Not Exhausted Yet

 

Well...let me amend that. The search possibilities have not yet been exhausted for finding our Anna and Rose in either immigration or marriage records—but I am! 

Finding Rose's second marriage documentation yesterday, which revealed that she considered her maiden name to be Krauss and not her birth name, Puchała, gave me a new impetus to search for other records listing her as Rose Krauss. Though I hoped to find documentation for her first marriage to a Mr. Miller—why couldn't she have chosen an eligible young bachelor with an unusual name?—using this newfound discovery of the alternate surname usage, I found nothing.

So far.

Likewise, trying to find Rose's mother Anna living in New York City with someone named Julius Krauss proved unsuccessful...so far. Not that there weren't any men by that name, mind you, but just none who lived with anyone named Anna. And considering how Rose always lived with her mother (or vice versa), that also provided us with a null set.

I'd like to say I'll keep trying for the remainder of this month. After all, the goal in locating marriage records for these two women was to help me find whatever became of Rose's birth father—and Anna's first husband—Thomas Puchała. At some time in the future, hopefully search engines or AI assistance may point me to those missing documents. But for the remaining few days this week, it's likely better to return to the Puchała line and wrap up what we know about Thomas and his ancestors, then draw up a plan for the next time I revisit this research puzzle.

Proving Rose is Rose

 

It's no wonder there are three different identities for Anastasia Zegarska's daughter Rosalia Puchała on the FamilySearch.org universal tree. Just locating all the records I've placed on Anastasia's timeline, mostly showing her relationship to and residence with her daughter, shows me that both Anastasia and Rosalia went by different identities at different times.

Take their names. In Poland, they were known as Anastasia and Rosalia. In America, they became Anna and Rose. Besides the changes in their married names, however, there were some other details that didn't seem quite right. For instance, consider the marriage certificate for Rose's second marriage in New York City. Though I can see, by following a cluster of documents concerning Rose and her mother, that I was trailing the same woman, I need a way to demonstrate that Rose was Rose was Rose. I need to compose a proof argument for these women's identities.

Let's take a look at that 1915 marriage record in Brooklyn, New York, as searchable through the Historical Vital Records Project via the website of the New York City Municipal Archives.

First, we learn the full name of the groom, George Washington Kober, and discover that, although this was his first marriage, he was already forty three years of age. Named after his father, the groom's mother was listed as Pauline Hutton. He was born in the borough of Manhattan.

Rose, on the other hand, had previously been married, then divorced. Her name on the license was listed as Rose Miller, though I still have no idea what the first husband's given name was, nor when that first marriage ceremony was conducted or ended. Her age was given as forty, which would yield a year of birth as 1875, not far from the September 1872 baptismal record I have for her from Schwarzwald.

From that point, the details veer toward the unexpected. Though I did note in yesterday's timeline that Anastasia Zegarska's married name was sometimes recorded as Anna Krauss (or spelling variations), I had never found any document I could ascertain tied the right Anna with the right Mr. Krauss. Yet on her daughter's marriage record, Rose gives her maiden name as Krauss, not Puchała as we'd expect it to be.

The possible gift that comes with this confusion is that her "father" was listed as Julius Krauss on this Kober-Miller marriage record. Admittedly, on the next line, Rose's mother was entered as Anna Zegar, not Zegarska, and even the entry of the maiden name Krauss was on a line only meant to be completed in the case of the bride being a widow, not a divorcee. But amidst these unexpected entries, perhaps we can extrapolate a few search terms which might help us, in turn, figure out a bit more about Anna, herself.

Granted, some of this involves speculation, but I have noticed that children who refer to a step-father as their "real" father often had that man enter their life at an early age. This might guide us in our search for widow Anna Puchała's second marriage. And of course, since this marriage license gives us our first glimpse of Anna's husband's given name, we now can search for someone named Julius Krauss, a most helpful balancing act when faced with multiple spelling variations of the common surname Krauss.

Then, too, if Rose considered her maiden name to be Krauss, perhaps that is the name under which she entered this country, helping to narrow the search for her appearance as well as Anna's in passenger records.

The main point, once having located such records, is to use them all together to tie up the three identities for Rose in the FamilySearch tree into one person, telling the whole of Rose's story under one heading. One document alone could never tell the whole of a story such as hers. 

Turning to Timelines

When puzzling over a brick wall ancestor, it sometimes helps to turn to timelines to ferret out the missing information. In Anastasia Zegarska's lifetime saga of many married names, I'm still trying to determine when she married which husband, and when the previous husband might have died. After all, I've run into some conflicting reports concerning her daughter Rosalia, giving me doubts about which husband came last—not to mention which husband's name Anastasia used when she left her home in Pomerania to sail for America.

In brief, today's my day to lay out the dates, with links back to the appropriate documents, where available. After we sort out the mess, tomorrow we'll take a hard look at the one document which has me all confused. There may be an explanation...if we can find some missing documents.

So, for Anastasia, a.k.a. Anna, here we go.

• 1848: Anastasia born in Schwarzwald (Czarnylas, Poland), as estimated from her marriage record
• 1868: Anastasia married Thomas Puchała in Schwarzwald
• 1872: Anastasia mentioned in baptismal record of daughter Rosalia in Lubichowo
• 1910: Anastasia entered as "Annie Kusfkr" in the Brooklyn, New York, household of daughter Rose Muller in U.S. Census
• 1915: Listed as Anna Krausse in Brooklyn household on Knickerbocker Avenue with daughter Rose Miller in New York State census enumerated on June 1
• 1915: November 15 marriage record of George W. Kober and Rose Miller identified Rose as a divorced woman for whom this was her second marriage; document identified Rose's current address in Brooklyn as Knickerbocker Avenue, but states her maiden name was Krauss and her mother's maiden name was Anna Zegar
• 1920: Anna "Krouse" was listed in the U. S. Census as mother-in-law in the household of George W. Kober and his wife Rose, now living at 729 96th Street in Woodhaven, part of the Borough of Queens in New York City
• 1921: A newspaper report of her death in The Brooklyn Standard Union on September 29, 1921—including the right house address and city (but not street) of the Kober household—listed her name as Anna "Kraus"
• 1921: Her death certificate listed her name as Anna Kusharvska on the front of the document, yet on the reverse, spelled that surname as Kusharvoska; with her daughter listed as "Mrs. Geo. W. Kober" and the place of death given as 729 96th Street in Richmond Hill 

There, like a sandwich, we have documents in both the earlier and latest segments of Anastasia's life in America listing her surname as some variation on what seems to be the unusual surname of Kusharvska. Yet, other records seem to hint that Anna went by the name Krauss in the earlier years of her residence in New York City. 

My main goal in ferreting out Anna's married names is not only finding the identity of these two men in her later life, but determining what name she chose to represent herself when entering this country as an immigrant. Her second and third marriage record plus that record of her passage to America would be useful to find. It may all come down to which surname she went by—and how she, or those officials documenting her identity, might have spelled it. 

Tracing Rose to Find Anna

 

What if a family member's life story is too long to fit into those neat little boxes on a family tree? That's the problem I'm facing as I consider how to follow Anastasia Zegarska through her three marriages, the death of at least six children and the life of her surviving two: my father's Aunt Rose and his own father, Rose's brother.

It was a snap to determine that tracing Aunt Rose was one sure way to spot her mother through the decades in which they lived in New York City. I'm presuming the same may be the key to finding the family's immigration records, and possibly even the documentation on Anastasia's second and third marriage record. But when I try to share that paper trail on the one publicly-accessible free family tree used internationally by so many, I run into a problem: there is not one single entry for Aunt Rose.

There are three.

The story, as we've already partially discovered, spans decades and involves several documents, each of which cannot be added to my Rose without extracting them from the "other" Rose. On top of that, a careful reading of Rose's first married name—clearly written as Muller, according to the 1910 census—was somehow revised to show as Miller for her second marriage license to George Kober. How do I know that was the same Rose? Simple: her mother was still living with her in the next census.

To complicate matters, that same Kober marriage record for Aunt Rose gave a different maiden name: Krauss. This opens my eyes to some possible complications. Could the original Rose I found, baptized in Poland as Rosalia Puchała, be one of the six children her mother Anastasia lost? Could this Rose be a child born after her mother's marriage to the second husband named Krauss? But if that were so, then my grandfather, four years younger than Rose, would also have been a Krauss, rather than keep any variation on the Puchała name, as he did well into his adult years. Yet that could be a hint as to when Anastasia married this second husband: most likely when her children were still young enough to consider Mr. Krauss as their surrogate father.

The trouble with facing complicated extractions from the FamilySearch tree is that I just would rather throw up my hands and walk away. After all, I have that information all documented on my other online family trees. It's just that, considering the international reach of FamilySearch, I'm still hoping someone back in Poland might also be researching that family line and spot it on that publicly-accessible website. And reach out to connect. Collaboration can be very helpful.

There is, however, more to be accomplished with Rose's mother, Anastasia. Knowing, first, that in America Anastasia went by the shortened name Anna helps guide the process. But I still lack any proof of Anna's subsequent marriages to anyone called Kusharvski, let alone someone else named Krauss. It was only in the shock of the moment of discovering her mother's suicide that Rose blurted out the name Kusharvski to emergency personnel; I hadn't even known of it before finding that death record. I still can't find Anna's burial marker. And though, in retrospect, that bungled entry for immigrant Anna in 1910—her name spelled Kusfkr by the enumerator that year—seems to indicate she was once known as Anna Kusharvski, it isn't exactly a document; it's merely an error-ridden notation.

The best thing to do at this point is go back and re-assemble all the documents I have for this family, including both front and back of each record, for some details are handwritten on the reverse and in the margins.

Then, I need to put them in date order for one reason: I need to see the gaps in each person's story. Creating a "timeline" of name changes may help, despite not having the actual documents. I can infer from each surname's appearance when it might have become part of the family's story. Even now, as I begin this process, I'm spotting some details in the flow of information that may rearrange my own understanding of the history. We'll see, first, what we can unearth by putting that process to use on the American side of the equation, then create a timeline hypothesis to test.

Widowed, Times Three

 

Some ancestors present more twists and turns to their life story. Anastasia Zegarska was one of those hard-to-trace ancestors. But it was her husband, Thomas Puchała, who lost me as I tried to trace his own life story. With that, I was left with following the only family members remaining to him: his widow, Anastasia, and her two surviving children, Rosalia and Teodor.

Even then, finding Anastasia and her two children in any further Polish records—not to mention, her disappearing husband Thomas—has been, so far, an unsuccessful pursuit. Obviously, though, the three surviving family members did show up in New York, but the gap between their last written appearance in what was then Prussia and their discovery in New York City cost me the years between 1872 and (possibly) 1910. In the meantime, Anastasia appeared in records with two additional surnames: Kusharvski and Krauss (also recorded as Krouse). To count it all up, when looking for Anastasia, we are looking for a woman who was widowed three times. Where are the records?

It would be nice to find those missing marriage records, of course, but what would be even more helpful would be to find Anastasia as she moved from 1870s "Schwarzwald" in Prussia through her immigration passage to New York City. The search would also cement details not only about the two other men she called her husband, but would also help to narrow down the year and location of her first husband's death. If those records are even still in existence and not a casualty of a subsequent war, it would be helpful to find solid documentation of this widow's life trajectory.

Seeking Julius

 

If Aunt Rose stated that her father's given name was Julius, and if Rose's mother Anna was married to someone named Krauss, it would stand to reason that the man Rose referred to in her marriage records was named Julius Krauss. That's a reasonable guess, but the real question is: can we find anyone by that name in New York City who was married to our Anna?

I've never spotted Anna in documents which included the name of her husband. In the 1920 census, she was listed as the widow Anna Krouse in her son-in-law's Queens, New York, household. Earlier, in the New York State census for 1915, she appeared alongside her daughter as Anna Krausse. Before that point, the only place where I can find Anna was in the 1910 census, where her name was mangled into the incomprehensible spelling "Kusfkr." What became of Anna's husband? Could his name have been Julius? And can we find any sign of their household in New York City?

Looking for Julius and Anna was not as easy as it sounds. First, the search had to include all spelling variations for the surname Krauss. Then, I limited the age possibilities for Julius to a range similar to Anna's own age. And since none of my own family members had ever mentioned children resulting from Anna's marriage to the mysterious Mr. Krauss, I had to presume that the couple did not have children.

Right away, I spotted a couple with the requisite names, Julius and Anna, in the 1900 census. Manhattan bookbinder Julius, born in 1858, was on the young side for our candidate, but that wasn't the key to his rejection; it was a much younger Anna in the household, along with their three children—none of whom was named either Rose or Theodore—who tipped me off that this was not the Julius I was seeking.

A more promising candidate in that 1900 census was the Manhattan jeweler Julius Krauss, who was born in 1850. Yet his was a marriage lasting for nearly thirty years--a narrative which wouldn't have matched our Anna's story. And though some people have trouble correctly understanding and answering census questions, the fact that the couple reported having no children—and certainly no children still alive at that time—gave me pause.

Trying a different approach, I looked in passenger records for anyone named Julius Krauss or any of the other spelling permutations which could possibly have been used. For each Julius found, I checked to see whether he was traveling with someone named Anna. The only possibility I found was again a man with a family of several children—all except for our Rose and Theodore.

Deciding to take Anna's enumeration information seriously, I wondered whether I could find a death record for a Julius Krauss which would justify her reports of widowhood. The earliest date in which I found Anna Krauss calling herself a widow was in the 1920 census. The 1915 New York State census did not ask for marital status, but even then, Anna's household did not list a husband. Could I locate a death record for the missing Julius? Not really: the one record I found, in which a Julius Krauss died in New York City, the date was in 1900. Besides, the man was forty two at the time, somewhat young for a husband of a then-fifty year old woman.

Thinking that over further, I realized the enigmatic 1910 census—the one with the strange Kusfkr surname—was telling me that Anna was not married to anyone named Krauss until after that point in 1910. And yet, when Anna died in 1921, her name was once again reported as something similar to that Kusfkr name: Kusharvska. Could the Julius Rose had named in her wedding documents have actually been a man named Julius Kusharvski?

Another key to unraveling this mystery: in the 1920 census, Rose reported that she was a United States citizen, giving 1915—the year of her marriage to George Kober—as the date of her naturalization. On the other hand, Anna gave her status as alien, despite what appeared to be two marriages since her children were born in Poland. If either of those husbands were United States citizens, she should also have been able to claim she was a naturalized citizen. Thus, we can infer that Anna, even if she married after arriving in New York, could only have married another alien.

For now, I'll set aside my quest to find the identity of the father named Julius in Rose's marriage license applications. While I've certainly not exhausted all possible routes to learning more about Anna's two possible husbands, it's clear I'll need to try a different approach to finding more information on these immigrant family members.

The Story Behind the Story

 

It may seem strange, reading through all the research contortions I've twisted myself into, that I am having so much difficulty figuring out the maiden name of my grandfather's sister. And yes, generally, that answer  would be self-evident. But not in Aunt Rose's case. Here's why: there's a story behind that story.

My first problem was that I didn't even know I had an Aunt Rose until just after the last relative from my father's generation had died. Fortunately, on that relative's last birthday celebration, my brother had made a big to-do about interviewing her to capture some of her remembrances of days long past—and taping the conversation. Among other memories, this woman shared stories about a relative she called Aunt Rose.

At about the same time, my oldest cousin sent me a few old family photographs, including some from my father's boyhood days. Family photographs being what they are, they were seldom solo affairs. One picture captured my father and his sister—the birthday honoree—as children, along with their mother and a fanciful woman my cousin called Aunt Rose. Back then, neither of us could be sure this was a blood relative; we thought perhaps the woman had been called "Aunt" as a token of respect accorded to a close family friend.

It took quite a bit of research to locate the true Aunt Rose—mostly after my brother's interview with our own aunt produced some married names—and realize she was, indeed, a family member and not simply a close friend. By then, I had long since sent for my grandfather's death certificate and gleaned the names listed for his parents. The only problem was: I already knew half of that information was flat out wrong.

According to my grandfather's death certificate, he was son of a man named John. The surname for both father and son matched. The trouble was: that surname was fabricated. It was not the true name of either son or father—in which case, it couldn't be the maiden name of my newly-discovered Aunt Rose, either.

Although Aunt Rose lived with her mother in all the records in which I've been able to find her, for me to rely on her mother Anna's documentation wouldn't have helped, either. For the census records, Anna was always listed with a surname appearing with various spelling permutations, generally being something like Krauss. And yet, while the newspaper report of her tragic death listed her surname as Kraus, the actual police report gave an entirely different surname: something like Kusharvska.

Don't think that either Krauss or Kusharvski were Rose's maiden name, though. At least, that is not according to what I've found on my grandfather's own records from his homeland, something I only discovered, thanks to a very helpful DNA match (and diligent researcher). According to what I subsequently found at a Polish genealogy website, my grandfather's name at birth was actually Puchała. And my grandfather's own father had the Polish equivalent of the given name Thomas.

Problem: that name was obviously not Julius, the name given twice for the two marriage records we've found for Aunt Rose. Where did Julius come from? Could that have been the name of Anna's subsequent husband, the source of the unusual Kusharvski surname? Or was Rose not my grandfather's full sibling?

While I may never be able to determine the source for that strange double entry of Julius, it's about time we take a step backwards—much farther backwards—to review what I found on the birth records of both Rose and her brother.

Taking a Few Steps Backwards

 

Ever so gradually, we take a few steps backwards in time, trying to coax history into revealing the story of our ancestors. In the case of Aunt Rose, my paternal grandfather's sister, I'd like to follow her immigrant story from the end of her life in the metropolitan New York City area to the beginning of her days, somewhere across the ocean in central Europe.

Once I found resources to look up articles mentioning her name in the lesser-known newspapers of the city, it was fairly easy to trace Aunt Rose's life from her marriage to post office supervisor George Kober, to his death and her subsequent—albeit brief—marriage to Julius Hassinger. But what about taking that life story's journey backwards? That was my next step. I wanted to see how far back I could go, while gleaning information I might have missed in previous visits to her saga.

There are a few reasons I need to retrace those research steps once again. For one thing, I have yet to locate any document of Rose's first marriage. Then, more importantly, I am lacking any record of her arrival in this country—an event which she, supposedly, shared with her mother and, hopefully, my grandfather. Furthermore, Rose's mother's own story is hidden behind a series of married surnames which come with little to no documentation of their own. Any clues I can find to point me in the right direction to find confirmation of those details would be so appreciated.

In review before launching out to discover the missing information, here's what I've already found. From Rose's appearance in the 1920 census along with her second husband George Kober and her ever-present mother Anna "Krouse," their date of arrival was reported to be 1883. This was the census which included the gift of an enumerator error showing Rose's origin in "Schwartzwald"—a designation which, interpreted, seemed to be "Black Forest," but turned out, to my delight, to actually refer to a place in Poland known also as Czarnylas. 

Moving backwards in time, I could also find Rose and her mother in the 1915 New York State census in neighboring Brooklyn. At that time, Rose was listed by her previous married name, Miller, though no husband was present in the household. Instead, there she was with her mother, this time listed as Anna Krausse. At that point, the mother and daughter had declared they had been in the country for the past thirty years—in other words, since 1885.

At long last, I finally was able to push back to the 1910 federal census and find Rose and Anna one last time. In this enumeration, the mother and daughter stated their arrival in New York was in 1884—yet another close but different year. Then, too, Rose, listing this as her first marriage—and yet with no husband present in the household—had her name given as Rose Muller, not Miller.

That, however, was not what concerned me. It was fairly easy to shift that one letter in subsequent searches to find Rose in previous records—though to no avail. It was the listing for her mother which totally threw me off. Gone was the surname Krausse, or Krouse, or any other of multiple spelling permutations. Surely a case of enumerator misspelling, rather than transcription error, this one bid me try searching once again for Anna—this time, using a wildcard approach. If I couldn't find either Rose or Anna in immigration documentation or passenger records with the more common names of Miller or Krauss, perhaps this new search option for a very different surname would lead me to a connection.

Aunt Rose on Paper

 

If "start with what you know" is one of the cardinal rules of genealogy, our quest to learn more about the mysterious Aunt Rose of my family's old photographs needs to start with a recounting of what I've already discovered.

I've been on Aunt Rose's trail for years, something I catalogued earlier this week in listing various posts I've added to this blog. Behind the scenes, I've scoured New York documents for signs of her whereabouts, especially where the documents detail the people in her family. This was not an easy task, for I've yet to find either Rose or her brother—presumably my paternal grandfather—living in the same household after their arrival in New York from their native Poland. What I list today are details which form a sort of connect-the-dots sequence which may—or may not—fit into the puzzle of the truth about my paternal grandfather.

The first research problem was that I couldn't identify Aunt Rose by a maiden name. Not in New York. The only saving grace was that Aunt Rose almost always lived with a woman named Anna, presumably my great-grandmother. But even trying to trace Rose's mother was a challenge because, like Rose, Anna was married at least twice, possibly three times. I never could be sure I had the right person for either Rose or Anna.

My first sighting was of a woman named Rose Miller. This was in an entry in the 1915 New York State census. Rose, thirty nine at the time, was living at 675 Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn with her sixty seven year old mother, Anna Krausse. Both were recorded as having been born in Germany, and arriving in the United States thirty years prior to the enumeration. Although Anna was entered as an alien, Rose, presumably on account of her marriage to the unnamed—and absent—Mr. Miller, was listed as a U. S. citizen.

At the time, despite the surnames, I considered this to be a possible entry for Rose only because I had seen other family records mentioning Anna by that name, Krausse, albeit in various spelling permutations. Further searches brought up a November 17, 1915, marriage record for a Rose Miller who married a New York City post office employee named George Washington Kober. Indeed, a check of the 1920 census brought up a household including George Kober, his wife Rose, and his mother-in-law, Anna "Krouse." 

That 1920 census brought me the gift of an enumerator error in that Rose's place of birth was listed as the name of a town—"Schwartzwald"—rather than the required name of a foreign country. Of course, that error was lined out and corrected by the equally erroneous—but politically correct—entry of "Germany," but it was enough for me to discover just where the family's origin might have been.

Shortly after that census, Aunt Rose faced the tragedy of her mother's suicide, which led me to another puzzling family detail. Searching for death reports on the date of Anna's suicide, the only name listed in the New York City records was for a woman with a surname listed as Kusharvska. If this was our Anna—and it was the only Anna listed in death records for the city on that date and address—it proposed yet another surname to be added to the family history. But how?

The only indication of anything remotely like that surname for Rose's mother was when I found the two of them, again living together, back in the 1910 census. There, Rose Miller was entered in the record with her mother, whose mangled surname was listed as "Kusfkr." I can only imagine the enumerator's befuddled face upon having a Polish immigrant tell him how to spell in English what must have sounded almost unpronounceable.

The trail for Rose went nearly dark after the 1930 census, the last point at which she was enumerated alongside her husband, George Kober. George died in 1932, and was buried at the beautiful Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, presumably near where his unfortunate mother-in-law, Anna, had been laid to rest. After that point, I found a newspaper entry announcing the marriage of Rose Kober to a post office employee named Julius Hassinger—but after that report, I found no sign of the couple. 

Worse, I could locate no further record of Rose—except for a typed-in entry on George Kober's Find A Grave memorial that he was "husband of Rose."

Finding a mention of an ancestry every ten years may be a satisfactory result for some researchers, but somehow, this relative is too close to my own generation for that to suffice. I want to know when, of all the dates of immigration offered in census records, Aunt Rose actually made it to New York. Finding a passenger record for a specific ship would be a nice touch. Beyond that, though, finding something as simple as a death record—whether under her name as Rose Hassinger, as her most recent marriage would lead us to suspect, or by her former name, Rose Kober—is important.

Aunt Rose, though beaming in family photos as the doting aunt to my young father and his sister, had no children of her own, thus no one to remember her or add her name to their lineage. Yet, she likely was present at many family functions—everything from holiday gatherings to special occasions like weddings or graduations. Such are the "little" details I'm hoping to discover this month, along with the weightier details of landmark experiences in her own life. Above all, though she became no one's ancestor, I want Aunt Rose to be remembered as if she were.

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. 

Focus on Growth Potential

 

If, in talking about the buildup of water pressure behind a dam, we were to put the situation in euphemistic terms, we could have said we were examining its "growth potential"—but that would only be an accurate assessment if the dam were flexible enough to accommodate the added pressure. Most dams are not.

Genealogy, on the other hand, always seems flexible enough to absorb the added "volume." There is always room for another branch on the family tree, no matter how many names and corresponding dates suddenly appear on account of our newly-discovered relatives.

That, of course, is good news for me, as I am about to add several hundred names to my father's family tree, all at once. I just need to build up the courage to plug this huge new branch into the right spot in the tree.

In the meantime, work on that one project has slowed all my other research tasks to a near standstill. Work on my mother's 23,616 person tree: zero. For my mother-in-law's 19,334 person tree? Zero. Nothing on my father-in-law's puny 1,813 person tree, either. And if it weren't for discovering another DNA match on my father's side of the family, that tree would have been stuck at zero, as well. As it was, that DNA match led me to nine additional family members I hadn't been aware of, so his tree now has 740 people in it...but not for long.

Where all my work focus has gone in the past two weeks was into building a new family tree, a tree connected to the first few of what has now grown into a dozen DNA matches who all have one thing in common: they are related to ancestors who were apparently siblings of my paternal grandfather's mother. As more and more of them appear in my various DNA accounts (I've tested at five different companies), it becomes increasingly clear that that is the connection.

So, in this past two week period, while I did practically nothing to augment my four longstanding family trees, I've been working to get to know this really big family from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which I had absolutely no clue existed before the age of DNA testing. Over the past two weeks, I've managed to assemble a family tree of strangers, large enough to include 732 names (plus supporting documentation), 341 of which I added only this month.

Of course, I'm nowhere near done yet. But is anyone's family tree ever done? The focus of my goal is all those founding Zegarska sisters from Czarnylas, Poland, the backbone of this family tree, so I can trace each one's descendants down to the present day. Included in that task, of course, will be the main point: flagging each DNA match to demonstrate the route connecting that match with my great-grandmother, the woman known to my family only as Anna Krauss.

That is one woman who took a lot of her story with her to her grave. While I'll likely never find the explanation to many of the details I did uncover for that woman, at least these many DNA tests are serving to confirm the answer to one mystery which the paper trail could never provide: Anna's origin and parentage in Poland.

Moving from a Tentative Yes to a Definitive Maybe

 

Slowly, slowly, the lethargy of indecision gives way to the realm of "maybe." How hard it is to trust the results of a paperless DNA test.

Now, after well over a year, that first DNA discovery on my paternal line—thanks to the AutoClusters tool at MyHeritage—has blossomed into nearly a dozen matches tying my paternal grandfather to an extended family of Polish immigrants bound for Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A good percentage of those DNA matches, it's true, descend from those same two Zegarska sisters whom I suspect were also the sibling of my paternal grandfather's mother—the woman I only know (on paper) as immigrant to New York City, Anna Krauss.

Unfortunately, on my side of the equation, there are very few others to ask to test, if I wanted to see any further DNA evidence. My cousins from my paternal aunt's side of the family would also be descendants of Anna through that same son, offering me no new information I couldn't already glean from a paper trail. Anna's daughter, the one the family called Aunt Rose, had no children that I can find. Anna had no other children, leaving no other way to double check from our family lines, other than her son—the man who frustratingly changed his name, with no documented explanation, to John T. McCann.

But those other Zegarska daughters I found in the marriage records, back in their Polish hometown of Czarnylas: I'm still working diligently to trace their descendants. Just yesterday, I added thirty four names to that private tree I'm building on all those DNA matches for this Zegarska connection. Since the beginning of November, that means the tree has grown by 114 names.

In the meantime, I've worked on the line of yet another Zegarska sister who married and moved from Czarnylas to Milwaukee, allowing me to confirm yet another DNA match. And that makes me realize why it is so important to make my decision and plug these families into my main tree at Ancestry: it will give me the utility of not only noting these people as DNA matches right in my tree, but also tagging them so the connection is verified.

Yet, I still feel the need to be indecisive. Perhaps wrapping up a few more of these DNA "shared matches" will help bolster that confidence. Before I tag anyone in my public tree, I want to confirm how they connect via the paper trail, as much as possible. It would be helpful to reassess the head count as confirmation. If nothing else, it will provide a solid platform from which I can finally take that DNA-based leap of faith.

Awfully Presumptive of Me

 

In researching our immigrant ancestors—especially when speculating over the land of their origin—the duly diligent are those who heed warnings to take their investigations step by step. No wild leaps of faith, flinging ourselves across the Atlantic, at least not without a paper trail.

I threw all such sage advice to the four winds. Impatience got the better of me, and I struck out to see whether I could find Anna Krauss, or Kusharvska, or Puhalski, or whoever she was. If my DNA test results have any say in the matter, at one time, Anna was a young Polish woman with a maiden name of Zegarska.

Despite the rigors of science—which brought us genetic genealogy in the first place—I still have a hard time swallowing such an assertion. I have been too indoctrinated in the mandate that we adhere to a paper trail. And so, I look. And I look again. And I still can't be sure, even though the matches add up to several individuals who all know their roots and all claim that same surname, Zegarski.

So, back again I go, checking out the online resources, since at a time like this, I sure won't be traveling to Poland. FamilySearch provides me with a handy listing of online sources for records concerning Pomerania, the northwestern shoreline section of Poland where those Zegarski roots were supposed to originate. And reminds me that Ancestry.com has a collection of Pomeranian Parish Register Transcripts and also Pomeranian Passenger Lists.

I search. And I find nothing.

Then I look at the fine print for these collections. As it turns out, the parish register collection reminds me that "This collection does not represent all parish records for this area and time period." And the passenger collection pipes up, "In comparison to the millions of emigrants who traveled via Bremerhaven and Hamburg, the 20,000 passengers who passed through Szczecin and Swinoujscie represent only a small portion of the total."

But of course.

Still, I can go back to my old Polish staple for all things Pomeranian: The Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne (PTG)—or, the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, for those of us who can only speak English. And, once again—as if I can't believe my eyes—I did.

I searched for all unmarried women in the parish of Czarnylas who went by the name Zegarska between the years 1865 and 1876, dates generously extending both before and after the likely time in which my paternal grandfather's parents might have married. While there wasn't any mention of an Anna, at least there was an Anastasia:

 

There was a Marianna who, in 1864, married Franz Krocz, and a Susanna who married Mathias Machlus in 1875. Right in the middle was Anastasia and her intended, Thomas Puchała, with the very reasonable marriage date in 1868.

Why reasonable? While, best I can tell, my grandfather was born in 1876, if we turn to that same website to examine baptismal records, we find that, in another parish nearby, the same couple was named as parents of a son, Joseph, in 1869, and a daughter named Rosalia in 1872. In addition, there was a son named Theodor who was born in 1876, though no name was provided for his father, and his mother was listed by both her married surname plus the notation that she was "born Zegarska."

What happened to those other Zegarska women in Czarnylas? If they were this Anastasia's sisters, can we follow their records to discover what became of them? Perhaps we can trace them along their immigrant trail to North America—if that is indeed how I ended up with Zegarska DNA matches in Wisconsin. 

Taking that Theory for a Test Drive

 

So, I'm stuck on the name given for my supposed great-grandmother, Anna, following her unexpected death. In all the census records in which I could find her—which, admittedly, were very few—she had been represented as Anna Krauss. Despite the fairly common surname, I was pretty sure I had located the right woman; the telltale sign was the constant accompaniment of her daughter in the same New York City household.

It was that daughter, in fact, who at the shocking discovery of Anna's unexpected death, provided her mother's name for the death record. Not that she would have me, the family historian, uppermost in her mind at the moment, but she sure didn't help out by providing a name I haven't been able to find anywhere else. I didn't expect to see the resultant surname on Anna's death certificate to read Kusharvska. Where did that come from? Could Rose have, at that moment, forgotten her own mother's name?

Needless to say, I've been stuck on that detail since that discovery, five years ago. Who ever heard of a surname like Kusharvska? I tucked that one aside for future consideration—until yesterday. It occurred to me to handle that name like a Polish researcher might. Remember, it was Americans who wrote up that death certificate, but when Anna was born—and married—she was living in Poland. How would the Polish have spelled her name?

My guess was "Kuszarwska." The "sz" for the American "sh." The "w" for the American "v." If I tried that variation in spelling, could I find anything online? Did anyone else have a surname like that?

Here's what I found online—complicated, of course, by the shifting search results, I guess, by when the search was performed, for I got different results on different attempts at the same site.

The first time I tried, on FamilySearch.org, to find something like Kuszarwski (using the masculine form, as it would be more likely to be used in America), I received hits for these similar spelling variations:

• Karczewski
• Kurczewski
• Kuszewski

Thus, it seemed credible to think perhaps when Anna's daughter Rose stammered out the answers to the government official charged with collecting such information, she may have pronounced the name wrong—a "sh" sound instead of a "ch." Who knows—maybe by that time, Polish-born Rose may have developed a New York accent, herself, rendering that middle syllable more like Ku-shawv-ska than an actual "r" sound. At least, now we know there are surnames similar to the one Rose provided at the time of her mother's death.

Among the records I found at FamilySearch, I also found the reasonable variation Kucharski in a census record—enumerators not known for their spelling precision nor their handwriting clarity—as well as Kuchorski. The name is apparently out there.

I then took my search question to Ancestry.com to see whether I could find any names similar to "Kuszarvska" there. Using that same Polish take on the spelling, I even located a Kuszmarski in the 1940 census in Chicago—not quite my target, but at least containing that telltale "sz" combination.

Searching on Ancestry brought a broad range of possibilities. It was encouraging to find an option spelled Kusharfsky—phonetically similar, if not properly Polish in spelling. I was excited to spot an obituary which reported descendants named Kucharvski, according to the indexed report but which—confounded optical character "recognition"—upon actual inspection of the faded newsprint, yielded a surname spelled Kucharyski. Oh, so close, yet so far away.

I found a Michigan death record reporting a surname spelled Kuzarvski, and a poor transcription of a surname Kuzawski, which, in the original passenger record from "Germany" rendered the name Kuzawski. Frustrating.

Still, this little field research experiment told me one thing: there may well have been a surname that sounded similar to Kusharvski—or, in the feminine case, Kusharvska. For my efforts, I now have a healthy list of spelling variations which I can also check, in case that Kusharvska leads me nowhere.

The real question, however, is: can this name, no matter how it is spelled, lead me back to that tiny village in Poland where the Zegarskis once claimed to live? That, after all, is where all my Zegarski DNA matches on my paternal grandfather's side of the family say they have their roots.

Above: Kushervski? Or Kushewski? This 1886 Detroit marriage record was indexed both ways—perhaps the same fate of the surname reported at the death of Anna Kusharvska. Image courtesy Ancestry.com.

 

Oh, Duh: Phonics!

 

Tracing the family connections on our hardest-to-research ancestors is no different than dealing with any other line in our genealogy. We start with what we know, and work our way backwards in time, building one fact upon another. No overstepping our document-demanding bounds or jumping to conclusions without evidence. We move tentatively, then test, one step at a time.

The maddening thing about researching Anna Krauss was that she had to choose such a common surname for a place like New York City. To make matters worse, it was a surname with a variety of spelling options. Sometimes, she was listed as Anna Kraus, dropping the final "s"—or Krause, adding a final "e." She also had her name spelled Krouss, a reasonable guess, but a totally different search term for the desperate researcher.

But then, add in the various other names that she might have assumed in her lifetime. Was she really, at one point, the wife of Thomas Puhała? Or was that also spelled Puchała? And how did it become Puchalski? Or, if that really was her son's surname, was it an American indifference to spelling that wrought Puhalski?

Forget all those puzzles—how did the same woman show up on her own death certificate with yet another surname? The 1921 death certificate insisted this woman—on the right date and at the right address—was actually named Anna Kusharvska. Her daughter said so.

Of course, try as I might, I couldn't find any records other than that death report which included a surname like that. Even tampering with that Polish convention of the feminine ending to the name—"ska" instead of the masculine (and more widely recognized) "ski"—yielded no usable search results. 

That, among other reasons, was what inspired me to, well, do nothing more with that research puzzle. Until now.

It occurred to me, especially after spending all that time familiarizing myself with the general rules of Polish phonics, that perhaps, if I lent an ear to the sound of that name, rather than trying to focus on the appearance of its spelling, I might make more progress. So, considering those phonics tips I found online, I set about to reverse-engineer the mystery Anna Kusharvska's surname.

How might the Polish spell that surname? First, the "sh" in the initial syllable might more likely be represented in Polish by the letter combination "sz." Then, the "v" in the middle syllable would most certainly have been spelled with a "w" in Polish. In addition, though I don't know enough about the Polish language to say for sure, the insertion of that "r" in the middle syllable might indicate another aspect of Polish pronunciation that I'm just not equipped to fathom at this point.

Still, that said, could Kusharvska actually have looked like Kuszarwska? What are my chances? I had to go test out my theory with some online searches.    

Once More, Just to Make Sure

 

It was the Theory of Family Relativity™ at MyHeritage which opened my eyes to the possibility that some—a very few—of my DNA matches actually led the way to solve a family mystery. All my life, I had struggled with getting someone, anyone, on my father's side of the family to explain where we came from. My father refused to shed any light on the matter, and his father before him—for those of my siblings and cousins who remembered him—certainly wasn't any more cooperative.

That left me with the impossible task of finding records in New York City on a man with a name as common as John McCann. Believe me, those in my generation were quite eager to help, once they became aware I had taken on that family history dilemma as a project. Bit by bit, we assembled shreds of information, and dredged our collective memories for any glimmer of a hint. We shared photos, dug out old scrapbooks, looked through newspapers published long before our time, hoping all the while to reconstruct the story of one man's life—the story he, himself, refused to tell.

Along the way, one of my cousins—well, technically my first cousin once removed—discovered that, surprise, surprise, we were not Irish as we had always been told, but Polish. That discovery, itself, triggered further volleys of forgotten family stories and gave us a toe-hold on finding further documentation.

Online access to digitized documents has boosted this search greatly, of course, but further help arrived with the announcement, almost two years ago now, of Genetic Affairs' development of the AutoClusters device, which MyHeritage added to their tools under the clever name, the Theory of Family Relativity™.

When I first ran the tool at MyHeritage, my mother's extensive colonial American heritage generated several large colored boxes of connected matches, which was not surprising. Somewhere in the midst of all these obvious clusters, though, was an easy-to-overlook speck of color for a different set of matches. They turned out to belong to my paternal grandfather's family.

Of course, the tool didn't come right out and say that; I had to figure it out. Even now, having looked at the evidence from every possible angle, I still have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not imagining the wrong conclusion. Perhaps that's why I hesitate to pull the trigger and shoot this now-extended family tree of related DNA matches into my own tree.

The matches all circle around a woman who was often at the periphery of family memories, as told by my older cousins and siblings. Her name, as I always heard it, was Anna Krauss. She was the mother of a woman my dad and his sister were brought up to call Aunt Rose—but whether she was an aunt by virtue of blood relationship, or by the customary American device of teaching children to accord respect to close family friends, I couldn't tell.

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time researching Aunt Rose. I've found a lot about her, but despite all the diligence, I still can't locate anything as simple as a death record for her. Following Aunt Rose led me to valuable details on her mother—almost, but not quite, enough to help me understand just who Anna Krauss really was.

I've written about Aunt Rose before, as well as her mother. After stumbling upon the shocking news of her mother's death, I sent for the woman's death certificate—which did nothing but add further confusion to the story.

Despite all the twists and turns, I did manage to get one report—which may or may not have been correct—that Anna's maiden name had been Zegar.

Wouldn't you know it, but the several DNA matches I've discovered since that breakthrough, thanks to the MyHeritage and Genetic Affairs collaboration, all point back to women who happened to claim their maiden name was Zegarska. Close, but could it actually be the same? I find no other way to connect with these lines. 

I had first written about Aunt Rose and her mother Anna five years ago. After the DNA breakthrough, I again took up the topic in posts here almost exactly a year ago. Since then, I have yet to muster the courage to just plug these matches into my family tree. In the meantime, even more matches are showing up, at more than just that one company. It's getting to the point where, when I spot those surnames related to that line, I feel like I'm reading about family.

Just one more time, though, I want to make sure I've gotten this connection correct. There's something that just makes me hesitate when I come to the point of adding a relative to a family tree without any of the usual documentation. All I have, at this point, is the confirmation of DNA. We'll need to step into the world of that private, unsearchable tree I set up for this precise research question, and make sure we can assemble all the documentation possible to at least connect each match with the others in this new family constellation.

In the process, hopefully, we'll finally discover what became of the couple whom I've added toward the end of my list of the "Twelve Most Wanted" of my ancestors: Anna Zegar and—maybe—Thomas Puchała.

Cleaning (Tree) House

 

It's a new month. Forget that—it's almost a new year. And that reminds me of my resolutions, nearly a year ago, to clean house on my family tree.

Let's just say I stalled on that project, once those DNA matches dragged me halfway around the world. It's high time I keep a closer eye on the ticking clock. I have one more branch of my family to straighten up before the end of the year.

Sadly, that last research detour took a toll on my general progress. I like to check that progress every two weeks, but lately the numbers have tanked. Take a look at this: for my mother's line, I only added sixty eight new individuals to her tree in the past two weeks. Thanks to a DNA discovery on my mother-in-law's line, her numbers are a bit better—up seventy seven—but not any sweeping victory. And the men in our extended family? Zero for each of their trees—for my dad and even for my father-in-law, no matter how much I tried to tie together all those Falvey DNA matches.

Yes, yes, I know: my mom's tree is still a healthy 23,616 individuals strong. And my mother-in-law's tree is again catching up: 19,334 this weekend.

There is, however, a shift taking place, and it's in preparation for the next batch of my "Twelve Most Wanted" ancestors. This month—and likely through the rest of this waning year—I'm going to tackle my father's mystery paternal roots, and especially those DNA matches I found over a year ago who merited their own hidden, private tree, simply because I couldn't determine how to attach them in my dad's tree. I even toyed with hypotheses by setting up a private, unsearchable tree only for those DNA folks, so I could build their tree and see how each of them are related to each other. 

Now, I'm getting ready to take that scary step and attach that growing, theoretical tree to my dad's tree. And when I do: presto! Instant growth! That tree will suddenly encounter a growth spurt.

For now, though, I don't quite have the guts to do something so drastic. So I'm promising myself this month to explore that hypothesis just one more time. And then to tidy up what I've found on the new family, and make space to insert them into the old.

In the meantime, we'll take some time this coming week to reacquaint ourselves with Anna Zegar, or Zegarska, who became the lonely old woman in New York City we met as Anna Krauss—until a tragic turn of events uncovered an unexpected different name for the same woman.

The Joyride of "Creative" Spelling

What a joyride creative spelling can be for the desperate genealogist. The suspect linking me with several recently-acquired DNA matches on my beleaguered paternal side could have spelled her surname Krauss. Or Krouse. Or Krause. Or...well, you get the idea. There are several choices I could pursue.

All I know for sure about this woman was that the given name she went by was Anna. And that she once lived with a woman who was known to my father and his sister as "Aunt Rose." And that she killed herself one night, late in September, ninety eight years ago.

Anna, I suspect, was Aunt Rose's mother. It says as much in the 1915 state census for New York, and again in the 1920 U.S. census. But finding Krauss—or Krause, or Krouse, or any of several other spellings—made it impossible to locate any other record of Anna, especially in a place as large as New York City.

I had a worse time of it when I tried to figure out what her maiden name might have been. Her son's death certificate listed Anna's maiden name as Zegar. But then, a much later discovery popped up in which I discovered Anna's current name, at least on her own death certificate, was Kusharvska, and that her own parents were unknown—at least by her daughter Rose, the reporting party at the time she discovered Anna's horrible death.

I sometimes feel like I have circled the drain on this search, the many times I've attempted finding the truth about Anna's origins before. But this past summer's revelation of several new DNA matches at the several companies where I've tested has been encouraging. The best part of this situation seems to be the joy of being able to ditch this impossible task of finding Anna affixed to a married name of Krauss—or however it is spelled. Thanks to DNA, I may be able to zoom past "Go" and get to that unknown maiden name, based on hints in the trees of at least six already-researched families.

On Monday, we'll begin by looking at the nexus in those DNA matches' trees, a surname of Michalski, and the tiny hometown all these families left to immigrate to a settlement near Milwaukee, Wisconsin—far from both that hometown in Poland and the adopted home of my Anna and her daughter Rose in New York City. It seems a stretch, yet everywhere I look, I see anything but Krausses. But I do see possibilities. And that's just what I need right now in this latest attempt to solve a longstanding family mystery.

Aunt Rose Redux

I've told this story before, but it bears revisiting while I'm on this quest to discover my paternal grandfather's roots. John T. McCann—or, as we discovered, Theodore J. Puhalski—was a man hesitant to reveal his origin. That, at least, was what my older siblings and cousins told me; I never had the opportunity to meet him, myself. Anything we discovered about our paternal roots was information which belonged to my grandfather's wife's side of the family. The only hint of a blood relationship for this man was a woman my father and his sister knew as Aunt Rose.

I have only two mementos of this Aunt Rose. One is the photograph copied below, preserved by my cousin, which included my grandmother Sophie Laskowska, my father as a young boy, my cousin's mother, and this woman whom the family called Aunt Rose. The other item is a recording made in the 1980s on the occasion of my aunt's birthday, in which my brother walked her down memory lane and captured her reminiscences on tape.

One of the stops my aunt made as she wandered among those family memories was to recall Aunt Rose. My brother gently tried to press for Rose's identity, or at least a full name, but my aunt's failing memory was able to only provide the sparsest of details. One point was that Rose was married three times. The other detail was that she had been married to a man named Kober.

As disappointing as it was to realize that that tape was the last significant opportunity to gain an understanding of the previous generation—my aunt died not long afterwards, the last in her generation—in retrospect, it wasn't hard to reconstruct the details of her Aunt Rose's life. Indeed, the first step was locating Rose's link to George Kober, from which point I could glean not only her current residence in census records, but also her previous married name (Miller) and that of her third marriage (Hassinger).

That address, as it turned out, was key to another discovery: that of Rose's mother. I had found them together as early as the 1915 New York State census, when Rose Miller was listed in the household of Anna "Krausse" on Knickerbocker Street in Brooklyn, and from that point through the 1920 census, she remained in the Kober household on 96th Street in the Queens community of Woodhaven.

Anna was there in the Kober residence, in fact, on the evening when, becoming unbearably despondent, she decided to end her own life—the event precipitating the tiny insertion in the local newspaper that alerted me to the date of her death.

If it weren't for that date, in fact, I would never have been able to obtain Anna's death certificate. The reason I couldn't find it under her name was that it wasn't filed under her name—not, at least, by the name we knew her.

This, of course, rather than solving my research quandary, only introduces more questions. Keep in mind, I had already long since sent for my grandfather's own death certificate. He had died in 1952. For mother's maiden name, someone had provided the information that she was Anna and that her maiden name was Zegar.

That, of course, would not be the first time I had discovered disagreements over names entered on death records, but I had figured it would be safe to assume Anna, Rose's mother—and, by association of Rose as my father's "aunt"—was married to someone named Krauss. Still, finding any documentation to support that was not successful—and any hope of concluding that as a tidy family arrangement was blown to bits by the name provided on Anna's own death certificate.

Why the Anna who died on the same date and at the same address as Anna Krauss would be entered under a different surname for her death certificate, I can't say, but that document now revealed that her name—at least at the point of her tragic demise—was Anna Kusharvska.

Not only was that the lone Anna who died on that date—28 September 1921—but the only one whose place of death was listed as the Kober residence. Since then, I have yet to find any other entry with that surname—or its masculine equivalent, Kusharvski. Until, that is, I began looking at the surnames in my paternally-linked DNA matches. While I haven't found any Puhalskis in those matches—nor any of its spelling variations—I did notice one thing as I looked through the Michalski trees in the Milwaukee families of my six paternal DNA matches: one of the Michalski brides had a surname with unusual spelling which kept getting mangled. While the name sometimes ended with the typical Polish -owski (or the female version, -owska, for those who knew the Polish naming custom), the name was just as likely to have an "r" inserted where the "w" should have been. Add to that the fact that "w" was often pronounced as a "v" and you have a combination rendering the same tongue-twisting ending as I found in the revelation about Anna's surname, Kusharvska.

Could that have been a regional variation? A phonetic twist only fluently rolling off Polish tongues, but not American ones? I couldn't help myself: the thought was tempting. I had to keep exploring what new details could be found since I last revisited this research problem four years ago. A lot has been added to the digitized records available online. My hope is that there may be enough new material to grant me a break-through, between these little clues and the trees of my newfound DNA matches.

Perhaps this is the perfect opportunity for me to learn a little bit more about Polish phonics.

Above: Photograph of "Aunt Rose" (top left), Sophie Laskowska McCann (top right) and Sophie's children (left to right), Anna Mae and Valentine. The photograph was likely taken before Rose married George Kober in 1915; photograph in private collection of family.

 

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.