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.

Even Farther Away From Home

 

If we put ourselves in our immigrant ancestors' shoes, we can see how long a trip those family members endured to arrive on our shores in America. Specifically, I'm thinking of my great-grandmother, Anastasia Zegarska Puchała, who traveled far from her home in the Pomeranian village of Czarnylas to the bustling shores of New York City.

Even farther away from home, as I discovered through the DNA matches descended from Anastasia's immigrant siblings, were those distant cousins whose Zegarski and Wojtaś ancestors traveled to Milwaukee in Wisconsin. But the story uncovered by my latest discoveries on this family line goes even farther away from home than that: I have some DNA matches who claim Australia as their home.

Wondering how a branch of my Polish family could have opted for such a direction, I had to seek out some explanations. In a more macro search concerning Polish immigration, I asked specifically for details on just who these Polish immigrants might have been who headed in that opposite direction.

To my surprise, there have been Polish immigrants arriving in Australia since the mid-1850s. While the Australian gold rushes might seem like a reasonable draw—and there were Poles among other Europeans seeking gold in Victoria, especially—the Polish arriving in Australia during that decade were noted to have established themselves in South Australia in a settlement now known as Polish Hill River. 

It is more likely, however, that any of my Polish relatives would have arrived in the subsequent century with the much larger group of displaced Polish people in the aftermath of the Second World War. This was a time period when the Australian population burgeoned with Polish immigrants, leaving their mark on the country's multicultural composition. Even last year, the estimated population in Australia of people who had been born in Poland was 47,680.

For those immigrating to Australia from Poland after World War II, we can now add their children and grandchildren who subsequently were born in that recently-adopted homeland—including those five DNA matches I've found who currently live there.

While that exploration of Australia's immigration history gives us a macro view of the Polish connection down under, what about the specifics of those five DNA cousins? If they descend from a Polish ancestor who was related to either my Zegarski or Wojtaś family lines, it may be difficult to construct the actual paper trail to document that connection.

While I can access transcriptions of Polish birth, marriage, and death records up to the first quarter century of the 1900s, nothing more recent has become available online for me to trace the connection. This may mean I'll need to rely on communicating in person with at least one of those DNA cousins to compare notes on the micro aspect of the more traditional paper trail of how we might connect.

However, I might have a plausible idea....

Pruning the Family Tree

This month, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet. Well, more to the point, now that I've regained functionality on my "merge with duplicate" button at Ancestry.com, these past few weeks have left a lot of carnage out in the genealogical ether; I've been vanquishing doubled profiles in her tree, left and right. Since today is the time for my biweekly count, let's see just how many duplicates my mother-in-law's "endogamy lite" family yielded. 

Before the beginning of this project, I had closed out the previous biweekly period with 41,826 individual profiles in my in-laws' tree. My pruning project, over this subsequent two week period, has apparently made a sizable difference: the tree now contains 41,717 relatives. I've ended up with 109 less people than where I started, two weeks ago. I'd say that's a lot of pruning.

This month, I've been focusing on my own father's Polish roots, facing an entirely different research challenge. While most of the time, I'm poring over Catholic Church records from the Prussian villages where my father's paternal grandmother's extended family once lived, I'm also paying keen attention to the DNA matches connected to this line—and to their shared matches, especially those I haven't been able to place in the family tree up to this point.

As I add these matches into my tree, slowly but surely, that branch has been blossoming. Over the past two weeks, that work has yielded 105 new entries. The challenge now, especially for those DNA matches who still live in Poland—or even in nearby European countries—is to find documentation to support their contention that we share these same Puchała, Zegarski, or Wojtaś lines. For the most robust records resource, I've looked mostly to FamilySearch.org, but I'm also thankful for the transcriptions from the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, which has been providing me with a research roadmap to guide the way to documents.

Granted, in past biweekly periods, I've experienced greater progress than I have this time—not to mention the reversed count for my in-laws' tree!—but the challenges of this month's research goal require a slower and more careful pace. Given that the Polish roots of my father's family will be my research focus through the end of this year, I anticipate a more sedate report for the next three biweekly periods as well, before we close out this year and move on to next year's Twelve Most Wanted.

One Name; Several Spellings

 

When it comes to searching for a specific ancestor, having one name to seek can provide the assurance that we're chasing the right person. But several different names? That starts plaguing me with doubts whether I've found the right person.

With this month's research goal—to find more about my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś—I discovered it was possible to find someone. But that someone named Marianna often appeared with a different spelling to her surname. Sometimes, it was Woytas. Or it could just as likely appear as Wojtasz.

Were these different people? That could be a reasonable question, especially for someone unfamiliar with researching Polish surnames. Having a basic understanding of Polish phonics, however, helped fortify my confidence that I was following the right trail, despite all those spelling variations.

Years ago—once I discovered that my paternal roots grew toward Poland and not the greenery of the Irish coast my grandfather claimed—I decided it was time to brush up on Polish phonics. The diacritical marks had me stumped, for one thing, and I don't feel comfortable with simply ignoring ignorance.

Beyond educating myself on, say, the use of the "ł" for my paternal grandfather's surname Puchała, I did a quick tour of the universe of Polish phonics. If nothing else, I wanted to know how to pronounce those surnames. After all, they are part of my heritage.

Since then, I've kept those resources close at hand, cheat sheets to remind me how to handle what otherwise would look like tongue-twisters. Names like Blaszczynski, for instance, no longer have me stumped.

So when it comes to entries like my second great-grandmother Marianna's maiden name, Wojtaś, I now understand why the multitude of record keeping officials—German-speaking Prussian government workers and Catholic priests rendering records in Latin—sometimes come up with different results. All of those results are variations on how the name was pronounced, but each one is a possible representation of the same sounds: "y" for "j" or "sh" for "sz" or even the diacritical "ś." 

With that understanding, let's launch into what can be found about Marianna Wojtaś and her years in the Pomeranian region of Poland.   

The Eleventh Ancestor

 

When I chose the eleventh ancestor out of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, it was not an easy choice. This was not because several others were clamoring for my attention; this was more a matter of wondering whether I would be able to find anyone. 

The way I plan out my research for the upcoming year is to set aside a season to devote to each of four branches of my family tree. For two quarters of the year, I work on members of my in-laws' families. For one quarter, I have ample material to pursue on behalf of my mother's roots. But for my father's line during the last quarter of each year, I always know I'll be stumped for yet another year, no matter which ancestor I select for the designated month's struggle.

This November's ancestor, I decided, would be a natural outgrowth of my research project for the previous month. In searching for what became of my great-grandfather Thomas Puchała, I would likely need to trace the migration path of his wife, Anastasia Zegarska. Thus, for this coming month, I reasoned it would make sense to move back one more generation and research Anastasia's mother, Marianna Wojtaś. 

All I could find about the Zegarski family centered around a small town now known as Czarnylas in the Polish region of Pomerania. As I noted last year in planning this month's research project, 

Just even finding the identity of that hometown took years to accomplish, so I need to take that as a reminder that some research projects take time—like years—to evolve into a shape roughly comparable to an actual answer. If I arrive at the end of this coming November without an answer to my question about Marianna's parents and siblings, I know I can return to this puzzle again in a future year—and that, eventually, more records will help guide me through the maze and point me in the right direction for my next step.

Thankfully, that hopeful wish has already turned out to bear fruit. I have indeed found more records which will be of great use. We are at least set for a smooth launch into a month of exploring the life of Marianna Wojtaś, my second great-grandmother, whose life spanned nearly the entire nineteenth century in the Polish region of Pomerania. We'll start tomorrow with an overview of some details which can help us navigate Polish genealogical research.

Launch Pad for Next Research Go-Round

 

Sometimes, I just need to send a research problem deep into the future. That's when I write a note to my future self, explaining what I need to do the next time I grapple with this ancestral brick wall. For Thomas Puchała, today is that day. I'm packaging up my Puchała roots and putting them on the launch pad to send into a future year. Here's what I need to remember for next time.

First, patience is in order, if only for the frustration of searching for a name containing diacritical marks. Puchała, as I've discovered, is a name that comes packaged in many forms, thanks specifically to the "ł" as written by Prussian governmental drudges and Catholic priests from many European backgrounds who nevertheless must record their flock's life passages in the quite-dead Latin language. For this, I've found the Puchała surname rendered as Puchata—or even Puchatta—as well as variations on Puchała without the diacritic designation, such as Puchala and Puchalla. All this, combined with many search results serving up transcriptions of the actual records; to see them with my own eyes might reveal the original was written correctly all along.

I did, however, manage to find some records for Thomas' father, whom I suspect his fellow countrymen called Jan, though church records listed as Johann. Along with that, I found three sisters and two brothers for Jan. The next time the Puchała family becomes a focus of my Twelve Most Wanted, I need to pursue whether any of those siblings did indeed survive to adulthood, marry, and have children—descendants whose progeny might be among my Polish and European DNA matches at MyHeritage. While at this point, it seems most of those siblings died in childhood, it may be possible that at least his sister Marianna was married. Though one record's transcription indicated her age at marriage was fifteen, I noticed the ceremony was conducted in 1858, later in the same year in which her father had died. Perhaps that was a move of desperation for the bereft family.

Still missing is any record of what became of Thomas, himself. With a birth year of about 1844, it is certainly safe to say the man is deceased—but when, I can't determine. It is likely after my grandfather's birth in 1876, but I can't really be sure. If this man was indeed my grandfather's father, he could even have died toward the end of 1875. Whatever the actual date of death was, it is certain his widow Anastasia married again. Though I have no record for either of her supposed subsequent marriages, it is clear that she represented herself by two additional surnames, at least when she emigrated from her home in Poland to the United States.

Also on my to-do list for this family will be clarifying the three marriages for Thomas' daughter Rosalia. Along with that goes writing a proof statement so others can follow that chain of events in her life, including re-organizing the entries for the various names of Rose in the FamilySearch universal tree.

Someone needs to tell these stories. They are tales which take more than one paragraph to explain—and certainly several documents to piece together the full story. Rose's tale is not unusual; tomorrow, I'll explain another such research twist I've been following from another project, where it takes piecing together several records to identify the same woman through the name changes in her life. 

With that, we'll launch Thomas Puchała's research questions into the future for a subsequent try. Hopefully, by then, more records will be digitized and accessible on the Polish end of the equation, enabling Thomas and his forebears to be discovered and documented. And with the arrival of a new month, next week we'll step from one of my father's ancestors to someone on another branch of his family. 

Not Exhausted Yet

 

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

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

So far.

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

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

Proving Rose is Rose

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning to Timelines

When puzzling over a brick wall ancestor, it sometimes helps to turn to timelines to ferret out the missing information. In Anastasia Zegarska's lifetime saga of many married names, I'm still trying to determine when she married which husband, and when the previous husband might have died. After all, I've run into some conflicting reports concerning her daughter Rosalia, giving me doubts about which husband came last—not to mention which husband's name Anastasia used when she left her home in Pomerania to sail for America.

In brief, today's my day to lay out the dates, with links back to the appropriate documents, where available. After we sort out the mess, tomorrow we'll take a hard look at the one document which has me all confused. There may be an explanation...if we can find some missing documents.

So, for Anastasia, a.k.a. Anna, here we go.

• 1848: Anastasia born in Schwarzwald (Czarnylas, Poland), as estimated from her marriage record
• 1868: Anastasia married Thomas Puchała in Schwarzwald
• 1872: Anastasia mentioned in baptismal record of daughter Rosalia in Lubichowo
• 1910: Anastasia entered as "Annie Kusfkr" in the Brooklyn, New York, household of daughter Rose Muller in U.S. Census
• 1915: Listed as Anna Krausse in Brooklyn household on Knickerbocker Avenue with daughter Rose Miller in New York State census enumerated on June 1
• 1915: November 15 marriage record of George W. Kober and Rose Miller identified Rose as a divorced woman for whom this was her second marriage; document identified Rose's current address in Brooklyn as Knickerbocker Avenue, but states her maiden name was Krauss and her mother's maiden name was Anna Zegar
• 1920: Anna "Krouse" was listed in the U. S. Census as mother-in-law in the household of George W. Kober and his wife Rose, now living at 729 96th Street in Woodhaven, part of the Borough of Queens in New York City
• 1921: A newspaper report of her death in The Brooklyn Standard Union on September 29, 1921—including the right house address and city (but not street) of the Kober household—listed her name as Anna "Kraus"
• 1921: Her death certificate listed her name as Anna Kusharvska on the front of the document, yet on the reverse, spelled that surname as Kusharvoska; with her daughter listed as "Mrs. Geo. W. Kober" and the place of death given as 729 96th Street in Richmond Hill 

There, like a sandwich, we have documents in both the earlier and latest segments of Anastasia's life in America listing her surname as some variation on what seems to be the unusual surname of Kusharvska. Yet, other records seem to hint that Anna went by the name Krauss in the earlier years of her residence in New York City. 

My main goal in ferreting out Anna's married names is not only finding the identity of these two men in her later life, but determining what name she chose to represent herself when entering this country as an immigrant. Her second and third marriage record plus that record of her passage to America would be useful to find. It may all come down to which surname she went by—and how she, or those officials documenting her identity, might have spelled it. 

Tracing Rose to Find Anna

 

What if a family member's life story is too long to fit into those neat little boxes on a family tree? That's the problem I'm facing as I consider how to follow Anastasia Zegarska through her three marriages, the death of at least six children and the life of her surviving two: my father's Aunt Rose and his own father, Rose's brother.

It was a snap to determine that tracing Aunt Rose was one sure way to spot her mother through the decades in which they lived in New York City. I'm presuming the same may be the key to finding the family's immigration records, and possibly even the documentation on Anastasia's second and third marriage record. But when I try to share that paper trail on the one publicly-accessible free family tree used internationally by so many, I run into a problem: there is not one single entry for Aunt Rose.

There are three.

The story, as we've already partially discovered, spans decades and involves several documents, each of which cannot be added to my Rose without extracting them from the "other" Rose. On top of that, a careful reading of Rose's first married name—clearly written as Muller, according to the 1910 census—was somehow revised to show as Miller for her second marriage license to George Kober. How do I know that was the same Rose? Simple: her mother was still living with her in the next census.

To complicate matters, that same Kober marriage record for Aunt Rose gave a different maiden name: Krauss. This opens my eyes to some possible complications. Could the original Rose I found, baptized in Poland as Rosalia Puchała, be one of the six children her mother Anastasia lost? Could this Rose be a child born after her mother's marriage to the second husband named Krauss? But if that were so, then my grandfather, four years younger than Rose, would also have been a Krauss, rather than keep any variation on the Puchała name, as he did well into his adult years. Yet that could be a hint as to when Anastasia married this second husband: most likely when her children were still young enough to consider Mr. Krauss as their surrogate father.

The trouble with facing complicated extractions from the FamilySearch tree is that I just would rather throw up my hands and walk away. After all, I have that information all documented on my other online family trees. It's just that, considering the international reach of FamilySearch, I'm still hoping someone back in Poland might also be researching that family line and spot it on that publicly-accessible website. And reach out to connect. Collaboration can be very helpful.

There is, however, more to be accomplished with Rose's mother, Anastasia. Knowing, first, that in America Anastasia went by the shortened name Anna helps guide the process. But I still lack any proof of Anna's subsequent marriages to anyone called Kusharvski, let alone someone else named Krauss. It was only in the shock of the moment of discovering her mother's suicide that Rose blurted out the name Kusharvski to emergency personnel; I hadn't even known of it before finding that death record. I still can't find Anna's burial marker. And though, in retrospect, that bungled entry for immigrant Anna in 1910—her name spelled Kusfkr by the enumerator that year—seems to indicate she was once known as Anna Kusharvski, it isn't exactly a document; it's merely an error-ridden notation.

The best thing to do at this point is go back and re-assemble all the documents I have for this family, including both front and back of each record, for some details are handwritten on the reverse and in the margins.

Then, I need to put them in date order for one reason: I need to see the gaps in each person's story. Creating a "timeline" of name changes may help, despite not having the actual documents. I can infer from each surname's appearance when it might have become part of the family's story. Even now, as I begin this process, I'm spotting some details in the flow of information that may rearrange my own understanding of the history. We'll see, first, what we can unearth by putting that process to use on the American side of the equation, then create a timeline hypothesis to test.

Checking the Mundane Details of Life

When I wake up, my morning routine often includes grabbing my phone and checking the upcoming day's weather. After all, it can become a helpful guide in cementing the day's plans. It occurred to me that, hungry as I am to know more about what my Polish ancestors' day to day life was like, I could try checking the same mundane record sets for them, so I pulled up my weather report and entered Lubichowo, Poland, to add to my weather site.

Yes, it's a first step, and only a tiny one. I could see that there was a slight chance of rain this morning, and more to come for the following four days. Seeing their high temperatures in the fifties (Fahrenheit) in Lubichowo and overnight lows trailing not far behind, I could compare their weather with mine—it was colder but milder, and far more humid there—and spot differences in other details. Sunrise came later in the morning and sunset about an hour earlier than ours, reminding me that Lubichowo was in a location much more to the north than my current home.

I thought I'd do a bit more exploration of local details. For a town as small as Lubichowo, it is not easy to find many resources about that location in English, although I suspect if I used Google Chrome for translation services, I'd discover more detailed information. Still, I could see that Lubichowo is in a rural part of Pomerania, as the local administrative district includes twenty four villages and "settlements" which combine to represent a total population of under six thousand people. In contrast, just one of the cities in the rural county where I live includes over three hundred thousand people.

I did discover that the territory is a low-lying area, with altitude somewhere between one hundred and three hundred feet above sea level. The ground is said to be poor, sandy soil, so it makes sense to learn that the principal crops there are potatoes or such cereal grains as wheat, barley, oats, or rye. Some small family farms also raised livestock. Perhaps this is as it was when my ancestors called that place their home.

Since I discovered Lubichowo lies on the fifty third parallel north, I decided to take a whirlwind tour of the world to see which other locations are as far north as my Puchała ancestors' native village. Of course, sections of the Netherlands, Wales, and England are located just as far north as Lubichowo is. Surprisingly, Lough Derg, the lake so close to my father-in-law's Tully ancestral home, also is on that parallel. Across the Atlantic, Newfoundland and Labrador lie on that same northern pathway, and the parallel runs through the city of Edmonton in the province of Alberta. The closest that parallel comes to touching the United States is among the Alaskan islands in the Bering Sea, a considerable distance north of my current home.

To begin to understand more of what life was like for my Puchała and Zegarski forebears, I suppose I could conduct some experiments with Artificial Intelligence like fellow genea-blogger Randy Seaver has done concerning his own ancestors, such as the narrative about his third great-grandmother who lived in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada, in 1845. But I suspect a more useful tool for me would be a system which could find resources in Polish, then accurately translate them into English so I could assemble the details into my own narrative.

Mostly, what I'm curious about is, first, what made these family members choose to leave their homeland, and next, why did this one lone branch of the family head for New York when everyone else went to Wisconsin? Surely, there is a story that I am missing.  

Friends in the Family

 

When it comes to reconstructing what life was like for the ancestors we are researching, those who lived in the same country as we do likely present little trouble for us in accessing the answers we seek. We can simply look up historic details about our location and find ample resources in our own language. Researching ancestors who emigrated from a foreign country, however, presents us with challenges, especially if the people in the originating country spoke a language different than ours.

Oftentimes in those cases, I turn to friends within the extended family for help. Older relatives can sometimes infuse a family history with stories of their own lived experience, adding insight—and sometimes even humor—into the genealogical narrative.

When it comes to my Puchała and Zegarski roots from Poland, however, I run into roadblocks. For one thing, my paternal grandfather made sure no one among his descendants would have any idea of his Polish roots—at least, that's the story from my older siblings and cousins who knew him personally.

So who can I turn to among those living relatives to find any inside observations about these Polish forebears? There certainly weren't any relatives from the Puchała side of the family to consult—at least, none that I have discovered so far. But the Zegarski side? Now, that's a different matter.

Thanks to DNA testing, I've discovered a number of third cousins on that side of the family. The first one I had found, years ago, was the one who pointed me to online resources in the country of Poland, which gave me a great head start. But this month, I've been wondering whether I could find anyone who actually knew any of those immigrant Zegarskis, or at least remembered their children or grandchildren. I've been on a hunt to connect with a recipient of the stories from the old country.

I noticed one distant relative (and DNA match) whose research kept popping up online, so I reached out to see if I could glean any insight on this extended family. While in 2025, the time is too distant to find anyone who personally remembered any of the immigrant Zegarskis, this researcher and I have started collaborating, an encouraging step. 

It's often beneficial to make friends from among the members of the extended family. These second and third cousins are not people I've ever met, but we have a common goal to learn about what our ancestors were really like. Yes, the hurdle of messaging someone who is essentially a stranger can seem daunting—after all, what if he or she doesn't answer?—but if we don't reach out and try to connect, we'll never attain our goal.

Granted, some people who take DNA tests only do so for specific, limited reasons—to learn about their ethnic roots, for instance, but if we look more closely at potential contacts from among our DNA matches, we can identify the most likely candidates who'd potentially respond to our message or, even better, collaborate with us.

If, in our brief introductory message to such candidates, we can identify the specific family line we are curious about, it helps to make a connection. But if we also scope out that individual's research history on that same website, we can get a better idea about who has been at this work consistently over time. Researchers who take the time to not only add documentation to their family tree, but to go out of their way to upload specific family mementos—photographs, or a letter written by an ancestor, for instance—show us the care they take to pursue those mystery roots. Unless people like these turn out to be proprietary about their research—the "don't touch my stuff" types who are, unfortunately, also out there—they may become the perfect research partner for delving into the unknown about our family history together.

Back before we had the wealth of documentation available to us online now, we used to rely far more upon connecting with other researchers. Queries on the forums of the past were full of people searching for anyone else who knew something about their brick wall ancestor. Friends in the family, back then, became a valuable research tool. With the abundance of records now at our fingertips with a click of the mouse, we seem to have forgotten the utility of reaching out and connecting with our own relatives who are seeking the same family history answers. I'm hoping that making an about-face on this trend may recharge this lagging search effort.

Overreach

 

"Bit off more than I can chew" would be something my parents might use to rebuke me for overreaching on those grandiose plans. But when I decided, last Friday, to wrap up my work in a tidy basket—complete the work of connecting all my Zegarski DNA matches at Ancestry.com, then harvest all the Zegarski documents I could find on FamilySearch.org—and be done over the weekend, well...yeah, overreach. 

Update: I'm far from finishing the DNA match connection process at Ancestry. The more DNA cousins I find there, the more I realize I need to update the Zegarski branch on my family tree. Considering how prolific that Wisconsin branch of this immigrant line has been, I'd say this will call for far more work than a weekend's diversion.

Regardless, I went exploring at FamilySearch.org as well. My goal has been to trace the line of descent for all the collateral lines of my Puchała roots. After all, I've got several Polish DNA cousins over at MyHeritage for whom I'd love to establish a connection. Finding the documentation between my ancestors in 1840s Pomerania and current generations across the European continent might be a challenge, but—talk about overreach—I'll give it a try.

In the meantime, I started trying another approach. Put this one in the "oldies but goodies" category: I'm reaching out to those distant Zegarski cousins who are researching the same family lines. Maybe one of them knows more about what the people in our ancestry were like than what we can find from dull, dry documents.

Collecting Zegarski Connections

 

While my great-grandfather's Puchała ancestors didn't seem to leave many descendants—at least, if I go by what can be found among my DNA matches—Thomas Puchała's in-laws certainly did. Anastasia Zegarska, my misfortune-plagued great-grandmother of the two surviving children, turned out to have many siblings, nieces and nephews who also migrated to the New World. I would never have known it, judging by the very few relatives I remember from my childhood, but there was a reason for this dearth of paternal kin. For whatever reason, while Anastasia chose to settle in New York City, her Zegarski relatives all headed for Wisconsin.

I never knew that information until just recently, after having taken my DNA test at five different genetic genealogy companies. MyHeritage was the first to pinpoint the Zegarski connections through their AutoClusters tool, but since some genealogy enthusiasts test at multiple places—and keep trees at more than one company, too—I eventually discovered one of those DNA matches also kept a family tree at Ancestry.com. 

That was a fortunate connection. Thankfully, this DNA match was quite willing to answer messages from other DNA matches. Not only that, but the information she provided was very helpful. That contact became my first baby steps into a world of genealogy research I had never tried before: researching Polish roots.

As it turns out, over time—well over a century, now—those Polish immigrants have yielded more relatives than I've been able to count. Still, I'm trying to keep track. Thanks to the ThruLines tool at Ancestry, plus the Shared Matches option from Ancestry's ProTools, I've been connecting the dots between those many unknown distant cousins and my Zegarski ancestry.

It's all adding up. And there's more to find. Sometimes, research can seem monotonous, but this repetition is forming a network of descendants I never knew existed. Perhaps I'm in awe over what can be found through DNA—at least when we have effective tools for organizing these many unknown people.

This weekend, I'll be taking time to see how many more unidentified relatives I can connect to this Zegarski line of descent, using the tools at Ancestry.com. Then, I'll turn to FamilySearch records to see whether I can spot any further collateral lines to document for each Puchała generation in Poland and the lines of their in-laws, then trace their descendants. Once equipped with further documentation on the lines of these newly-discovered descendants, on Monday, we'll see what connections can be made with the DNA matches listed at MyHeritage.  

Can't Push Forward, Can't Move Backward

 

When it comes to my Puchała line, I guess I've got to admit I'm stuck. I can't move that line backwards one more generation from my second great-grandfather Jan Puchała, and it sure looks like I can't even push forward in time to discover anything more about his son Thomas, my great-grandfather.

Stuck: I hate to admit it. Worse yet, I can't find any explanation for what became of Thomas Puchała. He simply seems to have disappeared. Thomas' wife Anastasia Zegarska traveled with her two surviving children, eventually ending up in that vast entry point for countless immigrants, New York City—but she certainly didn't appear to arrive under that same married name.

When Anastasia arrived in New York, the first appearance I can find for her is a woman with a different married name. That name was so different that it seemed to stump the local enumerator for the 1910 census, who simply wrote it as "Annie Kusfkr."

Whatever Anastasia's name had become, it was clear that it was a different married name, certainly not any variation on Puchała. It wasn't until I followed a long and winding trail for her daughter—now going by the shortened given name Rose—who had also apparently married by 1910.

From married names "Muller" to Kober to Hassinger I followed Rose. Somewhere in the middle of that chase, when Rose was still married to George Kober and Anastasia was "widowed" and living with them, one devastating morning Rose found that unusual married name blurting out from her trembling lips when she called for help after discovering that her mother had taken her own life. Whatever that name was from the 1910 census, I found it—or at least a closer approximation—in Anastasia's death certificate, even though the accompanying news report from her residence in Queens borough in New York City identified her as Anna Kraus.

One thing was clear, though, from tracing Anastasia from her maiden name to Puchała, to Krauss, and to  Kusharvski: something must have happened to Thomas Puchała long before Anastasia took her two children, Rosalia and Teodor, aboard a boat sailing for America. That record will still be on my research list for a long time, I suspect.

In the meantime, there is much more that can be done on this extended Puchała line. For one thing, I have the aggravation of cleaning up resources and plugging them into the universal tree at FamilySearch.org, complete with proof arguments to explain the convoluted story of what's been found. Rose, in her own several permutations, has appeared in at least two other family tree identities, though in none of them does she show any descendants of her own. Anastasia, as well, could use some explanation, at least for the missing marriage records, wherever those events occurred.

In addition to that, since one goal this month was to examine my paternal grandfather's patriline, that calls for seeking DNA matches who connect to that line. The difficulty is in finding the connections to those descendants who still remain in Poland—or even those who may have emigrated, but now have descendants in other European countries. The DNA may reveal some clues, but the documentation, once again, will be key—if I can find it.

While we're stuck in this tight loop, searching for missing documentation, I'll take some time to examine what can be found through DNA tests, especially at the one resource for the most international test results: MyHeritage.com. 

Another Generation, Another Location?

 

Why is it that we see our ancestors as people who lived in the same location, generation after generation? I don't know about you, but when I think of great-grandparents and the generations beyond that, I'm surprised to learn that they moved on to new locations from the place where they were born.

In my current experiment—finding how far I can go on the lines associated with my paternal grandfather's Polish Puchała roots—I'm seeing my ancestors stay in one town for maybe a generation or two. Then, onward the trail leads me to another location—if, at least, I am still following the same line.

Now that we've pushed back from Thomas Puchała to his father Jan and his wife Susanna Radomska, I thought I'd try my hand at finding Susanna's Radomski roots. It was no surprise to discover that Susanna was born in the same town as the one where she married Jan Puchała. The daughter of Andrzej Radomski and Marianna Nierzwicka, Susanna was born in Lubichowo, as we can surmise from her baptismal record in the Catholic Church there on New Year's Day in 1824.

But the daisy chain of family connections bids us push just one generation further to find her parents. While looking for the Latin version of their names in church documents, a marriage record for Andream Radomski and Maryanna Nierzwicka showed up for November 13, 1814.

Only problem: the church record was not kept in Lubichowo, but in a Prussian town known as Hoch Stüblau. Now what?

Straight to that trusty search engine I went, where the Meyer's Gazetteer pointed out a place by that same name. At the same time, Google redirected me to a place called Zblewo. Sure enough, if you click on the "map" tab under the Meyer's Gazetteer entry for Hoch Stüblau, in smaller print, you can see the word Zblewo.

Back to Google Maps to double check distances and feasibility. 

Sure enough, if taking the most direct route between the two locations, the distance made sense. Though more of a walk than the towns I had checked before, Zblewo is still a reasonable distance at about seven and a half miles from Lubichowo.

On the other hand, looking more closely at the handwritten record itself, the location of the ceremony looked vaguely like it was written as "Libichowo." Perhaps the marriage ceremony was held in Lubichowo, but the record was kept in Zblewo? Something to check for more information on typical clerical procedures in the Catholic Churches in that place and time. 

The Problem With Diacritics

 

The search for my father's Polish Puchała ancestors runs into a problem: the surname requires use of a diacritical mark. Depending on who was writing the record concerning any of his key life events, my great-grandfather Thomas Puchała's name could show up in the document containing a "t" instead of an "ł"—or double that, in either case. Or the official could just as easily disregarded use of any diacritics and simply written the name with a plain, unembellished "l." Wildcards, by necessity, become my best search engine friend in such cases. Whether documented by a Prussian official in German, or a church cleric in Latin, that "ł" could end up being my research downfall.

Still, I'm hoping I pinpointed the right parents when I located a baptismal record for a "weiblich" named Thomas Puchała, born November 20 in 1844 (despite the translation from German being rendered as "female"). The transcription indicated Thomas' surname as "Puchata"—a slight pen stroke which, once I see the actual handwritten document, will surely be more accurately transcribed as "Puchała."

Those parents, by the way, were listed in the transcription as Johann "Puchata" and Susanna "Damska." But I can't just accept the transcriber's word for that. Until I can make it to a FamilySearch Center to view the actual document—access to that record set is currently limited—I can at least double check with similar records.

Sure enough, the transcription of an 1842 marriage record for the same Johann "Puchata" indicated his bride's name to actually be Susanna Radomska. And not that many years later, Johann's own death record in 1858 indicated the same maiden name for his widow. In between those two dates, there were baptismal records for their children, supporting that same name for the mother, and, sadly, confirming that same maiden name in death records for some of those unfortunate children, as well.

So far, all records for the Puchała line showed them remaining in Lubichowo, but I'm wondering whether that detail will remain constant for yet another generation. To double check, let's push back another generation and see whether we can find any indication where that leads.

Mapping Where They Met in the Middle

 

Maps, whether historic or modern versions instantly accessible online, are a wonderful addition to the toolbox we use to uncover the life details of our ancestors. Since I had had such good fortune using online maps to determine the feasibility of courtship connections for my father-in-law's Irish ancestors, I thought I'd turn to Google Maps once again to pinpoint the location of the towns in Poland where my paternal ancestors Thomas Puchała and Anastasia Zegarska once lived.

I had been amazed—and quite pleased—to discover that I could enter the name of a townland in Ireland and have it come up in the search results on Google Maps. If it worked for townlands in Ireland, it should work for obscure places everywhere else in the world, right?

Records I had found online for Thomas Puchała mentioned a town called Lubichowo. For Anastasia, I had found mention of a place now called Czarnylas. I plugged those two names into Google Maps, just to double check that they were within a reasonable distance for traveling by foot or even by horse. After all, it was unlikely, at the time they were married in 1868, that two people would even meet if the distance between their homes was prohibitively long.

The first result to my maps query, however, puzzled me. 

Even if they met in the middle, this trip of nearly 185 miles would take over thirty hours of walking for this potential couple. Hardly a reasonable commitment, even for star-crossed lovers.

I went back to my search terms to double check parameters. Looking back to entries at Wikipedia for each of the towns, I noticed the maps included coordinates for each location. This time, I returned to Google Maps and plugged in the coordinates I had found at Wikipedia, rather than entering the town names.

This result seemed more likely.

This time, Lubichowo and Czarnylas were a more reasonable hike of about two and a half hours, if one took the shortcut. If a couple met in the middle, they could arrive at their destination in little over one hour.

This, however, pointed out the obvious: Google Maps wasn't exactly wrong, per se, in outlining the first trip. As we find in more familiar territory back in our own country, sometimes there are two towns with the same name—maybe even within the same state. Frustrating, yes, but a reminder to ensure that when we research our family history, we've found the right town for the right ancestor, for surely, that other town might oblige us by featuring another search result with the very same names as the relatives we're seeking.

This little map-drawing experiment calls me to go back and double check my research on yet another detail. If there are two Polish towns with the same name, what if I've selected the wrong one? There's a reason for that question besides the unexpected results on this mapping experiment: the fact that, as the territory changed hands from one governmental entity to another, the names for the towns also changed. In this case, the revision was from the names the towns are called in Poland today to the German names imposed upon those locations during the Prussian rule. We need to go back and double check what we had found about that town of Czarnylas.

Above maps courtesy of Google Maps.

The Wife's Side of the Story

 

Using Y-DNA to uncover more about my great-grandfather's patriline may not have revealed much, as we mentioned yesterday, but what if we looked at the story revealed by his wife's DNA? Thomas Puchała, being my great-grandfather, was a close enough relative to be identified through autosomal DNA matches. But when I looked at my DNA matches using Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, both Thomas and his wife, Anastasia Zegarska, yielded me only two matches. Problem: I know them both. This is no revelation.

Yet, if I move back one more generation and, rather than looking at the DNA matches showing for Thomas' father Jan—no surprise here, just the same two I already know—I look at Thomas' wife Anastasia Zegarska's parents, suddenly that match count jumps. For that couple, my second great-grandparents Jan Zegarski and Marianna Wojtaś, I now have twenty four DNA cousins to research. And twenty four more advocates for examining our jointly-held roots.

In this case, the exercise serves to provide one more data point to zero in on just who the Puchała men were. Granted, using autosomal DNA to track Thomas' wife's siblings' descendants—hint: these were the families who mostly emigrated from Poland to Wisconsin in the United States—did find me some cousins in the current generation. After spending a lifetime feeling like I had hardly any relatives, I like that sense of familial connection.

But tracing Thomas' in-laws did unearth one puzzling question. Having found a few documents on the two families, Puchałan and Zegarski, I now had the name of two villages of origin in Poland. Problem: entering that information on a map told me that the two families lived approximately 185 miles apart from each other. Not exactly a quick stroll to the marketplace.

That's simply not a likely scenario for courtship, 1860s style. Obviously, I need to turn back to those maps, add some additional information, and get a solid picture of where, exactly, the two towns were actually located. A distance like that might be a deal-breaker for a budding Polish romance in that century—not to mention, the accuracy of a pedigree chart.

A Targeted Testing Attempt

 

Though I started my DNA journey to confirm that closely-held family secret that we were, after all, Polish—and not Irish, as my grandfather had insisted—the very first DNA test I submitted didn't yield me much information at all.

That test was a targeted testing attempt on my part: I asked my brother if he would be willing to take a Y-DNA test. That test, currently offered by only one genetic genealogy company—Family Tree DNA in Houston, Texas—can reveal a deep ancestry, but only on one specific family line. That line, known as the patriline, belongs to the male test subject's father's father's father's ancestors on that one specific family line. Reaching much farther back in generations than the autosomal test can accurately reveal, its results are not wide as far as DNA cousins may go, but those results go deep.

While I'm grateful for my brother's willingness to serve as my proxy in seeking the truth about our father's genetic heritage—after all, women cannot test the Y-chromosome they don't have—his test has yet to provide me any solid leads. When I thought about this after the fact, I realized that not only was he my father's only son, but my dad—by then, long since passed away—had no brothers. Neither did his father, apparently. And I suspect that was the case in the generation preceding him.

Because this research question involves some generations relatively close to the present time, autosomal DNA testing could be the perfect tool for such a case. While I'm glad I have the results to my brother's Y-DNA test—with matches still being added over time as more people test—I asked my brother to also take the autosomal test. And I took one, too—at every genealogy company that offered such kits. I didn't want to miss any possible matches.

Perhaps it was serendipity that I discovered a lead. It was thanks to the auto-clusters program added to the tools at MyHeritage, which pointed out some unexpected Polish-American DNA cousins—in Wisconsin, of all places. It didn't, at first, make sense for someone whose immigrant family had settled not far from the docks of the New York City port where they first arrived in America. Of course, reviewing the details I had shared yesterday about the most likely locations for Polish immigrants to settle, that would make sense in hindsight.

Because I went overboard and tested at five different DNA companies, I checked for Polish matches at each of those testing locations. Apparently, I had company, for someone from that same Wisconsin line also tested at Ancestry.com. That connection turned out to be a godsend, for the administrator for that DNA cousin's test was quite knowledgeable about the family line, at least in the Wisconsin area, and also had found online resources back in Poland.

Where would we be in our research, if it weren't for other researchers willing to share what they have learned? When I first discovered these DNA matches, I had no clue how they connected to my family. There was certainly no sign of any geographic connection. Though I should have suspected it, that sleight of hand in slightly changing surnames came into play once again—from Zegarski descendants in Wisconsin to the surname Zegars in my New York City family's case. It took a leap of faith to make the first assumption, but as the DNA matches started piling up, it became far more obvious that I had found the connection.

But even so, those DNA matches didn't link with my research focus for this month—Thomas Puchała—but with his wife, Anastasia Zegarska. In fact, over ten years after my DNA test was taken, I've had many DNA matches added to the list of cousins connected to that Zegarski line of Thomas' wife. But for Thomas himself, I still have the same two DNA matches I've always had. Even if I step back a generation to Thomas' father Jan, I only have those two DNA matches—and they are close relatives to me, whom I know personally. There just aren't that many Puchała descendants to match, apparently.

Still, the question is: if we can't find any direct matches with the Puchała line, can we learn anything about the men in this patriline by inferring details from what we can discover about their wives? Let's take some time to check whether the DNA can lead us to any helpful records there.