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.

Weaving the Strands Just a Bit Longer

 

What do you do when you can't reach back far enough in the DNA cousin's pedigree to confirm the genetic connection? In one case I've been tackling for the past couple months, it appears this DNA match connects through an immigrant descendant of my Olejniczak ancestors in Poland. This is one of those DNA problems that may require following an assumption just to reach any verification. Thus, I'm weaving the strands of this family line forward in time, in hopes of discovering the connection.

The potential DNA cousin is supposedly a descendant of Jan Olejniczak, born in Michałówo, a tiny village near Żerków where he was baptized in June of 1869. His father Bartłomiej was brother of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, wife of Franz Jankowski. Jan—or Joannes, as he was baptized—eventually disappeared from the region in Prussia where he had grown up. Could he have emigrated? Was this Polish immigrant in the United States named John Olejniczak one and the same as Jan?

To determine the answer, I've started by accepting the assumption that Jan or Joannes were one and the same as this American immigrant. From that point, I've been working my way through Jan's American descendants, bit by bit. There are, of course, many questions still unanswered, but to know just what I'm working with, I need to have a documented tree.

So far, I've worked a few lines of this possible Jan Olejniczak down to the level of fourth cousin once removed. The strategy is to build out that line of descent to see whether I can find any other DNA matches connecting to this strand. So far, I've picked up a few more DNA matches whose trees include Olejniczak surnames, but none of those family lines seem to connect with my Jan.

Some research questions take time to weave together the strands. This line of descent seems to be one of them. Jan—or John Olenzak, as he eventually was called in Ohio—had several children, some of whom had children and grandchildren. While I can always be hopeful and say from progress that this looks like a possible connection, I'm still far from finished. Questions still lurk in the outer reaches of this wandering adventurer's journey, and this exercise will take far more time to complete—and even then, the conclusion may be that I've followed the wrong name twin's line.

But at least I'm still working on it. 

Tackling an Old Problem

 

Old research problems can be tantalizing and simultaneously frustrating. I thought I'd spend the weekend jumping back to tackle a DNA match's Olejniczak roots from my research project last month. By now, I had reconciled myself to the thought that DNA doesn't lie—and that Polish immigrants to America had good reasons to do their best to blend into the English-speaking background.

Thus, my question: was John Olenzak really the Johan Olejniczak who once had been baptized as Joannes Olejniczak, nephew of my second great-grandmother? Think again if you presumed this would be an easy project. The process of discovering that the Polish Jan Olejniczak was born on the same day as John Olenzak was not that difficult, but moving further into his family constellation introduced more problems.

For one thing, Johan's naturalization record—of which I only could find a transcription—indicated his arrival in New York City in 1905. Yet a passenger listing for a wife, two sons, a daughter, and two unmarried sisters-in-law showed an arrival in 1906. Obviously, Johan could have traveled ahead—his address at the time was given as the town of Neffs in Belmont County, Ohio. But the sticky part was that the names of these family members traveling to join Johan did not match up with later census records for the family, 

Traveling on the Zeeland from Antwerp were Stanislawa Olejniczak and her children Marjan, Stefania, and Stanislaw, plus Wladyslawa and Josefa Pruchniewicz. The problem is that the earliest census where I can find John's family in Ohio includes a son and two daughters—quite backwards from the passenger listing—and a wife names Pelagia, not Stanislawa as had been entered on the passenger list.

Now what? This is apparently not going to be the slam-dunk weekend project I had envisioned. Jan Olejniczak and his immigrant family will have to travel back to the genealogical drawing board with me and await yet another weekend before we can find any answers.

On a Lark, a Wide Open Search

 

After attending to the uploading of several additional Polish ancestors to my various family trees online, on a lark, I tried my hand at a wide open search of the research location which kept my focus for the entire month of October, and is set to be my continued focus in November. I opened up the search engine at Google and entered the term, "Żerków." After all, that is the Catholic parish where many of my paternal grandmother's family records were found, and the seat of an administrative district by the same name. I was curious to see what else might be out there, online, and of possible use, so I conducted a general search.

Granted, the town of Żerków has barely more than two thousand residents right now, so I doubted there'd be much to find online of genealogical use. One resource I wanted to check for sure was the FamilySearch Wiki. I wasn't sure whether there would even be a page devoted to Żerków as a subject—and there wasn't, specifically. But there were some useful finds.

For one thing, doing a Google search of the overall FamilySearch.org website yielded two entries. The first was a catalog entry for the microfilms of Lutheran and Catholic church records for Prussia dating from 1430 through 1998, with many of the films available for viewing online. The second discovery was an inventory of those church records, sorting out the data by locality, district, and church organization, all laid out in a table format alphabetized by locality—with, of course, a long way to scroll to reach the bottom and the entry for Żerków.

There were other results for Żerków found through my experiment with Google. Since I've already written about this location in prior blog posts, it was not unexpected to see those articles show up in Google, too—but an appearance on that Google list by fellow geneablogger, Julie Roberts Szczecinkiewicz, was a pleasant surprise to see. I was already aware that Julie has blogged about her Polish roots, but I hadn't noticed this particular post mentioning Żerków, specifically.

Since adding this expanding branch of my family to my trees posted at several other sites has been a goal, it was good to notice that results for my Żerków search included an information page at WikiTree including subcategories of Prussian villages in the area, as well as an alphabetical listing of all those individuals in the universal WikiTree from Żerków. While I see no relatives on that list other than those I had added, myself, that is a list I'll come back to over time, in hopes of discovering others researching this same line.

While in November, I'll move on from researching that Olejniczak line to that of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski, we'll still be relying on records from the same general vicinity around Żerków. I'm looking forward to seeing how many additional records I'll be able to find on the Laskowski side, now that I've found the archival link to transcribed records at my new favorite go-to Polish website, BaSIA.   

The Unfinished Work Behind, the New Challenges Ahead

 

Despite a tidy research plan—my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors, one designated for each month of the year—the end of one month often leaves me in this same difficult position: with a pile of unfinished work I'm about to leave behind as I step into the new month's puzzle. With the start of November, I say goodbye to the family of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, and greet the incoming research puzzle embodied in the story of a different second great-grandparent, Mateusz Laskowski.

Franziska and Mateusz were related only by marriage, as Franziska's daughter Marianna Jankowska married Mateusz's son Antoni Laskowski. Perhaps Franziska and Mateusz knew of each other from associations through their church parish in the Polish town of Żerków, though Mateusz was already a teenager by the time Franziska was born.

With this new month, while we'll hopefully learn more of the details of the Laskowski side of my family, I can't just set aside the unfinished business on the Olejniczak family. After all, I just settled it in my mind that Franziska's nephew Jan Olejniczak may well be the Polish immigrant who settled in Ohio, and came to be known in his adopted country as John Olenzak. With a DNA match to guide me, I will be building a family tree behind the scenes as I continue the search for records to illuminate the possibility of this family match. With lots of work on that project, I may be sharing news of progress occasionally, before we close out the year of 2024.

Next week, we'll review what I've already gleaned on Mateusz Laskowski and his immediate family. As we've already seen from our exploration of the Olejniczak line last month, there are many more resources online now for finding Polish documents to confirm names, dates, and family relationships for these immigrants from Żerków, Poland. Piecing these together, we'll see whether we can push back the brick wall another generation or two before the month of November comes to a close.

Finding the Stop Between "Here" and "There"

 

It would be so handy in tracing the path of immigrant ancestors if they were careful to leave their homeland and go straight to their new home in that foreign land. In the case of Jan Olejniczak, however, there was this stopping place in between arriving here in the United States from his birthplace in Poland. And I couldn't locate that stopping point to even begin searching for records.

Thanks to discovery of a DNA match who descends from the man who might have been my family's relative Jan Olejniczak, I've been searching through records after his arrival in the United States. In the 1920 census, it was clear that before he arrived in the United States, Jan—his name now anglicized to read John—had not only married but become the proud parent of three children who were born in Germany: Kazmier, Louise, and Lottie. It took quite a bit of examining records of those three Olejniczak children to determine just where in Germany they might have been born. Eventually, the answer surfaced: a town called Reklinghausen.

Easy, I thought: I'll just look up the town in the online, searchable Meyers Gazetteer.

Not so fast, it turned out. "No results" was the answer to my query. I attempted the "sounds like" option, and got several results. Those, however, reminded me of my failed attempts at determining exactly which of multiple Polish towns with the same name might be the right location. So I tried a different approach.

While the original document I had viewed for the origin of Jan's children had spelled the German location as Reklinghausen, an online search yielded a Wikipedia article for the similar spelling of Recklinghausen.

In addition to discovering that the town had been the site of over one hundred witchcraft trials, I learned that it was part of the Ruhr area of western Germany, known for its coal mining activities. Chasing other resources, I gleaned some possible reasons why a Polish young man like Jan Olejniczak might have migrated to that far side of Germany: to get a job in the mines. In fact, Jan would have been in good company there. There was even a German term for those who came from Poland in that influx of Polish immigrants to work the mines in Recklinghausen: Ruhrpolen.

The migration of Polish workers occurred mainly in the 1870s. The significant fact was that most came from the same region where Jan was born. Yet Jan himself would barely have been an infant at that time. Presumably when he did make the move, he would have found a thriving Polish community of his former neighbors and associates when he arrived.

Still to be found, however, are any records of the birth of those three children of Jan and his wife, Pelagia. Nor have I been able to find a marriage record for the couple. The long tasks ahead also include locating passenger lists with the family's names, presumably in a predictable grouping. While I'll be searching to  find more of such genealogical tokens, in the meantime, I'll be tentatively adding this possible branch of the Olejniczak family into my own tree—and reaching out to connect with the DNA match who led me to this clue.

From Jan to Johan to John: Let's Assume

 

Earlier this month, I had taken a peek at my only DNA match sharing the ancestral surname Olejniczak from the brother of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak. This cousin match, although distant at an estimated third cousin once removed, claimed as his direct ancestor someone named John Olejniczak. That John, born in 1869, had supposedly emigrated from Poland and ended up in the United States in the unlikely location of Harrison County, Ohio.

When he first showed up in American records, he had reported his name as Johan. Indeed, the three eldest of his children actually were born in Germany, according to the 1920 census, so perhaps he had come to this country by way of Germany, even if he had been born in Poland, where friends and neighbors would have been more likely to have called him Jan.

Of course, on my end, I am thinking about the son of Franziska's brother Bartholomaeus, whom he named Jan—or, as the Latin version of church baptismal records would put it, Joannes Olejniczak.

The difficulty in trying, from my end of the research puzzle in late 1800s Poland, to document my way forward in time from that baptismal record is far greater than retracing this DNA match's steps from his own parents back to his connection with his Olejniczak roots. Though his public tree posted online is supported with few records, let's assume that while this may seem like a doubtful jaunt down a rabbit trail, it may become a worthwhile chase, and begin the hunt.

It takes several steps to follow the documents to see that the name our immigrant of interest used at the point of his death in 1963—John Olenzak—still represented the man who for his naturalization records had reported his name as Johan Olejniczak. Yet the final reporting of his date of birth—June 8, 1869—lines up perfectly with our Joannes Olejniczak's baptismal record. And while a Belmont, Ohio, transcription of Johan's citizenship records indicated his place of birth in Poland was called Michałowo—a place which in today's maps looks to be on the other side of the country, certainly too far away for his family to get to Żerków for his baptism two days after birth—a quick consulting of the map at Meyer's Gazetteer shows us a likely village within walking distance of the church parish. And eases my mind that we are talking about the right person and the right place.

Next step: to build a tentative tree to test the connection between the Olejniczak lines.

Image above: Inset from map of Żerków showing Michałowo toward the top left side; image courtesy Meyers Gazetteer entry for Żerków (click tab labeled "map" on website for full image).

Back to the Question at the Beginning

 

I'm watching October run quickly through its last few days, which reminds me that I still haven't answered a question I stumbled over at the beginning of this month. In probing to see if I could learn anything more about the roots of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, were there any of her siblings or cousins who also left Poland for a New World?

Since the only sibling I could find was her brother Bartłomiej, dutifully recorded in Latin in church documents as Bartholomaeus, I looked at each of his children that I could find through online resources. Despite finding records for six children—and quite a few grandchildren who survived to adulthood—none seemed to have left the country for brighter prospects abroad.

Except for one.

That one left only a Catholic baptismal record under the Latin version of his name—Joannes for Jan—back in his hometown of Żerków. And then?

Best I could tell, it seemed as if Jan Olejniczak had disappeared. True, so many of the other descendants of my Olejniczak line seemed to disappear from available digitized records sources, too, so I can't put too much stock in noticing that absence.

There was, however, another tantalizing hint: a DNA match with someone whose roots included a surname which morphed from Olejniczak to Oleyniczak to, eventually, Olenzak. The immigrant's given name? John.

The DNA connection was a mere sliver of a segment—far too small to take seriously—but linked us to yet another DNA match on that side of my family who was far more closely connected.

Could this DNA match's ancestor have been the missing Jan Olejniczak, son of Bartholomeus—or Bartłomiej—my second great-grandmother's brother? It certainly will be worth a try to rebuild this match's tree in these last few days of the month, before we move on to another of my father's ancestors for November. There certainly is a gap in this potential immigrant's journey calling for further explanation.

With a Little Help From Some "Friends"

 

One good point about posting a family tree in more than one public place is that some genealogy resources come with "friends" who provide additional help.

I'm often amused, after posting yet another Polish name on my tree at MyHeritage, to receive their almost breathless announcement that they have found that same ancestor listed on another family tree. "Hurry, come look and see if this is your relative," the email bids me—and I look, only to discover the amazing discovery is no more than a report that, yep, it was I who just posted that ancestor to one of my several trees.

In this case, however, that wasn't so. Having clicked through the provided link to examine the discovery, I realized what might have triggered the issue. Researching my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak's extended family, I had been using documents retrieved from church records, not civil records. Those church records having been drawn up in Latin, not the native language, had yielded an entry for Franziska's daughter-in-law, Catharina Orszulak—but the bride's actual given name, at least for my Polish forebears, would have been Katarzyna. 

What I had no way of knowing was that while her 1863 marriage record in Żerków was entered in Latin, her 1845 baptismal record from that same parish provided the Polish version of her given name.

That baptism occurred exactly one hundred seventy nine years ago today, a serendipitous observation that was not lost upon me. Still, the near-miss of it all gives me pause to reflect: what else do we miss by not trying more than one way to search for an answer?

Thankfully, the AI assist churning away in the background, courtesy of my account at MyHeritage, spotted the possible discrepancy and reported the connection to me anyhow, despite differing versions of the given name. That AI notification led me to someone else's tree at FamilySearch.org, and the opportunity to consider the source document for myself.

Still, there are other challenges, one of which I've already encountered in tracing these Polish roots: the fact that so many villages are identified by the same name. Take Katarzina's marriage record, for instance, which identifies her as being from Michałów. Great—but which one? According to Wikipedia, there are more than thirty places claiming that same name. I had to pull up a map program to explore the possibilities and find which town by that name would qualify as the closest Michałów to the church in Żerków where Katarzyna had married Bartholomeus Olejniczak—and where she was likely born.

It was thanks to the assist of some AI "friends" that my attention was directed to a document which I might otherwise have overlooked. I expect there may be many more such fortunate discoveries over the years as I tackle these Polish records. After all, a machine which never tires of reviewing documents—perhaps even around the clock—can certainly multiply the effort of us mere mortals who must take some rest from time to time. I certainly appreciate the help. 

Putting On the Brakes

 

There is nothing that can put the brakes on genealogical progress like entering into hitherto unexplored regions. For me, that unexplored region—still!—is Poland. There is so much yet to discover.

No surprise, then, that taking stock of my progress in the past two weeks showed a less vibrant count than I've seen when documenting, say, my roots reaching farther back in America's history than the starting date of this country's establishment. Yes, "Poland" (or its previous iterations throughout history) has been around for far more centuries than the United States, but finding the records for all the people living there is much more of a challenge.

So, how did I do, having shifted my research course this month to chase my father's Polish heritage? While I now have 38,526 documented individuals in my family tree, only sixty nine of them were added to that list in the past two weeks. Between jumping from website to website, trying to patch the record gaps in available digitized documents, then adding that information to four separate trees online, progress has been far slower than in the past.

Still, I feel good about what's been done this month. For one thing, realizing that sharing is part of the challenge—hey, I'm all for "cousin bait"—I want to put those names of newfound ancestors out there where others can find them, too. Who knows? Maybe my second great-grandmother was your second great-grandmother, too. Now, I can point the way to a little-known website which provides scans of the records we both are seeking.

Not that I haven't given up on my in-laws' tree. Even though we made the shift from my father-in-law's Irish roots at the beginning of October, I still had some research business to wrap up on his lines, plus some details on my mother-in-law's family that I stumbled upon this past week. For my in-laws' tree, just ten more names were added and documented, but no matter how small the increase, every one represents a research victory I'm glad to celebrate. My in-laws' tree now includes records for 36,853 ancestors and collateral lines. Maybe some of them are distant cousins of yours, too.

In less than a week, we'll move into another month, and the chance to research another branch of my Polish ancestry. Progress will undoubtedly be just as slow as it's been this month, but I count this as yet another opportunity to become a trailblazer, in hopes a cousin here—or somewhere else around the world—will realize our connection. 

An Unheralded Star

 

Some changes arrive with much fanfare. Others slip in, almost unnoticed. The star I spotted today was one of those latter unheralded entries.

While working on my Twelve Most Wanted project for this month—finding more documentation on my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak—behind the scenes, I've also been updating all the records linked to each of her descendants. Working my way down the line of descent from her daughter Marianna, I suddenly realized there was this little star next to Marianna's name.

That's funny, I thought. I hadn't noticed that before. I certainly didn't put it there. Hovering my cursor over the star, I noticed the words pop up, "Prioritize this person."

Not wanting to find myself in the position of Alice in Wonderland, staring at the little cake labeled "eat me," I was disinclined to click on that recently-appearing star. I did a search to see whether Ancestry.com had recently posted any announcements about that change on their blog. 

Nothing. 

I poked around my own tree and realized that if I clicked on the icon for adding labels—a change at Ancestry which has been around for a while now—among the many choices for "My Tree Tags" was a group called "Research Status Tags." And—you guessed it—within that cluster was a choice labeled "Prioritized Person."

It took a bit more exploration before I could find an additional explanation. Still, that announcement arrived almost accidentally as I continued my work on those Olejniczak descendants. A pop-up window advised, "Prioritize up to ten people in your tree that you're most interested in learning about." I can't even recall how I first spotted that notice, but suddenly, there it was.

After mentioning that the ancestor so marked will display a star icon, the explanation continued, "We'll put special focus on finding hints about them." The entry concluded with a "Got it" button at the bottom of the window.

Special focus on finding more hints? I'm game to see what will happen. However, I already know that Ancestry.com's collection is rather sparse when it comes to Polish records for the region and time period specific to my own ancestors. Granted, with the changing boundaries—and languages—of that geographic area, I'm facing even more challenges, but if a simple star next to Franziska Olejniczak's name can lead me to more information, I'll eagerly look forward to seeing it.

Just Where is That Place, Anyhow?

 

Genealogy can sometimes become a strange mix of mysteries and the mundane. Now that I've found a resource—the Polish website BaSIA—from which I can pull up scanned documents to verify births of my Polish ancestors' extended family, I've been working through the descendants of each collateral line of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, and then the collateral lines of my great-grandmother Marianna Jankowska, to add links to each individual's verifying documents. That can be the kind of dull undertaking that makes even the most dedicated genealogist's eyes glaze over.

Predictably, many of those documents confirmed that the extended family lived in Żerków, just like my own direct line ancestors did. Even moving further in time through the generations on those collateral lines, I'd see records confirming that same residence in Żerków, long after my own ancestors had left the country. But then, as I worked through the process with each descendant, I looked closer at the birth records and realized there was another location mentioned in the documents. The problem with that was: the country had more than one town with that same name—many more such towns. Now what? Just where was that place I was seeking, anyhow?

The trouble began when I decided to be too smart for my own good. I realized the documents I was reading were written not in Polish, but in German. Equipped with my trusty Google Translate, I decided to spot check some of those foreign words, like "wóhnhaft."

In case you don't speak German—I don't, so you're in good company—"wóhnhaft" means "resident," as in "resident of ...." In this family's case—say, the record for Cecilia Karcz, daughter of my great-grandmother's sister Antonina—the town in question was called Lisewo.

Great, I thought. I'll just look that up. 

Not so easy, it turns out. According to Wikipedia, there are at least eight different locations in Poland which go by that same name. Many of them, it turns out, are part of another region of Poland, known as Pomerania.

Thankfully, I already know from my paternal grandfather's branch of the family that those Pomeranian locations would not apply to my paternal grandmother's side of the family, so I eliminated most of the list that way. The rest, though, I'd have to sift through by another process of guesswork reasoning.

As it turned out, two of the remaining same-named towns were part of what is known as the Greater Poland Voivodeship, a province which is also known as Wielkopolska. So, my next step was to turn to Google Maps to see which one of those two contenders might be closer to Żerków.

Fortunately, there was one clear winner in that competition, a town located within the right province, in the county called Września. That Lisewo was a mere eleven kilometers east of Żerków, as opposed to the alternate location eighty kilometers away, which in modern terms would have required a drive of over an hour.

Still, there was something which bothered me about accepting these handy explanations. For one thing, those hundred year old documents sometimes spelled the family's residence as Lissowo, rather than Lisewo. Was that the same place? A case of messy handwriting? Or another example of the Germans attempting to wipe all signs of the conquered heritage off their maps?

I tried one more exploration: what would happen if I searched for "Lissowo" rather than "Lisewo"? While the search result which caught my eye is not exactly for the same Lisewo as the one I believe was my family's home—this entry was for a Pomeranian town—the website called Kartenmeister reported some alternate names for a town they catalogued by the German name Lissau. Note the alternative names: Lissowo (dated 1789, but spelled just as the late 1800s documents I found had indicated) and, under the heading, "Polish/Russian name," Lisewo.

Given all that, I'd say I just found the right place for those ancestors to call home.

Don't Discount the Journey

 

When we are deep in the midst of tracking our elusive ancestors and holding fast to each twist and turn in the race to find all the family details, perhaps it is easy to forget to sit back and enjoy the journey. Don't discount that journey. While we may be tempted to label that journey as a slippery slope—or (gasp) even a rabbit trail—we may as well enjoy the trip. After all, we may be back on this trail once again, so learn to recognize the sign posts of the scenery.

It was on the trail of each of the descendants of my third great-grandparents Nikolaus Olejniczak and Josefa Grzegorczyk (try saying that one three times, fast) when I got stuck on one particular relative. Their great-granddaughter Marianna Banaszak had married a man with another tongue-twister name, Kazimierz Szczepański, and I had found not only their 1923 marriage record, but the 1928 death record for their three week old daughter Cecylia.

But then something else popped up. As I scrolled through the listings for Marianna's married surname, looking for entries with more recent dates, listings for Kazimierz started being linked to the name of another woman: Jadwiga Banaszak, not Marianna Banaszak. I wondered if this were the point at which the index had made a shift from church records based in Latin to civil records in the contemporary language. After all, I had seen Marianna's uncle Walenty listed in church records as Valentinus and, of course, Jan showing as Joannes in Latin and Johann in German. Was there a Polish equivalent to Marianna that I didn't know about?

That's when the journey began: taking the detour to learn more about Polish names. The FamilySearch wiki provided more information than I ever thought possible on every aspect of the very different world of Polish names, both given names and surnames—as well as the grammatical effect of the Polish language conventions on Polish names. And if that weren't enough, Wikipedia provided another entry on the topic of Polish names.

Since I had already discovered some of the surprising differences between Latin and Polish versions of given names—like the Latin Adalbertus becoming Wojciech in Polish—I was ready for any such further surprises. But as far as Marianna went, according to the index to the Słownik imion—or Dictionary of Names—Marianna in almost every European language was...Marianna.

So what about Jadwiga? This was the crux of the journey, and a great introduction to Polish history. Apparently a name holding cultural significance—and recent resurgence—in Poland, it calls to mind the first woman to be crowned as monarch of the Kingdom of Poland. In case you don't recall it, that event occurred in 1384, but her name has lived on over the centuries in Poland—a little something I hadn't known until stumbling upon this puzzling entry for a different wife's name for Kazimierz Szczepański.

What I don't yet know is whether there were two men by the same name living in the area surrounding Jarocin, Poland, with one married to Marianna and the other to Jadwiga—or whether that signified the death of Kazimierz's first wife before those entries in 1934 and 1935 containing Jadwiga's name. While I certainly have further to go to catch up with that answer, I can continue to enjoy what I'm discovering while I'm still on the journey.

 

Cracking the Door Open Just a Tiny Bit More

 

Finding documentation for the ten children of Józefa Olejniczak and her husband Michael Banaszak was far more than I had expected for the limited access I have to Polish records of the early 1900s. Each time I return to this project of researching my paternal grandmother's roots, the closed door seems to crack open just a tiny bit more, for which I am thankful.

I'm thankful, particularly, for the additional records being linked to the transcriptions listed at the Polish website BaSIA. Without their help at those websites, there would have been very little available to me in the U.S. to find.

Now that I've found Józefa's family, my next step is to research the newly-found surnames of her married children. Again, another tour of the BaSIA entries, leading to another set of documents and entries in multiple trees, complete with links listed back to the specific archival scans serving as source documentation.

With each of those discoveries made, as well as the ones yet to find, I feel the need to post those names and dates to each place where I am keeping a family tree—not just on my primary tree at Ancestry, but also at FamilySearch, MyHeritage (good connection to international researchers), and WikiTree. It's so important, having discovered a resource, to point the way for others, so I make sure to paste the link to the actual documents on each entry I make in those trees. Since they are all public trees, hopefully someone else will spot these details and follow the trail to the sources I've discovered.

The process isn't quick, and it certainly isn't easy. It's downright tedious, admittedly, but the process is worth the persevering. I think of the possible cousins who might find this helpful—and, if helped, will take the time to at least drop a line and connect.

In genealogy, we are all in this together. While your part of "together" may come from an entirely different part of the world—hey, I grew up being told I was Irish!—you may someday discover you need to know more about this hidden corner of the world, as well. And the places where you are researching your roots may well become the source of help or encouragement for a distant cousin you haven't even met—yet.

Józefa: Moving Beyond the Expected

 

By the time my research arrived at the fourth daughter of Bartholomaeus Olejniczak, I was already primed to not expect much from the few Polish records already available online. For Józefa's older sisters Franziska, Marianna, and Catharina, I had found—for the most part—very little. The baby of the family, however, was different.

Born February 3, 1876, by the time Józefa turned one year of age, her mother had died. By the time she became twenty three, Józefa was married. Her intended, Michael Banaszak, moved his bride from her family's home in Żerków to nearby Jarocin, where the records of births and marriages over the following years moved far beyond the limited dates I had come to expect. Unlike what I observed of the records in Żerków, as I kept stretching the search parameters to later and later dates for this family in Jarocin, the information kept appearing in the readout at BaSIA, the Polish website I've been using to search this branch of my family.

All told, I was able to find records for Józefa and Michael Banaszak in Jarocin dating from the birth of their oldest child, Waclaw, in 1900, all the way to marriage records for their daughters Marianna (to Kazimierz Szczepański in 1923) and Johanna (to Ignacy Frankowiak in 1931). 

Like clockwork at almost one child for every two years, Michael and Józefa welcomed ten Banaszak children into the world. Of course, there were the not-unusual sad spots when they lost their children Czeslaus in 1906 as a three year old, and Wojciech in 1915 as a one year old infant. But looking at the birth year of their youngest daughter Wladislawa, born in 1916, I wondered how much more heartbreak the family was about to face as they endured at least one World War, and possibly two—if they lived long enough to see it.

With these freshly-found discoveries about Józefa Olejniczak, I need to enter the information in my trees at FamilySearch, MyHeritage, and Ancestry, as well as include links back to the actual documents identified by my search through the BaSIA transcriptions. Perhaps those entries will flag even more digitized documents housed at any of the other websites. One can hope. But for now, I'm satisfied to know I've been able to reach beyond the turn of the century and into the 1900s with at least this one branch of the Olejniczak family. Perhaps that will be a close enough hook for a Polish DNA cousin to find me now.

When Everything Gets Translated

 

What do you do when every document involving your ancestors is in a foreign language you don't speak? You use Google Translate, of course.

What else was I supposed to do, when one of the few hints on Ancestry.com that popped up for my Polish family said: 

W Styczniu 1919 R. Wstąpił Jako Ochotnik Do Pleszewskiej Kompanii Powstańczej, Którą Dowodził Ppor. Pamin. Brał Udział W Walkach Pod Kobylą Górą, Czarnymlasem, Mijamnicami I O Miasto Kępno. Po Zawarciu Rozejmu Powrócił Do Domu.

Do you understand that? I didn't think so; neither do I.

The family member in particular was the son-in-law of one of Bartholomaeus Olejniczak's daughters, Franziska, whom we discussed just the other day, so I really wanted to know what those words meant. Finally—and quite unexpectedly—after poking around the details on this collateral line of my second great-grandmother, I had finally broken through the brick wall keeping me from twentieth century information—and I couldn't understand even one word of that information.

The route for the family connection was this: from Bartholomaeus, my second great-grandmother's brother, I examined what could be found on each of his children. We've already discussed how I had no clear leads for either of his sons. Right now, I am in the midst of exploring what can be found on each of his four daughters.

From the eldest daughter—Franziska, possibly named after my second great-grandmother—I found two marriage records. From the first marriage, to Adalbertus Kondoła (or possibly Kondeła), I then found a baptismal record for their daughter Catharina Agnes, which included an added line noting Catharina's subsequent marriage.

When I looked up the name of Catharina's husband, Joannes in church records, I again was treated to more information: that he was the son of Stanislaus Zajdel and a woman whose maiden name was by now quite familiar: Julianna Mikołajczak. I transcribed his parents' names and his date of birth—May 16, 1885—into my trees at Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and MyHeritage.com. 

Then other hints began popping up, finally bringing me into the world of records for the 1900s. Billion Graves gave the date of death for Jan Zajdel as October 26, 1969, with his date of birth in agreement with the record I had found previously. Billion Graves also mentioned that Katarzyna Zajdel died in 1961, and provided a date of birth in harmony with the date I had found for Catharina Kondoła, granddaughter of our Bartholomaeus Olejniczak.

Being careful to enter all this newfound information into each of my trees, I then returned to Jan's entry at Ancestry.com, and discovered another bonus in the hints there. It was the readout in Polish I had printed above. Since I had no idea what any of that passage said, I copied and pasted the entire paragraph into Google Translate, and learned something new about this small branch of my third great-grandparents' line. 

According to the translation, here is what the link at Ancestry was telling me about Jan Zajdel:

In January 1919, he joined the Pleszew Uprising Company as a volunteer, commanded by 2nd Lt. Pamin. He took part in the battles of Kobyla Góra, Czarnylas, Mijamnice and the town of Kępno. After the conclusion of the Armistice, he returned home.

Of course, I had no idea what the Pleszew Uprising Company might have been, so once again, I took my question to Google, and found this entry at Wikipedia, in which this particular uprising was noted to have been one of the two most successful uprisings in the long history of occupied Poland. For this, according to the hint at Ancestry.com, among others, Jan Zajdel became a recipient of the Greater Poland Uprising Cross.

That unexpected foray into one branch of my Polish roots finally brought me as close to present times as I had ever managed to go. While I certainly have a long, long way to go to find the rest of the family's story—let alone any Polish DNA cousins—it is encouraging to have found at least one token of what became of my ancestors' family members who chose to stay behind in Poland.

 

Catharina Makes Connections

 

Bartholomaues Olejniczak's third daughter Catharina—whom I suspect was actually called Katarzyna anywhere other than in Catholic Church records—ended up surprising me with connections by marriage to another member of her family tree. Although I can find some, but not all, Polish records at FamilySearch.org, this discovery came to me, thanks to the links at the Polish genealogy website, BaSIA.

The only reference I could find to Catharina was a mention of her 1897 marriage. Unsurprisingly, that event took place in Żerków, apparently the family's longstanding home in Poland. Her intended, Martin—make that Marcin in Polish—was the son of Marianna Smołka and her husband Stanislaus Mikołajczak.

"Wait a minute," I thought. I've seen that long, consonant-studded surname before. Long and unusual names complete with diacritical marks not part of my American lexicon can catch my eye like that.

Sure enough, I had seen that name before. Mikołajczak turned out to already be a surname figuring in my ever-expanding family tree. In fact, Stanislaus and Marianna Mikołajczak had another child who had married into this same Olejniczak family: their daughter Franziska.

Before you groan over yet another Franziska being added to this family saga, let's pause and consider just how few records I've been able to find on this family through the "usual" means. I'm celebrating every small victory I can find. And this Franziska we had already met when talking about the bride of Catharina's older brother Walenty—or Valentinus.

Thanks to the finding aid at BaSIA, I now have a digital copy of the 1897 marriage record for Catharina Olejniczak and Franziska's brother, Martin Mikołajczak.

What I couldn't find, though, were any records of birth for the couple's children. At this point, that lack could be the result of destroyed records, or records not within the dates of the collection at hand. Or that could mean that the couple moved out of the area, whether to another part of Poland or Europe—or even emigrating to America. Without a more thorough search, at this point I cannot say. But I'll keep looking.

Second Sister Marianna

 

Sometimes, research forays bestow some positive benefits, even after years of struggle. After having had past difficulties finding records verifying the collateral lines of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, it turns out that her brother's daughters have all showed up in now-digitized documents. Yesterday, we discussed Franziska's niece of the same name; today we'll look at the second-oldest of the sisters, Marianna.

In the case of this daughter of Bartholomaeus Olejniczak and his wife Catharina Orszulak, I actually found her name in two records. At her baptism at the Catholic Church in Żerków, Marianna's date of birth was recorded as July 27, 1871—seven years after the arrival of her older sister Franziska.

Almost like clockwork, twenty years later on November 16, 1891, Marianna Olejniczak married Adalbertus Marecki. Though not unusual for that time period, he was a man ten years her senior. As we've already learned from Marianna's older sister, who also married someone named Adalbertus, Marianna's husband was more likely called Wojciech at home, a far different name than that rendered in his Latin church records.

Unfortunately, unlike her sister's marriage record, this later version from their home church's marriage records did not include the name of the couple's parents. What appeared to be an entry listing the witnesses included one named Franz Jankowski, who would have been husband to Marianna's paternal aunt.

Piecing together documents and transcriptions from various Polish websites, I was able to find mention of eleven children for this couple, who were born between 1893 and 1910. Among those many children were at least two who died in infancy and another daughter, Josepha, who died as a teenager. My next task for this branch of the family is to pursue any sign of documentation for those children of Marianna and Wojciech Marecki who lived to adulthood, married, and welcomed in another generation of the extended Olejniczak family, presumably all still living in Poland into the early 1900s.  

Finding Another Franziska

 

Working through the line of descent from ancestors and then combining that with a search through all the family's collateral lines can begin to reveal patterns. I have yet to determine just who it was whose name Franziska echoed down through namesakes in the generations of my paternal grandmother's matriline, but I am finding that name repeated. Surely this is a sign that someone, somewhere in my family's past, had a favorite ancestor to be honored that way.

Whether Bartholomaeus Olejniczak decided to honor his sister—my second great-grandmother—by naming his oldest daughter after her, I can't yet be sure. Perhaps Bartholomaeus and his sister Franziska had a grandmother by that name—a generation which is, so far, beyond my research reach.

Thankfully, Bartholomaeus' daughter Franziska can be traced through a couple records from the now-nonexistent country of Prussia. According to a transcription found at the Polish website BaSIA, I was led to the scan (#86) of the actual 1889 marriage document for a twenty-five year old Franziska Olejniczak, daughter of Bartholomaeus and Katharina Orszulak Olejniczak.

In that record, I learned that this Franziska's husband was known by two possible surnames: either Kondoła or  Kądala. To complicate matters, his given name—Adalbertus in Catholic church records—was not exactly a Polish name. That Latin version appears to have been the substitution of choice for Prussian sons known in Polish as Wojciech. Thus, the search for the couple's seven (or more) descendants gets complicated—until, of course, Franziska's husband died and she married, next, a man known as Anton Bogaczyński, with whom she had three more children.

Did any of these ten children live to adulthood? So far, I know that at least one child did. Born to Franziska and her first husband on March 22, 1892, in Ludwinow, the child was baptized Catharina. A note below her record on the top line of the page in the register for the parish in Żerków revealed that her full name was Catharina Agnes Kondoła and that she was subsequently married to Joannes—or Jan—Zajdel.

Following documentation and links on various online resources led me to the Billion Graves website, where an entry for someone with that same identity—Jan Zajdel, born May 16, 1885—showed his death on October 26, 1969, and burial in western Poland in Grodzisk Wielkopolskie. 

That makes this the first person related to descendants of my father's Polish line whom I've been able to trace into relatively modern times. Whether he was indeed the husband of Catharina, and whether this couple ever had children, I have yet to discover—if I find out anything at all.

Progress for such a research goal—finding descendants of my Polish ancestors' collateral lines—seems so incremental and piecemeal. Here a little, there a little, each breadcrumb of information preserved eventually will add up to substantial information. But so slowly it unfolds.

Finding Four Sisters

 

When struggling to find information on a brick wall ancestor, I turn aside to the mystery ancestor's collateral lines. In that way, I often can coax out information on my direct line which might not otherwise become apparent. Yet I generally find more success in that method when I look to the brothers in any given line—not the sisters. But in the case of my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak, when I sidestepped her line to explore her brother's line, it was his four daughters who led me to additional records, not his two sons.

Finding those sisters of the less-than-helpful brothers may have been easier for many reasons. Perhaps, in a place with such a history as war-torn Europe, the brothers might have been drafted to do what young men are expected to do for their country. Or perhaps they just died young, yet left no paper trail for me to find.

Regardless of the cause, I'm glad to have the opportunity to trace the family of this collateral line of my second great-grandmother. Cousin bait, remember, can lead me to possible DNA matches, those descendants of such mystery ancestors who are living in our current time.

With that, I have four options to pursue. Bartholomaeus' eldest child, a daughter with that now-familiar family name Franziska, was born about 1864, as I gratefully discovered through transcriptions at one Polish website, BaSIA. After Bartholomaeus' two sons were born, Franziska finally got a sister: Marianna. Again, thanks to Polish websites, I learned her date of birth was July 27, 1871. Third daughter, making her appearance on November 6, 1873, was Catharina. And the apparent baby of the family, Josepha, arrived on February 3, 1876.

The good news—at least for my DNA testing purposes—was that each of these sisters eventually married, producing documentation which enabled me to follow their stories a bit further. And in that continuing story, some of their children also helped point the way for me through their own baptismal records.

Is that as much as I'd hoped? Of course not. I'm still wrestling with a gap in records, falling far short of any privacy protections that might have been instituted on behalf of the living. But at least with these lines of descent from my second great-grandmother's brother, I can begin to trace connections.

We'll take some time this week to trace each sister's family connections, just in case that leads to any future serendipitous encounters with long lost family. Cousin bait candidate number one: Bartholomaeus' eldest daughter Franziska.