Another Son Stays Home

 

Researching ancestral lines stretching back to colonial times in America can prove challenging. In questioning which of Lyman Jackson's ten sons remained with him in his last residence in Erie County, Pennsylvania, I've found indications that some lines of descent moved westward. So far, I had only found one son who remained with his father in Erie County. But I may have just located another son who chose to stay—or return—home in Erie County.

My quest for this week has been to trace the remaining children of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather Lyman and his wife Deidama—particularly those who moved westward. My assumption was that all but his son Michael had left Pennsylvania to obtain land elsewhere, especially considering that many of the men in that large family were of an age to have either served in the Revolutionary War, or in the War of 1812 which followed so soon afterwards.

Third child on the list of Lyman's descendants was Ebenezer. Lacking records, it seemed reports had him living—or traveling—both to places westward and residences back where Lyman himself had once lived in upstate New York. While Ebenezer may seem to be a rare choice for a given name in our day, I still needed to ensure that the few places where I spotted that name—Ebenezer Jackson—would not lure me into following a name twin.

However, thanks to a biographical sketch of one of his grandsons, published in 1893, far from the Jackson family's Pennsylvania home in the Biographical Review of Dane County, Wisconsin, Edson B. Jackson chose to include the story of both his father, John Lyman Jackson, and his grandfather, Ebenezer Jackson. Whether these accounts are complete and factually accurate, hopefully documentation will reveal. The task now will be to use this publication as a pathfinder, and see whether records can support this account.

According to this account, apparently after serving in the War of 1812, Ebenezer originally settled in Wyoming County, New York, in a place called Sheldon. Sometime before this, Ebenezer had married a woman from Otsego County named either Betsey Prindle or Pringle. The location of that marriage is not surprising, considering that Ebenezer's father Lyman had been reported in the 1800 census in that same county.

The biographical sketch went on to note that Ebenezer eventually moved to Albion in Erie County, Pennsylvania, "where he lived until he died." Though that comment may seem unhelpful, the sketch did include a date of death—August 7, 1857—providing us a way pointer to help locate a will to confirm the names of the seven children listed in the book.

Admittedly, family history books can often include embellishments, but this sketch has provided enough information to help us trace Ebenezer's family through documentation in those early years and confirm—or correct—what information has already been published.

A Path to the Past

 

You know the drill in genealogy: you start with what you know, then move incrementally backwards into the past, seeking documentation to confirm the validity of each step. In this month's case, though, I'll be following that path to the past more slowly than if we'd been on a chase to merely name the ancestors of this month's selection of my Twelve Most Wanted. I already know Lyman Jackson was the father of my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, John Jay Jackson. And I've already discovered that Michael Jackson, in turn, was Lyman's father.

This month, we'll take the details already found on Lyman Jackson's life and zoom in to see what additional information we can glean on this family. For one thing, Lyman Jackson and his wife, Deidama Dunham, were said to be parents of thirteen children. I don't yet know how many of those Jackson children left descendants of their own, but I'm thinking our DNA account should contain far more than the seventy DNA cousins who have been spotted by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool up to this point. I'll be busy adding lines of descent—times thirteen—to this couple's family tree.

From what I've already found, Lyman Jackson was buried in 1835 in Albion, a township in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Checking the 1830 census for that same location, there is a listing for the household of one Lyman Jackson, along with entries for the families of his sons, Michael, David, and Royal.

Leaping over ten years to reach the next census, we find Lyman Jackson was still in Erie County, according to the 1820 census. In addition, three of his sons were listed in their own separate households: "J. D." (probably Jesse Dunham Jackson), Michael, and Abner. However, for this decade, the Jackson households were located in Conneaut Township.

Even in the 1810 census, we find Lyman Jackson and his household still located in Erie County, where the population at that time was less than four thousand people.

Rewinding history yet another decade, Lyman and his family were no longer in Pennsylvania for the 1800 census. They had moved the distance of 350 miles to Exeter in Otsego County, New York. At this earlier date, the corresponding entry for one Michael Jackson was likely not Lyman's son, but his father.

Another significant move occurred during the previous decade, for in the 1790 census, Lyman Jackson was showing in the records of the town of Pownal in Vermont. Among the names of heads of households there can be spotted the name of Obadiah Dunham, father of Lyman's wife Deidama.

For a time period in which travel would have been considered difficult at best, this large family managed to navigate at least two significant moves—to say nothing of what brought Lyman from his birthplace in Simsbury, Connecticut, up north to Vermont.

Looking at an itinerary like that just begs me to dig a bit deeper into the story behind each of those moves for the Jackson family.

Some Answers Come Quickly

 

Most months, I begin my search for the designated ancestor from among my Twelve Most Wanted for the year by saying I want to discover that brick wall ancestor's parents. However, I no sooner started work on this month's ancestor than I learned the answer to that question.

The focus for this month, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather Lyman Jackson, was noted by his entry at the D.A.R. website to have been born in 1756 in Simsbury, Connecticut. In a digitized version at Ancestry.com of the Lucius Barnes Barbour Collection, a multi-volume set of transcriptions of Connecticut vital records, two Jackson entries confirm that location. One is the line item for the February 29 birth of Lyman, son of Michael Jackson; an entry above that is for his brother Jesse, born at the end of 1759.

The last time I had worked on Lyman Jackson as one of my Twelve Most Wanted was almost three years ago in May of 2023. Granted, I had started that month's research by focusing on Lyman's son John Jay Jackson, my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, who had spent most of his adult years in Ohio after having served in the War of 1812. By the end of that month, I had found John in his father's home and began the effort to push back the generations yet one more time.

This month, I'd like to pick up that chase, but not merely to pursue another generation's names and pertinent dates. For Lyman, this will involve a chase through the newly-formed states in a new country, following this Revolutionary War Patriot and his wife and thirteen children as they moved from New England to upstate New York, and eventually to the western side of Pennsylvania. More importantly, I'd like to zero in on life during that time period, especially in the earlier years of the history of the places the Jacksons once called home, over two hundred years ago.

May as Well Make it a Couple

 

We're wrapping up the last selection of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 as we close out on the traditional celebration of Epiphany, the last of the twelve days of Christmas. Most people have long since returned to work and the routine of their daily schedule, but focusing on these twelve days has always been my way to enjoy the Christmas holiday just a little bit longer each year.

For this last selection of my Twelve Most Wanted, I decided to close out the year with the wife of the previous month's selection. I'll be focusing on researching Franciszek Jankowski in November, so in the following month, we'll step over to research his wife, Franciszka Olejniczak. Each of these two ancestors were among my father's eight Polish great-grandparents.

Not that my father had known any of his great-grandparents. Although he did know their daughter Marianna, who was my father's maternal grandmother, as an immigrant to New York City, she most likely didn't speak much English. I do have one photo of the family, which I suspect included Marianna, but that family's decision to keep mum about their roots has hampered my generation's ability to truly know about the family's past.

Marianna's mother, Franciszka, was a woman she never saw again after her departure for a strange New World. That last moment together happened early in 1889. 

That was only the first of goodbyes. In 1907, Franciszka's second daughter left for New York, as well, taking a second set of grandchildren with her. As far as I can tell, a third daughter remained in Poland, marrying and raising a large family—if, that is, those children survived the harsh conditions that seemed to claim the life of so many children in that rural area of the country.

Hopefully, in exploring Franciszka's story, we'll discover what became of that third daughter and her family. In addition, thanks to the marriage record I had mentioned yesterday, we have a head start in learning the names of Franciszka's parents, allowing us the possibility of learning more about Franciszka's own siblings and their collateral lines. Of course, if we can push back another generation before that point, it will certainly be an added bonus for this last of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026—but we'll have to wait until December to find out how much we can learn about Franciszka Olejniczak this time around.

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. 

Letting Doubts Give Way to Documents

I've always had my doubts about Thomas. Of all the Hilscher children, Thomas the immigrant seemed out to give me grief in researching his whereabouts. Yes, I eventually could locate a record of his death in New York City, confirming an anglicized version of his parents' names, but I couldn't quite sketch out much more of his life story—until, that is, I took the detour of exploring the story of what I presumed was an unrelated Polish immigrant to New York City.

That immigrant, as we've since seen, was Stanislaus Samolewski. Despite having a surname given to snares of misspelling, Stanislaus was still someone whose life trajectory I could follow. And in following his path from Żerków, Prussia, to a new life in America, I somehow also learned a few things about Thomas Hilscher.

Among the few details I had already found about Thomas Hilscher, I had managed to locate a passenger record. Traveling across the Atlantic with several family members, Thomas had arrived in New York City aboard the steamship Amerika on April 7, 1912. Among the passengers listed on that page were Stanislawa, Thomas' wife, and four children ranging in age from fourteen years down to ten months.

For two of the children, a different surname had been entered, then smudged out. A flip of the page on this record showed more information on the continuation page: that the relationship between those two teenagers and Thomas indicated he was their stepfather. 

There was more to be found amidst the scrawled handwriting on those two pages of the passenger listing. In the brackets surrounding this family grouping, an encouraging note I found on the first page was that Thomas indicated his father's name. I'm sure my sign of relief was audible when I spotted the name Peter Hilscher, followed by the note that this father was from Żerków, despite the written claims of the family being from Germany, not Poland.

On the reverse of that passenger listing, however, were more details that could help me in piecing together the extended Hilscher family. For one thing, I learned that Thomas—although not anyone else in his party—had lived in the United States previously. In fact, he had been to New York twice: once in 1887, and again in 1893. At both times, he had traveled to Brooklyn, the part of New York City to which he was returning.

That second page also provided the information that the two older boys in his party were not his own children, but step-sons.

Most important, though, was the answer to the question concerning whether Thomas was "going to join a relative or friend" and, if so, what that person's name and address was. This was the family history gold for my quest to piece together the connection to my DNA matches: Thomas' answer was Stanislaus "Samolowski," noted in that passenger record to be his brother-in-law from 187 Bayard Place in Brooklyn.

In fact, something I only realized when I researched Stanislaus Samolewski's own records: Thomas Hilscher's brother-in-law was also returning home to Brooklyn on that same vessel. His own entry on the passenger list showed that he, too, had been to the United States before; in fact, by 1912, Stanislaus, traveling with his wife Antonina and two daughters on the Amerika, was returning to Brooklyn as a naturalized citizen.

Thanks to the lead provided by the scantily-documented family trees retrieved from several DNA matches,  a stranger from the past with a Polish surname led me not only to more details concerning his own family history, but secured a connection to a family I was researching. Until I spotted those DNA clues, I hadn't been able to document the connection between the two Hilscher siblings, Thomas and his sister Antonina, by 1912 the wife of Stanislaus Samolewski. That discovery was enough impetus to lead me back to the rest of the ThruLines lists to seek out more Hilscher—and, ultimately, Gramlewicz—connections.

The Long Slide Down to the Present

 

Disappearing relatives from the meager collection of digitized or transcribed records from 1800s Prussia all become the brick walls I wonder about. Did those children find an untimely death due to rampant infection or the ravages of wars? Or did they successfully make it to adulthood, marry, and raise families of their own, still living in Poland—but beyond the time frame of Polish records I can access online? Finding the rest of their stories in immigrant records in the United States refreshes my energy, and with discoveries like that,  only then can we move on to trace their line through subsequent generations.

Now that I've connected Antonina Hilscher, a descendant of a collateral line related to my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz, to her married identity in New York City, it's time to begin that long slide down the family tree to the present generation, adding and documenting each descendant in the family line. Why? I'm on the hunt to discover possible DNA cousins who can confirm my genetic connection to this collateral Gramlewicz line.

There's a reason I'm keen on finding such DNA matches. You see, Elżbieta's birth and parentage have caused me grief when it comes to documentation. I've had some hints that she was sister to Katarzyna Gramlewicz, but I haven't been satisfied with any solid record sources. Knowing that Katarzyna married Wincenty Cichocki and became the mother of several children, including daughter Agnieszka (Agnes in Latin church records), brightens the path leading me to this newfound connection with DNA matches descended from Stanislaus Samolewski.

You see, Agnieszka married Piotr Hilscher, and the path between those Samolewski DNA matches and I now becomes much clearer. Their daughter Antonina stands out as a bright Exhibit A, but that is not the only Hilscher child who migrated to America. There was one other child, named Thomas, who also opted to move to New York City. And following Thomas' own name through several documents led me to some handwritten notes scrawled on the back of passenger records which, had I not looked at the actual documents—and then flipped the page to look at the reverse side—I would have missed. 

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at that genealogical gold that gilded this story of the Gramlewicz DNA connections. 

Antonina's Identity

 

Unraveling a family history mystery seldom takes a direct path; we may follow a wandering trail before we can even pick up the scent of a possible lead. In following the DNA hint of several descendants of Polish immigrant Stanislaus Samolewski to his adopted home in New York City, it turns out the connection to my DNA cousins might not be from him, after all, but from his wife.

Who this wife was, I couldn't tell at first. It was time to determine her true identity. Several signs pointed to someone named Antoinette, and other reports claimed her maiden name was one of those classical—and lengthy—Polish surnames. The main problem was that this Antoinette's profile was not fitting my family tree parameters at all. How, then, did we connect?

Fortunately, researching Stanislaus more closely despite realizing he wasn't the connecting link to my DNA matches helped uncover some useful clues. For some of them, though, I had to wander through records of a subsequent generation, and take care to read both the front and the back of pages of records scrawled in illegible handwriting. Such is the genealogical life, as we all have experienced.

If one of the first of those documents I had examined had been Stanislaus' own death certificate, it would have saved me some steps. Of course, having two different spellings for his surname meant looking for both name variants, plaguing me with concerns that I might be following the trail of an unrelated name twin. After all, New York City's population was big enough to guarantee a high probability of running into that snare.

Adding to the confusion, a passenger record seemed to indicate the "Samolowski" family's arrival in New York in 1912—until a closer look revealed this was not their first journey to America. That reassured me that finding a "Somelesky" family in the 1905 New York State census might not be far off from the family I was seeking, especially since daughter Zofia (or Sophia) showed in both records.

Besides mention of that daughter, I was still left with the variants of Stanislaus' wife: Antonia or Antoinette in census records, yet Antonina in the passenger record. Such an inconsistency as that continued through the other records I had found as I traced all signs of Stanislaus' existence in his new home. That's why finding the actual digitized version of his death record helped.

Just as much as Stanislaus' wife's name varied, reports of her maiden name presented the same puzzle. At the bottom of a page in the New York State Death Index, I found the entry for Antonina Samolewski's own passing: April 1, 1956—though following that discovery with the search for her obituary brought me once again to that alternate identity of Antoinette Samolewski.

That April 6 obituary in the Brooklyn Greenpoint Weekly Star, headlined "A. Samolewski," thankfully spelled out her name. Despite a deceptive start in that article with her name listed as "Antoinette," the obituary provided her maiden name. This was the key: Antonina, born in Poland, was a Hilscher.

Just to be sure, I located a second confirmation in a transcription of the Social Security Applications and Claims Index for one of the Samolewskis' daughters. For daughter Josephine Annette, born apparently just after her parents returned to New York from a trip back to Poland, her record provided the maiden name of her mother as Hilsher.

Discovering the name was Antonina Hilscher was good news. I already had a name like that in my own family tree. It was time to take a closer look and see if I could find records on the other side of this story to confirm her whereabouts back in Poland.

  

 

Seeking Signs of Sam

When several DNA matches serve up a sign that we might be connected through an ancestor named Samolowski, I'm game to chase that clue. After all, as DNA cousins go, the several I found through Ancestry's ThruLines listing for my second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz didn't provide me much more information in their abbreviated family trees than that one Polish surname, Samolowski. If I wanted to learn more, I'd have to become my own sleuth.

I spent some time looking for documents in New York City, where this Polish immigrant apparently settled, and discovered a few promising signs. First was the helpful revelation that his name might actually be Stanislaus Samolewski, not Samolowski. Perhaps owing to transcriptions of sloppy handwriting, the incorrect lead was understandable, but searching for the correct spelling might be more effective than chasing a wrong lead. I was glad to have that updated input.

Locating mention of a likely death certificate in an index provided by Ancestry.com, I noted the certificate number, then turned to the New York City Municipal Archives website to enter that number in my search for the actual document for "Stanislaw" Samolewski's 1941 death. From that point, I gleaned the names of Stanislaus' parents.

The death certificate noted those names to be William and Josephine. No maiden name was given for Stanislaus' mother. And it was a sure bet that, given he was born in Poland, his father's given name wouldn't exactly be William.

If Stanislaus was the likely candidate to connect me with those several DNA matches, what was the chance that he came from the same place as my second great-grandmother? I decided to try my luck at searching through the Samolewski baptismal records at the Catholic Church my ancestors attended in Żerków. After all, I had been searching through that record set for my Gramlewicz collateral lines, and already had the link saved; all I had to do was change the surname in the search parameters and I'd be on a roll.

Sure enough, there were plenty of entries for members of the Samolewski family there. From the baptismal records, I spotted children of a couple whose names—in Latin, of course, since they were in church records—were entered as Guilhelmus and Josepha.

I'd buy that Guilhelmus as Latin for the William in an American death certificate, and maybe we could slide by with Josepha instead of Josephine. Added bonus: the records provided Josepha's maiden name as Sierseniewska, or sometimes Sierszeniewska. The down side was that none of the documented children of this couple was named Stanislaus.

Granted, this could still be the right couple, but that one child could have been baptized elsewhere—perhaps a firstborn who was returned to his mother's home church for the honors in the presence of his maternal grandparents.

I had been expecting to see that mother's maiden name as one from my own direct family line. Scratch that hope—but I did think of one more possibility: Stanislaus' own wife's maiden name. The trouble was, I couldn't be sure of even that. In many of the entries I found online for a man named Stanislaus Samolewski, the wife's maiden name was given as another very long, Polish-sounding surname. But going back to his own death record, his wife's name—indeed, the informant on his death certificate—was listed as Antonina, not the "Antoinette" I had seen in other records. 

Perhaps, I figured, my DNA connections could have come through Antonina's own line, since Stanislaus' mother's maiden name didn't seem a likely connection. My next goal was to determine Antonina's own identity. The search was now on for her own maiden name.

Finding Friends and Neighbors

 

Who would have thought that a puny segment of DNA could connect me with a very distant cousin whose ancestor lived, coincidentally, in the same village as my ancestors in Poland, six thousand miles away from my home. How we connect, I don't yet know. It's only a matter of thirty one centiMorgans binding us together in the family tree. How else we connect, I have no idea. Yet.

Face it: anyone living in that ancestral home of Żerków, a small Polish town where my Gramlewicz family lived, with a population in the 1800s of less than two thousand people, had a good possibility of being a relative. Distant, but some sort of family. Considering the closeness of those living in such a town, if I couldn't pinpoint the exact relationship, there would be a high likelihood that such a match's ancestor and mine would at least be friends or neighbors—and, as small villages sometimes go, eventually become family. It would just be a matter of figuring out how far back the connection happened—and if there were any records still in existence to confirm the link.

I found this DNA match while using the same approach I had mentioned yesterday. I started with the Clusters function and the ThruLines listings at Ancestry.com for my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, then examined the Shared Matches listed by Ancestry's ProTools, looking for other DNA matches who mutually connected me with those Gramlewicz descendants.

After those first four successes yesterday, I branched out to a more distant connection to my roots, whose name sounded far more American than Polish. For this iteration, the Shared Matches contained a vastly different set of names than I had seen with the last four I had processed. Other than one third cousin among these matches whom I had placed in my tree years ago, and one new one I had entered after yesterday's efforts, all the Shared Matches for this latest discovery were new names to me.

The fascinating detail about this match with the very American-sounding name was that several of the Shared Matches contained one or another form of the name "Sam" in their own moniker. I picked one of those "Sam" matches and repeated my process, looking at this next match's closest DNA relatives. I continued until I found enough details on a potential ancestral link to move to the next step of researching documents for more details.

The whole process led me to a man named Stanislaus Samolowski, an immigrant from Poland to New York City. Sailing from Hamburg with his wife and two daughters, the family arrived on the aptly-named ship Amerika in 1912. 

My next question, of course, was whether this man or his wife were related to my Gramlewicz family back in Żerków, that tiny town in Poland which a branch of my paternal family once called home. I did a cursory peek, enough to tell me that further research was warranted, so we'll take a closer look at the possibilities tomorrow. At this point, all I know is that the Samolowskis and Gramlewiczes were at least neighbors, possibly even friends in that same Polish town. If we go back far enough in a place that tiny, they might possibly turn out to be family, after all.

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.

There's Always Time for a Detour

 

Just blame that beguiling email notice from Ancestry.com. It's almost like they said, "Pssssst! Here's a hint about your brick wall ancestor." Only in this case, it was a message telling me that they found a hint about my own mother—quite a detour from the person I've been planning to research this month.

Well, what's there to learn about one's own mom, right? You think you know everything about the parents you grew up with. But no, this message was too beguiling. I clicked through to discover my mother's entry in the New York City Voter Registers from the years when the high school graduate had arrived fresh from Ohio to seek her fortune in the Big Apple. 

I knew about her dreams, after attending acting school, to break into stardom somehow—stage, radio, movies. I knew about the various venues where she had worked. But cashier at a shop at Rockefeller Center? That entry in the official record wasn't in the plans she had recited to me. Perhaps when she registered to vote, she had run into a dry spell. Everyone has to make a living somehow.

While it was fun to see which party was named in her voter registration, or map out the route from her apartment on Lexington Avenue to her job at Rockefeller Center, the bigger gift of receiving that emailed hint from Ancestry was knowing that I now had access to the actual digitized registers, not just a transcription of key fields skimmed off the pages. Since this month's focus is on one branch of my Polish ancestors, I could now search through that same record set for the entries of all my other New York relatives, both direct ancestors and all their collateral lines from 1915 through 1958. A lot of work, to be sure, but what a treat for my researching curiosity.

While this record set is a new discovery for me, the treat is in the full access to the record, versus being begrudgingly satisfied with the mere transcription. Exploring the full record set allows me to satisfy my need to be nosy about my ancestors, to suck out the marrow of their daily lives' minutiae to somehow build a clearer picture of what was important to them in their day's routine.

New York has always been a difficult place for me to research, mostly on account of the long-time inaccessibility of their records. Both New York State and the city itself have been a problem for many other researchers, as well. I've got plenty of company when, for instance, I once again have an opportunity to cheer the Freedom of Information Act victories at Reclaim the Records, such as the searchable New York State Death Index, now available free online.

Every new addition accessible for free online is a plus for all of us. In this case, a little detour through the records of New York State now available online is a personal treat for me, even though it is a detour from my research plans for this month. Even though my research is now generations removed from that point, there's always time to go back and add more details to the profiles I've long since created for the closest of my near relatives.

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.

Not Exhausted Yet

 

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

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

So far.

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

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

Proving Rose is Rose

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Documenting Anna and her Daughter

 

Now, as I'm turning back to create a timeline of name changes for both Anastasia Zegarska and her daughter Rosalia, I'm reminded of how thankful I am to be able to access online versions of such documents. The fact that I can, despite being on a business trip far from home this past week, pull up virtual copies of hundred-year-old records from New York City for both Anna and her daughter is all thanks to the efforts of one nonprofit organization called Reclaim the Records.

If you have been following their ten-plus year saga—yes, Reclaim the Records received some of the first fruits of their labor from the city almost exactly ten years ago, on October 14, 2015—you know there have been several updates, as well as setbacks. But eventually, they won.

And so did we: with several ways to access government records concerning our ancestors living in New York City.

The other day, in my new ongoing collaboration with another Zegarski researcher, I noticed this cousin mention accessing these historical vital records via a New York City website. Sure enough, I could jump right on that latest research goal to harvest the details from the digital copies of marriage and death records for my New York City ancestors. Sure, I could wait until I got home and pull out the paper copies I had paid for—but this is now, and I didn't want to wait to start the review. Patience, apparently, is no longer a virtue for an online research project.

With that, I'm beginning to construct that name-change timeline for both Anastasia and Rosalia—or, as they were known in New York, Anna and Rose. And all the while, I'm appreciating some intrepid attorneys back in the Big Apple who wouldn't take "No!" for an answer.