Off the Shelf: One in Six Million

 

Heading to a conference in Minnesota last week, I thought I'd grab a book to read on the flight. This was a title I'd long awaited the chance to read: Amy Fish's One in Six Million. 

I thought the flight would give me plenty of time to complete the brief volume—after all, its length is only 210 pages, including notes, acknowledgments, and even a book club reader's guide. That was not so, due to unexpected turbulence, a reason which has also kept me from reading in cars and trains. (I'll spare you the details.)

Thus, putting the book's engrossing story on hold, I attended an educator's conference which included a tour of a local synagogue, perhaps as an ethnic-awareness exercise, but which served as a timely enrichment of my reading experience as well. 

You see, encountering a story like One in Six Million is not merely an exercise in reading one page after another. Though the pages do turn—and sometimes, you can't help but read just one more—the story unfolds much like a Middle Eastern or Jewish explanation might. You simply must understand the background. And the author is more than happy to provide that enrichment.

Simply put, the book recounts the predicament of a woman who didn't even know who she was. Wrapped in a woolen blanket and set to the side of the road as an eight month old infant, her only identifiers were a first name and date—presumably of her birth—written on a note pinned to her only protection from the elements. How she got there or why can only be presumed by the events surrounding the town near the street where she was found: a village in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942.

The baby, once abandoned, was eventually found and rescued, of course. Else her tale would have been a brief one. Instead, the story recounts how many people and networks came together over time to help one woman discover who she really was, and who her family had been. While the author pulls in many facets of the process and its international cast of volunteers, this requires understanding of several aspects, including the early use of technology to reunite Holocaust survivors, efforts to build a genealogical database now freely available to all, the introduction of DNA testing for family history, and the volunteers from around the world who each played a tiny part in reaching the conclusion, decades afterwards, of the infant's true identity. 

From my viewpoint—yes, I did complete the book on my return flight—this is a book not merely read, but absorbed. Perhaps it's my genealogical perspective—I've personally met some of the DNA players mentioned in the book—but I found One in Six Million to be a recounting which, after being completed, still remains on my mind. 

The Stated Goal — And Then Some

 

Work on last month's research plan got me thinking it was a productive month. Now that it's time for my biweekly count, we'll get to see just how busy that month actually was.

Truth be told, I wasn't solely working on my stated goal for the first of my Twelve Most Wanted in January; I had some side projects also clamoring for attention. Thanks to some open-ended questions from last year when I muddled over my father's Polish ancestry, I've still been working on all my Zegarski connections from Czarnylas in Pomerania. That is mostly due to a collaboration with a distant DNA cousin who is also pursuing those Zegarski roots.

Another side project has been thanks to a recent phone call from my husband's niece, who had several questions about specific family lines. A long talk—and an invitation sent for her to view my in-laws' family tree for herself—prompting me to revisit that work, myself. I just couldn't help myself; I ended up adding a few more details to that tree, resulting in an increased count for my in-laws' tree, despite that project not being scheduled until this spring.

The main focus in January, though, has been in building out the family line of my fifth great-grandfather, John Carter of Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Granted, as I build out those lines to the present time, some branches extend towards sixth and seventh great-grandchildren for those families whose generations aren't quite so long as my own branch has tended to be.

While that is a work still in progress—and will be for a long time to come—the numbers are encouraging. The Carter branch stretched to take in 274 additional descendants of John Carter and his (likely) three wives. My tree now has a total of 41,311 documented individuals included.

On the other side of the equation, my in-laws' tree—which should have stayed stock still until April—gained an additional fifteen people, just from that one unexpected conversation with a niece. That tree now contains documentation for 41,752 family members.

Yet to come will be the impact from another joyful announcement, this time from my own niece, who just texted me the news that her application for membership to the Mayflower Society has been accepted. Time to get busy and put in an application on my own behalf—which, of course, will find me adding more collateral lines for that branch of the family, as well.

The main focus for this new month, however, will be to stick with my plan for the second of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026. This month's research direction came through a delightful in-person discovery at our own local society meeting last fall, leading to some conversations which inspired my decision to do more in-person classes and events for our local genealogy scene. We'll talk about that tomorrow, as I introduce my brick wall ancestor from colonial North Carolina, Job Tison. 

Permission to Copy

 

We may think little about what goes on behind the scenes regarding those wonderful, instantly-accessible historic documents we retrieve from resources such as Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org. We somehow realize that someone had to grant permission for the genealogy organizations to access and digitize records from someone else's archives. But what went into that permission-granting process seldom appears on the surface of the exchanges we conduct, every time we look for an ancestor's paper trail.

I'm not here to provide the "MEGO" (My Eyes Glaze Over) blow by blow on just how that process unfolds—a process which, I suspect, has as many variants as companies signing the behind-the-scenes contractual agreements. I can, however, give a nutshell-sized vignette of how that series of agreements impacted me in my attempt this weekend to gain access to some old Polish genealogical records.

When I went looking for documents verifying the family details of my father's ancestors in the Pomeranian regions of northern Poland last fall, I found a frustratingly high number of records for which I could only view the transcript, not a copy of the actual handwritten record. The problem with such transcriptions is in that lack of access. To not be able to see the scrawl of the handwriting and check whether it was transcribed correctly—or completely—can hamper research progress. I wanted to see a digitized copy of the actual documents, not simply a transcription.

Finding any mention of such records on FamilySearch meant getting an error message informing me that, to see the actual document, I needed to go in person to a local FamilySearch Center. As I found out this weekend at such a center, that doesn't simply mean to physically sit in the library, tap into their wifi, and pull up the document.

"It depends on the agreement," the FamilySearch volunteer informed me. "Some agreements involve copyright issues."

I am looking for documents in the mid-1800s, I thought, being the grump that I am...but bit my tongue and didn't say. Obviously, this was a matter of more than simple copyright. Contractual arrangements can reach far beyond the date at which published material would enter the public domain.

Being instructed on exactly how I could proceed to the permission point, I began my work. I had about twenty documents for which I had gleaned the URL for quick access. Oh, no, that turns out: each document had to be accessed by a new search, then pulled up on the center's own computers, the transcribed record printed, then brought up on another screen by the volunteer, who would then access and carefully cut and paste the document into another file for printing.

By the time I had to leave that day, I had about five actual documents printed up, with far more to complete than I had time to access. In the meantime, I gained a few insights. First, don't batch work in piles so high, they can't be dispatched in a matter of a couple hours; this wears out volunteers, not to mention, welcome mats. Second, leave margin for unexpected discoveries. When I finally was able to look at the actual document for one of my Zegarski ancestors in Czarnylas—a line item in a baptismal record—not only did I find the relative I was seeking, but stumbled upon names of family members in other entries included on the same page. Cousins! In a small village, that type of serendipity can happen. And third, don't assume the routine that makes the most sense from your vantage point will be the one that makes sense to the people who set up the system.

Now that I've got a clearer picture of how that system operates, I'll be making more frequent—but less lengthy—visits to my local FamilySearch Center to gain permission to access the rest of those twenty-something documents. In the meantime, I'm scouring the documents for all the details I can glean—including those surprise appearances of collateral lines in this Polish ancestry.

Research Synergy: Where Collaboration is Key

 

When it comes to researching distant ancestors with umpteen children, grandchildren, and beyond through five generations, it takes a team of researchers to keep it all straight. That's why I'm an advocate of reaching out and connecting with other researchers tracing the same family lines. Whether that means a teamwork approach—you tackle this child's line of descent; I'll take that second-born child—or sharing in the mad scramble to analyze documents found, having someone else to bounce ideas off of can not only make a difference, but add a bonus of a shared victory dance at the end of the line.

So it's been with the discovery of a fellow genealogy blogger, Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry, who had made similar discoveries two years ago about a wife of John Carter—Sarah Kenyon—not mentioned in published genealogies. It was two years ago when Patrick posted about several court records from which can be gleaned information to partially reconstruct family relationships between the Carter half-siblings. We have since been sharing information and observations about what we are finding. And we both have discussed how the use of mitochondrial DNA testing may sort out the centuries-old mysteries of John Carter's wives.

Patrick is currently tracing the line of John Carter's daughter Frances through her marriage to Rice Curtis, their children and grandchildren, as revealed in—what else?—court documents. He's sharing what he is finding in his own blog, sorting it out from Frances Carter Curtis' own will, detailing her family's relocation from her childhood home in Virginia to Davidson County, Tennessee, where the will was filed. 

While I've been spending my weekdays scouring court documents regarding my fifth great-grandfather John Carter this month, behind the scenes I'm still catching up on the unsolved mysteries of last winter, when I wrestled with my father's Polish ancestors. On that line, too, I have met up with a distant cousin—coincidentally a DNA match—who is also researching that particular family. That is a good thing, for there are many descendants yet to find, including missing ones in Poland whose disappearing trail may actually have wandered across an ocean to America. Sometimes it's hard to reconnect the two parts of one person's life trajectory when it involves migration across an ocean.

Two sets of eyes are better than one when it comes to spotting details, or unearthing a record that hadn't been considered before. Even more comes into play when those two sets of eyes can claim two different sets of DNA matches, and can compare and contrast the lines of their respective DNA cousins. When one team member doesn't have key matches, but the other one does, that fuels research synergy.

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.

Revisiting Family Lines

 

Some ancestors need more attention than others. In the case of selecting three of my father's ancestors for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026, it turns out there was more than one neglected Polish line. Of my dad's eight great-grandparents, I had only spent one month out of the past six years focusing on his maternal grandmother's father—and that was back in 2021. It's about time I revisit that line in the family tree.

This ancestor, born about 1829 in what used to be the country of Prussia, was listed in his marriage record as "Franciscum" Jankowski. That was from a record in Latin. As far as his family, friends, and neighbors went, I'm sure it was more likely that he was called Franciszek. But since government records kept during that time period would have been in German, we'll need to keep an eye out for the name Franz Jankowski, as well.

Thanks to his marriage record, I already have one document naming his parents. In addition, I've already found records naming three children. One, of course, was my own great-grandmother Marianna, who left her homeland for New York City along with her three young children when her husband sent word bidding her to come join him in his new home. Franciszek's second daughter followed a similar path after her own marriage—only in her case, the immigration route led her to upstate New York to settle near Buffalo. For a third daughter of Franciszek, I can find Polish records of her marriage, and documents naming several children, but at that point in the years leading up to the first World War, the trail of Polish records disappeared.

In the years since I last worked on the Jankowski family line, there have surely been more recent records added to sources such as the Polish websites I now frequent. It's time to revisit those foreign resources, check for each of Franciszek's grandchildren by name, and delve into those collateral lines.

The main goal here is to seek DNA cousins whose ancestry shares this same Jankowski root. In addition to that, since I have the names of Franciszek's parents, I'm hoping to see whether I can push back that line yet another generation. If nothing else, I'd like to explore records for possibilities of his own siblings and their lines of descent, as well.

It often seems as if finding one piece of information becomes the key to open another door in these Polish brick walls, so I want to press through in any available direction. After all, Franciszek spent a good portion of his life raising his family in that same Polish village I researched last fall, Żerków, so the record set availability has become more familiar to me. I'm looking forward to expanding this Jankowski branch of the family quite a bit more this coming November as part of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.

Taking Inventory

 

Looking into the new year, I decided it was time to take inventory on my research progress before making plans for upcoming projects. Much as I had done when I began making selections for the three ancestors from my father-in-law's Irish lines for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026, as we move into plans for my own paternal ancestors for the last quarter of the year, I thought I'd follow suit with a tally of results for my Polish ancestors.

There is a reason for keeping track of such selections. I tend to lean toward those ancestors who keep me chomping at the bit to continue working on the same line. These are the ancestors for whom ample records keep luring me onward—meanwhile, sucking up all the available research time in my calendar while other branches lie dormant. I want to ensure that no branch is left neglected—especially those brick wall ancestors.

So once again, I drew up a list of the eight great-grandparents, this time from my father's side of the family tree. Fortunately, in some cases, I had broken beyond that generation to find parents' names, but in those cases, I just tallied the parents in the category for that specific paternal great-grandparent.

As had happened when I examined my father-in-law's eight greats, I saw that some lines were weighted with more attention than others. And, just as with my father-in-law's results, there was one of my father's great-grandparents whom I hadn't researched at all.

That glaring exception will become the tenth of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026. That featured relative will be Susanna Radomska, wife of the brick wall ancestor on my dad's patriline, Jan Puchała. Though I am stumped with her husband's line, learning more about Susanna herself may provide some clues about how she met her future husband. We'll examine what we can find about her parents' identity as well as the names of her siblings, so that we can trace collateral lines for DNA purposes, too.

With this research plan for next October, we will move from researching my father-in-law's ancestors in Ireland to puzzling over Polish records for the last three months of the year.

Just as planning for this new year's Twelve Most Wanted works better by taking inventory of research objectives to find the neglected branches of the family tree, today also marks another type of inventory: my biweekly count. Granted, the past two weeks have been filled with holiday activities—not to mention some needed rest and relaxation with family—but I was able to complete some work wrapping up last December's goal, and slip into the new month's project.

Between those two activities, I managed to add eighty more documented names to my family tree, so we will start 2026 with a tree filled with 40,824 individuals. And thanks to those newsy inserts arriving with Christmas cards last month, I was able to add six more names to my in-laws' family tree, where the count is now at 41,737 relatives.

I anticipate the biweekly count will jump back to more usual parameters as we move past the holidays and I launch into January's research focus. But before we do so, there are two more ancestors I need to line up for this year's Twelve Most Wanted.

Taking in the Broad View

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleaning Up the Loose Ends

 

Sometimes, what's left after a big discovery—or even a small but significant one on the family tree—is nothing more than a big list of loose ends to clean up. As I'm wrapping up this last month's challenge from my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, that is exactly what I'm seeing.

I realized early on in researching my brick wall second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, that if I were to make any progress on her branch of the family, it would most likely come through some careful examination of records for her collateral lines. And yet, encountering documents for several of her siblings, I also noticed what must have been a stark reality of life in mid-1800s Prussia: a lot of childhood mortality.

With Elżbieta's line, only two of her siblings lived to adulthood—and even one of them, Apolonia, apparently died in childbirth, losing her infant daughter as well. The remaining sibling who lived to adulthood, Katarzyna, had several children with husband Wincenty Cichocki, yet I'm still pursuing the twists and turns of this family through online records in Poland.

At this late date, I have one more day to continue that task of cleaning up the loose ends on Elżbieta's sister's line, then I'll need to draw up research plans for the next time I revisit this research question. At that point, even if I do make any significant discoveries, there will only be time to write down those conclusions as a springboard to launch us into a future year's efforts on pursuing this Gramlewicz family.

Then, we'll be on to some time for celebrating the holidays, after which we'll grab those "twelve days of Christmas" to plan for next year's research challenges.

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. 

DNA Matches: Not Always on the Genetic Genealogy Menu

 

When the discovery of one DNA match leads to useful family history revelations, it's natural to want to find more. Finding useful leads, however, is not something to instantly order up from some genetic genealogy menu. It takes two to make a match, and we can't simply guarantee that the right family member will step up to fulfill that match-making role.

Right now, I'm wrapping up my Twelve Most Wanted research goal for the last month of the year. I've been focusing on my Polish second great-grandmother Elżbieta Gramlewicz in hopes of locating details about her parents' true identity and discovering information on which of her siblings survived to adulthood. More than just that, I'm also hoping to learn which Gramlewicz descendants opted to leave their homeland and migrate to the United States, where records are far more easily accessible (at least for English-speaking researchers). 

The more I review my DNA matches, the more I locate who descend from this same line I've been working on in the past two weeks. I anticipate working on that set of DNA matches behind the scenes for the rest of this month. That line contains descendants of Elżbieta's sister Katarzyna Gramlewicz, who married Vincent (or Wincenty) Cichocki.

The more I look, the more DNA cousins I find who connect to Katarzyna's line. In my case, this is an encouraging sign, since I originally had my doubts that the two women were sisters. But surely there are other siblings from this family who apparently married and had children who could possibly be the beginning of other lines of Gramlewicz matches. It's just a matter of finding them.

Among the possibilities are Elzbieta's sister Apolonia. As I mentioned yesterday, though Apolonia's life was cut short by a possible untimely death when she was still in her twenties, she had married Paweł Zakrzewicz, that surname which kept on popping up in family records, sometimes unexpectedly. I have found records indicating that Apolonia had two daughters before her death, although at least one had died in infancy.

Of the rest of Elżbieta's family, most seemed to die in childhood, if not in infancy. Even the youngest of the siblings—Piotr Paweł Gramlewicz—died in adolescence, leaving the possibilities for future DNA matches quite slim indeed.

While it is true that I hadn't been able to find a birth or baptismal record for Elżbieta, herself, suggesting there might be another sibling still not accounted for, it might be time to lay this puzzle to rest and move on to examine that other Gramlewicz family's records—the one whose descendant called Elżbieta's son Antoni her "uncle." 

You Can't Have Just One

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connecting the Dots to Connect the Family

 

It sometimes seems like a roundabout journey, connecting many dots before we can put together the family tree. In the case of my research focus this month, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, I had wanted to discover more about her siblings—and, ultimately, her parents. Problem: there wasn't exactly a straight line leading me from my second great-grandmother to her parents.

We've just returned from wandering through the records to connect Antonina, the wife of Stanislaus Samolewski, with one of her siblings, Thomas Hilscher. Why, you might ask, does that Hilscher discovery mean so much to me? I realize there may be some missing steps in the tale of why I'm ecstatic to have found those documents in the past few days.

Knowing that siblings Antonina and Thomas were children of Peter and Agnes—likely Piotr and Agnieszka in their native tongue—helped in a big way. Not only did that knowledge reveal how several DNA matches related to me, but since I already had the Hilscher line in my tree from previous research, I could see the next generational step.

That next generation came through Piotr's wife, Agnieszka, who was born a Cichocki. Her 1839 baptismal record shows her own parents as Vincent Cichocki and Katarzyna Gramlewicz.

Back at the beginning of this month's research project, I had mentioned the lack of any document to show my second great-grandmother's relationship to this Gramlewicz family. There were indications that Elżbieta and Katarzyna were sisters, but I couldn't locate a baptismal record for Elżbieta. 

Katarzyna, however was another matter. I could find several documents mentioning her name—up to the 1887 record of her death in Żerków, Poland, which detailed the names of her parents. In a record on May 2, 1887, "Catharina" was noted to be the daughter of "Andreas" Gramlewicz and "Catharina" Zakrzewicz. Along with that detail, the record included mention of Katarzyna's husband, "Vincent" Cichocki, and her daughter "Agnes"—with Agnieszka's married surname, spelled following Polish phonics, as Hilszer for Hilscher.

With that connection between Katarzyna, mother of Agnieszka Cichocka Hilscher, and grandmother of Thomas and Antonina, the fact that among Katarzyna's descendants are several of my DNA matches points to the strong possibility that Katarzyna and Elżbieta were sisters. Of course, lacking the actual documentation indicating such a relationship suggests that they could also have been another close relationship, perhaps cousins. In my book, while it appears that I'm closer to the truth, it still means I simply need to keep looking further.

Document above: May 1887 death record for Catharina Cichocka courtesy of the State Archives in Kalisz, Poland, from the Civil Registry Office at Żerków, scan number 109.  

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. 

Tree Building: Fast and Slow

 

When a key puzzle piece slips into place, that's when the work really begins. It's the wandering and searching beforehand that takes up time, but produces little in the way of tree building. Perhaps it's like investments—only we who are seeking our roots are looking for a different kind of growth.

Once the connection could be made between Stanislaus Samolewski's wife of the many monikers—Antonia, Antoinette, Antonina—and the woman by the latter given name plus the maiden name of Hilscher, I had found the right spot to add her into the family tree. And I also gained that sigh of relief that I could figure out the rest of Antonina Hilscher's personal history.

Researching Polish ancestors using limited resources that are actually available in Poland may be a great help, but it also can be frustrating when the latest of those transcriptions suddenly stops appearing in the database. For the Antonina Hilscher I found in Żerków records, born in 1868, although I could find many other children born to parents with that surname, I couldn't, at first, find Antonina—not at FamilySearch, not at my Polish resource, BaSIA, the Database of Archival Indexing System.

I had to think phonetically to retrieve any mention of Antonina Hilscher back in Poland. Despite baptismal records in the Catholic faith being recorded in Latin, the priest entering her 1868 record must have been thinking in Polish phonics, for her surname was entered with the spelling Hilczer. Easy, right? Of course a Polish person would pronounce that name as Hilscher. But anyone solely with knowledge of Latin—or even German or English—would have been stumped.

There she was, though, in the digitized records at FamilySearch: a daughter of Peter "Hilczer" and Agnes Cichocka. And it was that Cichocki connection that I knew would lead me back to the point of this month's research: the Gramlewicz family.

But not quite yet. We'll need to dig into more records before we can breathe that sign of relief. In the meantime, you can be sure I'm building out that Gramlewicz branch as fast as I can. Sometimes the work is glacially slow—just like the quest to find Antonina through the Samolewski DNA connections—but other times we race to keep ahead of the information avalanche. 

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.