Reflections on this Research Journey

 

Sometimes, a research challenge is straightforward: you have a specific research goal, you formulate a plan, you execute the plan, everything goes exactly as predicted, and you file the answer for future reference.

That's not how this past month went. My goal—for finding two out of my "Twelve Most Wanted" ancestors for 2020—was to locate something, anything, about my paternal grandfather's origin. 

Yes, that's right: this family history fanatic did not even know the most basic details about my own grandfather. A pretty sorry state of affairs for someone who can trace her maternal line all the way back to the Mayflower.

Along the way, while piecing together the vaguest of hints about the woman called "Aunt Rose" by my father and his sister, and finding details about the tragic death of her mother, it became apparent that these were clues pointing me back to a small town in Poland called Czarnylas. A constant stream of DNA matches helped confirm the fact that not only did my paternal grandfather re-invent himself with a new identity in New York City, but his own mother changed her name, in a way, during her immigration process. The woman whose name I knew as Anna Krauss apparently began life with the name Anastasia Zegarska.

I've talked about all the discoveries along the way, the disappointments, the twists and turns—and the amazement at the awesome power of DNA to give us connections where we thought we'd never find any. Even though the paper trail is now pieced together in a coherent way, the corollary I still need to get off my chest is the metaphysics of the experience of having to go find all that stuff.

I wondered things like: why did my Anna end up in New York City, if all her relatives immigrated to Milwaukee? Some of her relatives even made the trip the same year she arrived in New York. Why didn't she stick with family?

Surely, I thought, she would have kept in touch with her fellow immigrants from her small village back in Poland. But where were the letters? Or at least the oral tradition of sharing with one's children about occurrences in the lives of one's siblings.

The thought occurred to me: could it be that Anna didn't even know how to write? When I researched my husband's Irish roots, if an ancestor needed to send a letter to family, but didn't know how to write, he found someone who could help him compose the message that was needed. Why was there seemingly no awareness in my family of a large group of relatives living in Milwaukee?

There is, of course, a simple way to answer that question—simple, of course, but not complete. We can see what the census records tell us about who can write and who cannot. The trick, of course, was to find Anna in the census for those earlier enumerations. "Aunt Rose," at the time, would have been married to a Miller, but the closest I can find for a possible household in 1910 has Anna's surname written as "Kusfkr"—perhaps an enumerator's ineffective translation of that mysterious Kusharvski surname which didn't surface again until Anna's unfortunate death. Sure enough, that record shows that Rose, the daughter, could read and write English, but her mother could not.

But what about her relatives in Milwaukee? Could anyone there write? As it turns out, my Anna's youngest sister, who also went by the name Anna—my Anna being born Anastasia—arrived in Milwaukee about a year after her sister's arrival in New York. According to the 1900 census there, Anna and her husband, Thomas Gracz, were both listed as being able to read and write. And so it was with the others of Anna's relatives in Milwaukee.

I wonder about the lack of connection. Was there a story buried deeper, behind this apparent need to disassociate themselves from the identity of their past? Is there more to be discovered? I have known other immigrants from war-torn areas of Europe whose parents did not fare well in the transition to a new home, despite the relative safety of the new location. Back then, there may not have been a name for it, but post-traumatic stress without a scientific name is still a devastating burden.

While we can now find so many records to document the overt facts of our ancestors' existence, without that personal narrative, we can't always read between the lines of a disjointed life story. We can approximate, but not certify intangibles like motivation or disappointments. Those who have ancestors who kept personal journals or wrote letters which family preserved well beyond their lifespan indeed have a treasure, for perhaps they are the only ones who can say with certainty that they have documented indications of how an ancestor felt about what befell her in life.

For the rest of us, it can only be conjecture. Research can reach only so far. 

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. 

Clues that Lead Nowhere

Trying to locate any of Anna Zegarska Gracz's siblings who might have opted to follow her recently-married example and immigrate with their newlywed spouse to a new world: not as easy as one would have thought. I have, for instance, the clue of another tongue-twisting Polish surname among those six DNA matches that have, just this past summer, led me back to historic Pomerania to research my paternal grandfather's roots. This time, the surname is Krzewinski—do not ask me how to pronounce it!

Using the marriage search option at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association website, I had searched for all Zegarska daughters who were married in their home village of Czarnylas, and got this result:

Though it is difficult to read such a small document—you can find it for yourself by using those search terms at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website—right above the 1879 entry for Anna Zegarska's marriage to Thomas Gracz, there is an entry for Marianna Zegarska. Her husband is listed as that same unpronounceable surname of Krzewinski. Their wedding date is given as 1879.

However, when you search on the same website for baptismal records for that same groom's name—Krzewinski—there are five children listed for the same Johann, but the mother of the children is listed as someone by the name of Anna Woitaś or Wojtaś, likely spelling variations on the same surname. That surname, incidentally, is the same as the mother's maiden name for the Zegarska daughters I am trying to track, making me wonder whether Johann Krzewinski was brother-in-law to the mother of the two Zegarska daughters I am researching.

To complicate matters, though there is a marriage listed for Johann Krzewinski and Marianna Zegarska, I can find no record of any baptisms for children of this couple. So how does this Krzewinski line connect with me? After all, I have one, possibly two, DNA matches which include this Krzewinski surname in their pedigree.

Though that Krzewinski line did come to America—bringing the possibility of our relationship tantalizingly closer—without actual documentation, I can't rely on the DNA connection solely for assurance of our relationship. I really need to ferret out additional sources for documentation, especially knowing how prone to error transcriptions can be, even under the best of circumstances.

I will certainly examine that line more closely as I work through this puzzle. In the meantime, the main point of all this winding pursuit of DNA matches on my paternal grandfather's line is to consider the question: could my grandfather's mother, whom I presumed was named Anna Zegar, actually be siblings or close cousins to the Zegarska lines which immigrated to Milwaukee? After all, that same marriage listing I posted above has another possible "Anna" listed, and her marriage is to someone with a surname very close to the one I learned was once my grandfather's last name. Could Thomas Puchała who married Anastasia Zegarska possibly be the missing parents of my paternal grandfather?

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.