Taking in the Broad View

 

Sometimes the research task bids us keep our nose close to the ground, sniffing out every hint, gobbling up every clue. When our focus gets that nearsighted, it helps to pick up our head to reorient ourselves with the broader picture. At the close of this month's research project, I did just that. I needed to take in the broad view—and it was worth the encouragement I gained. 

The last task for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025 was to learn all I could about my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz and her family. I can say that I almost certainly did confirm her parents' names—Andrzej (Andreas) Gramlewicz and Katarzyna Nowicka—though I did encounter some rough spots concerning her mother's true identity.

From there, I reverted to that necessary step for connecting the dots with all those unidentified DNA matches: I worked through each collateral line and documented that person's descendants back toward the present time, as far as I could go through the generations.

That's when I decided to lift up my head and take in the broad view. Using my family tree at Ancestry.com, I constructed a vertical tree with Andrzej and Katarzyna as the head couple. From there, I added all available children listed in my tree, clicking through as far as I could go through the generations.

Though I have a long way to go before I finish adding to my tree all the descendants for each branch of this Gramlewicz family, one thing I spotted was worth the effort to draw up this chart: for some lines of the family, I have already charted down to the sixth great-grandchildren of Andrzej and Katarzyna. I had no idea there were this many generations documented in my tree for this couple.

Included in this month's goal was my quest to figure out just how Annie Gramlewicz was related to my second great-grandfather Anton Laskowski, Elżbieta's son. Though I did plot her ancestry to about the same generation as Andrzej Gramlewicz, I could not document any familial connection, despite both families living in the same small town of Żerków in what is now part of Poland. And yet, there were ample records available online to allow me to chart Annie's family tree from her own ancestral couple down to the present time.

One thing I noticed, whether tracing my own Gramlewicz line or that of my mystery cousin, was the availability of online records for most of the 1800s. That enabled me to build out both trees. Records from the earliest years of the subsequent century are also starting to make their appearance, so one step to take the next time I revisit this research project is to see how many of the subsequent generation I can add to my records.

A sticking point in following these generations is whether they remained in Poland or emigrated. For those who settled in North America, it was far easier to find their records than it had been to trace family members in the war-torn years of the 1900s in Europe. And a surprise lesson learned from the ravages of those same years was that a number of survivors in Poland took up the offer to be relocated to Australia, a detail I hadn't known anything about prior to discovering Gramlewicz DNA cousins in that country this month.

Hopefully, more records of Polish heritage will be added to online collections, whether by American genealogical organizations or by researchers in Poland. I'm especially keen to find records predating the 1800s, my current brick wall era. I keep thinking it will be "just one more" generation and then I'll find my answer concerning the connection between Anton Laskowski and his "niece" Anna Gramlewicz. Perhaps given a year or so to add to the collections, whether here or overseas, and I'll know. 

Closing Out the Year

 

It seems like only a few days ago when I was mourning the passing of summer, and here we are, staring 2026 in the face. In just a blink, Christmas will be here. Those who are celebrating Hanukkah are even now just about to put a close on the eighth night of their Festival of Lights. And today? Well, this will be the last of my biweekly counts for 2025.

This month has turned out differently than I had expected. Encouraged by increased access to Polish records online—at least, now that I've got the hang of deciphering old German script and breaking the Polish-to-English code—I thought perhaps I'd make more headway than I did. True, the month is not yet over, but I still need to reserve some time for a few holiday posts before I launch into selecting my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 during the twelve days of Christmas.

Mostly on account of wanting to cross-check any discoveries I've made, I've spent lots of time jumping between BaSIA, the Database of Archival Indexing System, which provides transcriptions of Polish records, and their hyperlinks to specific documents at governmental archives, as well as old scans of church records at FamilySearch.org. In the spirit of this season of giving, I've been making a list and checking it twice—if not more than that, as I continue searching for those Gramlewicz and Laskowski connections on paper and through DNA testing services.

So how did things go in the past two weeks? Faster than I thought, but not as fast as I'd hoped. I managed to add 127 new documented individuals to my tree, mostly either Gramlewicz descendants who had emigrated from Poland, or branches of that family still residing in their hometown back in Żerków. Those new additions to the tree either connected to Elżbieta Gramlewicz's line or were ancestral connections to her son Anton Laskowski's supposed "niece" whom he took in as a teenager after she returned to New York from traveling with her own Gramlewicz family members to Poland. All told, those two Gramlewicz branches boosts my tree count to a total of 40,744 documented relatives.

Though I don't plan to work on my in-laws' tree again for quite some time, every now and then a surprise discovery pops up, beguiling me to turn my attention to my husband's roots. Such was the case this past week, when a surprise DNA match I noticed simply demanded to be placed in the right spot in that family tree.

You know how that goes: you can't just plug in a name and not give any reasons for why that name deserves that space. And suddenly, seven more individuals were documented and added to my in-laws' tree, upping that tree's total a modest amount to 41,731. 

While I'll soon be diverting my attention to planning next year's research projects, I'll still be working on those Gramlewicz research questions for this last month of the year. Floating branches on a family tree may be one way to solve the documentation issue when we don't quite know where to plug in a relative, but they still beg a resolution. It's likely I'll be working on this for quite some time—and revisiting the issue in a future year, as well. 

Anna's Father

 

Tracing the ancestry of Anna Gramlewicz, the young woman who showed up in my great-grandfather Anton Laskowski's New York City apartment in 1915, might have seemed an easy task—at first. When Anna was born in New York, it was easy to trace her father in American records. Moving back past the year of his immigration, however, was not quite as easy.

Anna's father, Mieczyslaw, was born and baptized in Żerków, the same small town where so many of my paternal grandmother's ancestors once lived. Mieczyslaw's December 27, 1863, entry in the baptismal register showed his father's name as Laurentius Gramlewicz, most likely the Latin version of the Polish given name Wawrzyniec.

Knowing that, however, does not solve my problem of finding the connection to Anton's own mother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. If there is a connection in the Gramlewicz family, we will need to reach back farther than just one generation.

There was, however, another point to glean from Mieczyslaw's baptismal record: the name of his own mother. Right on the same line in that baptismal register, we find another possible connection. Mieczyslaw's mother's maiden name was Marianna Laskowska—or, apparently, "Marie" for short. Remember that women's surnames in Poland are modified to reflect their gender, thus rendering Marianna's brothers' surname as Laskowski, but her sisters' maiden name as Laskowska.

This discovery opens up another possibility for why Anton would claim Annie Gramlewicz as his niece. Could he have been related to her through a Laskowski family member?

Finding Marianna's own 1888 death record among the online archival holdings in Żerków, I noticed one thing right away. If Mieczyslaw's arrival in New York, according to census records, was said to have been in 1889, perhaps his mother's passing was the impetus for him to leave his homeland and seek his fortune in a land of promise. 

It was interesting to see that, though he was among the youngest of his parents' children, he was the reporting party named in Marianna's death record. According to his report, his mother's parents were listed as Adelbert Laskowski and Rosalie Damerska. A note inserted in the text indicated an alternate name for Adelbert: Wojcieck.

Neither of those names helps in our quest to discover the nexus between Anton Laskowski and his "niece" Anna Gramlewicz. This is not even because Anton's parents' names were different than the Laskowski connection from Mieczyslaw's records. The difficulty comes in realizing that, as far as I can access them right now, online records for the region where Żerków is located in Poland simply do not go back that far in time.

While I can't go back, page by page in time, there may still be another way. That way is by slipping through the side door of DNA testing—but only if we are fortunate enough to discover someone from those families has already taken a DNA test, and that the relationship is not so distant as to be too tiny to detect the connection. Looking backward in time by following the trail of a DNA match's ancestry can sometimes present a perspective we couldn't have otherwise found.

Anton's Niece Annie

 

Some branches of a family tree seem to twist and turn—and ultimately lead us nowhere. Such was the case with the relative who showed up in my great-grandfather's 1915 New York City household. My great-grandfather, Anton, told the census enumerator that she, Annie, was his niece. And that was the end of the explanation.

Who, exactly, Annie was has been a puzzle I've yet to figure out. At first, I took the clue at face value (though I subsequently learned to take that relationship label with a huge grain of salt). And can you blame me? Annie's surname was Gramlewicz, same as the maiden name of Anton's own mother, Elżbieta.

By the time I was able to access the type of records genealogists demand, I could see that simple claim made to a passing census worker wasn't quite what it should have been. As tempting as it was to make the assumption based on that Gramlewicz surname, the more I looked through records, especially in Poland, the less sure I was of the claim's veracity.

Now that we've found a useful stash of records from the old dominion of Prussia, that part of modern-day Poland where the Gramlewicz and Laskowski families originated, it's possible to take a second look. While I'm thankful for expanded access to Old World records, I'm still stumped by the claim of niece. Let's take a look at what we now know about Annie, then move backwards through the generations, if possible, to find the connection.

What was obvious from that 1915 New York State census record was that Annie was not born in Poland, as was Anton and his wife Marianna, but she was actually born in New York City. In fact, according to the 1900 census, the three siblings in the Gramlewicz household along with Anna were also born in New York. Yet their parents—whose names were listed with horribly mangled spelling—were both said to have been from Germany, most likely Prussia.

Anna's parents' names, more accurately spelled, would be Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz and Jozefa Byczyńska.  According to that same 1900 census, the couple had been married for seven years. We also learn from that census that Mieczyslaw had been in the United States since 1889, while Jozefa trailed him by two years.

Though Anna was born in New York, and thus a United States citizen, an entire chapter in her personal story is revealed by her return trip from Poland in 1913, aboard the SS Friedrich der Grosse. The passenger record provided her date of birth as June 24, 1897, and her place of birth as Brooklyn. She was apparently traveling alone on the same ship on which she had traveled with the rest of her family, who had chosen to return to their hometown in Żerków in 1908.

With the information on her father's name and hometown in Poland, the next step is to trace his line through the generations until we find the nexus with Anton's own mother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. The only problem is that it isn't as easy as that might seem. 

You Can't Have Just One

 

I learned a long time ago that when it comes to documenting family relationships, you can't rely on just one document to confirm ancestral connections. In looking at the Prussian death record for Catharina Cichocki, I was reminded of how many times I've seen mistaken reports of the deceased person's parents' names—especially that of the mother's maiden name. When it comes to confirming relationships through documentation, it helps to look twice.

Finding Catharina's 1887 death record, now held at the Polish archival collection at Żerków (see scan number nine), I saw that her maiden name was Gramlewicz, and that her father's name was Andreas Gramlewicz. After providing that information, the record stated that her mother was also named Catharina, with the surname Zakrzewicz.

Wait, I thought: didn't I have records with differing assertions for that mother's maiden name? Perhaps my second great-grandmother Elżbieta and Katarzyna were not full siblings, after all. I went back to the other record I had for the supposed sisters' parents: the 1810 marriage record for Andreas and Catharina. Sure enough, there in that record, the bride's maiden name was given as Nowicka. Not Zakrzewicz. 

Of course, I thought, perhaps Andreas had been married twice. Since daughter Catharina was born about ten years before Elżbieta, perhaps Catharina's mother had subsequently died and Andreas married a second Catharina, surnamed Zakrzewicz. It was a possible scenario.

And yet, when I looked for documents on another Gramlewicz sibling—Apolonia, baptized in 1820—her record, too, indicated the mother's name as Catharina "de Nowickie." (Ironically, Apolonia's godfather was listed as a Zakrzewicz, and years later, she ended up marrying someone else with that surname, Paweł Zakrzewicz.)

Checking for younger brother Piotr Paweł, his baptismal record, despite using the Polish form of the participants' names, also noted his mother to be Katarzyna Nowicka.

Looking at Elżbieta's own death record didn't help matters. While I claim no expertise in reading old German handwriting, I can clearly see that her father was listed as Andreas Gramlewicz. Included in that record was mention of Elżbieta's husband, listed as "Matheus" Laskowski, and her son, Anton. No mention that I can find in the verbiage indicates the identity of her mother.

From all this, we can see that Elżbieta's older and younger siblings were mentioned in records identifying their mother as Catharina or Katarzyna Nowicka—the same woman identified in Andreas' own marriage record. Perhaps I'll never learn why Elżbieta's own death record doesn't appear to include mention of her mother's maiden name—at least, as best I can tell with limited knowledge of old German script.

Perhaps, considering the DNA matches I've found who descended from Elżbieta's presumed sister Katarzyna, it would help to examine the expected range of centiMorgans for a full-parent relationship versus a half-sibling situation. It's probably time to go looking for other Gramlewicz descendants in my DNA matches again. 

Taking a List, Checking it Twice

 

When stuck on a research project, it isn't a bad idea to go back and check all that work twice. I know, I know: it's a lot of drudgery. But so is getting stuck.

For my Twelve Most Wanted for each year, I take a whole month to focus on one specific ancestor, typically someone who presents me with a research problem, a.k.a. "brick wall." Sometimes, I end up repeating the same featured ancestor in subsequent years. After all, I've been doing this routine for years now, and sometimes a solid month of research still won't get me unstuck. So I revisit some of those challenging ancestors.

This month's challenge—reviewing my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz and her connection to a Gramlewicz woman who ended up in New York City in Elżbieta's son's household—involves some relatives I've researched before. When I finish out a month without achieving my research goal, I write up the details describing where I'm stuck, complete with suggestions about where to look next, as well as a review of what I've already accomplished.

When I covered a related family last winter, I made a note to return once again to do a thorough search in one particular record set I had found on FamilySearch.org. I saved not only the link to the specific collection, but the URL preserving my specific search terms for the Gramlewicz family in their home town of Żerków, Poland. I make it a practice to save such notes in an electronic file, so I can easily return to the spot where I left off last time.

That specific note from 2024 allowed me to zero in on a collection at FamilySearch.org labeled "Germany, Prussia, Posen, Catholic and Lutheran Church Records, 1430-1998." While the label may seem too broad for my specific purposes, setting up the parameters I needed allowed me to narrow down the search from 34,601 hits to entries for one surname only: Gramlewicz.

I had made a note last year telling me precisely which page to return to in the results, for the next time I visited this problem. And this year? I clicked through to that specific link and did exactly that.

Now that I've made my way through all Gramlewicz entries in that list of baptisms, I'll next check in that same record set for the surname that Elżbieta married into: Laskowski. From that point, I'll review all the collateral lines added to my family tree based on this search, and repeat the same process for each of those other surnames.

The main reason for reaching out to these collateral lines is that somewhere down through the generations there are descendants who decided to take a DNA test. And I suspect a good number of these matches don't even know they are related to a Gramlewicz ancestor. Thus, neither they nor I have any idea why we show up as DNA matches. By examining these collateral lines from the generations of my great-grandparents and their parents, I'm hoping to clarify the path that connects us. This week, we'll hopefully make some discoveries through that process.

Two Stop Shopping

 

When it comes to Internet resources for researching Polish roots, the typical places Americans use—with the exception of FamilySearch.org—have few Polish resources. For those willing to brave the strange world of websites composed in foreign languages, there is one resource for genealogical information from what was once the Prussian region called Posen: a website called the Database of Archival Indexing System, or BaSIA for short.

I've been there before, and hopefully, that website, combined with the other ones I usually use, will help out once again in my two-stop-shopping approach to searching for ancestors from the small Polish village of Żerków.

BaSIA is volunteer operated, with a long list of contributors who serve as transcribers of records from the region. Though the website, based in Poland, includes an option to select the language in which to view the material, even using that feature only covers a few basic entries in the system.

Perhaps I've just moved into a stage in my research requiring reliance upon not just one website, but a tap dance through a combination of many resources. For me, one-stop genealogy is dead. While I've learned to spot the few key Polish words that are of most interest to genealogists, I've also gotten used to cutting and pasting phrases from their "English language" version of the website into Google translate to guide me.

For instance, take their statement on the website's landing page. There are a few headings in English, but the text below each readable header is obviously not in my native tongue. For instance, look at the subtitle, "About the Project." Understandable enough—until you begin reading the text below that headline. No, your eyes are not deceiving you; you don't need to get a stronger prescription for your reading glasses. The rest of the article is in Polish. But if I run that foreign language statement through a translation system online, here is what our Polish friends behind this useful website are telling us:

The BaSIA project, or 'Archival Indexing System Database', was created for a wide range of genealogists and researchers of the history of Greater Poland from the 18th to the 20th centuries (although it also contains older information). Through a user-friendly interface, it provides users with a database containing indexes compiled by volunteers, derived from materials stored in state and church archives, among others. It allows users to find the names of people they are searching for, links to scans, vital records, and other information that helps identify families, places, and basic facts from their history. The database is created using the ASIA application ('Automatic Archival Indexing System'), which primarily allows for user-friendly indexing of archival records and simultaneously acts as an intermediary in the process of indexing and making the results available online.

As they've expanded over the years at BaSIA, they have included links to the state archive in Poznań, so that you can click through on a specific transcribed record and be led to the actual document from which the transcription was drawn. Thus, I can pull up the actual death record for Elżbieta Gramlewicz Laskowska, drawn up following her April 1886 passing.

What is helpful in this specific case is that the record provides the names of several people related to Elzbieta's family, including the name of her father, given in the document as Andreas Gramlewicz. What I can't yet decipher is what follows the "und" after Andreas' name is entered. It's Elżbieta's mother's name, I'd presume—but what is it? Even the transcriber couldn't decipher the entry.

One for the Price of Two

 

When supposed relatives don't quite fit into the family tree the way we thought, we can sometimes find ourselves building out what turns out to be two trees. In the case of "Uncle" Anton Laskowski and his "niece" Annie Gramlewicz, I may have to do twice the amount of work, just to figure out how she was related to Anton's mother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. It may turn out that, for my answer, I'll get one tree—but for the price of two.

According to the 1900 census, Annie, who was born in New York, was living with her parents in Brooklyn. She remained in the New York City area until her immigrant parents, Mieczyslaw and Jozefa, decided it was best for them to return to their homeland. Annie may have reluctantly acquiesced to her parents' request that she go back to Poland with them, but it wasn't long until she came back to the place where she was born. The most likely reason? Shortly after appearing in the 1915 New York State census in Anton Laskowski's household, she was married.

Tracing Annie's family back in Poland meant finding the parents for Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz. Tentatively, I've found a likely couple: Lorenz Gramlewicz and Marianna Laskowska. But how Lorenz connects with Anton's mother and her Gramlewicz roots, I have yet to discover. Mieczyslaw's mother's Laskowski roots are also tantalizing, but I've yet to figure out how—or if—Marianna is related to Anton's own Laskowski line.

Looking at FamilySearch.org is often helpful—and often the only recourse for English-speaking researchers seeking Polish documents—because of the huge number of international records accessible through their website. However, for records located in what used to be the region known as Posen in Prussia, there is a Polish website which may come to my rescue. We'll take a look at that resource tomorrow.

When "Uncle" Isn't Entirely Accurate

 

I should have caught on to this detail sooner, but my mind was thinking too literally. When I heard the term "uncle," I took it to mean exactly that: a parent's brother, or perhaps even a parent's brother-in-law. Gone from my mind was any remembrance of the parade of visiting adults in my childhood home whom I dutifully called "uncle" and "aunt" upon my parents' prompting. It was simply a term of respect, not relationship.

If not through that childhood memory, I should have realized that detail through my immigrant acquaintances from various ethnicities, especially when I was introduced to their many "aunts" and "uncles." I once asked a friend from India just how many aunts she had—to which she laughed and explained that whether they were family or friends, if older than she was, they were greeted with that deferential term of respect.

And how many of my friends in California would speak of their "tia" or "tio" and never once give up the detail that there was no relationship? Terms like aunt or uncle, while taken literally by genealogists, can so often mean otherwise.

So when I encountered the 1915 New York State census entry for my great-grandfather Anton Laskowski, listing Annie Gramlewicz among his household residents, I assumed she was indeed what he said she was: his niece.

Anton Laskowski, after all, was my source for his own mother's name. His death certificate reported her maiden name to be Elżbieta Gramlewicz. It would stand to reason that Annie Gramlewicz, logically, would be the daughter of Anton's mother's brother.

How wrong I was. When I did, years later, receive a message from a great-grandniece of Annie, she provided the rest of the family's story, which I've recounted here years ago. From that online contact, I was able to build out Annie's tree for a few more generations—and in that process, though not finding the correct Gramlewicz connection, I did discover a marriage between Annie's direct line Gramlewicz ancestor and another Laskowski relative.

The plot thickens.

Do you suppose that Laskowski ancestor would neatly fit into Anton's patriline? Of course not—not, at least, as far as I've been able to determine through limited access to Polish documentation. In the end—meaning the last time I worked on this puzzle—I set up Annie's side of the Gramlewicz family as a floating branch in my tree, still waiting to be connected to the rest of my Polish ancestry.

Just exactly how Annie could call Anton her uncle is my guiding motivation for selecting the Gramlewicz family as the focus of this month's Twelve Most Wanted. I want to discover more about Elżbieta's parents and siblings, yes, but this chase may go for generations beyond that, depending on just what prompted Anton to call Annie his niece.

. . . And Elżbieta Makes Twelve

 

Welcome to December, the last month of the year, filled with holidays and celebrations. In my case, I hope to celebrate some discoveries about my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, her siblings and parents.

I named Elżbieta the last of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025. As I outlined in my research plans nearly a year ago, I hope to learn more about not only Elżbieta herself, but her siblings and parents, as well.

Before we begin this month's search, though, here's an overview of what I've already uncovered about this Polish ancestor. Like many family history researchers, I first learned of Elżbieta's name courtesy of the 1935 New York City death certificate of her son, Antoni Laskowski.

Though I had sent for my immigrant great-grandfather's death certificate the old "SASE" way years ago (if you know, you know), it wasn't until recently that I've been able to retrieve further family information through online means, both in New York City and back in Poland, the land Elżbieta never left. Thanks to FamilySearch.org, I can now view her January 22, 1844, marriage record to Mateusz Laskowski in their home parish in Żerków. 

According to that Żerków marriage record, Elżbieta was noted to be twenty four years of age, putting her estimated year of birth at 1820. However, I have yet to locate any baptismal or birth records for her. The only other detail I've been able to find is courtesy of one website in Poland, which then pointed me to online records from a Polish archive, confirming Elżbieta's 1886 death in the same town where she was married.

To find Elżbieta's siblings will mean locating that birth or baptismal confirmation to first uncover the names of her parents. These details will help me to confirm a number of DNA matches, both at Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com especially, due to the latter's high number of customers from European countries. That puts this as job number one for this coming week, but while I'm looking for further details on this Gramlewicz family behind the scenes, we do need to talk about the one connection I had made with this family, back in New York City, the same place where Elżbieta's name first appeared during my earliest search for her identity.

Awash in Collateral Connections

 

It should have come as no surprise that families from small communities would, over the generations, intermarry with relatives. Yet, when I chose my Twelve Most Wanted ancestral goal for November, I blithely placed that potential number of intermarried surnames at a number far lower than it may turn out to be. Right now, as I close out this month's research, I am awash in potential collateral connections—only on the likely relatives of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski. That says nothing about the connections with his wife's Gramlewicz family—which I still need to pursue—or the other surnames I've discovered which are connected to this family.

Add that to my ever-growing to-do list of unfinished research. Thankfully, finding more online resources for local documentation from the Laskowskis' Polish home in Żerków has helped my progress. Last year, I thought I had gone as far as I could without actually traveling to Poland; this year, I'm staring down a list of possibly accessible names which are far too long to wrap up on this last day of the month.

The result last year of thinking I had hit the end of the line for this family persuaded me to veer off course from my Twelve Most Wanted research route. We'll discuss December's projects tomorrow, but I am now thinking we may need to blend in some catch-up work on the families we've left behind during this quarter's family history explorations. If nothing else, they will inform the selection for those Twelve Most Wanted, once I begin planning for 2025—which won't be long in coming.

Noticing Name Twins

 

In a town as small as Żerków, one wouldn't expect to run into name twins, but it seemed that my Polish great-grandfather Anton Laskowski had one. 

As I worked on my latest project—harvesting all the documentation I could find on births, marriages, and deaths of Żerków residents named Laskowski—I kept seeing the name Anton Laskowski pop up. Remembering that even now, Żerków has barely over two thousand residents, I thought I'd be immune to the research trouble caused by following the wrong name twin backwards in time.

Seeing documents mentioning that other Anton Laskowski seemed wrong. This other Anton had a wife named Elizabeth—surely, the rendering of that woman's name in Latin church records, for Polish would have given it as Elżbieta—whereas my Anton had a mother named Elżbieta. Considering my Anton's father was Mateusz, not Anton, details were not adding up.

Since my project has involved checking each Laskowski record for the entire century of the 1800s at the Polish website BaSIA, of course the missing detail was to identify each Anton's dates. As I moved toward the end of the century, one death record provided that missing information. This duplicate Anton, dying in 1888, was listed as the son of Martin Laskowski and his wife Marie. Sadly, no maiden name for Anton's mother was provided. But the entry did inform me that this Anton's wife was born Elizabeth Roszak. And since he was said to have been eighty six years of age—often an inaccurate estimate—that would place his birth around 1802.

Because my Anton Laskowski was much younger—he was born about 1844, if the age given on his marriage record was correct—I'd guess that, rather than a name twin, my Anton might have been named after the elder Anton. When it comes to namesakes in the Polish tradition, though, I have yet to find guidance on any naming patterns or other family traditions in that earlier century, with the exception of the Catholic adherence to naming children born close to a saint's feast day by the name of that specific honored saint.

Perhaps, considering that, my Anton may not have been named after this older Anton after all. Though I find it hard to fathom in a town of such a small size, perhaps the elder Anton Laskowski knew nothing of the younger Anton Laskowski at all. Is there room for a name coincidence in a town of barely two thousand people? Hopefully, more work on my Laskowski document-gathering project will eventually provide that answer.

Wide, But Not so Deep

 

Some research ideas may seem brainy at the first, but turn out to be nothing more than a rabbit trail. I'm hoping my latest foray into the Laskowski heritage in Żerków, Poland, doesn't turn out to be another example of the latter.

What I've ended up doing, now that I've found a couple online resources for documentation of that small village in what used to be Prussia, is building a tree which may be more wide than it is deep. Though it seemed at first that there was a date gap in records from about 1850 through the mid 1870s, by combining what I found at the Polish website BaSIA with church records from Żerków at FamilySearch.org, I'm actually making progress finding collateral lines in the extended Laskowski family.

The thought occurred to me that, once having found these Laskowski cousins, I should search for their partner's surname as well. Sometimes, abysmal handwriting being what it is in any language, surnames could be misread and mis-indexed, but if I also searched for the spouse's surname, additional records could be harvested from this wide search.

Thus, I've been exploring the surnames related by marriage to my Laskowski roots. This involves looking for Jankowski, Wroblewski, and Gramlewicz entries as well. With those extensions to my original quest, I've noticed that Wroblewski, for one, has been rendered at least two different ways in church records, making the search more convoluted. And now, I'm discovering the same for Gramlewicz, if for nothing more than the curse of abysmal handwriting.

Sometimes, for instance, searching for Gramlewicz brings limited returns, while if I searched by the other spouse's surname, I'd get results for more children, for instance. Yet, looking at the document itself, I could clearly see that the name written was what I was seeking, not the several permutations I had spotted in search results.

It is apparent that, in a town as small as Żerków, intermarriages were bound to happen over the generations. As I persevere with this adjusted research process, I'm ending up with a tree spread wide with collateral lines. The hope is that, at some point soon, I'll start seeing some of these family lines intertwine. 

Adding Clusters

 

A little here (at this website), a little there (at another website), and pretty soon I'm adding clusters of relatives to the family tree. Admittedly, each of those clusters makes its own floating tree in my newest project to seek and record all Laskowski family members from the 1800s in Żerków, the Polish town which once was part of Prussia.

This time, I started with the 1878 death record of seventy one year old Antonina Markiewicz, who was listed as a daughter of Paul Laskowski and Marianna at the Polish website BaSIA. Checking my chart of all Laskowski entries I had harvested from the database at BaSIA, I then noticed I already had a few other entries for Antonina. I had found the 1826 marriage entry for Antonina and her husband, Franciszek Markiewicz, and two baptismal records.

From that point, same as I had done yesterday, I moved from the BaSIA website to FamilySearch.org, where in the same Żerków record set I had used previously, I now searched for any baptismal records containing the names of these parents. There, along with the couple's marriage record, I found an entry for their daughter Maryanna, born on December 6, 1838. In addition, I found subsequent baptismal records for two sons, Franciszek and Ignatius, whose much later birth dates caused me to look twice to make sure the estimated year of birth for their mother would still sustain believability that these were Antonina's sons.

Pleased with the continued progress on my experiment, I began holding out hope that perhaps there would be a way to see how all these Laskowskis connect in tiny Żerków. It may all depend on whether I can uncover further resources for documentation during that time period.

If it Isn't Here, Could it be There?

 

Looking for records of Polish ancestors has been, as I've said before, not a plug-and-play experience. Part of the documented family story I may have located through the Polish website BaSIA, but that collection's big gap in the middle of the nineteenth century, right where I need to research, hasn't been much of a help.

I got to wondering: if the records aren't accessible through BaSIA, could I find them anywhere else? I'm not prepared to fully answer that question yet, but I'm beginning my experiment to test out that hypothesis.

Yesterday, I harvested all the information I could find at BaSIA for any mention of Laskowski kin in the town of Żerków in nineteenth century Prussia. At that point, surveying all the possible connections yet lacking any way to confidently link them to my own Laskowski ancestry, I mused over the possibility of adding—and organizing—them as a "floating tree" within my own tree at Ancestry.com.

Today, I tried out that idea. Any time I do this, I always cringe when I cut the individual entry loose from its anchor in the original tree. Yes, I know that the Laskowski entry to which I linked this possible relative is not really a sibling. Nonetheless, it bothers me. But I did it.

My first victim, er, volunteer was the husband of Marianna Zaborowska. It was her 1882 death record at BaSIA which told me that this seventy six year old woman was the wife of Adalbert Laskowski. With those two names and approximate dates, I scooted off to FamilySearch to see whether I could find any records for the couple there.

Fortunately, I had already learned that Adalbert—or Adalbertus—was the way the Polish given name Wojciech would be entered in Catholic church records, which were usually drawn up in Latin. Beginning my experiment at FamilySearch, I selected "search," then chose "images," where I entered the place name for my Laskowski family in the former country of Prussia: Żerków. I estimated the date range when this couple would have had children—if they had any children—and clicked on the link for the digitized collection of baptismal records for that era.

Once that record set was selected, I clicked the little magnifying glass icon at the top of the set and entered the name of interest: Adalbert Laskowski. Five possibilities popped up, including two with Marcyanna Zaborowska's name as mother of the baptized child.

Back to my own tree at Ancestry, I began by entering Adalbert—alias Wojciech—Laskowski as if he were brother of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski. Then, I cut him loose from the supposed father and mother and let Wojciech float free, untethered in family tree outer space.

Because the FamilySearch record set for Żerków baptisms included two children for Wojciech and Marcianna—son Piotr Paweł, born in June of 1841, and son Stanisław, born in November 1842—I added their information to the free-floating Laskowski couple so that at least these four people are now connected to each other. I'll repeat this process as I compare the rest of the records I found at BaSIA with any that I can locate through FamilySearch.org's image collection.

Needless to say, I may be busy at this project for a long, long time. Just maybe, at some point, I'll figure out how these Laskowskis relate to the ones in town who belong to my family's line. If nothing else, I'll map out the connections between the families living nearly two hundred years ago in the tiny town of Żerków, Poland.

Organizing the Splat of the Data

 

So, the data's gathered. Now what?

I'm sitting here, looking at the list I've harvested from a search for Laskowski relatives documented in the tiny town of Żerków throughout the 1800s. I'm trying to figure out a way to organize the great, big splat of it all. There's a gap in the fat middle of it, of course, likely due to the inevitable destruction of some records through the centuries—or, perhaps if I'm lucky, the gap is simply owing to a backlog in uploading indexed results onto the website.

Spanning the century in my search for this one particular surname was my way of hoping to circumvent the problem of missing records. Almost as if vindicating my hunch, I did find some marriage and death records towards the end of the 1800s which provided names of parents whom I hadn't encountered back at the beginning of that century. Yet it still is hard to sift through all this information and find patterns or connections.

When I think of patterns for ancestral connections, the easiest way for my brain to recognize them is to lay out all the information in a pedigree chart. But how to connect all these disparate names? It occurred to me that using the technique of a "floating tree" might be just the answer. That way, I'd enter each of these Laskowski names into my family tree at Ancestry.com, then cut the entry lose from the tree so no relationship is implied. From that point, each time I run into that name again—say, in a subsequent marriage record, or listed as parent of a child who died later in the century—I can look it up in my index (since it is floating free from any relationships) and then add the new name and relationship to that floating individual's entry.

Eventually, I'd have several clustered cells floating around, detached in the ether of my family tree. True, they'd be disconnected still from my own Laskowski line, but I'd be holding them in reserve, in hopes that someday, more records will be added to the various digitized collections I can now access.

Looking at the Polish website BaSIA, I've noticed that each transcription is linked to the scan of the actual document held in the Polish archives. Along with the link to the scanned picture, the BaSIA entry provides the date that each entry was added to the website. I've noticed that some of those entries had upload dates early in 2012, while others were added closer to the end of that decade. I'm fervently hoping this is still a work in progress, with more indexed and scanned records to come. That gap in resources from about the 1850s through the 1880s could contain the very information I'm seeking.

It's a Small Town, After All

 

There are some research problems which leave me feeling as if I'm walking in circles. Pursuing my Laskowski ancestors in Żerków is one of those problems. The more I try to compile a listing of all the documents containing the surname Laskowski for resident of Żerków, the more I'm spotting relatives sporting the other surnames in my paternal line.

Can that be so surprising? After all, Żerków is only a town of maybe two thousand residents now. That each of the residents, over several generations, would be likely to marry spouses from the other, likely limited, families in the area should not be surprising. But I was surprised, nonetheless.

Take my new brick wall ancestor Bonawentura Laskowski. He's my third great-grandfather, so now I'm making progress, having moved into this new generation. But that's where I'm stumped. I cannot find any connections for this man who died in 1827.

I got the brainy idea that, if I couldn't make any progress on the Laskowski side of the equation, perhaps I'd find better luck looking at the other side of the family. That other side is represented by Bonawentura's wife, Orszula Wroblewska. With a name like that, I'm automatically folding in more uncertainty, because I've seen her name rendered several ways. Some records list her given name as Ursula, which would be understandable. But my doubt rises even further when I find only records spelling her maiden name as Wrobleska, not Wroblewska. Could this just be a case of simple misspelling? 

I did a search for documents on the Polish website BaSIA to see what would show up. I narrowed the search parameters to a ten kilometer area around Żerków, and lessened the similarity range to a more lenient level to capture any other possible spelling variations. 

With that, I began to pull in possibilities for this side of the family. I found a twenty six year old woman named Cunegunda Wrobleska who died in 1821, as well as a sixty year old woman named Franciszka with the same surname who died in 1818. But when I came upon the 1820 death notice for eighty year old Regina Wrobleska, something made me stop and consider.

Regina, I noticed, was apparently unlike the others with the surname Wrobleska, for this entry gave her maiden name. The record noted that she was born a Laskoska. Fortunately for whoever might be among her descendants, her parents' names were listed: Adalbertus Laskoski and Barbara. Although there was no maiden name given for Regina's mother Barbara, this was the first instance I had found in Żerków of someone this early in the century provided with parents' names.

But what was this? Besides Orszula Wroblewska, my third great-grandmother who married Bonawentura Laskowski, here was another woman whose life story also tied together these two surnames. Could there have been more?

Looking further, I also spotted another surname which has appeared in this branch of my family tree before: Gramlewicz. Only this time, instead of representing the line of Bonawentura's daughter-in-law Elzbieta Gramlewicz, this was the birth record for Laurentius Gramlewicz, son of Michael Gramlewicz and Marianna Wrobleska. Somehow, all three of these surnames are tied together in my roots—and more than once. 

Yes, Żerków is a small town, after all—so what was I to expect? Whether I can conclude that minor misspellings do not indicate entirely unrelated families, I can't yet be sure. But I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm slipping into the outer edges of some signs of endogamy in my family tree.

In Search of Polish Naming Conventions

 

Researching ancestors from an English language country is far simpler than pursuing those secret ancestors my paternal grandparents never wanted us kids to find. Yes, the cousins persevered and made discoveries, but now that I'm faced with the prospect of untangling at least eighty Laskowski ancestors from the same tiny village, I need some help.

I'm currently in search of information on Polish naming conventions, especially to help me sort out those many mentions of newborn Laskowskis in baptismal records. It occurred to me how much easier my research would be if my Polish forebears abode by some simple rules of thumb like, say, the Irish naming pattern. Or how about the pattern the Irish used for selecting godparents? If only my Polish ancestors had relied on such conventions, I'd have it made. Every time I'd spot a godparent's name, I'd know exactly how that name would fit into the family picture.

I decided to search for some answers to questions like, "How did Polish parents select godparents for their newborn babies?" Or, "Was there any naming convention Polish parents used in naming their babies after older relatives?"

Apparently, while I can find such material regarding Irish families, there are no such articles written on the subject for Polish ancestors that I can find. I did find some very generic advice, along the lines of naming children after saints, or perhaps—though apparently rare—after a godparent. But who would be the one chosen as the godparent? I have more questions than answers.

When it came to Polish naming conventions, I did find articles explaining the Polish custom of variations on surname endings, based mostly on conventions of their own language. And there was a far more modern version of information on what goes into a Polish name. I even found an article on "name days" celebrated in Poland—though I read elsewhere that that Polish tradition is losing ground in more modern times.

Still, I haven't found any naming patterns which might provide clues as to who was related to whom—which leaves me no option but guesswork at this point. Or a lot of research, and the hope that there are many more records to be found out there, somewhere.

On Laskowski Overload

 

Doing a "One Name Study" on a surname as common in Poland as Laskowski may have been overkill for someone just wishing to find my third great-grandfather's parents' names, but narrowing the parameters seemed like a do-able idea. Since Bonawentura Laskowski's death record at the close of 1827 left me nothing but two nondescript dashes for the names of each of his parents, I was hoping for another way to not only push backwards another generation, but also look sideways for the names of any of his siblings.

That's when I got the brainy idea to take a page from the playbook of genealogists who advise doing cluster research. I went looking for everyone named Laskowski who was mentioned in records posted at the Polish website BaSIA. Having set up my search parameters—any mentions of the surname Laskowski between the years 1793 and 1900 in documents for residents of Żerków—I soon found myself in Laskowski overload.

There were no less than eighty mentions of the Laskowski surname in my search results. Mind you, I eliminated any records for which a Laskowski family member served as a witness on someone else's document. Those remaining on my list were results for which the surname directly involved a family relationship to that name, whether as subject or parent in a birth, marriage, or death record. Because of the possibility of spelling variations, I also set the parameters for similarity of name above seventy percent, since there were so many instances of the surname being spelled as Laskoski.

Of course, there are potential downsides to such an approach. For one thing, my Laskowski side might have involved some relatives who married individuals living nearby but outside the actual town of Żerków. Another problem might be further hazards on the spelling and handwriting front: names either written with more than that one letter "w" missing from the handwritten note—Laskoski instead of Laskowski—or names for which abysmal handwriting caused a misreading of the entry. To capture those, I would need to set the "similarity" slide bar to a more lenient setting—and, more likely, actually look at the records for myself to see whether they were incorrectly indexed.

One final observation about this process: there may be other sources for records from Żerków. I'll need to see whether other resources can be found. For instance, I've already found copied versions of church records, thanks to a digitizing project completed years ago by FamilySearch. Though several of the names written in that collection were incorrectly indexed, as I work my way through that record set, I'm discovering family connections which I would have missed, had I simply relied on a computerized search through the indexed version of the records.

With eighty possibilities to consider, I'd say this is a more than adequate start to my project, and one to keep me far busier over this weekend than I had originally expected. Whether I ever find the connection between Mateusz's father Bonawentura Laskowski and the rest of the Laskowski residents in Żerków, I can at least glean a few connections between the family lines I've now found represented in those scanned documents.

Which Way Did He Go?

 

It almost seems as if my Polish second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski was an only child. Other than his younger sister Antonina, who was born and died in 1821, there seemed to be no trace of any siblings in the Laskowskis' hometown of Żerków. It was therefore a hopeful possibility to follow Mateusz's son Antoni Laskowski and his family to their new home in America and discover that there was another man by the same surname living in the Laskowski household. Just a bit too old to be Antoni's own son—Antoni's eldest was only eleven at the time—and likewise of an age which wouldn't fit into Antoni's brother Lorenz's family, this Andrew could have been a cousin.

Andrew Laskowski showed up in Antoni's household in the 1892 New York State census. Born approximately in 1866, I presumed this Andrew was born in the same town Antoni had once called home—Żerków. But after Andrew's appearance in the 1892 census, which way did he go? Unless he migrated farther west to Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Illinois, I could find no trace of any likely candidate for this man.

The trouble with seeing this clue slip so easily through my fingers is that I was hoping he would be the link to help me find any collateral lines for Antoni's father Mateusz. Surely, I thought, this Andrew could have been Mateusz's nephew. And where there was a nephew sporting the same surname, there would have been a brother from Mateusz's own generation.

If I couldn't find the right Andrew Laskowski in America after 1892, I reasoned, perhaps I could find him back home in Żerków. That, however, was not in the books for me, either. I tried searching at BaSIA, both using Andrew's Polish name—Andrzej—and the alternative Latin spelling of Andreas for possible church records. Though Andrew had reported an age leading to an estimated birth year of 1866, I widened my search back to 1860, with a cutoff date two years beyond the date of his entry in the 1892 New York State census. No hits.

It was then that it occurred to me to put another research concept to use: what if I searched for all the entries containing the surname Laskowski in Żerków? After all, the town of Zerkow has a population of just over two thousand people now. At the start of the previous century, that population was 1,631. My chances of finding actual relatives with that same surname living in Żerków in the late 1880s could be fairly high.

The concept of cluster research—or, as one key researcher has dubbed it, the F.A.N. Club—may well turn up some possible collateral lines for me. Admittedly, I'll have to proceed carefully. And the list will basically serve as a guide, not a final conclusion. But lacking any other approach to locate documentation to reveal any collateral lines, I'm certainly game to launch this exploration.