Connecting the Dots to Connect the Family

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letting Doubts Give Way to Documents

I've always had my doubts about Thomas. Of all the Hilscher children, Thomas the immigrant seemed out to give me grief in researching his whereabouts. Yes, I eventually could locate a record of his death in New York City, confirming an anglicized version of his parents' names, but I couldn't quite sketch out much more of his life story—until, that is, I took the detour of exploring the story of what I presumed was an unrelated Polish immigrant to New York City.

That immigrant, as we've since seen, was Stanislaus Samolewski. Despite having a surname given to snares of misspelling, Stanislaus was still someone whose life trajectory I could follow. And in following his path from Żerków, Prussia, to a new life in America, I somehow also learned a few things about Thomas Hilscher.

Among the few details I had already found about Thomas Hilscher, I had managed to locate a passenger record. Traveling across the Atlantic with several family members, Thomas had arrived in New York City aboard the steamship Amerika on April 7, 1912. Among the passengers listed on that page were Stanislawa, Thomas' wife, and four children ranging in age from fourteen years down to ten months.

For two of the children, a different surname had been entered, then smudged out. A flip of the page on this record showed more information on the continuation page: that the relationship between those two teenagers and Thomas indicated he was their stepfather. 

There was more to be found amidst the scrawled handwriting on those two pages of the passenger listing. In the brackets surrounding this family grouping, an encouraging note I found on the first page was that Thomas indicated his father's name. I'm sure my sign of relief was audible when I spotted the name Peter Hilscher, followed by the note that this father was from Żerków, despite the written claims of the family being from Germany, not Poland.

On the reverse of that passenger listing, however, were more details that could help me in piecing together the extended Hilscher family. For one thing, I learned that Thomas—although not anyone else in his party—had lived in the United States previously. In fact, he had been to New York twice: once in 1887, and again in 1893. At both times, he had traveled to Brooklyn, the part of New York City to which he was returning.

That second page also provided the information that the two older boys in his party were not his own children, but step-sons.

Most important, though, was the answer to the question concerning whether Thomas was "going to join a relative or friend" and, if so, what that person's name and address was. This was the family history gold for my quest to piece together the connection to my DNA matches: Thomas' answer was Stanislaus "Samolowski," noted in that passenger record to be his brother-in-law from 187 Bayard Place in Brooklyn.

In fact, something I only realized when I researched Stanislaus Samolewski's own records: Thomas Hilscher's brother-in-law was also returning home to Brooklyn on that same vessel. His own entry on the passenger list showed that he, too, had been to the United States before; in fact, by 1912, Stanislaus, traveling with his wife Antonina and two daughters on the Amerika, was returning to Brooklyn as a naturalized citizen.

Thanks to the lead provided by the scantily-documented family trees retrieved from several DNA matches,  a stranger from the past with a Polish surname led me not only to more details concerning his own family history, but secured a connection to a family I was researching. Until I spotted those DNA clues, I hadn't been able to document the connection between the two Hilscher siblings, Thomas and his sister Antonina, by 1912 the wife of Stanislaus Samolewski. That discovery was enough impetus to lead me back to the rest of the ThruLines lists to seek out more Hilscher—and, ultimately, Gramlewicz—connections.

Tree Building: Fast and Slow

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antonina's Identity

 

Unraveling a family history mystery seldom takes a direct path; we may follow a wandering trail before we can even pick up the scent of a possible lead. In following the DNA hint of several descendants of Polish immigrant Stanislaus Samolewski to his adopted home in New York City, it turns out the connection to my DNA cousins might not be from him, after all, but from his wife.

Who this wife was, I couldn't tell at first. It was time to determine her true identity. Several signs pointed to someone named Antoinette, and other reports claimed her maiden name was one of those classical—and lengthy—Polish surnames. The main problem was that this Antoinette's profile was not fitting my family tree parameters at all. How, then, did we connect?

Fortunately, researching Stanislaus more closely despite realizing he wasn't the connecting link to my DNA matches helped uncover some useful clues. For some of them, though, I had to wander through records of a subsequent generation, and take care to read both the front and the back of pages of records scrawled in illegible handwriting. Such is the genealogical life, as we all have experienced.

If one of the first of those documents I had examined had been Stanislaus' own death certificate, it would have saved me some steps. Of course, having two different spellings for his surname meant looking for both name variants, plaguing me with concerns that I might be following the trail of an unrelated name twin. After all, New York City's population was big enough to guarantee a high probability of running into that snare.

Adding to the confusion, a passenger record seemed to indicate the "Samolowski" family's arrival in New York in 1912—until a closer look revealed this was not their first journey to America. That reassured me that finding a "Somelesky" family in the 1905 New York State census might not be far off from the family I was seeking, especially since daughter Zofia (or Sophia) showed in both records.

Besides mention of that daughter, I was still left with the variants of Stanislaus' wife: Antonia or Antoinette in census records, yet Antonina in the passenger record. Such an inconsistency as that continued through the other records I had found as I traced all signs of Stanislaus' existence in his new home. That's why finding the actual digitized version of his death record helped.

Just as much as Stanislaus' wife's name varied, reports of her maiden name presented the same puzzle. At the bottom of a page in the New York State Death Index, I found the entry for Antonina Samolewski's own passing: April 1, 1956—though following that discovery with the search for her obituary brought me once again to that alternate identity of Antoinette Samolewski.

That April 6 obituary in the Brooklyn Greenpoint Weekly Star, headlined "A. Samolewski," thankfully spelled out her name. Despite a deceptive start in that article with her name listed as "Antoinette," the obituary provided her maiden name. This was the key: Antonina, born in Poland, was a Hilscher.

Just to be sure, I located a second confirmation in a transcription of the Social Security Applications and Claims Index for one of the Samolewskis' daughters. For daughter Josephine Annette, born apparently just after her parents returned to New York from a trip back to Poland, her record provided the maiden name of her mother as Hilsher.

Discovering the name was Antonina Hilscher was good news. I already had a name like that in my own family tree. It was time to take a closer look and see if I could find records on the other side of this story to confirm her whereabouts back in Poland.