Where the Falvey Name Leads Us

 

While the search for other ancestors may eventually put us in a tailspin, looking for a surname like Falvey has one fortunate benefit: it points us straight to County Kerry, Ireland. Granted, I already know that fact from Johanna Falvey Kelly's obituary, published in Fort Wayne, Indiana, following her 1903 death. But even if I hadn't accessed that old newspaper article, the history of the Falvey surname would guide me in that direction.

It's not every surname which warrants an entry on Wikipedia, but there it is among all the digital entries: a brief overview of the history of the Falvey surname. While it is interesting to know about the long span of the surname's history—or at least its conjecture—descending from one of the High Kings of Ireland, what I want to zero in on this month will be far less regal. All I'm hoping for is the specific line involving my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna. 

For that, just as the Wikipedia entry pointed out, I'm far more likely to find kin if I look at the region around the Lakes of Killarney, or the Dingle Peninsula, as the Wikipedia history surmises, though anywhere in County Kerry or nearby County Cork might be a reasonable target. And, as that article also noted, to look among the common folk in those more humble rural areas.

Sure enough, if we push our search closer to modern times—at least by the time of the still-existent 1901 or 1911 census enumerations—we can see the spread of Falvey residences across the southwestern part of Ireland in surname distribution maps.

Our task this week will be to push back as far as modern documentation can go, to see where the Falvey surname is listed. Granted, this will be a spotty picture, taking in only those on property records or tax rolls. As we do that, we'll also need to get up to speed on the lay of the land: the names and the locations of the townlands in County Kerry which contain mention of the Falvey surname. We have a lot to cover this week, but let's make those townland diagrams our next stop.

About Those Flanagans

 

Tracing my father-in-law's Flanagan roots in Chicago was an obvious starting point; Chicago was home to four generations of his family history. Chasing those Flanagans anywhere, however, may turn out to be a challenge.

As far as the surname Flanagan goes, the first problem we'll encounter is one of spelling. Far too many variants on the surname's spelling can make for research roadblocks. From Flanagan to Flanigan may be a change so slight as to not be noticed (except for the most ardent proofreaders), but add in variants such as Flannagan or Flanaghan and it's time to start using the wildcard asterisk in online searches. Then, too, for those Irish immigrants who, due to laws in place in times past, had no idea how to spell their own surname because they couldn't even read, who was to know if a clerk or government official spelled their name wrong?

Spelling woes aside, there is another challenge facing us in chasing my father-in-law's Flanagan forebears: the sheer number of people who share that family name.

I've always realized that Flanagan was a common surname, but I thought I'd better look for some statistics on that issue—and found out the surname isn't as common as I had thought. Still, in the United States, where my father-in-law's Flanagan ancestors immigrated, the Flanagan surname, at least a decade ago, was ranked just below the top one thousand surnames. Putting it another way, roughly one in every eight thousand people has the surname Flanagan. I guess there's not as many Flanagans here as I had assumed.

When we look at the numbers back in Ireland, it appears that—at least now—the Flanagan surname is ranked the ninety-fourth most common in the country. In other words, one out of every 572 Irish residents claims the surname Flanagan. 

To give those numbers a bit more granularity, I found a website which illustrates the spread and frequency of the surname by maps. While I am not conversant in the specifics of Poor Law Union locations—or even electoral divisions—the website Historic Stats provides maps demonstrating the distribution of the surname Flanagan in Ireland.

Just eyeballing those maps, I get the vague sense that our Flanagan immigrants may have come from one of the areas more densely populated with Flanagans, but I'm not so sure yet. But before we can get to the point of making an educated guess on that count, we need to head back to Chicago to set the record straight there on some Flanagan details.

 

When Unusual Mixes With Common

 

What happens when you combine the unusual with something common? In the case of this month's quest to discover more about my father's Olejniczak great-grandmother, I am beginning to realize that combining that surname with a given name as common as John puts the brakes on research progress.

How common is a name like Olejniczak? In all my life, I don't ever recall meeting anyone with a name like that. Even considering, with Polish phonics, that name is pronounced far differently than it looks to American eyes, I don't believe I've ever heard anyone mention that name.

To me, that is always a good sign. To look for an unusual name can mean an easier route to finding the right person for the name—so how common is a surname like Olejniczak? Here in the United States, compared to all other American surnames, Olejniczak ranks well below the twenty thousandth mark, showing up only 1,592 times in listings of all the surnames in the country in a recent tally.

But how does the surname rank in the country of its origin? One surname distribution site ranks Olejniczak 139th of all Polish surnames, with well over twenty thousand residents of Poland claiming that as their surname—a far different picture than we see in the United States or any other non-Polish country.

Not quite rare, but at least unusual: that's how I'd classify that surname. But what happens when we combine that search edge with a given name as common as John? My guess is that the uniqueness of the search term plummets—both in Poland, where I'd be looking for Jan (or, in church records, Joannes), and elsewhere for an immigrant named John. Suddenly, the uniqueness evaporates. Combine that with an immigrant's possible decision to modify that foreign-sounding surname, and the search terms get thrown wide open.

As it turns out, our Franziska Olejniczak, my father's great-grandmother, had a brother. In church records, his name appeared in its Latin version, Bartholomaeus. There, it was fairly easy to find the names of his sons, including that son with the common name Jan—or Joannes in church records, where we find him baptized in June of 1869 in the same town where I've found so many of my father's other Polish ancestors.

It just so happens that, of all my thousands of DNA matches, there is one—and only one—who connects with me through the Olejniczak grandparents of this Joannes Olejniczak, son of Bartholomaeus. It's a very small match, to be sure, but it is there, calling for attention.

Not happy to just take things at face value, that did grab my attention, and I looked. Despite hopes that this would be a workable match and a documentable line of descent, I found it to have rather disappointing support. While the tree of this DNA match showed this immigrant John Olejniczak to be born in 1868, there were very few documents to support the timeline for that tree. Reports of birth in "Germany," while possibly a politically correct label for the time period, may indicate a different person with that same common name of John, despite the unusual surname. And a morphing surname evolving over the years to help this immigrant fit into American culture did not help, either.

This will obviously call for examination of records, both to trace any clues of this other John Olejniczak's identity and family history and to search for more details on my own "John" Olejniczak, wherever he might have ended up. We'll jump into that chase tomorrow.

Googling Surnames

 

While it was tempting to follow the family trail of my fifth great-grandmother Elizabeth's father, Thomas Lewis, to the hardly believable story of his father John Lewis, we need to reel back the family fishing line to Elizabeth's mother's side of the story. My goal this month, after all, is to keep pursuing my matriline, so that is the direction we need to take for the remainder of this month.

To tell the truth, at this juncture, it seemed challenging to pursue that task, given that the next surname we will be examining is one I considered to be rather unusual: Strother. To disabuse myself of that intimidating notion, I decided to dive in to an introductory tour of surname possibilities: I Googled the surname "Strother."

I was surprised to see how many results turned up. From Ancestry.com, I learned that the Strother surname could be found not only in the United States, but in Canada, as well as England and Scotland. It likely originated as a habitational name, though the precise location of that suspected "wooded marshland" from which the Strother surname was supposedly derived has yet to be discovered. More to our purposes, the Ancestry.com article noted that by 1840, there were forty two Strother families living in Virginia, exactly where my sixth great-grandmother Jane Strother had been born about 1732.

Fortunately for me, the Strother family apparently was keenly interested in their own family history. I found several published records online, everything from a thirteen-page typewritten article from the collection of the Orange County California Genealogical Society to a September 1903 journal article in the Register of Kentucky State Historical Society. Better than that were the discoveries of specific Strother descendants' papers, including their own genealogical pursuits, archived in the holdings of the Atlanta History Center, the University of North Carolina, and the Digital Library of Georgia.

More interesting than that, at least to me, was stumbling upon the online existence of The William Strother Society, Inc.

Granted, all these discoveries are premature, given the fact that all I know, so far, is the least smattering of details about one member of the Strother family in colonial Virginia. And that is this: that Thomas Lewis, son of "Irish John" Lewis, married someone named Jane Strother, said to be daughter of William Strother and Margaret Watts.

And all I thought would happen with this project, given how searches for women in colonial Virginia can go, would be to run into a brick wall.

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.

Collateral Connections

 

Many people, when starting to build their family tree, opt to go straight for the main line: they want to know only about their own direct ancestors. After those direct ancestors turn into brick wall ancestors, though, we begin to see the value in taking a detour to explore those ancestors' siblings and cousins—or what we call collateral lines.

Now that I've been stuck on this unexpected but quite possibly verifiable brother to my father-in-law's maternal grandfather, I've been calling collateral lines my best research friends. Yet, I'm almost running out of month for this research project, and need to sit myself down, ask a few guiding questions, and remind myself of the value of seeking out collateral connections. I'll be taking the rest of this week to do just that as I wrap up this month.

One prime goal is to connect our eight DNA matches who belong to this unexpected collateral line—all descendants of Irish immigrants Dennis Tully and Margaret Hurley—with our family's direct line descending from a different Denis Tully and wife, Margaret Flannery. I suspect that count of eight DNA matches will grow before the week's out. 

Here's why. The younger Dennis Tully had several daughters, all of whom would lose their maiden name in the transition to becoming mothers in their own rights. Thus, repeating that process for another generation or two, our DNA matches from Dennis Tully's line might present us with an unexpected surname—unless, that is, I become familiar with the list of possible surnames for descendants.

I've only just begun this search for descendants in the past week, and yet, I already have a list comprised of thirteen surnames I would otherwise not have known about. The list includes some typically Irish surnames, such as Cahill, McCauley, and McCabe—the last one of particular interest, because I believe I've spotted that one on otherwise unidentified family photos.

The list also stretches to some unusual surnames, such as Homan, Devlin, Demming, and Calladine. I always am happy when research leads to those names which are seen less often, for they sometimes make tracing the right family a bit easier. 

Of course, on the flip side of that convenient scenario are those I groan about: common surnames such as McDonald, Wallace, and Wilson. Those challenges are in there, just to keep me on my toes, I suppose.

Adding Baxter, Kane, and Storey rounds out my list, so far, although I am quite sure there will eventually be far more, as I notice each generation seems to include at least five children. As I go, I will add the lines of descent to my father-in-law's family tree, so that I can link each Tully DNA match to the appropriate relationship.

That is not the only task for collateral lines, however. Just as for direct line ancestors, these relatives also need to be supported by documentation. As I go through this process, the value of it becomes the chance to learn more about each individual as a person, not just as a slot to fill in in the family tree. The hope is that, in the process, I'll run across some clues as to who might know more about how their ancestor Dennis Tully connected to my father-in-law's grandfather John Tully, and to his father, Denis Tully.

This is an assignment far less streamlined than simply attaching a name to a branch on the tree. Depending on how much we can read between the lines on boring government documentation like census enumerations, for instance, those ancestors may remain an enigma to me.

On the other hand, just this past weekend, I ran across an obituary for the wife of one descendant, who had dedicated her life's work to establishing a local archives of Irish-American history. I regret the fact that I learned about this person through her obituary—this is the type of person I would have loved to share this research quest with!—but the discovery drops one of those encouraging breadcrumbs to keep me on the trail leading (hopefully) to answers.

It is in these collateral lines that we may find the answers to our brick-wall situations. Though there are no guarantees, I'm convinced of the possibility. And that's enough to keep me going down that research pathway. 

A Primer on Polish Surnames

 

In case I need to say this, I'll go ahead and state the obvious: Polish is a different language than English. While that statement might bring on an "oh, duh" reaction, let's take a few minutes—like, the remainder of this blog post—to dive a bit deeper into the differences between the two languages, at least when it comes to naming traditions. This might come in handy as we progress with exploring the family trees of Polish DNA matches.

I've run into a promising DNA match at MyHeritage, someone from Poland whose third great-grandparents may be the same as my Antoni Laskowski's grandparents. In other words, that DNA match and I might be fourth cousins. Only problem: that match's tree shows those third great-grandparents' names in Latin, likely based on Catholic church records. Worse, their daughter's maiden name—which should also be my second great-grandmother's surname—shows as Gramlewiczówna, not Gramlewicz, as I've already found in records.

Where did the -ówna come in? And does that make any difference?

Due to various differences in general between Polish and English, names—like other words in Polish—take on modifiers as a suffix to the root word. While there are many modern conventions now added to the basic concepts that were kept during the time of our ancestors, let's focus on those more traditional name modifiers, since those will be what we find as we hunt for records documenting our ancestors in Poland.

Among other functions, those modifiers can indicate gender of the person (or item) being referred to. The simplest example of this, when discussing surnames, is when the ending "i" in a surname is changed to "a" to refer to a woman. Thus, as I mentioned yesterday, my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski would, as a man, bear a surname ending in "i" but any unmarried sisters would be referred to by the surname modification Laskowska.

That, however, is the easy part. If, in conversation, a speaker were referring to more than one person in a family group, if that group included at least one man, the modifier would be changed to use the masculine plural suffix. For instance, Antoni Laskowski's entire family group would now be referred to as Laskowscy while in English we would simply have referred to the Laskowskis.

There's more. Let's say Antoni's sister Agnes got together with her niece Sophie Laskowska for a delightful afternoon outing. For that Laskowski girls' day out, people would refer to the women with a feminine plural ending, as Laskowskie.

It helps to recognize these surname variations when we read records, not just to know how many people we are discussing—or exactly whom the group included—but to understand that what seems like a spelling aberration is really pinpointing the same surname while revealing details about the group's makeup.

But there's still more. And this is closer to our question this week. While there are handy charts to summarize what I've just pointed out, I had to scroll down to nearly the bottom of this one online resource to find my answer about the surname variant Gramlewiczówna.

The suffix -ówna denotes a special version of the feminine surname variant. For this, we again need a quick study of Polish. While the suffix -owa (or -ewa) denotes a married woman, if the suffix is slightly modified to read -ówna, we are now referring to an unmarried woman. Thus, my DNA match's second great-grandmother Catharina (or, I suspect, Katarzyna) Gramlewiczówna would only be referred to with that surname before her marriage. The surname Gramlewiczówna thus was not an entirely different surname, but simply the Polish way of denoting that Catharina was a young, unmarried woman. In other words, had she lived in America, her maiden name would have simply read Gramlewicz.

Though that may seem to be a satisfying explanation, I'd still like to find that version of her name recorded in governmental or church records in Poland—as well as an identification of her parents and listing of their geographic location. That will become my next exploration.

 

 

Comparing Names

 

In the process of delving into our family's history, we can collect quite a variety of names and surnames. Those family names, however, we presume will remain the same as we explore each line of our ancestors, the surname passing identically from generation to generation following the customary patrilineal progression. Not so, however, when it comes to the Polish, as I'm discovering while tracing my grandmother's Laskowski roots.

Anyone researching Polish family history has likely already learned that surnames change, depending on whether it is a man who is being identified, or his wife. My paternal grandmother's father was Antoni Laskowski, for instance, but his daughter would be referred to as Sophie Laskowska, the feminine form -a being utilized at the surname's suffix for women.

There is much more to this cultural tradition, of course, but when I first started researching the Laskowski line, I had to adjust to this Polish naming norm. Now, however, we get to dive deeper into this world of Polish surnames as I examine the "Theory of Family Relativity" presented for one interesting DNA match at MyHeritage. I'm in search of more training on that world of surname suffixes for my Polish ancestors.

When MyHeritage presents their reasons as to why my Antoni Laskowski's grandparents might be one and the same as my DNA match's ancestors, I run into many naming issues. The first problem, as I see right away, can be easily dispatched. The MyHeritage Theory is only 55% certain that my Andrzej Gramlewicz is the same person as my DNA match's tree entry for Andreas Gramlewicz. Checking my handy search engine, I easily see that the Polish form for Andreas—which name was likely found in a Catholic record, based in Latin—is Andrzej. Likewise, Andrzej's wife Katarzyna was likely recorded in Catholic records as Catharina, as my DNA match's tree had the name listed.

When I move down to the subsequent generation in my Polish DNA match's tree, however, I run into a problem far more difficult to simply explain away. In addition to my Elżbieta (Antoni's mother), Andreas and Catharina apparently had an older daughter they named after her mother, Catharina. While the spelling variation between Catharina and Katarzyna can easily be explained, it takes a bit more to piece together the story behind this daughter's maiden name. According to this DNA match's tree, that surname was not Gramlewicz, but Gramlewiczówna.

Same woman? Or not? We'll take some time tomorrow to break down the explanation.  

Clues from a Spouse

 

While it helps to glean hints about brick-wall ancestors from collateral lines and even the "F.A.N. Club" of other associates, those clues need to be read carefully. In one connection to John Stevens, the Irish immigrant ancestor we've been chasing throughout this month, I nearly read those resources incorrectly.

We can sometimes read volumes into the choice of a spouse. In the case of John Stevens' second wife, Eliza Murdock, that was exactly what I attempted to do. After all, who in the 1860s would not have carefully selected a bride based on similar background, tendencies, and preferences? In some cases, the choice of a spouse could point to a long line of clues about an ancestor's extended family.

With widower John Stevens' second wife, we see a woman whose surname—at least to me—seemed more Scottish than Irish. Though Eliza and her family were, like John Stevens, immigrants who settled in Lafayette, Indiana, on account of her brothers, she could claim a family name which was significant in the local community.

Eliza's brother James had a story which sounded like an echo of another immigrant's rise from humble beginnings to incredible success: the story of Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie. Indeed, in one county history book published in 1909, Past and Present of Tippecanoe County Indiana, the entire second volume opened with much space dedicated to businessman James Murdock's portrait and biography.

While the surname Murdock—as well as its more well-known variant, Murdoch—does have some roots reaching back centuries in Scotland, it is primarily a Gaelic surname. Though at first I was concerned to see John Stevens choosing to marry a woman whose name seemed to indicate a Scottish, rather than Irish, heritage, I was relieved to see that surname history. Once again, my doubts had surfaced about John Stevens being the person he claimed he was.

As it turns out, James Murdock—John Stevens' brother-in-law—was apparently born in County Sligo, Ireland. That, at least, was what was reported on James' 1908 death certificate. If indeed that report was correct, it is reassuring to find that County Sligo bordered on the county of John Stevens' birth, County Mayo. While admittedly, those more northern regions of the island of Ireland did have displaced peoples and migration from other parts of the British empire, that is a story from a far earlier history than the years of John Stevens' own residence in Ireland.

While some researchers have suggested that the choice of an immigrant's spouse—having married after arrival in the new homeland—might reveal that the two families knew each other back in Ireland, I don't believe that would be true in this case. Though John Stevens and the Murdock family arrived in Indiana at roughly the same time, their migration pathways were not similar—the Murdock family sailing first to Canada, then migrating in stages through various states before arriving in Indiana. Their acquaintance was most likely made after each party had settled in Lafayette.

Does exploration of a spouse's history help determine more about an immigrant's own origin? Perhaps, in some cases. Not that I can see, so far, in the case of John Stevens. Though hints of Scottish, rather than Irish, roots do show up in the Murdock story—James' father John was said to have been "a Scotch-man by birth"—such details only set my own suspicions about John Stevens resonating; there is no solid evidence to lend me a paper trail, or even point a possible way to fresh discovery. While collateral line exploration may often open up our eyes to possibilities, in this case, it only reminds me to proceed further with caution.  

Learning About Irish Surnames

 

Perhaps, in searching for the family history of the Irish Stevens line, it might help to take a step back and look at the broad overview of Irish surnames in general. For such a tactic as that, there is no better place to visit than the website of Irish researcher John Grenham.

After some of the details I had gleaned last week, I was beginning to wonder whether Stevens might not even be an Irish surname. It was encouraging to pull up John Grenham's map of Stevens households in mid-nineteenth century Ireland. Details used in this map were gleaned from the mid-century Griffith's Valuation.

Thankfully, I spotted one lone Stevens household showing for County Mayo, the location claimed by John Stevens as his origin on his Declaration of Intent after arrival in Indiana. In addition, there were a few Stevens households in other locations in the northern regions of Ireland—and far more households listed under the Stephens spelling variation.

Still, I wasn't sure whether Stevens was truly an Irish surname. Thankfully, John Grenham had answers. According to his sources—mostly, in this case, the volumes by Edward MacLysaght, Irish Families and More Irish Families—he noted that all Gaelic names began with "O'" or "Mac." 

How a name like Stevens would fit into a picture of history like that is not yet clear to me. And that can only mean one thing: keep digging further for the answer.

Stuck on the Stevens Surname

 

When stuck on a research project, my philosophy is to start right where you are: with square one. Since I cannot shake loose of this research wrestling hold my brick wall opponent has me locked in—lack of any further information on my husband's second great-grandfather—that first step is to look at the history of the man's surname.

I have certain go-to websites for checking the basics on a surname I am researching, so that is where I first headed to learn what I could about the Stevens surname. Granted, researching the Stevens line is not exactly as hopeless a proposal as researching, say, Smith—but it does have its challenges.

One challenge is the well-known alternate spelling of Stephens (but there are others). In addition, the surname turns out to have a wide range of geographic origins (perhaps explaining some of those spelling variations).

When I research the background and history of a surname, I bring my question first to a search engine to see what will come up. Among the usual resources are Ancestry.com and Wikipedia—and that was much the case with today's exercise.

The Ancestry entry for Stevens didn't contain too many surprises. According to Ancestry.com, Stevens is a patronymic form of the given name Steven; no surprise there. The surname can claim roots not only from England, but from Flemish, Dutch, and German origin. To complicate matters, several other countries' similar-sounding surnames may have morphed into the very English-sounding Stevens, either by virtue of their phonetic state or their like meaning (such as the Serbian Stevanović).

Likewise, the Wikipedia entry on Stevens didn't add any surprises. It identified Stevens as an English language surname (no surprise there!) meaning "son of Steven" but did add one interesting detail: that the surname was brought to England after the Norman Conquest.

In Forebears, the surname distribution website, below the customary distribution map are entries about the Stevens surname from several old resources, including books dating back to the mid 1800s, such as Patronymica Britannica and An Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names. One book which caught my eye, though, was Charles Wareing Endell Bardsley's A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames, originally published in 1896 (with this 1901 revision available online).

Why that particular volume? After all, my father-in-law's eight great-grandparents were all born in Ireland. And yet, something showed up in this last revision of my husband's DNA ethnicity report which gives me pause. Considering something is just not adding up in this John Stevens' immigrant story, we may as well take a look at every hint we can find. We'll attend to that very task, tomorrow.

About That Family Name

 

Kids can get so embarrassed by anything that makes them seem different than their friends. In the case of Marilyn Sowle Bean's husband, apparently it was his own name which embarrassed him. 

Given the name Earle, it seemed to have an extra letter at the end, a pretentious "e" which set him apart. Since Earle had also inherited another detail which made him stand apart from everyone else in school—he was born with Marfan Syndrome, causing his unusual height—he must have figured carving an "e" off his name was far more manageable than shedding a foot off his height. Why draw more attention to oneself than necessary?

Apparently, by the time he was about to turn ten, his maternal grandmother Effie Williams Woodworth had gotten wind of the egregious omission, and wrote to inform him of her displeasure. Her May 15, 1936, letter was sent to the boy barely three years after he had lost his mother—Maude, Effie's daughter—leaving him, along with his brother Sam, to be raised by his blind and deaf father and his paternal grandmother.

The letter may have started out like a typical note from a grandmother, with thanks for a Mother's Day gift he had made her, along with a report on how the weather had been in Oroville, California, where she had moved only the past March. She did not miss an opportunity to gently chide Earle and his brother for not writing her more often, then remind them that their dear departed mother's birthday was coming up a week from the next Sunday.

Then came the lecture.

Now Earle, I see you do not spell your name as it should be. Yours is a family name. That's why your mother named you Earle. Your brother's name was Merle. Please remember your name is Earle.

That last Earle was underlined for emphasis. Effie did not want Earle to miss her point. She then launched into the explanation: her paternal grandmother was an Earle—the twin sister "Merriette" Earle. You could tell she was quite proud of her family heritage—though I suspect her grandson did not appreciate the history lesson about to follow.

The Earles were very aristocratic people so you should feel honored. Your mother would wish you to spell it that way. My father's name was Eugene Earle Williams + where ever there is an Earle in our family it's spelled Earle.

Effie continued to regale her young grandson with examples of others in the extended family whose full name included Earle, then threw in a sentence about how the "Indians" in northern Wisconsin captured some of the Earle family—most of whom subsequently escaped—and then abruptly closed the letter with a cheery, "Well Earle, write again" and signed off "lovingly" as Grandma Woodworth.

I had long heard the story of how Earle had dropped that final "e" in his name over the protests of his grandmother, and now that I've received that package of Marilyn's saved letters, I now can read that note for myself. Saved after all those years, first by Earle himself, then by his wife Marilyn, eighty five years later it has finally made its way to me. Some family stories can be substantiated, but the proof doesn't always come easily.

So, What About that Surname?

 

We sometimes are so focused on getting to the next step in our quest to discover our ancestors that we forget all about learning anything further on who those people were. When I research a family line, I have to remind myself to put on the research brakes and take a look around before racing to find the next answer.

Now that I've found more than one record assuring me that my great-grandmother Mary Laskowski's father was named Franz Jankowski, this is one of those points. I may not necessarily stop to smell any literal roses at this juncture, but at least I can spare a moment to discover more about the surname, itself. Sometimes, those discoveries come in handy as we progress through our search process, so let's see what we can learn about the surname Jankowski.

My first stop in such a search is to see what the section on name origins says on the Ancestry.com website. In the case of Jankowski, we learn that this is a "habitational" name for people originating in locations bearing a similar name—such as the village of Janków, located somewhat to the northwest of the village, or any of the several other Polish locations sporting that same name. In fact, there are still over thirty locations in Poland with place names derived from the root of my great-grandmother's maiden name. Some help.

That root from which all those Polish towns derive their identity is a personal name known as Janek, a boy's name meaning "God is gracious." It is actually a nickname for the popular Polish given name Jan. Once again, do you get the sense that learning about this surname is not helping me pinpoint any details about my forebears?

One detail I learned about the surname Jankowski was that the suffix -ski was often affixed to the name of the estate with which the founding ancestor was once associated. While that may seem helpful, remember we're dealing with the possibility of upwards of thirty locations in history which could have served as the family's origin.

Still, it was fun—although perhaps the Polish equivalent of trying to trace one's roots back to Charlemagne—to learn that those "-ski" surnames could have originated with a landowner, who in due process had to indicate his connection to the Polish nobility by use of an additional identifier signifying his specific clan—a designation called "herb" (thus giving an entirely different spin to the Polish surname website known as "herby"). I did, thankfully, avoid that glaring Bright Shiny Object bidding me fall down the rabbit hole of Polish privileged social classes and nobility. 

While I always hope I'm about to enter a research project chasing a surname rare enough to nearly guarantee that those found will be my own relatives, in the case of the Jankowski surname, that is not how it is to be. True, in the worldwide possibility of relative rankings of surnames, Jankowski ranks 5,424th, but in Poland, it is ninth most common among their surnames. Still no edge to help my research.

If it is any help, the Jankowski surname is far less prevalent in the United States, where Franz Jankowski's daughter Marianna settled with her husband and three young children. My next step in trying to discover more on Marianna's family is to inspect her collateral lines to see if anyone else from the family might offer us some useful clues. We'll turn back, tomorrow, to the same Polish websites where I found the transcription of Marianna's wedding record, in search of any other family members.

Meet "Mary"

 

The New York City resident listed as "Mary" in the 1910 United States census may have been the woman I discovered to be my paternal grandmother's own mother, but—true to form in researching this family line—that was not her real name. Oh, she was wife of Anton Laskowski, alright, and she brought with her three children on her trip across the Atlantic from Poland, but Mary was more likely the Americanized version of her name.

I first found her real name after following her connection with the Laskowski family through several documents. We saw yesterday the census record where I first located this Mary, along with my grandmother—revealing my grandmother's real married name. Sophie, my grandmother, was listed as daughter of a couple recorded as Antone and Mary Laskowski.

Learning about the Laskowskis—and in particular, trying to determine when they arrived in New York City—presented one challenge. With each decade's enumeration, the family's year of arrival in the United States changed. In the end, records claimed they arrived here any time from 1889 through 1892. While that was not an impossible date range to tackle, this was New York City and, as I discovered, Mary Laskowski was a fairly common name among trans-Atlantic passengers.

If it were not for New York State's decision to authorize a separate census in 1892, I might not have gleaned some useful information on the Laskowski household—and at least eliminated one report of their date of immigration. The 1892 state census, taken on February 16, not only provided the names and ages of everyone included in the Laskowski household in Brooklyn, but it became my means to at least eliminate one report of arrival: 1892 was a date likely too late to be a viable report.

  

In trying to zero in on the actual date of the family's arrival in New York City, there were two additional details which could have helped my initial search. The first was the Polish tradition of altering the surname of women to end in "-a" rather than "-i." So, for instance, instead of looking for Mary Laskowski, it would have been more helpful to search for Mary Laskowska.

However, in addition to that custom specific to women of Polish origin, there was another detail: her given name. It wasn't until I finally located Mary's passenger record—both the record completed by the port where she departed and the listing turned in on the American side—that I found her actual name.

With that discovery, not only did I realize she was traveling to meet her husband, who had already settled in New York, but I gained the Polish version of her children's names, as well. Along with eight year old Johann, four year old Miecyslaus, and toddler Sofie, their mother was identified as Marianna Laskowska.

Almost as a footnote to that discovery—at least according to the Hamburg passenger list—listed alongside Marianna was a single man by the name of Miecyslaus "Gremlowitch," whom we'll discover later this month was not just a coincidental listing, but actually a young man related to the Laskowski family. That, of course, jumps far ahead of our story, but is helpful in guiding research when family members cluster together on records. First, though, let's take a closer look at the woman we now know as Marianna. There's more we need to discover about her family.

 

Above: Excerpt from the 1892 New York State Census for the Laskowski household in Brooklyn; image courtesy Ancestry.com. 

So, Just How DO You Spell That Name?

 

Some surnames have got it made. There isn't much wiggle room when it comes to spelling a name like Baker, bestowing a certain sense of research confidence. But Manouiloff? Oh, let me count the ways a name like that can be messed up.

When I first stumbled upon the possibility that my godmother Genia, only child of war refugees Michael and Lydia Melnitchenko, might have had an aunt who also immigrated from their interim residence in France, I thought I was on to the beginning of a productive search for at least one branch of her roots.

Not so. Just as unexpectedly as Alexandra Manouiloff appeared in records linked to the wandering Melnitchenkos, she vanished from the scene. First I found her in Marseilles. Then I spotted her in a passenger list, arriving in New York City. And not long after she filed her petition for naturalization, she died.

Oh, I checked all the usual places for further signs of her name in records, but without any success. That's when I took my search straight to the search engines and out from the confines of genealogical websites. There are, as you've realized from past searches here, many ways to find further information on surnames in general.

What could I find about the surname Manouiloff? Sadly, not much—but of what I did discover, it will take more than one post and, I promise you, a long slide down a rabbit hole as well.

Where would a surname like Manouiloff show up, you ask? I tried directing that question to the surname distribution site, Forebears.io, but was rewarded for my effort by a null set—plus a list of alternate spellings to try, many (but not all) of which led back to Russia.

Reconsidering my query, I thought maybe a suffix like "-off" didn't look very Russian. Perhaps it was more likely that Russians might end such a sound with "-ov." Furthermore, since the name, as we saw it, came from a refugee who had settled in France, for whom the middle syllable, spelled "oui," might actually sound like the French word for yes, "oui," we might need to reconsider that section of the surname as well. Once again trying to think like a Russian, perhaps the spelling might originally have been more like "uy"—thus, I settled on the Forebears alternate choice, "Manuylov."

That didn't tell me much.

Face it: Alexandra Manouiloff's surname could have been spelled in any of a kazillion ways, especially considering it had passed through an intermediary stop before arriving on American shores to be mangled by English-speaking bureaucrats.

In fact, as far as the French went, during the time period spanning the war-torn twentieth century, when Alexandra would have settled in Marseilles, one French genealogy site indicated that only one person was born with that surname at all. And whoever that was, it was someone who was born in Paris.

Now, keep in mind, all we have for Lydia's and Alexandra's addresses in France were for Marseilles, but if you recall Lydia's daughter's profession—a ballet dancer—we need to remember that Genia spent quite a bit of time in Paris receiving her training and then beginning her career. It is not beyond possibility that having an aunt in Paris to chaperone her activities when Lydia was not available would have made that arrangement more realistic.

Who might that one Manouiloff born in Paris have been? To Google I went for more information, and found references to one "J. Manouiloff" referenced as a contributor to a few research articles published in French science journals in the 1970s. Whether that J. Manouiloff was one and the same as a Joseph Manouiloff listed in a French genealogy site who has since died in Paris, I can't tell.

There were, of course, other Manouiloffs listed at both Ancestry and MyHeritage, but I can't at this point tell whether there was any connection. As Alexandra was listed as Lydia's sister, and I already have discovered Lydia's maiden name, we need to remember that Manouiloff was Alexandra's married name—a name useful for tracing her details in later life, but not helpful for the years before her arrival in France.

Before chasing after any conjecture about alternate spellings, though, there is one fascinating detail I stumbled across that we may as well stop to examine. I warn you: it will be a rabbit hole, and likely not of a type to equip us to find answers to our questions about Lydia's family, but if you are interested in Russian history, you may find it a fascinating detour. You see, embedded deep within the Russian history which was likely at the root of what caused the young Melnitchenkos to flee their homeland was another player's vignette in the Russian saga, someone who also happened to claim that very same name, spelled exactly the same way: Manouiloff.

Where to Go When You Don't Know Where to Go

 

You're desperate to discover more about your family's roots, so you're researching a new-to-you location, perhaps the homeland where your immigrant family originated. For documents, records, or simply the history of this new place, where do you go first? What's the best way to get yourself oriented to the location of reliable information resources?

Seems like I'm continually in that research dilemma. Last month, in pressing behind that 1870 brick wall for African American lineages, it took a week of instruction to give me hope that I can, indeed piece together a family tree for King Stockton using available documents. As for this month's research challenge—finding more details about the family of my godmother Genia Melnitchenko—I am once again in the same predicament. I have never before tried my hand at researching the type of ethnic heritage her parents claimed.

Well, let me amend that: I only knew what they claimed as it was reported to me in my childhood by my own mother, Genia's friend from those early years of her dance career in New York City. For a child, remembering all those details may seem hard, but actually, there wasn't much to tell. Genia's folks, I was told, were Russian, but they fled their homeland during some catastrophic time in history. All I knew was that they ran away to France, where Genia was born and raised.

I knew, also, that Genia's dad had been a sailor. I presumed, in my childhood simplicity, that meant he worked on sea-going vessels. In fact, my mother figured that perhaps his occupation was what enabled the couple to escape their homeland in the midst of crisis.

Those few details, however, were all I had to work with. There is no one left to ask—they are all long gone now. And how was a child to know whether the language those people spoke was indeed a bona fide dialect of Russian? I had to take their word for it.

So now, I start where I always start. First, I like to get a feel for the origin of a surname by using a few online resources specifically designed for that purpose. Then, I move on to resources which would provide an overview of researching that area; Cyndi's List for general direction, and the FamilySearch Wiki for pertinent guidance are most helpful there. As I compile my list of promising resources and begin the task of familiarizing myself with the basics of a region's history, I begin to get a sense of where to take my research next.

Let's see what can be found about Genia's birth surname, Melnitchenko. While many people use Ancestry.com on a regular basis, it may not be widely known that they do offer an overview of surname histories. I find these by googling the surname, rather than searching directly on the website. This time, when I searched for the surname Melnitchenko, however, I was dismayed to see Ancestry's response:

 

Sorry, indeed. This was not a promising sign.

The website did redeem itself, though, with a clickable lead to a listing of all people in the Social Security Death Index filing a claim containing the surname Melnitchenko. Thankfully, there were a few of them listed, including some from the New York City area where Genia and her parents once lived. That's a start.

Moving to another favorite website I use for a research overview on surnames, the Forebears site on surname meaning and distribution regretfully noted, "The meaning of this surname is not listed." Fortunately, they did provide a distribution listing and map. From that, I could see that the most likely place in all the world to find someone with that surname Melnitchenko would be...right here in the United States.

What happened to Russia?

Perhaps yet another go-to website has failed me. The Forebears website only listed one solitary entry for Melnitchenkos in Russia. There weren't even any spectacular entries for the eastern European countries—eight mentions for Estonia, and just one for Ukraine. That was it.

At that point, I needed to rewind back to the most basic of basic steps. I headed to Google to do a simple search on the surname itself. What should I find there, but a suggestion for an alternate spelling: Melnichenko, omitting that "t" ending the second syllable. 

Retracing my steps with that spelling variation vastly improved the reply on the Forebears distribution readout. Now, there were thirteen thousand families showing with that surname in Russia, and fourteen hundred in Belarus. There were entries for Melnichenkos in several other countries now emerged from the former Soviet Union, as well as an entry for a place I never even heard of—Transnistria.

Suddenly, my research world got a whole lot bigger.

I took a moment to see how many other spelling variations I could collect. Frankly, Ancestry's feeble attempt at providing options was laughable—including Mitchener and Pellicano—but I also knew that Wikipedia often has information on specific surnames. That turned out to be a great lead, providing yet another way to reformat the spelling of that surname I knew as Melnitchenko: why not substitute a "y" for the "i" in that same second syllable?

According to Wikipedia, the surname Melnychenko is one often seen as a spelling variant not only in Russia and Belarus, but in Ukraine. In fact, it is attributed as a surname of origin in the Ukrainian language. While my godmother's surname might well have indicated her Russian origin, as I had been told in childhood by my mother, this opened up another possibility. The Wikipedia article handily even provided me with the Ukrainian version of writing that name: Мельниченко.

I was already getting in the mood to delve into this newfound ethnic possibility when I recalled yet another unsubstantiated prompting. This one was dragged out of the deep recesses of my memory-of-useless-trivia, but one which I had tied to my godmother's name when I first saw it. During the most recent of news reports of the controversy involving Russia and the Crimean peninsula they dispute with the Ukrainian government, I had discovered a book written about the history of the Ukrainian struggle for independence. While I had had no compelling reason to be interested in the intricacies of eastern European diplomacy—well, let's just come out and call it brute force—there was one little detail that did catch my eye when I ran across that book.

The author's name was Melnitchenko.

Have you ever bought a book, simply because the author's name matched an unusual surname that belonged in your family's history?

Almost a One-in-a-Million Name

 

With all these Polish surnames dancing in my head (but not like visions of sugar plum fairies), it's time to take a step back and reassess just what it is I'm seeking. The one constant in this assortment of DNA matches linked to my paternal grandfather's mother is her mother's maiden name. Sometimes, it was spelled Woitas. In other documents, it included the Polish diacritical mark to look like Woitaś. Still other times, the "i" was substituted by a "j" to render Wojtas. What can we learn about a surname like that?

When I plugged that name into the Google search engine, one result mentioned the name was the 52,389th most common name on earth. That means it's a one in 746,063 chance that I'll come up with a Woitas somewhere in the world.

That's almost a one-in-a-million chance of finding someone with the surname I'm most interested in, genealogically speaking, right now. Of course, that's the assessment of one website, assuming I don't search using the Polish version, Woitaś. For plain ol' Woitas, we can see a wide distribution of that surname around the world—not unsurprisingly, using that very spelling in countries with languages based on the Latin alphabet.

If we move to Polish spelling, Woitaś results in a much more limited distribution as a surname: other than two outliers in England and one in Ireland, the rest can be found—at least, as of 2014—in, you guessed it, Poland.

Perhaps that tells us nothing more than that if you wish to continue writing your name as your countrymen did back in Poland, you'd better plan on staying close to home.

Many Woitas descendants did, apparently. Looking at Ancestry's examination of the surname in the United States, only records from the 1920 census could be used to extrapolate information. In 1920, there were only eighteen households in the entire country with the surname Woitas—and only four in Wisconsin, despite so many of my DNA matches' ancestors settling there. If you search by the spelling Wojtas, oddly enough the number of families in the U.S. increases to fifty one, with Illinois having the largest percentage of that surname.

While it is nice to know that the surname Woitas was likely derived from the given name Wojciech, it is unlikely that I'll stumble across a close relative by searching American records for that surname at Ancestry. What I really need to find is some way to demonstrate just how Anna Wojtas, wife of Jan Krzewinski and ancestors of my DNA matches, was related to Marianna Wojtas, likely maternal grandmother of my own grandfather.

Once again, I turn to the only online resource which might provide answers: the site of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. There, searching for variations on the maiden name Woitas, I find these marriage results from the entire region of Pomerania between 1830 and 1850:

Just looking at this listing, we can observe a few details which might turn out to be helpful. First of all, other than the one outlier of a parish called Lignowy Szlacheckie, the rest represent transcriptions of documents from Czarnylas, where my own family originated, or documents from a village called Pączewo. 

Since I have no idea where those villages were located in Poland, I check Google Maps to get oriented to possibilities. Other than noticing that the other village names are repeated in the readout, we learn that the sole entry for Lignowy Szlacheckie represents a location which was nearly thirty kilometers away from Czarnylas—today, a half hour's drive. Putting it in the perspective of that time frame, it would have been nearly a five hour walk. I'd say it is less likely that the Woitas woman who married in that village would be related to my Woitas ancestor.

The Woitas women from the other two villages, however, are a different case. For instance, take a look at the first entry in that chart: Johann Zegarski and Marianna Woitas. Those are my ancestors, parents of the Zegarska sisters I've already written about, from the village of Czarnylas. And yet, Marianna Woitas was married in Pączewo. Perhaps the Woitas household was in Pączewo, and the Zegarski couple established themselves in nearby Czarnylas to raise their family—a likely scenario, considering the two villages are three kilometers apart, easily walked in less than an hour.

Taking a closer look at the readout for the Woitas marriages, we notice a few other details. One is that there is more than one Marianna in that listing. Both weddings were in the same village, one in 1833 and the other in 1839, but I already know from other documentation that the same Marianna wasn't married twice. Could this indicate two Woitas families in Pączewo? Could these two women be cousins? Is there a way to sort out which Woitas children belong to which of the two families?

Another detail to spot in that readout: although there was an Anna Woitas who married in the same town as our Marianna, there was another marriage for an Anna Woitas—that one in Czarnylas, the one with the Krzewinski man whose three sons and one daughter left for far away Milwaukee. 

Can we infer from that 1848 marriage of Anna Woitas and Johann Krzewinski in Czarnylas that Anna followed her older, married sister Marianna to Czarnylas? Or would it be the 1836 marriage back in Pączewo which represents the more likely sister to Marianna? It's still too soon to determine any relationships without more details, so we're back to sorting through all the records we can find online. 

Above chart from the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association via search for marriages for women surnamed Woitas, limited to dates 1830 through 1850.

Taking that Theory for a Test Drive

 

So, I'm stuck on the name given for my supposed great-grandmother, Anna, following her unexpected death. In all the census records in which I could find her—which, admittedly, were very few—she had been represented as Anna Krauss. Despite the fairly common surname, I was pretty sure I had located the right woman; the telltale sign was the constant accompaniment of her daughter in the same New York City household.

It was that daughter, in fact, who at the shocking discovery of Anna's unexpected death, provided her mother's name for the death record. Not that she would have me, the family historian, uppermost in her mind at the moment, but she sure didn't help out by providing a name I haven't been able to find anywhere else. I didn't expect to see the resultant surname on Anna's death certificate to read Kusharvska. Where did that come from? Could Rose have, at that moment, forgotten her own mother's name?

Needless to say, I've been stuck on that detail since that discovery, five years ago. Who ever heard of a surname like Kusharvska? I tucked that one aside for future consideration—until yesterday. It occurred to me to handle that name like a Polish researcher might. Remember, it was Americans who wrote up that death certificate, but when Anna was born—and married—she was living in Poland. How would the Polish have spelled her name?

My guess was "Kuszarwska." The "sz" for the American "sh." The "w" for the American "v." If I tried that variation in spelling, could I find anything online? Did anyone else have a surname like that?

Here's what I found online—complicated, of course, by the shifting search results, I guess, by when the search was performed, for I got different results on different attempts at the same site.

The first time I tried, on FamilySearch.org, to find something like Kuszarwski (using the masculine form, as it would be more likely to be used in America), I received hits for these similar spelling variations:

• Karczewski
• Kurczewski
• Kuszewski

Thus, it seemed credible to think perhaps when Anna's daughter Rose stammered out the answers to the government official charged with collecting such information, she may have pronounced the name wrong—a "sh" sound instead of a "ch." Who knows—maybe by that time, Polish-born Rose may have developed a New York accent, herself, rendering that middle syllable more like Ku-shawv-ska than an actual "r" sound. At least, now we know there are surnames similar to the one Rose provided at the time of her mother's death.

Among the records I found at FamilySearch, I also found the reasonable variation Kucharski in a census record—enumerators not known for their spelling precision nor their handwriting clarity—as well as Kuchorski. The name is apparently out there.

I then took my search question to Ancestry.com to see whether I could find any names similar to "Kuszarvska" there. Using that same Polish take on the spelling, I even located a Kuszmarski in the 1940 census in Chicago—not quite my target, but at least containing that telltale "sz" combination.

Searching on Ancestry brought a broad range of possibilities. It was encouraging to find an option spelled Kusharfsky—phonetically similar, if not properly Polish in spelling. I was excited to spot an obituary which reported descendants named Kucharvski, according to the indexed report but which—confounded optical character "recognition"—upon actual inspection of the faded newsprint, yielded a surname spelled Kucharyski. Oh, so close, yet so far away.

I found a Michigan death record reporting a surname spelled Kuzarvski, and a poor transcription of a surname Kuzawski, which, in the original passenger record from "Germany" rendered the name Kuzawski. Frustrating.

Still, this little field research experiment told me one thing: there may well have been a surname that sounded similar to Kusharvski—or, in the feminine case, Kusharvska. For my efforts, I now have a healthy list of spelling variations which I can also check, in case that Kusharvska leads me nowhere.

The real question, however, is: can this name, no matter how it is spelled, lead me back to that tiny village in Poland where the Zegarskis once claimed to live? That, after all, is where all my Zegarski DNA matches on my paternal grandfather's side of the family say they have their roots.

Above: Kushervski? Or Kushewski? This 1886 Detroit marriage record was indexed both ways—perhaps the same fate of the surname reported at the death of Anna Kusharvska. Image courtesy Ancestry.com.

 

"Vel" is to Polish as "Dit" is to French?

Attempting to research the family history of my mystery grandfather—the man known by his grandchildren as John McCann who turned out arriving in New York with a name far more Polish than Irish—has been a challenge. A hopeful sign that I might soon break through that brick wall is the recent arrival of a handful of DNA matches which can only connect with the line of the erstwhile Theodore Puchalski.

All of those DNA matches to my paternal grandfather's line happen to contain the surname Michalski. As I mentioned yesterday, knowing that fact—even the documentation showing they all landed in Wisconsin—is not entirely comforting. After all, once I tried my hand at the Polish search engine called Herby, I realized that the Poles really seem to like the surname Michalski. As of 1990, there were over fifty thousand people all over Poland sporting that surname.

Herby, however, left me a parting tidbit. In addition to the entry showing me the forty nine provinces containing residents with that Michalski surname, there was a second entry. This second line showed me that there were a mere twenty two additional people in one solitary province who all had a special form of the surname Michalski: it was called Michalski vel Michalak.

Perhaps that name may sound like gibberish to you, but I perked up when I spotted that second line. I had seen something like that before, in a Michalski tree of one of my DNA matches. When I had first seen it, I thought maybe it was a mistake, or a researcher's way of saying, "I'm not sure which one is the right surname." The entry had two names: Michalski and Michalek.

Similar names, admittedly, and one could have been the result of a documentation error, or the effect of reading sloppy handwriting. That, at least, would be the type of assumption an American like me might make. But here it was now—at least a similar version in the entry for "Michalski vel Michalak"—and I couldn't just walk away from it. Perhaps if only because of the virtue of capturing that family location in one specific province—Łódź—I had to pursue the reason why it was showing up.

Just in case there might be something to this, I ran the thing through Google translate. Perhaps "vel" was a specific word in Polish. And there was a result for my efforts, but all the screen told me was "aka." Written just like that.

Of course, by this time, you may be screaming "A. K. A." for my lack of insight, but you know me: I have to make sure of things. So I kept plodding along, looking for answers.

I wondered whether "vel" in Polish might be a way to handle names the same way the French in Canada would use the convention, "dit." In French, "dit" means "called," and "dit names" could signify two different surnames, both of which might be used by a family (or sometimes, alternately used).

I put my little hypothesis to the test, and searched for information on how the Polish use "vel" names. Along the way, I found a wealth of details on how very differently the Polish handle the use of surnames—much more than the little factoid I already knew about the masculine and feminine form of Polish surnames. Eventually, that led to the answer to my question about "vel." Yes, as it turns out, you can think of "vel" names much the same as a French Canadian of the 1800s might have used "dit names." "Vel" apparently comes from the Latin, and signifies an alias—for instance, if a soldier having participated in an uprising wanted to evade authorities, yet otherwise retain both identities.

Of course, you know finding a detail like that will not help my research progress. Now I'll have to figure out just why those Michalski vel Michalak scoundrels had to assume a double identity.

How Do You Spell it, Anyhow?

I'm often reminded of the importance of studying the milieu surrounding our ancestors' lives. This past month, while I've put on the public "game face" at A Family Tapestry of puzzling over how to return abandoned family photographs to long-lost family members, behind the scenes, I've had a delightful time helping a family member navigate the challenges of DNA testing to discover the true identity of her maternal grandfather.

The wonderful surprise was learning that he was certainly Italian in origin—an unexpected turn of events for this Irish-American and Eastern-European descendant. With a steep learning curve ahead of her, this inquisitive budding genealogist had no hesitation in diving right in and immersing herself in the research.

Doing the documentation dance was no problem at first. Reconstructing the paper trail of this man and his Chicago-area family seemed to make sense at first. But pushing back through the decades, coming perilously close to the date of his parents' arrivals in their New World, she hit a stumbling block: spelling.

Apparently, the Chicago family she learned about had always spelled their surname with a final "a"—the sound of a good Italian surname, I suppose. Then came the point of discovering that the family hadn't come straight from Italy to Chicago, but had originally landed in New York. And stayed there for a while.

When I found some documentation of this detail and showed it to her, the immediate response was, "That can't be my family; they spell their name differently." This surname, according to the records, concluded with an "i," not an "a."

Of course, that was the 1890s and it was New York, home of the indifferent bureaucrat. But it was also home of some large Catholic churches, as well—not to mention the thousands upon thousands of fellow immigrant Italians. Perhaps it was they who got it right and the Chicago contingent who were mistaken.

It took a while for this new researcher to warm to the idea that not everyone takes spelling as seriously as twenty-first century teachers. But eventually the wonder that is genetic genealogy opened her eyes to the possibility that, yes, this New York contingent might well be related to her—after all, there was a link to a descendant of that very New York family showing up in her matches!

It is quite circumspectly that we approach the puzzles of spelling "creativity." What could be simply a case of liberality in one's spelling habits might, on the other hand, represent a rabbit trail leading to false conclusions. Oh, that everyone understood the need for standardization in spelling as we "enlightened" modern people do—or, perhaps, we just need to get over ourselves and realize that things were different in bygone eras.

In the meantime, it is perhaps for our research protection that we have this parallel way to test our spelling assumptions—a way to test everything from wondering whether two Fullers were descendants of the same Mayflower ancestors to examining whether two people having differently spelled versions of the same surname could actually be related.