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.

Finding a Final Resting Place

 

While I've finally discovered that Aunt Rose died toward the end of 1937, that certainly doesn't mean that is the end of her story—not, at least, for family history research purposes. There are far too many gaps left in her story. Among them is that tiny detail of finding her final resting place.

There is nothing I've found online that confirms where that resting place might have been. Now that I've finally located the date of her death—not to mention, that key detail of what surname her burial records might have listed—I can begin that next research process.

Not finding any obituary for Aunt Rose, though she was survived not only by her third husband, Julius Hassinger, but by her younger brother, I had some searching still to do. While a copy of a New York State death index revealed the date of her death, I'm curious to see what was recorded for the names of Rose's parents—not to mention, discovering who the reporting party might have been. I doubt her third husband, to whom she was married for only three years, would have been able to correctly answer such questions—though her brother, my secretive paternal grandfather, might have been, if he'd be willing to break silence on his origins just this once.

Discovering what was surely the mangled married name of Rose's mother led me to one cemetery where Rose might have been buried, if she didn't have plans to be buried with Julius Hassinger, her current husband. That cemetery was the beautiful and historic Woodlawn Cemetery located in the northern portion of the Bronx, part of New York City. That was the cemetery, according to death records, where Rose laid her mother to rest after Anna's tragic demise in 1921, although searches through Find a Grave with several spelling variations yielded no results from the memorials posted there.

The Find a Grave memorials do include an entry—however, without any headstone photograph—for Rose's second husband, George Kober, and note an inscription stating "Husband of Rose." I can click a handy button at Find a Grave and request that a photo be taken, but I will first need to provide a burial location before sending that request. Since the only map of the cemetery I can find online dates back to 1912, that hardly helps. I will need to call the cemetery on a nice, quiet day midweek, when the office isn't quite so busy.

Still, though I can't find any mention of Rose herself in the Woodlawn entries at Find a Grave, I did notice that George's father, the senior George W. Kober, was also buried at Woodlawn. I'm hoping this detail indicates a family burial plot, in which case, I will ask for the names of everyone buried at that location, including Rose's mother Anna. Who knows what additional ways Anna's Polish surname might have been mangled in American records.

Finding this final resting place for both Rose and her mother Anna will help me gather those last few details I've been lacking. Perhaps that will provide a key to open the door for future searches. After all, this may be the last stop in the story of the end of their lives, but in genealogy, we are always working backwards in time. The answers from the end of the story may well be the information I need to unlock doors on the details of their life prior to their arrival in New York City.

"K-u-s-f-k-r . . . Say, What?!"

 

It was Mrs. Emma Jones, the eminently patient census enumerator tasked in 1910 with documenting the many foreigners resident in Brooklyn's district number 885, who may finally have had her patience tried by the responses from the household of one Rose Muller. Rose, my paternal grandfather's sister, was married at the time but living solely with her mother Anna.

It was Anna's surname, given to the enumerator, which stumped her. I can just hear the conversation now: bilingual Polish immigrant Rose speaking on behalf of her aging mother Anna, trying to re-size a Polish surname to fit an English-speaker's ears.

"K-u-s-f-k-r...say what, now?" the enumerator Mrs. Jones might have repeated, as she wrote those letters on the census record. Unfamiliar with the workings of Polish phonics, the government worker may simply have resorted to asking Anna's daughter to spell the name. But with a target answer sounding something like Kusharvski, I can understand why the resultant entry ended up being the clearly-written but hopelessly inaccurate entry that it was.

Since I have yet to find any confirmation of my great-grandmother Anna's arrival in the United States, I've needed to decode that surname just as much as that 1910 enumerator might have wanted to do. I still am lacking significant sections of the immigration story of my great-grandmother and her two children, Aunt Rose and her brother, my paternal grandfather. Even the surnames I've found don't seem to line up with other records on file for Anna. And I've since found more versions to complicate matters.

Step one was to see if I could locate an actual correct spelling for what surely was an English speaker's rendition of Polish phonics. Though I had already learned about the differences in pronouncing consonants "w" and "v" in both Polish and German, a few years ago I made it a point to learn the basics of Polish phonics. For a name which might have sounded like Kusharvski, for instance, I now know that the sound we write in English as "sh" would have been rendered as "sz" in Polish. The "v" might actually have been written in Polish as a "w." And for the version of the surname used to refer to women, the ending would most definitely have been changed from "-ski" to "-ska."

But would that "Kuszarwska" have been the actual appearance of Anna's name in American records? Likely not—unless, of course, the English-speaking official writing the record understood the particulars of the Polish language. In between the proper Polish rendering of the name and the American transcription of what they thought they heard could lie a multitude of guesses.

To find those possible versions of Anna's surname, then, I resorted to testing out a wildcard key. On Ancestry.com, using an asterisk to represent the letters I was unsure of, I entered the query as "Kus*ski" and its feminine version, "Kus*ska."

One alternative spelling suggested from this search was "Kuszajewski," a possibility from a Buffalo city directory which I will keep in mind as I continue my search for Anna and her children—although I'm sure there will be other suggestions. The goal is to find alternate possibilities to see if I can use those suggestions to then move on to find Anna in passenger records. Up until this point, I've been unsuccessful in this, using the name Anna Krauss which had been listed in census records after her arrival. There has got to be some way to connect Anna to her past—and, following that trail, to discover the documents for her two immigrant children, as well.

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.    

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.

 

Found Another Julius

It's been a little over a week since I decided to celebrate Independence Day by gathering my own set of documents linking me back to that Revolution. As I mentioned, my long-postponed D.A.R. application needed some attention, and the July 4 holiday seemed just the time to complete it.

As sometimes happens, after I submitted my documentation to the local chapter's registrar, it turned out I needed just one more death certificate.

Now...where did I put that thing?

So began a week-long merry chase for one scant slip of paper that I just knew had to be "in here, somewhere."

At the close of the week, I still hadn't located the item.

In the meantime, however, I had found a whole bunch of other papers which turned out to come in handy.

You know how it is: you start down the trail, intending to head to one destination. And then, along comes The Bright Shiny—that innocuous Thing with the irresistible pull—and snatches you right off your feet and away from The Trail of Good Intentions.

What's a disciplined genealogical researcher to do? Well, in my case, take a look; one never knows whether the Thing found might be what I was looking for the last time I went through this ordeal.

In my defense, there are boxes and boxes of files, accumulated over years of research, now needing my attention. You have to remember, I've been at this stuff for decades. I'm not kidding when I say I was born wanting to know about my family history. That's quite a few years of filing away documents, research notes, photographs, memos and letters.

As it turns out, there was one document which I was quite pleased to find. I had sent for it years ago—likely before the advent of online research, for I clearly remember getting this one via the stamped-self-addressed, snail mail route. Besides, it was a record from New York City—that Black Hole of document requests which tries the patience of genealogical souls. On top of that, since I didn't know what surname to file the long-awaited resultant document under, I had simply stuck it in my father's file. His old file. Like, tucked away in one of those storage boxes.

If you recall my attempt once again, a few months ago, to figure out the origin of my paternal grandfather's family, you may have guessed—correctly—that this misplaced document has to do with my grandfather's sister Rose. When we last discussed her, I had just discovered that her unfortunate mother's name, rather than Anna Kraus, might have been Kusharvska.

Rose, herself, had not been much of a help to me in discerning her maiden name. The best I could do was locate her in the New York State census under the name Rose Miller. That was the earliest record I could find for Rose. Later, I found ample evidence of her marriage to New York City resident George Washington Kober. But then, hoping to send for Rose's death certificate to identify both her parents' true names, I once again ran into a stumbling block: Rose had married again.

Rose's new husband was a man with a name the local newspaper editors just couldn't seem to spell consistently. Sometimes, he was identified as Julius Hasinger. Other times, it was Julius Hessinger. All that, however, was superfluous in the face of one other little detail: no matter how it was spelled, it didn't lead me to Rose's date of death, and thus, neither did it lead to a way to locate her own death certificate.

Finding this one slip of paper last week, though, may have put that whole question to rest. For conveniently, I had sent away for the "Certificate and Record of Marriage" of one George Washington Kober and Rose Miller, married in New York City on the seventeenth of November, 1915.

The record included several details which handily fill in the blanks for my father's Aunt Rose. First, at the time of her marriage to Mr. Kober, she had been divorced. Thus the source of her surname in the 1915 census as Miller.

Notwithstanding that answer, on the next line, requesting "Maiden name, if a widow," she answered, "Krauss."

If that leads you to believe that, having been told that Rose's mother Anna's married name was Krauss, it must have been Anna's maiden name that was Kusharvska, think again. The marriage record then asked for the mother's maiden name—in this case, Rose's mother's maiden name was given as Anna Zegar.

Zegar! That added a new name to my list of surnames to pursue. And it effectively removed the sting—at least partially—of getting that death certificate for Anna and seeing the entry "unknown" for both Anna's parents. At least now I had a lead for Anna's father's surname.

There was one more useful detail on Rose's marriage license application: that of her own father's given name.  In now being able to read his name on her marriage record, I wonder if, years later in meeting the man who was to become her third husband, Rose felt some affinity to him through something as introductory as his name. Have you ever noticed how often ancestors seem to marry someone having a name just like their sibling or their parent? I've seen it so many times, yet never hear anyone remark on that. And once again, Rose provides another example of that trivial detail, for the given name of her father—the elusive Mr. Krauss I have yet to find in any documents—was Julius.

The Most Hated Word in a Genealogist's Lexicon

While pursuing a new genealogical trail brings the thrill of the hunt, often a genealogist is tracking progress, not on one, but on several simultaneous chases. So, while we are hot on the trail of the once-again-immigrating Ryan family as they move on from their decades-long visit in North Dakota, I've been checking the calendar and impatiently watching my mailbox, the farther we move from that date in mid May when I sent away for the death certificate for someone in yet another side of the family. It's a death certificate I've been awaiting for someone who might have been my father's paternal grandmother—or who might just turn out to be a total stranger. I've been waiting for news on one Anna Kusharvska of Queens, New York.

As you may have already guessed, tucked in with yesterday afternoon's mail delivery was an envelope from the City of New York Municipal Archives. Although my husband—along with my daughter and a visiting family friend—greatly enjoyed taunting me by waving the thing just out of my reach, they eventually relented and dropped the coveted item into my hands.

What I was seeking, when I sent for the death certificate of Anna Kusharvska, was the answer to a series of questions.

First, I wanted to see what address was listed for this woman who had died on the exact same day as my great grandmother, Anna Kraus. After all, since the only person listed as having died on the day the newspaper report had indicated as Anna Kraus' date of death was someone whose surname was not Kraus but Kusharvska, I was interested in seeing whether the two were one and the same Anna.

Then, of course, as any genealogical researcher would, I wanted to learn the names of Anna's father and mother. If this Anna turned out to be my Anna, that would be valuable information.

You may remember my original series of posts, explaining how I came across the name Kusharvska. It was in pursuit of clues as to whether the mysterious "Aunt Rose" of my older cousin's memory was actually my paternal grandfather's sister or not. When I stumbled upon a Brooklyn Standard Union article from September 29, 1921, reporting Rose's mother's death, you know I would want to send for that confirmation. It would, of course, contain the kind of information that would allow me to push back just one more generation than I had ever been able to reach before.

But the name I was seeking was Anna Kraus, not Anna Kusharvska. Yet, there was no entry on the New York City death index for anyone named Kraus in Queens on that date. But there was an entry for someone named Kusharvska.

So, who was this other Anna?

Apparently, though she did not live at the 729 Ninetieth Street that the newspaper identified as our Anna's place of death, the death certificate, coincidentally, listed the Kusharvska house number as 729. The only catch was that it was on Ninety Sixth Street. Hmmm...was it possible that someone converted a six to a zero for that newspaper report? A quick double-check of the 1920 census, completed just over a year prior to that point, showed Rose and her husband George Kober—along with Anna Kraus—listed at 729 Ninety Sixth Street.

So...Anna Kraus was Anna Kusharvska. And, just as cemetery records had already confirmed, the certificate showed she was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery—the same place where Rose's husband George was later laid to rest. The gruesome details of the suicide were also confirmed on this certificate, along with a statement on the reverse identifying "Mrs. Geo. W. Kober" as Anna Kusharvska's daughter.

The bold strokes of the script in which the form was completed slowed my eyes from sweeping over the page of Anna Kusharvska's death certificate. It took me a while to locate the next step I was seeking: the place set aside to list the name and birthplace of both the decedent's father and mother. This would be the lines which could open up an entire new avenue of pursuit for my research. If you've been in my shoes before, you know exactly how exciting it can be to finally see this revealed.

Or how devastating it can be, after waiting so long and hoping so long, to discover...nothing.

And that is exactly what unfolded with this letter.

Putting myself in the shoes of the distraught daughter who had to provide the answers, I can imagine all the turmoil that must have accompanied the completion of this form: the shock and anguish for Rose of discovering what her mother had done and suddenly not only being faced with having to make funeral arrangements, but also being thrust into an unexpected interface with New York City law enforcement personnel.

But I still wish she could have maintained her composure enough to have presented these officials with some informed guess as to what to put on those blanks begging for the name and birthplace of Anna's father and mother.

Granted, Rose did manage to report that each of them was born in Germany—as was Anna and, in fact, Rose, herself.

But when I searched the scrawling handwriting for those names I was seeking, I found myself colliding with what I've decided must be a genealogist's most hated word: "Unknown."

All told, what I learned from receipt of this document was that Anna Kraus was somehow Anna Kusharvska. Why she showed in both the 1915 New York State census and the 1920 federal census as Anna Kraus, I have no idea. This death certificate certainly provided no clue.

I end up having to walk away from this hope of discovering more about my father's family, realizing just how much I rue seeing one innocuous word, when it appears on governmental documents of this type. When it comes to delving into one's own family story, "unknown" is such an unwelcomed word.