An Unheralded Star

 

Some changes arrive with much fanfare. Others slip in, almost unnoticed. The star I spotted today was one of those latter unheralded entries.

While working on my Twelve Most Wanted project for this month—finding more documentation on my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak—behind the scenes, I've also been updating all the records linked to each of her descendants. Working my way down the line of descent from her daughter Marianna, I suddenly realized there was this little star next to Marianna's name.

That's funny, I thought. I hadn't noticed that before. I certainly didn't put it there. Hovering my cursor over the star, I noticed the words pop up, "Prioritize this person."

Not wanting to find myself in the position of Alice in Wonderland, staring at the little cake labeled "eat me," I was disinclined to click on that recently-appearing star. I did a search to see whether Ancestry.com had recently posted any announcements about that change on their blog. 

Nothing. 

I poked around my own tree and realized that if I clicked on the icon for adding labels—a change at Ancestry which has been around for a while now—among the many choices for "My Tree Tags" was a group called "Research Status Tags." And—you guessed it—within that cluster was a choice labeled "Prioritized Person."

It took a bit more exploration before I could find an additional explanation. Still, that announcement arrived almost accidentally as I continued my work on those Olejniczak descendants. A pop-up window advised, "Prioritize up to ten people in your tree that you're most interested in learning about." I can't even recall how I first spotted that notice, but suddenly, there it was.

After mentioning that the ancestor so marked will display a star icon, the explanation continued, "We'll put special focus on finding hints about them." The entry concluded with a "Got it" button at the bottom of the window.

Special focus on finding more hints? I'm game to see what will happen. However, I already know that Ancestry.com's collection is rather sparse when it comes to Polish records for the region and time period specific to my own ancestors. Granted, with the changing boundaries—and languages—of that geographic area, I'm facing even more challenges, but if a simple star next to Franziska Olejniczak's name can lead me to more information, I'll eagerly look forward to seeing it.

When Digging Below the Tip of the Iceberg

 

Years ago, the California Genealogical Society created a poster featuring a drawing of an iceberg. The caption, in part, read, "Genealogy Research: Internet is just the tip of the iceberg." The poster continued by explaining that successful research also requires the willingness to check many other resources.

 When we are called upon to name some of those "other resources," some of us are able to think of courthouses where records are created and stored, or governmental archives. Sometimes, we remember to check our local libraries—and maybe the libraries of our ancestors' own hometown. But beyond that, many of us might be hard pressed to name any other likely resource for a given research question.

Having a finding aid to guide us in a new-to-us research location would be helpful. Thankfully, there are such aids, at least for places where volunteers have been resourceful enough to make available their secret stashes for other researchers. I sometimes found the old GenWeb sites—both American and international—to serve quite capably in that capacity. Though I seldom resort to it, Linkpendium also comes to mind as a way to ferret out those hidden local resources. But now, with so many resources online, I simply turn to a good ol' Google search to find material which I might otherwise have missed.

Sometimes, though, the resources we seek might be right under our noses—but we don't even realize it. I'm reminded of an experience this past month in helping a new member of our local genealogical society. This member, who joined online from quite a distance from our own city, inquired about finding a book for which she had received a photocopy from her now-gone grandmother. All she had was the book's title and author—and a convincing picture of a very blurry photocopied front page.

In receiving such a request, my first thoughts were to check the online catalog listing the books in the holdings of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or the genealogy center of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne. Thankfully, instead of that, I made my first step a trip to the online collective of public libraries known as WorldCat.org.

There—perhaps you've guessed it—I discovered four libraries nearby which have that specific book in their holdings, including our own city library. There was a catch, however: the book was not in the stacks, nor in the reference section, but locked away in a special collection labeled simply, "Local History." Who would have known there was such a place? But knowing that now, I could go and ask the reference librarian how to gain access so I could see the book for myself.

How many other libraries have secret stashes like that? How many local residents are aware of such holdings—let alone those of us researching that community from miles away?

Sometimes, we may discover help in already-compiled finding aids. Sometimes, developing a deft hand at trawling the Internet with the help of search engines can make the difference. But there are other times when we simply need to follow our noses and learn to ask questions as we move along the research path.

Once we get there—that place where, finally, we discover the answer to our previously unanswerable question—the all-important next step is to write down what we were looking for and where we found it. Who knows? We may be retracing our steps to this very spot for another genealogy question in the future.

Finding Aids: Lists of Where to Look for Answers

 

Face it: when your family history quest brings you into new research territory, it helps to have a guide to walk you through unfamiliar places. That, in a way, is what finding aids are: lists of where to find resources that will help with your specific research goal.

Delving into my paternal grandparents' roots in Poland is indeed, for me, walking into unknown territory. I have already tried my hand at researching one branch of my paternal grandfather's ancestors when I included that relative in my Twelve Most Wanted list for last year. Now, I want to find more information on another branch of my paternal side: my great-grandmother Marianna Jankowska's family.

But where to look? That's where locating finding aids is so important.

When we think of finding aids, one resource that comes to mind might be Cyndi's List, which includes a long list of possible places to check in her section on Poland. Another might be to pull up the catalog at Ancestry.com. However, even though I have a World Explorer subscription, I found the listings for Poland at Ancestry seem to focus mainly on several record sets from the World War II era—many of them free to access, no matter what type of subscription you have—or they cover a different region of Poland than the area where Marianna's family lived.

When all else fails—and why wait until then?!—one sure bet is to check the wiki at FamilySearch.org, and that is indeed what I did. My first stop was to check the resources FamilySearch might have pertaining to Catholic church records in Poland, mainly to orient myself to their holdings. I also looked at the FamilySearch wiki for all church records in Poland, since several civil records were derived from church copies.

Working one's way through a wiki sometimes ends up being a chase through a chain of links. Sure enough, the Poland Church Records wiki advised how to determine your family's specific parish, recommending a visit to the website Kartenmeister to find the church and civil jurisdictions for Marianna's family in the tiny town of Żerków. As promised, the website provided the information I was seeking, including the helpful detail that the town, under German control, was called Bergstadt.

The FamilySearch wiki went on to provide a list of several websites either hosted in Poland or devoted on Polish ancestry. Some of them were already familiar to me. Others focused on specific regions in Poland other than Marianna's homeland. One, for instance, was a site I had heard of before—Geneteka—but had never used. While FamilySearch provides an entry on Geneteka in their own wiki, the website itself provides a tutorial, as well.

Working with resources like the FamilySearch wiki, you will find the website is good for providing information in more ways than one. Sure enough, there was yet another entry in the wiki on finding aids in Poland, this one listing many of the sites mentioned in the previous paragraph, but also listing regional websites, as well as browsable images within their own website.

If that were not enough, the wiki also included a clickable list of websites by record type.

Granted, there are many gaps to contend with in record availability. Not only in the town of Żerków, but also in the greater surrounding region of Poznań, the devastation of World War II destroyed not only buildings but the records housed within—not to mention the staggering number of lives lost.

With this list of lists as our starting point, we will sift through the possibilities to see what can be located on Marianna's relatives in the Jankowski family next week.