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. 

Change of Plans

 

Sometimes, a change of plans can happen for the nicest of surprises. Today is one of those days. I had planned to launch into a new month of research on the third of my father-in-law's mystery ancestors for this year. Then, an unexpected email landed in my in-box which I simply can't not talk about. I thought about saving this post for next weekend, but since today's a holiday anyhow, I'll let that be my excuse to celebrate a little.

If you have been following A Family Tapestry for any amount of time longer than, say, the past couple years, you probably have picked up the notion that when I started this family history journey, I knew next to nothing about my own father's side of the family. Put it simply: I knew my dad's name, and a rough estimate of his date of birth somewhere in New York City—and that was it. He wasn't too helpful about adding any information, either; his usual response to my childhood pleas—delivered in a typical New York accent—was, "Ah, you don't wanna know that."

My older siblings and cousins and I eventually got together and compared notes on our respective parents from this side of the family. Bit by bit, we were able to assemble lines from census records and other details which revealed the story of a family with a far different surname than the one I grew up with: it was Puhalski. Or Puhalaski. Or, finally back in Poland, the family's origin, Puhała.

That search took years of sharing discoveries among ourselves, but even then, I'd run into people who warned me that what my cousins and I had found was simply a case of a woman—my paternal grandmother, Sophie Laskowska—marrying two different men. That was the usual way to explain away family records with two different surnames, not the alternate—and very possible—scenario of an immigrant deciding to unofficially change his own name.

Well, along came technology—we bandy about the term "AI" now—and changed all that. Unbidden and certainly unexpectedly, I got this email yesterday about a discovery regarding a newspaper printed over a century ago. The email was from the genealogy company MyHeritage, which a few years ago had acquired a significant collection of New York newspapers and state documents. With their release this year of OldNews.com, MyHeritage was certainly equipped to help me resolve that research dilemma, but I never dreamed it possible to actually find an answer to this problem in print, certainly not in the pages of any New York newspaper.

It was MyHeritage's SuperSearch function which did the heavy lifting for me, though I hadn't even the slightest notion that they were working behind the scenes to uncover answers for me. Thus, the unexpected email brought me, unbidden, the answer I thought I would never find.

That long-awaited answer was buried in the legal notices from the June 13, 1917, edition of the Flushing Daily Times, in the midst of articles on page three concerning rallies for the Red Cross, real estate sales, classified ads, and even a cartoon strip. In essence, at a "Special Term of the Supreme Court" for Queens County (but held in Kings County) on June 12, Theodore J. Puhalski petitioned to change his name to John T. McCann. In addition, the notice included the request for the petitioner's two children to also have their surname changed for "good reasons" and that their interests "will be substantially promoted thereby."

Makes one wonder what those "good reasons" might have been. Whatever they were, they remained as much a secret as the very court incident, itself—until, at least, a smartly set up computer system aided in uncovering details I never dreamed actually existed.

Today might be a different holiday celebration for you than the event I'm celebrating. For now, I'm cheering for this unexpected discovery, definitely a genealogy happy-dance-worthy moment. Tomorrow, we'll get back to work on previously scheduled research plans. I promise.

Newspaper image above from page 3 of the Flushing Daily Times for June 13, 1917, courtesy of OldNews.com at MyHeritage.com.

Tracing the Vaudevillian

 

If my grandfather was once a vaudevillian—or vaudeville performer—to trace his story back to any particular act, theater, or touring circuit would take a monumental research effort. Setting the stage for my effort, I took in a brief introduction to the live performance genre in hopes its history would guide my search. I'm not sure it will, but here's what I learned.

My grandfather, alternately called Theodore J. and John T., could have been credited for his act—if he had one on stage—under one of three possible surnames. The first, found in his earliest records in his homeland in what is now Poland, would be Puchała. Once having arrived in New York, government records documented my grandfather's surname as Puhalski, or in one instance, Puchalaski. Yet, out of the blue, in 1915 he reappeared with his family under a different surname, McCann. Where did that come from? Perhaps that was the name he used in performances—if he used any name at all.

To think that I can pinpoint his involvement in vaudeville solely by the dates of his lifespan—or even by those few years between his arrival in the United States and the demise of vaudeville—would not be a likely research plan. Though classic vaudeville—according to its history—grew out of a form developed in France in the late 1800s, well within my grandfather's early adult years, its version in North America was actually a combination of several entertainment traditions. Some of these influences, such as the variety shows which existed since the time of the Civil War, certainly predated my grandfather, although coincidentally, one impresario in New York City first began substituting the term "vaudeville" for "variety show" the very year my grandfather was born—1876.

On the other end of vaudeville's history, at least in the United States, some attribute the rise of movies as a leading cause of the demise of the live performances of vaudeville. While some fix that date as the decade beginning in 1910, the date at which one key New York theater shifted from combined entertainment to exclusively cinematic entertainment—16 November 1932—is attributed as the shift which signaled the end of vaudeville.

With a time frame as ample as that timeline, it doesn't provide us any guidance in pinpointing my grandfather's possible participation in that genre of entertainment. That, however, is not the only reason such a search would be difficult. Just reviewing the history of vaudeville's run in America gives us other reasons to wilt at the prospect of researching this question. 

In order to build a successful business model, the live acts of vaudeville needed to tour from city to city. Often, entertainers on these circuits would be on the road for up to forty two weeks out of the year. This could have explained why I never found my grandfather in earlier census records prior to his marriage and appearance in the 1905 New York State census. However, another daunting fact about these vaudeville circuits was that, in their heyday, they employed over twelve thousand people throughout the entire industry. Finding the as-yet-unnamed act of my grandfather would be a formidable task, given such odds.

Still, there are some resources, should I be brave enough to attempt the search. As with all such endeavors, the more I search, the more resources I find. Let's take a closer look at where vaudeville resources can be found in tomorrow's post—just in case you, like I did, encounter a family story about an ancestor who was also a vaudevillian. 

The Other Question

 

There's another research question to grapple with before this month comes to a close. When I started this month's project, my hope was to track my father's music career from his early adulthood. After all, even though he was only one generation removed from me, there was a lot of life story that I didn't know much about. I was curious. Now that digitized genealogy and general history resources can be found at the click of a mouse, this was my golden moment.

Granted, I found a lot of newspaper reports on my dad, thanks to leads my brother provided. Not hints given to me, personally—hey, I was the kid sister; what would I know?—but to several interviewers documenting his own career over the years (for which I'm grateful), and also, once again, thanks to the archiving essence of our now digitized world.

Before I close out this month's family research project, though, there is one other question I need to answer. The month started out with me wondering what my brother meant when he said he descended from a line of entertainers—both his father and his grandfather. My dad I always knew about—but what about my grandfather? He was dead before I was born; I never met him. What little I had gleaned about his life and his personality from older siblings and cousins led me to understand they too knew little about his background. This would be my month to track down an answer to that other question: just what entertainment this grandfather might have provided in his younger years.

The trick in researching such a question lies in the fact that this was the man who changed his name upon arrival on American shores. Known in his homeland by the Polish equivalent of the name Theodore J. Puchalski, once in New York, he reversed order on his given names to become "John T." Whether he used his surname, originally Puchalski, or opted for a more streamlined American version for this entertainment diversion, I can't tell.

Theodore J.—or John T.—was born in 1876. Though the information on his petition for naturalization states he arrived in New York in 1884, I have not been able to find any trace of him in records before the 1905 New York State census. By that point, he would have been almost thirty years of age—hiding a good ten to perhaps twelve years of the possible work my brother alluded to.

After that point—state enumerations did not include information on occupation—the federal census records were of no help, though they did confirm some details my older sister had shared with me about our grandfather. He was either listed as a "machinist" or working at a printing press. For one census, he was listed as a "foreman" but the enumerator didn't follow instructions for how to enter the type of industry—and had sloppy handwriting on top of that. I think I can be safe in saying he wasn't serving as a foreman for any night club acts.

As for the most obvious possibility for how the man could have been an entertainer—if you guessed vaudeville, we are both on the same page—there may be some clues. Both my older sister and my cousin—the oldest of the surviving grandchildren—have told me stories of how John T. was a juggler and had a friend who was a professional wrestler. But before we get lost in conjecture, let's get the overview of the historical setting of the era in which vaudeville flourished, tomorrow.

A Life in "Show Biz"

 

Long before I was ever on the scene, my dad played a small part in the local entertainment industry. Since that local scene happened to be in New York City, such an accomplishment was no small feat. By the time I was born, my father had retired from "show biz" but still kept involved in music, but even though I wasn't witness to his accomplishments, I knew there had to be that personal history out there—somewhere. This month, for the last of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, I decided to make the entertainment aspect of my family's history my prime focus.

The curiosity was sparked not by my dad's work history, happening long before I was born, but because of a phrase my brother had included in his own career biography. An actor, my brother was fond of saying he was a "third generation performer." I knew about my brother, and I certainly knew about my dad—but who was this third generation performer? Hopefully, by the end of this month's exploration, I'll not only have found more documentation for both of those two closer generations but learn who that mystery third generation relative was.

Though looking through newspapers of the era in which my dad was active provided some glimpses of his life and times, we'll save that review for later this month. Let's start at the beginning of his saga. Finding my father's own birth record—thanks to a tip from a fellow researcher years ago, when I had no idea of the possibility—was a real eye opener, for the name I always knew him by was not the name given to him at his birth. Remember, his father was the one who kept hidden the secret of his origin. If not for the many New York City documents now digitized and available online, I would have had no way to quickly confirm these details.

Back in 1905, a young immigrant and his twenty year old bride in Brooklyn became proud parents of a firstborn son they called Valentine. I always knew that was my dad's given name, so no surprise there. It was the surname that was the first clue that something definitely had changed between that 1905 date and years later when I became his daughter: his father's surname was listed as Puhalski.

Thankfully, now we can view that document for ourselves online, but when the in-law of a distant cousin reached out to me in the 1990s to share that discovery, not only could I not believe it, but I had to pay to obtain a copy of the document—and wait six weeks before I could say "seeing is believing."

By then, of course, my father was long gone, so I couldn't even attempt to ask him for an explanation. His parents were deceased before I was even born, so that was no option, either. But my older siblings and cousins did have the chance to talk to their grandparents. Though they never received any satisfying answers, they all agreed: there was more to the family story than was ever shared with those children.

Before the age at which young men are usually considered to have launched their career, my dad had already secured gainful employment as a musician. My mother suspected that my father had never finished high school—not uncommon for that generation—and remarked at what might have been the family's sore spot of realizing the son claimed a better income than his father, a skilled craftsman, was making. Why stay in school when the money's that good?

Granted, the music industry of that era was quite different than that of the current generation, which is something I'll need to explore while reviewing the experience my dad might have had breaking in to the entertainment world of his time. We'll take some time in the next few days to see what can be found about him in newspapers of his time. 

To -ski, to -ska . . . or Not at All

 

It may seem odd, jumping through the litany of possible family names for Aunt Rose, to be so convinced that her mother was a Zegarska and her father a Puchała. After all, in the few documents in which I've been able to pin down the family identity, Rose's mother was identified as Anna Zegars—with no "-ski" and no "-ska"—and her father as Puchałski. Which one to believe?

Years ago, when it was still possible to do so, I had sent away—the snail mail way—for my grandfather's death certificate. He, being Rose's brother, would have had the same information on his death record as she would have in hers—if, at this point, I still could send away for hers in a timely manner. While we have to remember that, at the point of a loved one's death, the farthest thing on the bereaved's mind would be to recall the deceased's mother's maiden name, genealogists typically look to this record to provide such information.

In my grandfather's death certificate, the answer to that question of mother's maiden name was: Zegars. Note here the absence of any sign of the typical suffix "-ski" which was normally attributed—at least in English-speaking countries—to surnames of Polish origin. Nor was the proper Polish designation of "-ska" for women included. His mother's maiden name was given simply as Zegars.

It took a DNA test, years later, to discover that Zegars was not entirely correct. That name was indeed missing a few letters. When I stumbled upon match after match with people who descended from women named Zegarska, that was an indication that my Anna must have also been part of that family. There was no other possible relationship. But why would the reporting party on my grandfather's death certificate eliminate those three final letters to his mother's name?

Let's look at the other side of this family: Rose's possible father. If, forgetting about those false leads about someone named Julius, we go back to Rose's likely baptismal record in her Polish homeland, we find the surname listed as Puchałła. Double-checking with her parents' own marriage record, her father was listed as Puchała.

And yet, once the family arrived in New York, the only records in which I could find my grandfather listed presented the name as Puchalski or Puhalski. Where did the -ski come from?

My confusion only became amplified when I looked at the history of the evolution of Polish surnames. In a Wikipedia overview of Polish surnames, the suffix "-ski" was used to define affiliation to something, such as a place of origin or a possession of territory. This, of course, was generally reserved for use by nobility. By the 1800s, though, the merchant and even peasant classes began adopting use of the "-ski" suffix—something which occurred during the lifetime of both Anna and the man who eventually became her Polish husband. 

Their two surviving children, Rose and Theodore, born in the 1870s, would have been eyewitnesses to that change. Whether they were aware in their childhood of the significance of that change—or even the fact that it was happening at all—I can't say. That Theodore represented himself, once arriving in America, as Puchalski rather than simply Puchała, as he had been documented in his native land, pummels me with many questions. Yet if he consciously changed his name by adding the "-ski" suffix once in New York, how is it that his family removed that same status symbol from his mother's maiden name at his death? 

Perhaps by that generation, the family had no idea what that change meant.

 

Image above: Transcription of the 1868 marriage record for Anastasia Zegarska and Thomas Puchała courtesy of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, which can be searched here.

Just Double Checking

 

Sometimes in family history research, so much time has passed since the last time a detail was fact checked that doubt makes me do a double take. That's where I am with my search for Aunt Rose right now. If she was my paternal grandfather's sister, why did she enter a different father's name on her marriage records than what I thought I had found for my grandfather?

As confusing as the name changes for my immigrant grandfather may have been, I was certain I never saw the name Julius listed on any of my grandfather's documents. Yet, that is what Aunt Rose gave—twice—on her applications for marriage license. Where did that name Julius come from?

Just to make sure, I pulled up the records I have found on my grandfather. For that task, I first needed to look far back in his timeline, since the name he used once his children were old enough to spot any changes was apparently not the name given when he was born. 

Working my way backwards through time, I found my grandfather in the 1910 U.S. Census, living with his wife, their two children, and her parents, "Antone" and Mary Laskowski, in Brooklyn, New York. For that record, my grandfather's name was listed as Theodore J. Puhalski. Five years earlier, though, while living in the same household, the man's surname stretched out to be written "Puhalaski" and his given name morphed to Thomas for the 1905 New York State census. Birth records for each of his two children, which I have long since sent for, fashioned the surname as either Puhalski or Puchalski.

Yet, when a fortunate DNA match led me to a family researcher in Wisconsin—where, apparently, all the rest of Aunt Rose's maternal relatives had immigrated—she pointed me to a resource for transcribed records from Aunt Rose's homeland: the Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne, or Pomeranian Genealogical Association, PTG for short. While these were not the actual written records I would eventually need to consult, those transcriptions provided some helpful information.

In Rose's case, her 1872 baptismal record gave her name as Rosalia. Her mother, always listed as Anna in all the New York records where she appeared in Rose's household, was recorded as Anastasia. And Rose's father? His surname was given as Puchałła. Most important, though, was the absence of any appearance of the name of Julius. Rose's father's name was given as Thomas.

Cross checking to find the baptismal record for Rose's brother, I located a promising entry. In the same town, in 1876, there was an entry for a son named Theodor. Curiously, there was no entry for the father's name, but the mother was listed as Anastazya "Puchała ur. Zegarska." With "ur" being the Polish abbreviation for "urodzony" meaning "born," that entry seemed to suggest that the father was no longer present. Did he die? Or had he simply left, doubting he was the father of that child?

While I haven't been able to find any record of the man's death, I did confirm the couple's 1868 marriage in the bride's hometown of Czarnylas in Pomerania. The baptismal records for their children were filed in the nearby administrative district known as Lubichowo, and it is quite possible that, after their wedding, that is where the couple had settled.

Whether Rose's father had died or somehow separated himself from the family, it is apparent that Rose's mother Anna remarried, for in New York, she was listed in census records under the surname Krauss—at least, until the newspaper report of her suicide surfaced the entirely different surname of Kusharvski. If Rose's report of a father named Julius were correct, its source would have to be owing to the name of a step-father. And that leads to another question: were there any Krauss households in New York City which included a husband and wife duo named Julius and Anna?

Image above: Transcription of 1872 baptismal entry for Rosalia Puchałła courtesy of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, and can be searched here.

But What About the Patriline?

 

It certainly can be encouraging, when tentatively dipping into new research territory, to find hits for searches on those foreign-sounding surnames. I had no problem getting results to my queries for the Polish surname Radomski, the maiden name—in the feminine form of Radomska—for my second great-grandmother. Even when I limited the search to her hometown of Lubichowo in the region of Pomerania, there were websites cheering me on to the right track.

Not so for Susanna Radomska's husband. His surname, supposedly Puchała, gave me very few signs that I was on the right track. Looking for anyone else besides their son Thomas—or whatever his given name really was in Polish—I could only come up with one other candidate in the same village.

That possibility was a woman by the name of Marianna Puchała, who in 1858 married a man listed as Johann Flizik. Predictably, within the year, they welcomed their firstborn, a daughter they named Anna Elisabeth. And then promptly dropped out of sight.

Oh great: a surname to search which is even more obscure than Puchała. This caused me grave doubts that I was on the right track. I headed back to my go-to websites for surname origins at Forebears.io, where they assured me that, yes, there is such a surname as Puchała—although a rather rare one. Predictably, the greatest occurrence of that name occurs in Poland, where over six thousand incidences of that surname adds up to a relative rank of 742.

Okay, so now I understand where my struggle lies: there aren't too many of us around. Perhaps all my distant cousins tried the same tactic as had my paternal grandfather: move to New York and change your name.

Just to make sure there are others of us around—that still wasn't convincing enough for a doubter like me—I visited good ol' FamilySearch.org, where I entered the plain search term of Puchała. When enough hits helped build my courage that I am not imaging this surname, I tried a few limiting additions: search for Puchała in Pomorskie, Poland (the term for the province of Pomerania), and even search in Lubichowo.

I found plenty of people claiming that surname, both in Poland and in the United States, which was encouraging. Of course, they aren't my people, but at least there are people with that name in existence—a detail I was beginning to doubt. After all, having had my brother test his Y-DNA has not, in all those seven years since he agreed to test, produced one single exact match on that patriline. Where are all these Puchałas?

There is, however, one other question which plagues me as I pursue this Puchała line. That may have been the surname I was led back to as I traced this family from my grandfather in New York, to his multiply-married mother's birthplace in Poland, thanks to yet another boost from DNA testing. But Puchała wasn't the surname which I found my grandfather using when I first spotted him in New York before his top-secret name change. The name he was using then, depending on who was trying to spell it for American documents, was Puchalski, not Puchała. Where did he get the "-ski" from? 

Playing the Wildcard

 

What do you do when the surname you're seeking comes in too many shapes and sizes to track online? You become best friends with the wildcard: the asterisk symbol, used in many search engines to signify an unknown letter or string of letters.

Granted, by now I'm fairly certain about the various surnames pinned on my paternal grandfather. I've seen him listed as Puhalski. And Puchalski, for those whose German background lends them proper understanding about that pronunciation. I've even seen one census enumerator get carried away and list my grandfather as Puhalaski. But when I jump across the ocean from those American records to the paper trail back home, the name was most likely Puchała.

Yes, that name came with the diacritical mark on that last syllable. But don't count on even Polish records getting that correct. As I explore the transcribed records online at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, I've found some entries of that name with the diacritic, others without, and some—apparently to make up for past discrepancies—receiving a double dose.

Searching all those possibilities could be wearying, which is why I opted for the wildcard approach. Now that I've found what is the likely record of my grandfather's parents' marriage—Anastasia Zegarska to Thomas Puchała in Czarnylas in 1868—I thought I would try to push back another generation and find any sign of a family constellation anywhere in the historic region of Pomerania.

To stake out the territory as widely as possible, I calculated an earliest and latest possible birth year for Thomas Puchała, considering his wife was born in 1848. Then, I searched the entire region, rather than limiting the results to one parish, despite already establishing that Czarnylas was likely where the Zegarski family lived. There is always the possibility that Anastasia's fiance came from another village. 

Then, I searched only by surname, not given name, in case the priest in attendance decided to go against custom and record the name by traditional Polish spelling, rather than Latin. Besides, I wanted to see who else might have been in the family, if any patterns emerged.

Finally, rather than just searching for Puchała, I used the wildcard and searched for "Pucha*a" for the entire region of Pomerania. For that, I fervently hoped Puchała was not Poland's equivalent of Smith.

What I found was, shall we say, interesting. Here are the results for the years 1840 through 1875.

First, of course, I was ecstatic to see how the results fell into patterns. The results for some of the parish records fell clearly into family groups, with the preponderance of results falling to a village called Lubichowo. Checking Google Maps, I could tell the distance from that village to Czarnylas—Zegarski home base—was seven kilometers, a reasonable ninety minute walk.

More importantly, the Lubichowo Puchałas, Johann and Susanna, had a son named Thomas. The only baptism for a Puchała son named Thomas, I might add. From the top of the list above, with a baptism in 1842, we can count on that first listing for Marianna being Thomas' older sister, and we can also infer that Andreas in 1851, Franz in 1855, and Catharina in 1857 comprise the rest of Thomas' family.

From that point onward, extending beyond the time frame of this chart, the Puchała baptisms in Lubichowo reveal Thomas' own children, including (beyond this chart) my paternal grandfather Theodor in 1876.

Could it have been any easier? I had no idea "just trying" could actually yield an answer. Granted, in many cases, it doesn't. And after so much struggle to figure out who my paternal grandfather actually was—his identity changed so much, once he arrived in New York City—I was certainly primed for the worst, as far as research difficulty goes.

DNA matches—if we are fortunate enough to have those unknown distant cousins decide to test—can reach beyond the breach of paper trails and at least point us in a reasonable direction.

Of course, I have much more work ahead of me, in order to confirm my tentative conclusion. All those branches of the Zegarska sisters' families which led to successful DNA matches with descendants need to be documented—and added to my main tree, where I can pin the DNA tests to the right descendants. All those matches' centiMorgan counts need to be cross checked to see if they yield statistically reasonable relationships. And everything needs to be examined yet another time to make sure there is no alternate explanation for why I match all these Zegarska descendants.

As for the Puchała side of the family, I would love to find someone willing to participate in DNA testing, just to confirm our connection. That, however, is an unlikely scenario. Since 2014, I've waited for a Y-DNA match to my brother on this, our patriline, with no one even coming close. Of course, now that I can build out the tree, I can look for eligible descendants, but unless they, too, emigrated from Poland, there may be complications to obtaining a willing test participant.

Family history unfolds itself bit by bit in revealing to the researcher her hidden roots. At one time, it seemed inconceivable to me that I didn't really even know my own grandfather, much less where he came from. With the development of online resources with historic relevance—not to mention the powerhouse of genetic genealogy—what we presumed could never be knowable now lies behind a door which we have the power to actually open.

 

Above chart obtained by searching "Pucha*a" with dates 1840 through 1875 for baptisms in all parishes at Pomeranian Genealogical Association. 

Pulling the Trigger on the Family Tree

 

News flash: three more days and, at least in the United States, Thanksgiving will be upon us. Following that event—assuming we all survive the weekend which brings consumer-oriented Americans an extended "Black Friday"—there is only one more weekday left to the beleaguered month of November. That means—for those who have been counting this year—I have precious few days left to get back on track with my research plan for my "Twelve Most Wanted" ancestors for 2020.

In other words, for my great-grandmother Anna—whoever she was—I need to decide whether to pull the trigger and add a pile of DNA matches to my family tree, or defer the decision yet another year.

The preponderance of DNA fingers pointing to a blood relationship with the Zegarska sisters of Czarnylas in historic Pomerania—now part of present-day Poland—seems convincing. And yet, I hesitate. Why, for instance, did all the Zegarski relatives of "Anna" head to Milwaukee while my great-grandmother ended up in New York? There are just too many loose ends in Anna's own story leaving me in doubt. Untraceable subsequent marriages for Anna and a death certificate riddled with "unknown" responses don't inspire any confidence in a paper trail. Then, too, what if there was a missing other explanation for why all those Zegarska descendants connect to my DNA test?

Perhaps I am waiting for "evidence" which is non-existent. If there is no paper trail, what else can be said for the family in a proof argument?

And yet, I promised myself I'd spend a month each on twelve of my brick wall relatives. Sometimes, we gather all the information we can find, and then...wait. There are always new databases coming online, new record sets digitized and uploaded to genealogical websites, and other ways to reach out and connect with relatives who might have private collections, as well. While I wish for the smoking gun to clinch the genealogical argument, I have to remember that, first, I need to pull the trigger on the loaded apparatus I'm already holding.

With that, I will hold my breath, cover my eyes, and click whichever button it takes to upload my private, unsearchable DNA match tree to my main DNA-linked tree on Ancestry. That means that combined family tree will increase by 840 individuals, all somehow related to my Milwaukee DNA matches in that private stash I've been growing on the dark side of Ancestry.

In the meantime, in the remaining few days left in this month of November, I've got a small bit of unfinished business to attend to on the other half of this Zegarska partnership: the husband of Anna, er, Anastasia, who came into the family's picture with his 1868 marriage to Anastasia, and somehow disappeared after the last recorded birth for the couple in 1876. 

 

Above: Entry for the 1868 marriage of Thomas Puchała and Anastasia Zegarska in Czarnylas, Poland; transcription of original records provided by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association.

Alternate Annas

 

Theories always seem to wrap puzzles nicely in a box. When a perfect fit, they provide the precise alibi to trick us into accepting as true what might turn out, upon closer inspection, to be a flawed conclusion.

Take my struggles with figuring out the origin of my paternal grandfather's family. Discovering his undocumented name change, sometime after his arrival in New York from his native Poland, it only very slowly led to concluding—once again, without a paper trail—that his mother, listed on paper as Anna Krauss, was more likely a woman by the maiden name of Zegarska.

How do I know this? Only a theory. Yes, it is based on the fact that I now have several DNA matches which point to that Zegarski surname from a small town called Czarnylas in the northern Polish region of Pomerania.

Confounding that tempting theory is the fact that one line of descent from that Zegarski origin was linked to another woman known as Anna Zegarska. If that Anna Zegarska was sister to my Anna, something is obviously wrong with that theory. Could the Anna Zegarska, born in 1859 in Czarnylas, who married Tomasz Gracz and then moved to Milwaukee have had a sister whose full name was shortened to a nickname Anna? There were, after all, three other sisters whose names could lend themselves to such a theory.

One of them, Susanna, was baptised only two years previous to her sister Anna. With that in mind, though, unlike her sisters, Susanna would have married at a younger age: only eighteen at the time of her 1875 marriage to Mathias Machlus, rather than the typical twenty one. 

Could that have been the right Susanna? There was no trace of any Machlus baptismal records in Czarnylas listing a mother with a maiden name of Zegarska. 

There was an answer to that short-lived dilemma, though: soon after, the bride and groom moved closer to the port city of Gdańsk, where they, too, raised a large family of at least fourteen children before Susanna left off childbearing in 1899—or, as I rather suspect, the record set's transcriptions ended.

It is unlikely that, given how well-established the Machlus family became in over twenty years of residence in their adopted hometown of Dzierżążno, Susanna and Mathias would have then chosen to remove to America. Indeed, checking my DNA matches at Ancestry, there were none having the Machlus surname in their direct line. Susanna would not have been my Anna in New York.

Susanna's sister Marianna might also have been an alternate Anna. She, however, married a man by the name of Franz Krocz and, like her sister Susanna, moved from her native Czarnylas to nearby Bobowo, and then in the opposite direction to Skórcz. How do I know that? By following the baptismal records of her many children from 1865 through 1888. Again, an unlikely candidate to follow that with an immigrant journey across half a continent and an ocean. Marianna is not going to be my Anna in New York, either.

The remaining possibility for Anna among the three Zegarska sisters could only be Anastasia—and not just because of the similar name, but also because her husband's surname was so close to the Puchalski originally claimed by my paternal grandfather. Then, of course, there were those baptismal records linking Anastasia and her two children to my Anna in New York and her two children of the same given names, which also helped.

Despite all those other Annas—except one—remaining in Poland, there was at least one other Zegarska relative who eventually moved to Milwaukee. That I also know, thanks to only one reason: the DNA matches left in this Zegarska's trail. But for that particular woman, we'll need first to take another step backwards to understand how she connects to the bigger family picture.

Not so Quick and Dirty

 

I've heard "Search Angels" call it a "quick and dirty" tree when they are helping adoptees piece together possible family trees of their closest DNA matches. There is so much information to sift through, so many possibilities to discard, that the process does involve a lot of trial and error. May as well get to the punch line as quickly as possible.

Somehow, though I understand their reasoning, I can't find it in me to do the same: to turn out a quick and dirty tree. Not that I'm an adoptee, of course, but my paternal grandfather has a heritage so hidden as to make him virtually the same. 

Since taking up the challenge of the last couple in my "Twelve Most Wanted" ancestors for 2020, I've been tying up the loose ends on the mystery of Theodor Puchalski—or whatever his name really was—to see if his mother was the one who was sister to the several other immigrants from her hometown in Poland who emigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It sure looks possible, but I'd like it better if I could piece together a reasonable pedigree chart linking all these DNA match descendants to that family. Hence, the "quick and dirty." Only...not.

So a couple years ago now, when I first dealt with the possibility, I had set up a private, unsearchable tree on Ancestry, just for this research puzzle. I didn't want to lead anyone down the wrong path while I was experimenting with connections. That tree has been languishing ever since—until now, when I took up the challenge once again.

When I left off the pursuit last time, I had 391 individuals in that tree—remember, I need to trace all the descendants of each of those Zegarska sisters from Czarnylas, Poland, who traveled to America. With just this week's work, I've added eighty more names. Not bad for less than a week's work.

And that's where I get bogged down. Somehow, I can't just enter a name in a tree without making sure to attach supporting documentation. It's important to know why we mark down certain dates or locations. After all, I could forget, right? So, unlike those quick and nimble Search Angels who can knock out a family tree in just one night, I plod along, adding each decennial census record, double-checking each marriage and death record, verifying the burial information, gleaning what I can from each obituary. And on and on...slowly.

In the end—if I do get to the point where I feel confident enough to plug these DNA matches into my father's tree at precisely the spot where his presumed paternal grandmother belongs—it will be worth it to have all the accompanying documentation. In the meantime, I just wish I could go a little more hurrier.

Awfully Presumptive of Me

 

In researching our immigrant ancestors—especially when speculating over the land of their origin—the duly diligent are those who heed warnings to take their investigations step by step. No wild leaps of faith, flinging ourselves across the Atlantic, at least not without a paper trail.

I threw all such sage advice to the four winds. Impatience got the better of me, and I struck out to see whether I could find Anna Krauss, or Kusharvska, or Puhalski, or whoever she was. If my DNA test results have any say in the matter, at one time, Anna was a young Polish woman with a maiden name of Zegarska.

Despite the rigors of science—which brought us genetic genealogy in the first place—I still have a hard time swallowing such an assertion. I have been too indoctrinated in the mandate that we adhere to a paper trail. And so, I look. And I look again. And I still can't be sure, even though the matches add up to several individuals who all know their roots and all claim that same surname, Zegarski.

So, back again I go, checking out the online resources, since at a time like this, I sure won't be traveling to Poland. FamilySearch provides me with a handy listing of online sources for records concerning Pomerania, the northwestern shoreline section of Poland where those Zegarski roots were supposed to originate. And reminds me that Ancestry.com has a collection of Pomeranian Parish Register Transcripts and also Pomeranian Passenger Lists.

I search. And I find nothing.

Then I look at the fine print for these collections. As it turns out, the parish register collection reminds me that "This collection does not represent all parish records for this area and time period." And the passenger collection pipes up, "In comparison to the millions of emigrants who traveled via Bremerhaven and Hamburg, the 20,000 passengers who passed through Szczecin and Swinoujscie represent only a small portion of the total."

But of course.

Still, I can go back to my old Polish staple for all things Pomeranian: The Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne (PTG)—or, the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, for those of us who can only speak English. And, once again—as if I can't believe my eyes—I did.

I searched for all unmarried women in the parish of Czarnylas who went by the name Zegarska between the years 1865 and 1876, dates generously extending both before and after the likely time in which my paternal grandfather's parents might have married. While there wasn't any mention of an Anna, at least there was an Anastasia:

 

There was a Marianna who, in 1864, married Franz Krocz, and a Susanna who married Mathias Machlus in 1875. Right in the middle was Anastasia and her intended, Thomas Puchała, with the very reasonable marriage date in 1868.

Why reasonable? While, best I can tell, my grandfather was born in 1876, if we turn to that same website to examine baptismal records, we find that, in another parish nearby, the same couple was named as parents of a son, Joseph, in 1869, and a daughter named Rosalia in 1872. In addition, there was a son named Theodor who was born in 1876, though no name was provided for his father, and his mother was listed by both her married surname plus the notation that she was "born Zegarska."

What happened to those other Zegarska women in Czarnylas? If they were this Anastasia's sisters, can we follow their records to discover what became of them? Perhaps we can trace them along their immigrant trail to North America—if that is indeed how I ended up with Zegarska DNA matches in Wisconsin. 

Oh, Duh: Phonics!

 

Tracing the family connections on our hardest-to-research ancestors is no different than dealing with any other line in our genealogy. We start with what we know, and work our way backwards in time, building one fact upon another. No overstepping our document-demanding bounds or jumping to conclusions without evidence. We move tentatively, then test, one step at a time.

The maddening thing about researching Anna Krauss was that she had to choose such a common surname for a place like New York City. To make matters worse, it was a surname with a variety of spelling options. Sometimes, she was listed as Anna Kraus, dropping the final "s"—or Krause, adding a final "e." She also had her name spelled Krouss, a reasonable guess, but a totally different search term for the desperate researcher.

But then, add in the various other names that she might have assumed in her lifetime. Was she really, at one point, the wife of Thomas Puhała? Or was that also spelled Puchała? And how did it become Puchalski? Or, if that really was her son's surname, was it an American indifference to spelling that wrought Puhalski?

Forget all those puzzles—how did the same woman show up on her own death certificate with yet another surname? The 1921 death certificate insisted this woman—on the right date and at the right address—was actually named Anna Kusharvska. Her daughter said so.

Of course, try as I might, I couldn't find any records other than that death report which included a surname like that. Even tampering with that Polish convention of the feminine ending to the name—"ska" instead of the masculine (and more widely recognized) "ski"—yielded no usable search results. 

That, among other reasons, was what inspired me to, well, do nothing more with that research puzzle. Until now.

It occurred to me, especially after spending all that time familiarizing myself with the general rules of Polish phonics, that perhaps, if I lent an ear to the sound of that name, rather than trying to focus on the appearance of its spelling, I might make more progress. So, considering those phonics tips I found online, I set about to reverse-engineer the mystery Anna Kusharvska's surname.

How might the Polish spell that surname? First, the "sh" in the initial syllable might more likely be represented in Polish by the letter combination "sz." Then, the "v" in the middle syllable would most certainly have been spelled with a "w" in Polish. In addition, though I don't know enough about the Polish language to say for sure, the insertion of that "r" in the middle syllable might indicate another aspect of Polish pronunciation that I'm just not equipped to fathom at this point.

Still, that said, could Kusharvska actually have looked like Kuszarwska? What are my chances? I had to go test out my theory with some online searches.    

Fit to a "T"

 

It is the "T" that has always been the question—what did it stand for? My paternal grandfather, the man who somehow arrived in America as a child but never let on what became of his family, was always remembered by my cousins and older siblings by the name John T. McCann. As it so happens for those of us with gnarled branches on our family trees, that name—John T. McCann—was not his real name. For whatever reason, he never wanted anyone to know what it had been before he became John T.

Fast forward to this digitized age of family history research, when, at a click of a button, we can view a gamut of records covering the nations of the world and an expanse of at least two centuries of data, and we begin to see family secrets outed—including, apparently, John T.'s real identity.

If we have it right—and I've checked my cousin's discovery in as many ways as I could devise—our paternal grandfather, in addition to pulling a new surname out of thin air, reversed his first and middle names. Witness this 1910 U. S. Census report, taken at the Brooklyn, New York, household of my paternal grandmother's parents: the father listed for my young dad and aunt went by the name Theodore J. Puhalski. Not much later, he was going by an entirely different name: John McCann.

Of course, it helped to find his naturalization records, spelling out that middle name for the former Theodore Puhalski. But lining up the date of immigration with any such passenger's arrival in New York City has been futile, up to this point.

What if we do a presumed close and leap across the ocean to see what can be found back home in Poland? What if we also presume that the mystery Anna Krauss, who kept on the periphery of family memories, along with that Aunt Rose, were actually John T.'s blood relatives? And what if, based on the DNA matches I've since found, that Anna was actually sister to the two Zegarska ancestors of those matches? That's when I start finding records. 

 

On dates that seem to align just right with what I know about Theodore, er, John T., this record from the registry office at Lubichowo—a mere ten kilometers distance from the Zegarski family's origin in Czarnylas—fingers a woman by the name of Anastasia Zegarska as mother of not only "Theodor" but also "Rosalia." John T.? Aunt Rose? Yes, the Puhała is not quite Puhalski, but that is not the first time this family has been slack about strictly precise identification.

It all seems to line up just right—until we realize we can find no corresponding details in any ship's records arriving in New York City. Not, at least, around the date when John T. asserted he had arrived in 1884. Nor can any records be found to explain why Aunt Rose's mother was known—well, at least before her final record divulged a different identity—as Anna Krauss. And adding that unexpected surname Kusharvski to the list helped not one bit.

It would be helpful if we could unravel the mystery, starting from John T. in New York, then moving, step by step, backwards in time until we crossed the Atlantic and rewound our way back to that 1868 wedding in Czarnylas.

Perhaps that is why I am so hesitant to just plug those DNA matches into my father's family tree. Discoveries are verified by data, and in this case, the paper trail is missing. I'd like to start traveling that trail anew, beginning with Anna's most recently-discovered name, but who has a name like Kusharvska? Maybe this time around, with freshly digitized documents being constantly added to genealogical collections, the doors will open to us a little wider than the last time we traveled this line.

 

Above excerpt from baptismal indices obtained by search at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. 

Mirror Trees: Now we Like Them, Now we Don't

Mirror trees have always seemed like a viable yet last-ditch effort for me. It's not that I'm an adoptee in search of my birth parents, but I am in search of the birthright of my heritage. Thanks to some likely-excusable but now-bemoaned reasons, my paternal grandfather never felt the freedom to share his ethnic roots. Now, two generations after the fact, I and my cousins can understand what he was up against, but still we wish he would have felt freer to share that story.

Still, we have a recourse. DNA testing has opened up possibilities for many people who never knew the true story about their roots—yes, including adoptees. Because I'm almost in the same boat, I keep a close eye on what people in that situation do to untangle the mystery of their past. I've since moved from that tentative position of finding two, maybe three, matches who likely belong to my paternal grandfather's side of my family tree to finding nearly a dozen matches. And though my matches families' trajectory didn't include a stop in New York City, as mine did, they all came from that same tiny village in the northern reaches of Poland. It's time to see how our trees collide.

And collide it might be. Last time I mulled over possible research approaches, the favored advice for adoptees was to build what is called a mirror tree. Plenty of researchers were plugging the technique, from the experts to the motivated-yet-avocational to those marketing to the avocational.

Then, suddenly, the word on the street was that mirror trees were no longer in favor. There were other tools which some thought might be more helpful. Among them is the AutoCluster tool from Genetic Affairs, which, when coupled with their addition of an automated tree building service, can target specific potential connections for an adoptee. And although Ancestry.com itself—boasting the largest database of DNA test participants—once suggested adoptees visualize their family connections using a chart-generating program like Lucidchart, it turns out one of their own recent product developments, which they dubbed ThruLines^™, may have been the very tool which saved adoptees from computer-assisted contortions.

Of course, the downside to ThruLines^™ is that I need to add in my mystery grandfather's suspected parents to my tree—and then a match needs to have that in his or her tree, as well.  After all, ThruLines^™  is based on connections traced from information provided on Ancestry subscribers' trees. No correct information, no correct match intel. Simple as that.

Right now, the only match connected to my mystery grandfather who shows up in my DNA results is my brother's daughter, who likely grabbed that information on our grandfather from my tree. Not a very helpful hint. And, face it, if I put my hypothesis about my connection to those many Wisconsin Michalski cousins on my tree, if everyone else copied it as confirmed truth, guess what would likely show up on our ThruLines results? In a way, the results from this new tool lead us back to that same dilemma, creating a new kind of "mirror" in the feedback loop of everyone copying everyone else's tree.

The surest way to overcome such dilemmas is to bite the research bullet, brush up on my Polish language skills, and dig into those Pomeranian records online to see how those Michalski cousins actually do connect with my Puchalski forebears.

And Now, for the Next Trip

If this had been a month in the summer, it would be one of those times when you could say I don't let that green grass grow beneath my feet. But since it is wintertime, that grass wouldn't be growing, no matter how long I dallied between assignments—if, that is, I had any time to waste in between scheduled trips.

As it turns out, I'll have less than a week until I'll be off for another research trip to Florida. This time, my quest will take on more of a personal tone: I'll be visiting with cousins I haven't seen in a long time. As one cousin put it recently, I'll need to set aside enough time to "talk about old times" and not be so quick to rush off to the next visit.

There is a melancholy ring to such a plea. That is the generation which, sadly, is shrinking every year. The generation who can tell me about relatives I never got to meet—with stories of their own memories of my own grandparents on my dad's side. People who were gone before I even arrived on the scene. The oral histories provided by these cousins are my only recollections of the anecdotes of everyday life, the keyhole to peek at the everyday life quirks of the kind of close relatives everyone else takes for granted.

Job number one for me this week thus becomes getting my head around the immediate family trees of my cousins. One cousin from my paternal side has been in communication with me over my discoveries, last summer, of our connection to a place in Poland once known as Pomerania. Apparently, those are our common roots, though I know so very little about that line so far. Of course, that is the branch I think belongs to the mother of my mystery paternal grandfather; I have yet to decipher where that woman's husband originated. The only thing I can tell so far is that he didn't come from the same place where she grew up. So much for the notion that people in the "old country" stayed in the same place for hundreds of year. Sometimes, family trees are quite messy.

The other cousin connection will be a visit with a relative from my mother's side of the family. Though I have been able to trace that Florida line back a few generations—my third great grandfather George McClellan's family supposedly came from a place in South Carolina called the Barnwell District—the family's rich heritage in the state tells me I need to keep looking for more information. And my mother's cousin is more than willing to make sure I know all she can tell me about these McClellans.

Despite the opportunity to glean the details of our family's oral history from these two willing research partners, I can't just walk in and spend the time chatting. I need to refresh my memory with what we've already discovered, so we can take a few steps forward from that point.

So, for this week, I'll be using this time for a refresher course on not only that maternal McClellan line, but the latest discoveries on my paternal Puchalski (a.k.a. Puchała) line and my paternal grandmother's Laskowski line, as well. At least, by this point, I've learned enough facts about each of these families to run the risk of forgetting some details. It's nice to realize I've come that far, but important to not lose the momentum by neglecting that due diligence of refreshing my memory in preparation for these visits.

Ancestor #11: With Not Even a Name

When seeking a missing ancestor, starting with even a name would be helpful. That, however is precisely what I am lacking when I try to follow the trail to my paternal grandfather's roots. I may have discovered my grandfather's mother's side of the family—thanks, mostly to several DNA matches which popped up late last summer—but I have very little to go by when researching that patriline. This, remember, is the surname of the man who kept tight-lipped about his own ancestry.

Clues yielded by DNA matches hint about the possibility of what his future wife's maiden name might have been. Going by that, as well as other records, yields several possible names. One, found through various census entries after my grandfather's arrival in New York City, was Puhalski—or, depending on who did the transcription from sounds to phonics, Puchalski. Another entry—possibly a poor specimen—was something like Puhalaski. But the farthest-reaching variation—and yet, likely the closest one to the truth—was a Polish record showing my grandfather's dad by the name Thomas Puchała.

How far I'm willing to be caught up in a net which seems to stretch reality at each point in question, I don't know. Already, this Thomas Puchała involves being willing to accept that Anna Zegar in New York City could be the same woman as Thomas' wife, Anastasia Zegarska in Pomerania. Or even that Puchalski in New York evolved from Puchała in Poland.

But then, there's that DNA connection.

If I decided, yesterday, to make Anna Zegar my tenth ancestor of those Twelve Most Wanted, why not follow suit and list her husband—whoever he was—as my eleventh candidate? And that's exactly what I'll do. Thomas—or whoever he was—will hopefully yield up some of his secrets to me by the end of 2020.

Above: "Winter Storm," by German landscape artist Albert Ernst Mühlig (1862-1909); image courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

A -ski, a -ska, a Skeptic

The question is: for Polish surnames, is using the "-ski" optional?

In asking the question, yesterday, about the chances that a Polish immigrant born with a -ski suffix to his surname would see it as no problem, in his adopted American home, to drop the -ski, I meant to delve so much farther into surnames than the traditional shift from -ski for males to -ska for females. I'm wondering how often an immigrant would consider drop the suffix entirely.

To satisfy myself with an answer, I went hunting online for assurances. In the process, I gained a few insights into Polish surnames—and names in general—from a variety of sources.

First, let's address my observation that, in Poland, it seemed the same person might show up in subsequent records with a different form of the same name. One time, the church record might spell the name, Latin style. Another time, it might seem that the priest writing the record must have been German. My eyes were not deceiving me: what I saw as a father's name of Johann Zegarski was probably an artifact of the priest originating from a German background; that name would show up in other entries—coupled with the same wife's name—with his first name given as Jan, the preferred Polish variant. A researcher can, indeed, expect to see records from Poland showing traces of spelling from four different languages: Latin, Polish, German, or even Russian.

As for surnames, their history, according to several sources, seemed to follow the same script. Names ending in "-ski" could have meant the person was of noble ancestry. Or not; as the adoption of surnames spread throughout the region, eventually even peasants living on a noble's land might take on his surname, despite sharing absolutely no relationship.

A number of resources mentioned that the suffix "-ski" means "from." Checking with the ever-present Google Translate, that didn't seem to be the case, but perhaps this information is from a historic perspective. At any rate, when I found a website with listings of specific surnames—incredibly, including the surname Puchalski, a variant of the name I had found my grandfather claiming in Brooklyn—it identified that surname as being a "habitational name" for a person from any location with a name like Puchały.

Never one to take others' word for it, I went looking. The one village I found named Puchały seemed rather far from Czarnylas, as did one with the similar name of Puchałowo. Of course, there may be other villages with the same name which have disappeared over the centuries. This may be time to employ a reliable historical gazetteer.

Then, too, as Kimberly Powell noted, "While you might think such surnames could lead you to your ancestral village, often that's not the case."

Seeing surnames—especially habitational surnames—from the vantage point of history reminds me of an online exchange I had read, nearly thirty years ago. It was on one of those special interest group forums founded in the wake of America Online (remember AOL?) which was dedicated to researching Polish ancestry. One reader had suggested checking out a book by Fred Hoffman on Polish surnames.

At the time, I had made a mental note to take care of that later...and then promptly forgot about it. Now, I need that book, and feverishly made my way online to see if it was still available. It is: for a song and a dance and a mere $135 or so. Thankfully, I subsequently discovered not only the updated edition, but the fact that a two-volume duo is sold by the Polish Genealogical Society of America.

All that being said, I'm still not sure that Anna Zegar would be the same person as Anastasia Zegarska, or that Thomas or Tomasz Puchała would have a son named Theodore who, while removing the "-ska" from his mother's surname, would add a "-ski" to his own.  

What About Anna?

In muddling through the family trees of strangers who show up as DNA matches to the mystery paternal side of my family, it may be helpful to build out those trees to find any connections, but there comes a time when a researcher has to return to building on her own tree. That's what I want to try my hand at, today.

Granted, I'm stuck with my own grandfather. He's the one whom the family knew by one name, but now that we have access to some very old records, we discover he once went by another name. A radically different name—as in, Polish, not Irish. However, along comes six DNA matches (after a wait of six years), and they all point to a village of Czarnylas, and a mother's maiden name of Zegarska.

Only problem: my possible great-grandmother's name was Anna Zegar. Close, but not quite a match.

A few bonus points get awarded for the fact that her daughter (whom my father knew as "Aunt Rose") declared for one document that she was from "Schwartzwald," which place name turned out to be a secondary identity—at least, thanks to the Germans who occupied the area—for the village now known as Czarnylas. But can we really accept that Anna Zegar—the woman who possibly could be my grandfather's mother—was really born a Zegarski?

I've checked those DNA matches' trees—four of them, so far, quite thoroughly—and they point to that surname and that village. And they somehow connect to me. The only line they could match me on would be that of my paternal grandfather—either through his father or his mother. Yet the trees of my DNA matches don't reveal any further clues. It's trailblazing from here on out.

What I've already found, thanks to the transcriptions of marriage and baptism records at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website, is that there was a sister of Pauline—mother of the two Czechowska sisters who married the Michalski men who immigrated to Milwaukee—who had a name which could, possibly, have been converted in America to a nickname of Anna.

Granted, Pauline also had a sister who was given that exact name—Anna—but we've already followed her line and realized she married a man named Gracz. That Anna, we've already learned, moved to Milwaukee, while my Anna was in New York City, so it doesn't seem possible that that would be the identity of my grandfather's mother.

There was, among the Zegarska sisters, another daughter named Anastasia. This sister was baptized in Czarnylas in 1848. The transcription of her baptismal record gave the names of her parents as Johann Zegarski and Marianna Woitaś, just as we've seen for Pauline and the rest of that family. Following the paper trail on Anastasia, the transcription of marriage records show her 1868 marriage, in Czarnylas, to a man listed as Thomas Puchała.

There, the trail loses me—partly, I suspect, because I am not yet facile with the alphabetization requirements in the Polish language for letters with diacritical marks, but also, likely, because priests who kept the church records seemed to arbitrarily vary spellings, perhaps based on the original ethnicity of the priest, himself. Some spellings seemed very Latin, others more like German, while others seemed to keep the vernacular. A surname like Puchała would be very much at the mercy of both the transcriber and the original record-keeper.

And so it was that, despite losing the trail of Thomas—or possibly Tomasz—Puchała in Czarnylas, I did find a couple with a similar name in baptismal records for a neighboring village about thirty kilometers to the west, called Lubichowo. Could it be possible that Thomas Puchałła in the Lubichowo records was the same man? He did have a wife named Anastasia Zegarska, although a parenthetical remark was added to their entry of one name: Susanna. No other records in that search—of thirty entries retrieved—had such a secondary entry.

If we assume this was the same Thomas and Anastasia as the one we saw married in Czarnylas, it is tantalizing to see what they named their daughter in 1872: Rosalia. If Rosalia turns out to be Aunt Rose, the race is on to see whether she had a brother, and, if so, whether he would be my grandfather.

Once again, we see a Lubichowo baptismal entry for another infant, in this case, dated 1876. But this time, it comes with an ominous notation. The son, who was given the name Theodor, has no entry on his baptismal record for the name of a father. In the place where the mother's name would be listed, her name is given as "Puchała ur. Zegarska."

Google Translate has become my constant companion as I delve into this unexpected Polish side of my family history. Entering that phrase into the translator, we see what we had suspected: "Puchała born Zegarska." What had happened to Thomas Puchała?

This is where I return from these Polish transcriptions to my own family tree to review what I do know about the woman I was told was Anna Krauss, mother of Rose, living in New York City. This Anna, like Anastasia, was born in 1848. If my grandfather's original name was transcribed correctly in the records I've been able to find, his surname was listed in New York as Puhalski, or Puhalaski—at least, until he unofficially changed it around the time of the first World War.

My grandfather had, in those rare moments when he caved to his grandchildren's pestering, divulged that he had been an "orphan." Granted, by the time any grandchildren had arrived, Anna was already gone, having died in 1921, so technically, my grandfather could in all good conscience insist on that "orphan" status by virtue of this one fact: many great-grandparents don't live long enough to see their their children's grandchildren. However, it appears as if my grandfather's father was not in the picture by the time the family arrived in New York, as all records concerning Anna listed her with the surname Krauss—incidentally, a frustrating research dead end in its own right, but also demonstrating that her son might have been telling the truth, at least about being fatherless.

The question is: could the Anna Zegar Krauss who landed in New York actually be one and the same as the Anastasia Zegarska Puchała who was possibly widowed in Poland? Time to construct a tentative tree and run the relationships through their "what are the odds" paces.