Considering a Few Record Keeping Details

 

As I'm explaining the collateral lines I've found for the Radomski family, you might be wondering, "Why is it Susanna Radomska when her dad's name was Radomski? To answer a question like that, we may need to step away from our story for a process break to consider a few details.

Now that I've moved away from my father-in-law's Irish ancestors to spent the last three months of this year on my own father's Polish roots, it would help to remember a few items we learned when we studied this part of my family in past years. 

Among other things, one of the most obvious differences, now that I'm recording Polish family names was seeing the change in surname endings. Particularly for the quintessential Polish names ending in "-ski," we will see those endings change, depending on whether the ancestor we're referring to was a man or a woman. Women's surnames ended in "-a." With that simple explanation, we know that Susanna and her sisters would always have their maiden name represented as Radomska, even though their father was actually named Andrzej Radomski.

Another detail to grapple with: documentation. In English-speaking countries, we often can rely on multiple documented sources in the same language for tracing our ancestors. Through most of the past century, we had birth records, marriage certificates, or death notices—all completed in the same English we speak every day.

Not so in Poland. Depending on which entity was in charge of the government, a person's records might have been recorded in Polish, or they might have been entered in German, complete with the complicating factor of a handwritten script which few people now even know how to read. Yet, not all records were provided by the government—or survived the devastation of the years following our ancestors' lifetime.

Some of the records left to us were those drawn up by the church of that time period—in my ancestors' case, the Catholic church. That church brought with it the tradition of recording all information in yet another language: Latin. 

With that litany of differences, I as a researcher am left with a decision: should I record the names as I find them in the Latin records of my ancestors' religion? Or should I list them as they surely were known colloquially, in their own lifetime and surroundings? 

To answer that question, I not only have chosen to record my ancestors by the Polish tradition of matching the surname to the ancestor's gender, but to list them by the Polish version of their given name. Thus, for Susanna's father, I enter him into my family tree not as Andreas, which is how his church record would have identified him, but as Andrzej, as his peers might have called him.

Likewise, when I encounter a name which includes a letter which, in Polish, would include a character not recognized in the English alphabet, I chose to represent that letter as it would have been recorded in the person's native land. Thus, when Zuzanna became the bride of Jan, I recorded his name using the diacritical mark, "ł" for Puchała.

Finding and entering those unusual characters in records using my American-made computer with its English speaker's keyboard can seem to be somewhat of a challenge to record all these foreign names correctly. And yet, even with the limitations of not having purchased my keyboard in Poland, I've found an easy work-around. Sure, I can also memorize the ascii codes for each symbol, but who am I kidding? I don't have that great a memory. Instead, I use Google Translate to create, cut and paste the diacritical marks I need into my text. 

Simply go to the Google search page, click on the nine dots in the upper right corner, and select "translate" from the drop-down menu. Then, select the language needed, look for the keyboard icon to "Turn on Virtual Keyboard," then hit the "ctrl+alt" key to select the special characters for that language whenever you need to add a diacritical mark to the word you wish to enter.

I then copy the word and paste it where I need it. I'll paste it in a document I'm writing, or on a blog post, or I'll even add it to the name field for my family tree on Ancestry.com or other tree-building service. With relatively little effort at all, I then can include my ancestors in my tree using the name they were known as, back home in their native land.

Introducing Susanna

 

When you can't make any further progress on a brick wall ancestor—especially on the patrilineal side—what do you do next? In the case of my father's Polish ancestors, my first step is to look more closely at the woman who married that last patrilineal puzzle. 

That's why, this month, I'm introducing my father's great-grandmother, Susanna Radomska. When I selected her back in January as one of my Twelve Most Wanted to research this year, I realized I had never paid her much mind at all. For all the years I had used the Twelve Most Wanted system to organize my family history research, I had never once considered looking into the origin of one specific great-grandparent: Susanna Radomska. My focus had always been on her husband Jan Puchała, who has never since budged in his stubborn insistence to remain one of my brick wall ancestors. 

With that glaring exception to my research progress, we'll spend this month looking deeper into the roots of this great-grandmother, Susanna Radomska. I already know she was likely born in the small village of Lubichowo in the northern province of Pomerania in the country which was once called Prussia. Only back then, according to the Meyer's Gazetteer, the place was called Lubichow. Handily, as was noted in the gazetteer, the town claimed only one Catholic church. And thankfully, those church records are still in existence.

From those tiny details, I've cobbled together a research approach which first has me checking the transcriptions at PTG, the Pomeranian genealogical website I mentioned yesterday. Then, I'll be moving to FamilySearch.org to explore all the resources available at that website. Due to negotiations between that website and the foreign archives which hold the original documents, in many cases I will find myself having to travel to an actual FamilySearch library in order to view the documents rather than rely on someone else's transcription of the record. This, in some cases, may be absolutely essential, given varying writing styles, legibility after decades of fading ink and crumbling paper, and the inevitable mistakes that can occur when tackling hundreds of such records in the transcription process.

As it turns out, finding Susanna's parents was an easy task, thanks to her own baptismal record. Along with her record, the same church gets credit for numerous other documents containing the same parental names. Bit by bit, we'll discover more on this family from Lubichowo, in hopes of explaining distant cousins among DNA matches and other family mysteries, but the number one hope I have this month is to learn more about just how Susanna met and married Jan Puchała, that brick wall ancestor who became her husband in 1842. 

The Necessity of Multiple Resources

 

We may have become spoiled in the genealogy world, considering all the digitized records that can be accessed on websites like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org. Finding so many records in one place gives the aura of one-stop shopping for family trees. When we step beyond our own country to explore our roots in those immigrant ancestors' place of origin, though, we shift to face new challenges.

No matter how much a website may promise an international purview, on a case-by-case basis, that promise may only be upheld to varying degrees. In the case of my paternal Polish ancestors, I've already learned I'll need to cobble together multiple resources to progress with my research plan.

Since this month's goal is to find more details—and documentation—for my second great-grandmother Susanna Radomska, I already know I will need to look for resources which specialize not only in the nation of Poland, but which look to the north and the region historically known as Pomerania.

Fortunately for me, there is a Polish website which focuses on vital records from this exact region in Poland. This volunteer-driven site, with a URL echoing the initials of its name in Polish—Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne—is known in English as the Pomeranian Genealogical Association.

The PTG database provides transcriptions of vital records for the region from the early 1800s through the earliest decades of the subsequent century. Each entry also indicates the resource from which the transcriptions were drawn, mostly local archival holdings, which are indicated by book and photo number for those wishing to obtain copies of the actual documents.

Granted, many of the ancestral collateral lines I've already researched were also available through records at the more familiar FamilySearch.org—but not all. I've had to bounce between PTG and FamilySearch to see which records were lacking at FamilySearch, then prepare a list to pursue through those archival avenues. And even if I can locate those birth, marriage, or death records online, I'll need to deal with reading the old German script in many cases, simply because Pomerania was, at the time of my ancestors, part of the Prussian domain.

That, alone, is a great illustration for why doing international family research demands access to multiple online resources. I've found myself bouncing back and forth between Google's Translate app and cheat sheets that provide listings of words genealogists are most likely to encounter, such as this old handy (though ad-ridden) treasure from the old RootsWeb days.

Now that I'm bouncing back and forth between several online resources, building out the Radomski family line, it's high time we give this month's featured ancestor from my Twelve Most Wanted an introduction. With that, tomorrow we'll officially meet Susanna Radomska and see how she ties into the family line.

Wandering as I Wonder

 

At the start of each month, I sit down to form a research plan. I often follow the same basic procedure, and over the years, the process does become somewhat routine. In the case of my Polish paternal ancestors, the approach can be limited, leaving me to wonder, "now what?!" As I went through my usual routine, though, I began wandering through the results of what I found, more as if I were lost in the maze rather than zeroing in on my goal.

Looking to genetic records of DNA cousins is especially limited for Polish connections, based on the small number of matches I've found despite testing at five major genetic genealogy companies. Even though that is one of my first steps taken, in the case of my focus for this month (my father's great-grandmother Susanna Radomska). I have only four ThruLines suggestions given by that Ancestry tool. Each of those four ThruLines candidates happens to be a niece, nephew, or grand-nephew—each of them relatives I already know.

I tried a different approach. Rather than look at ThruLines to discover any alternate connections to Susanna Radomska, I picked up on a lesson I realized last month: stick to simply searching for the surnames. Though no DNA matches popped up with Radomska or Radomski in their family tree, at least I tried.

A second approach was to revisit the tree I've built at FamilySearch.org. First task was to make sure everyone was updated there, based on what I've already attained at my tree on Ancestry.com. FamilySearch is rich with foreign documents while Ancestry is lacking in such records, so that also provides a way to verify connections for both trees. As I wondered about each child listed in that Radomski tree—and made sure to connect documents back to my Ancestry tree as well—I began making new discoveries.

Those new discoveries, in turn, caused me to wander. And wandering is not exactly part of the profile of the "S.M.A.R.T." objectives researcher. Each time I entered a new name in my Ancestry tree, accompanied with the inevitable hints, I looked at the suggested trees to see whether the tree owner happened to be a DNA match. I then looked at that person's Shared Matches on my DNA readout, wandering from one possible match to another until I spotted the surnames I was seeking.

In the end, while ThruLines might not have provided me any direct links to the right people, this sidestepping approach, wandering from DNA cousin to DNA cousin, did eventually narrow down my focus. Some aspects of our quest can be so nebulous that there really aren't any exact links to lead us to our goal. But in the face of that blank slate, as we wonder what to do next, a little judicious wandering may just lead us to some answers—or at least productive realizations.

Stuck at Another Great-Grandparent

 

With the arrival of fall, it's time to switch our focus from my father-in-law's Irish ancestry to researching my own father's roots. There is only one problem with this change: I'm just as stuck at the point of my own father's great-grandparents, as I was with those of my father-in-law. It seems researching American-born ancestors proceeds far more smoothly than tackling the legacy of those immigrants' forebears. 

My father's father, the one who secretly changed the family name, was born with a surname which, itself, kept morphing over the years. Eventually recorded in the United States as Puchalski—possibly because in America "-ski" was assumed to always be affixed to Polish surnames—he was baptized in Prussia with the surname Puchała. 

This man's father, my father's paternal grandfather, was also difficult to locate through documentation. Perhaps because of the transcription hazards of copying (or bothering to even use at all) Polish diacritical marks, my best chance at finding his name in records in his homeland was through his wife. His 1868 marriage to Anastasia Zegarska did indeed confirm that Thomas Puchała was a man—unlike his baptismal record in 1844, identifying the Puchała infant as a "weiblich."

That document, faulty as it was, did help identify the soon-disappearing Thomas' parents. His father, according to church records, was noted as Johann. His mother, with a given name Susanna, had a partial rendition of her maiden name provided in that birth record. Fortunately, moving back a couple years, another record confirmed the maiden name of Johann Puchała's wife: Radomska.

From the point of that 1842 marriage record in the village now known as Lubichowo in northern Poland, we can begin piecing together the story of my father's great-grandparents. Our focus this month will be on Susanna, but my corollary hope is that some details of her life might uncover an explanation of whatever became of her husband and family, as well.

Marrying Into the Patriline

 

As long as I can remember, my paternal grandfather's origin was a closely-held secret. Even my older siblings and cousins who knew him personally could not coax the story out of him. Years after his passing, when all of us still tried collectively to find clues, there was not much to uncover. Despite my grandfather's decidedly Irish surname—which we didn't learn until just recently was an official legal request—we knew there had to be a different history for his family.

When the first of direct-to-consumer DNA tests came out, I learned about the Y-DNA test. Tracing the specific line from a son to his father, then his father, and so on back through the family's history, this genetic test could be a powerful tool to reveal a family's origin. There was one catch, however: this test was only applicable to a male descendant's patriline—and it was most meaningful when the subject's test matches someone else's test.

Fortunately, to solve our paternal mystery, my only brother was willing to serve as the test subject. I say "fortunately," not because I doubted my ability to talk my father into doing his own test, but because the opportunity to do so was, by then, long gone; he had passed away years before genetic genealogy of any type was publicly available. Because my brother's only son had also died, the only possible subject would have been my brother. I'm glad he was willing to participate.

Testing was the first part of the process. The second part was waiting to see if we had any matches close enough to provide guidance on where my father's family originated. We're still waiting for that discovery. In the meantime—and mostly thanks to records digitized at FamilySearch.org—I have managed to trace my way from my father's father to his father and, eventually, back to Poland where some documents identified his father as Jan Puchała.

From there, progress stopped. I had figured out who my father's great-grandfather was, but I could move no farther back in time.

No matter which ancestor I'm tracing, I've long since learned that, when stopped cold at a research roadblock, learn to step sideways. If a direct line refuses to divulge any details about the past, look to a collateral line. Siblings are one example, especially when minute changes in record keeping laws or customs over a span of even a few years may yield the detail that was missing for that direct line ancestor. 

There is, however, another way to tackle those brick wall ancestors. If I can't find the information I need on that earliest node in my father's patriline, I can sidestep that man entirely and look to his wife. For this month's selection of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026, as we transition to research on my father's side of the family, that is exactly what we'll do for October: see what we can find on Susanna Radomska, wife of Jan Puchała of Lubichowo in Poland's north region of Pomerania.

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.