weronika, the Czechowska sisters who married Michalski men before immigrating to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There they were: the transcriptions, at least, for Weronika's marriage in 1878, and Walerya's in 1886.

From there, I decided to push my way backwards in time. I looked for baptismal records for the two Czechowska sisters by targeting my search to Czarnylas only, and selected a reasonable but wide date range. Since Polish tradition dictated that women's surnames which end in -ska would be connected with fathers whose names were the familiar -ski suffix we associate with that ethnicity, I knew I'd be looking for records for a father whose surname was Czechowski.

And the search was on. I was ready for this process of elimination. First, I confirmed the dates of baptism for the sisters—1857 and 1870, respectively—and then took in the names of their parents. That's how I discovered their mother's maiden name of Zegarska.

Along the way, I noticed how many siblings the two Czechowska girls had, and realized I may someday need this information, organized into a family tree format. And so, I began...

Eventually, I got the brainy idea to correlate the baptismal information on this one section of the website with marriage information from another part of the search feature. But something got in the way of my brainy idea: it seemed each of the Czechowska girls were getting married at incredibly young ages. What was going on here? Was this a listing of betrothals, rather than actual marriages?

It dawned on me at that point that, like those of so many other ethnicities I've researched, Polish families might have also followed that tradition of naming their babies after their older relatives. Could there have been a previous generation busily naming their daughters these same names?

This required a repetition of the birth records search, and another round of adding records to my family-tree-in-the-air. I augmented this when I got the brainy idea to branch out and look for that Zegarska surname in the same way—look for the dad in baptismal records by entering his surname as Zegarski.

At the feverish pace I've kept up this week, I've added a considerable amount of names of Polish people from the early 1800s onward—all people I don't even know. My family-tree-in-the-air takes on the appearance of a pole, firmly anchored in Milwaukee Michalskis, then rising up three more generations with nary a branch, until it becomes a hairy mess of Czechowskis and Zegarskis in the tiny town of Czarnylas. All I needed now was a genealogical Jack-in-the-Beanstalk to come chop down my tree, and the whole ancestral mess in the clouds would come crashing to the ground.

Vulnerable, yes—to all sorts of errors. I'm not sure I could advise such a process. But I just couldn't help myself. The information was there and, well, information is always best comprehended in an organized format. I may have all those Czarnylas Czechowskis and Zegarskis organized, alright, but I can't yet vouch for any of them being related to me. Perhaps it is best that I've made that tree-in-the-air a private and unsearchable tree. For now, it's my private genealogical sandbox while I explore what patterns and information emerge—if there will be any at all.

Above: Illustration of Jack climbing the Beanstalk, from the 1922 book Journeys Through Bookland; courtesy Internet Archive via Wikipedia; illustration in the public domain.

A Maybe for a Mother

It is handy to find a fellow researcher willing to share notes.  In the process of pondering over the six DNA matches who seemed to be linked to my mystery grandfather, I ran across such a person. She is not a match to me, herself, but serves as an administrator for someone else whose DNA test does match me in only one possible way: through my paternal grandfather, the enigma who refused to tell his descendants much at all about his roots.

This researcher—light years ahead of me in tracking down this Michalski family of my DNA matches—had divulged the tidbit that the entire family emigrated from a tiny village in Poland called Czarnylas. That, last summer, prompted me to do some background reading on that tiny village, leading to this Wikipedia entry which made me cry to realize that it was, after all, the very place Aunt Rose had mentioned as her homeland in a census enumeration nearly one hundred years ago. Finding that, I knew this researcher was on the right track.

Still, a diligent researcher needs to start from the here and now, and work her way backwards in time, step by step, so I started out with those Michalski families in Wisconsin, and pieced together their immigrant stories. By the time I encountered their many baptismal records, I had found those two wives' maiden names of Czechowska—names affixed to women who were born in Poland.

Jumping from those familiar online resources we use for American research, I headed to a website with the tongue-twisting name of Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne, or PTG for short. (Translated, it simply is the Pomeranian Genealogical Association.) The PTG focuses on transcriptions of vital records from the region in Poland called Pomerania.

Once at the PTG website, I entered the sisters' maiden name in the search engine for Pomeranian marriage records, and found that, indeed, Piotr and Józef Michalski had married women by that maiden name. Our Peter and Veronica were married in Czarnylas, Poland, in 1878, and Józef and Walerya followed suit in 1886.

Since I couldn't just leave the exploration at that, I then moved to the PTG record set for baptisms to find the approximate birth dates for both Veronica and Valeria. It was there that I realized they were sisters, for each of their entries showed parents' names of Pauline and Andreas Czechowski. More importantly, the entries each showed, for Veronica and Valeria, the maiden name of their mother: Zegarska.

From that point, I couldn't stop myself, and I was at it again, looking this time for any other information I could find on all Michalskis, all Czechowskis, and, now, all Zegarskis. It was that Zegarska surname which fascinated me most of all for one very wobbly reason: it was so similar to another surname in my own tree.

Early in my attempt to learn more about my paternal grandfather, back in the days of snail-mail research, I had sent away for my grandfather's death certificate. To be sure, much of the information provided on that piece of paper was surely a fabrication. He had been, after all, going by an alias for a long time by the point of his death, and the rest of the family had had plenty of practice in aiding and abetting his ruse, including giving a falsified name for that of his own father.

With that in mind, what would be the chances that the report about his mother's maiden name would be correct? Yet, I duly noted it in my records, once I received the death certificate in the mail. The report never, ever seemed to be of much help, as I couldn't match it up to any family connections any time since that point. And yet, knowing how important it was for my grandfather to conceal his ethnic roots, could it be possible that, in the kernel of truth revealed in that one line on a death certificate, even that was bent to fit his preferred narrative?

Could his mother's maiden name, given as Anna Zegar, really have been a more Polish Zegarska? Could he have dropped that telltale Polish -ski? Is this the direction that DNA test is pointing us?

Two Sisters

Sometimes, it takes DNA to deconstruct a family history brick wall. That is what I'm hoping six matches which appeared this past summer will do for my father's ancestors. As much as my original attention was diverted to one specific surname held in common in the family trees of those six matches—the name Michalski—once I delved deeper into each match's pedigree chart, I noticed something interesting: that Michalski connection pointed to not one, but two different men. How those two Michalski men related to each other, I have yet to figure out, but there was one thing about them: each of them married a woman named Czechowska.

The older of the two Czechowska women was listed as Weronika in the 1900 census. By that time, she had been married for nineteen years to Piotr Michalski, and had given birth to either nine or seven children—depending on how you interpreted the write-over—seven of whom were then living with her in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Not long after that census, Piotr apparently passed away, for the 1910 census showed Weronika—by then Americanized to Veronica—listed as a widow and living with her five youngest children, including newest arrival, eight year old Frances.

Also living in Milwaukee at the time was another Czechowska woman by the name of Walerya. Fortunately for us, Walerya's eleven Michalski children left a paper trail of baptism records which, transcribed, gave an approximation of how her maiden name might have been spelled, along with multiple variations on her given name.

In the end, the choices for her new American self are a toss up between Valentina and Valeria. But Czechowska—or that surname's many alternates—became my next wayfinder in the journey to locate a connection between these six DNA matches and my paternal grandfather's family. They led me to record transcriptions in Poland showing their relationship to each other as sisters, sure, but their records, back in Poland, intrigued me for one very weak reason: the two sisters' mother had a maiden name which was not exactly the same, but similar to the supposed birth name of my own mystery grandfather's mother. 

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.

Dropping the -ski

Sometimes, those frustrating family history attempts at breaking through impenetrable brick walls result in getting lost in the minutiae. In this case, making little to no progress on the story of my paternal grandfather has led to musing about the many ways an immigrant can drop the last portion of his surname. After all, that's what my paternal grandmother's brother did. Could that have held true for her husband's side of the family, as well?

I already know my grandmother's maiden name was Laskowski. Though the family kept that as hidden as possible during the years when my father and aunt were growing up—remember, that's the grandmother who willingly went along with her husband's decision to switch his name from Theodore J. Puchalski to John T. McCann—my Laskowski great-grandparents only briefly attempted to report their surname as Lasko (in the 1900 census).

Just knowing that fact, however, tells me the family was willing to, let's say, look a little less Polish. Could that have been a more widespread temptation among their immigrant relatives, both close and more distant?

I'm entertaining such a question lately, owing to the discovery of several DNA matches who seem to connect specifically with my paternal grandfather's side of the family. The trouble is, they all seem to connect with each other through a surname I don't have in my family history: Michalski. However, since most of these connections are from at least a distance of third cousin, the nexus between all these Michalskis and my grandfather's line could be through one or more of the women in each generation.

And there's where I hit the snag that prompts me to wonder about those Polish -ski names. Could there have been someone else who also decided to drop the -ski?

In one particular Michalski tree, I encountered this pedigree assumption:

Keep in mind, not all of this line is documented on this match's tree, so I will have to contact the researcher and ask about the paper trail leading to this conclusion. However, I'm doubly interested in this pedigree chart. Of course, the obvious reason is that the other DNA matches' trees also have a Michalski married to a Czechorska (or Czechowska). But while the other trees name two people different than the ones in this line—and this line seems equally unaware of the relationship in those other lines—this particular tree pushed the generational diagram back one more step, showing the names of the Michalski wife's parents.

Note that Veronica Czechorska's parents were listed as Andreas Czechowski and Pauline Zegarska.

Now enters the instigation for my question: what do you suppose might be the chances that another Zegarska—say, one who landed in New York instead of Wisconsin—might have chosen to drop that pesky -ska for a more streamlined American-sounding surname? Could my Anna Zegars, mother of the inexplicable "Aunt Rose" and possible relative of my own grandfather, have been a relative of the Pauline Zegarska in the Wisconsin Michalski family?

It's a stretch, I know. But genealogy is often about formulating hypotheses and then examining the evidence. One thing is sure: somehow, I and several Michalski descendants have the same runs of genetic material in our DNA. We've got to connect somehow.