The Impetus to Leave

 

Timelines are a useful tool for putting an ancestor's life in perspective. Juxtaposing the key dates in a relative's life alongside the timeline of local, national, or world history can help us understand why past family members made the choices they did. In the case of my second great-grandfather Mateusz Laskowski's children, however, combining the timelines of these siblings may help illustrate why at least this one family came to the conclusion that it was better to leave home for a foreign land rather than stay in unacceptable circumstances.

The impetus to leave, in the case of the three remaining Laskowski children, can be likened to that oft-used phrase, "the straw that broke the camel's back." No one unfortunate event was likely to have unearthed the entire family from the land they called home for generations. Taken together, though, the choice made sense.

Consider this timeline spanning thirteen years of the extended family's life in Żerków in the country that was then called Prussia. Beginning in 1874, four days after Agnes Laskowska celebrated her marriage to Alexius Szumski, her nineteen year old brother Joseph died.

That didn't necessarily usher in any sense of foreboding, though, for by the end of that year, the Szumski family welcomed in their firstborn daughter Victoria. Soon after, more celebrations came with Lorenz's marriage to Anna Blaszczynska in 1878 and Antoni's marriage to Marianna Jankowska the following year.

The year after that, though, everything seemed to change. Five year old Victoria Szumska, Agnes' daughter, died in November. The next summer, the siblings' father Mateusz died. Another half year later, Agnes' infant son Joseph died. Another six months later—and almost exactly a year after the loss of her father—Agnes' own husband, Alexius Szumski, died.

Mercifully, a break in tragedies for the next four years allowed the family some time to recover from their many losses—until their mother, Elżbieta, died in April of 1886. After that, it was Antoni's turn to lose a son, which occurred before baby Joseph turned two months of age in February of 1887.

That same year may have brought the turning point for the growing families of all three of the remaining Laskowski siblings. For one thing, widowed Agnes remarried that year. Though I don't have exact dates of emigration for any of the couples, the possibility must have been on their mind by then.

Reports of dates of travel given in various census records point to the late 1880s for each family's possible travels. Agnes and her new husband welcomed their baby daughter Pelagia into the family in January of 1888 before they left for America. Lorenz and Anna may have preceded them, as their daughter Harriet was said to have been born "at sea" in September, 1886. And once eldest son Antoni settled affairs after his parents' passing, he may well have been traveling ahead by June 1887 to make preparations for his young family to join him in New York City in February 1889.

The decision to make such a drastic move—even with extended family at one's side—must have come at great price. Seeing the combined timelines of each Laskowski sibling concurrently helps envision the many difficulties the extended family faced before coming to that final decision to cut their ties with their homeland.

The Many Facets of One Woman's Life

 

Nearly a Christmas baby, Agnes Laskowska entered her parents' life in Żerków on December 22, 1851. Baptism had to wait until after the beginning of the new year. That detail became only one of the many facets of the story of this third child of Mateusz Laskowski and Elżbieta Gramlewicz.

I'm tempted to read between the lines on this child's story, but perhaps such an attempt would be misleading. Still, I can't help but imagine a life filled with sorrows—or at least see a picture of challenges.

When Agnes was twenty two, she married Alexius Szumski. The wedding was followed soon afterwards with the arrival of daughter Victoria, then son Ludwig and, finally, their son Joseph. 

While that may portray a family well on their way to a full and happy life, that was not the case here. Not long after Ludwig's arrival in 1878, life began to unravel for the Szumski family. Before Alexius and Agnes could welcome their third child, they were struck with the death of their daughter Victoria in November 1880, barely a week before her sixth birthday.

There was more to come. The couple lost their third child, Joseph, at the start of 1882—a year in which Alexius himself was to die that following July, leaving thirty year old Agnes a widow.

As often happened during that era of history, Agnes then married again in 1887. Now the bride of Ignatz Giernatowski, the newlywed couple soon welcomed their daughter Pelagia on January 17, 1888.

Perhaps as a way to remove themselves from the site of so many sorrows, Ignatz and Agnes afterwards decided to make the move from their home of many generations in Żerków to the United States. By 1900, they were living in Brooklyn, the part of New York City where so many of my other Polish family members had moved. Agnes' sad report in the census that she had been the mother of four, of whom only one remained, leads me to suspect that perhaps the language barrier and tendency to attempt spelling phonetically yielded Pelagia's name in that record as "Blanch."

It is probably owing to that same language barrier that I've been unable to trace any further details on Ignatz Giernatowski, but the New York City Municipal Death Index revealed that Agnes died on April 23, 1926.

It is fairly clear, once reviewing the many facets of Agnes Laskowska's life, why she might have had a clear motivation to move so far from all that was familiar in her childhood hometown. As for her two siblings who also emigrated, the story might not appear so clearly—until we blend the three siblings' stories into one timeline, and add another possible factor. We'll take a look at the threads in that story tomorrow.

Gambling With Guesses

One thing about genealogy: the protocol requires us to take things step by step—with documentation for each stop along the way. It would seem there'd be little room for guesses in this type of careful process.

But then, there are brick walls. Immovable, impassible brick walls. I've certainly given up on my fair share of brick walls (or, rather, learned to wait until later, when more digitized records got uploaded to websites). But I've also learned to be brave enough to guess, er, make an educated hypothesis and thoroughly test it out.

When it came to my great-grandfather's unfortunate sister Agnes Laskowska—the one who had lost two of her three children, along with her husband, before remarrying in Żerków, Poland—I had a few things going for me in the guess-making realm. First was that she married a man with a relatively unusual name (Ignatz Giernatowski). Second was that Agnes still had one son from her previous marriage, a boy by the name of Ludwig Szumski, whom I had already discovered was born in 1878. The third detail involved a child from Agnes' second marriage to Ignatz, whom the couple named, in January of 1888, Pelagia Giernatowska.

This is where the guessing comes in. I reasoned—wildly, I admit—that if Agnes' brothers moved to the New World, then perhaps it might not be so far-fetched to assume that Agnes and her second husband might have considered the same thing, as well. After all, my great-grandmother Mary Laskowska brought her three children across the Atlantic in 1889; perhaps her sister-in-law could have done so, as well.

I started pursuing these what-if scenarios to see if I could find any results. The first place I attempted my search was in the New York City area. After all, that is where Agnes' brother Anton headed when he made his start in the New World.

Fortunately, it wasn't long until my searches yielded a possibility. There was, in Brooklyn, according to the 1900 census, an Agnes married to someone named Ignatz, with the understandably-misspelled surname Gernatofski. Close, wouldn't you admit? Their household included three people: Agnes and her husband—who claimed they were married in 1888—and one daughter. According to the enumeration, Agnes had been the mother of four children, only one of whom was still living.

The only downside was that that child was named Blanch, not Pelagia.

Though I could not find any plausible entries in the 1910 census, the 1915 New York State census provided me with a possibility: a couple residing in Brooklyn named Ignatz and Agnes Giernatowsky. They, too, only had one daughter. Only problem: the daughter's name was Pauline. A third close-miss was the 1920 census, in which a Brooklyn couple named Ignatius and Agnes Gernotwoski lived with their daughter...Pleshia.

Did my Agnes and her husband with the ripe-for-misspelling surname even leave Poland and move to New York? I couldn't really tell from these frustrating results. There are, after all, lots of coincidences out there with foreign-sounding names which we think are rare (but turn out to be very common in that country, as we find out much later).

Genealogists are nothing if not plodding and prudent. Considering that, I had no choice but to set all this collection of possibilities aside. I couldn't—yet—be sure I had found the right people.

But then—and you know there will always be a "but then"—along came some surprise discoveries which gave me a research direction to follow. At first, I didn't even realize what had just landed in my lap, unbidden. This summer, though, it finally got impatient and slapped me in the face, waking me up to a different possibility.

Above: Excerpt from 1888 document (file 33 on this page) reporting birth of Pelagia Giernatowska, showing her parents' names to be Ignatz Giernatowski and Agnes Laskowska.

That Other Sister

It is one thing to find an ancestor to fit on the family tree, when you are working your way backwards in time from the relatives you know now. It is an entirely different thing to commence the search from a hundred years ago and on a different continent. Once I was able to jump "the pond" with my great-grandfather Anton Laskowski, though, a world of Polish online resources showed me the possibility that I could.

The key was finding just one Polish genealogy website. I somehow stumbled upon a volunteer online project dedicated to transcribing old marriage records from that very province which my great-grandparents once called home: Posen, or, as the city at its center is called now, Poznań. That website is called, in English, the Poznan Project. Later, and through a recommendation I found at that first site, I discovered a second resource at the database called BaSIA.

What I did, once I discovered those online resources, was rather tedious: I looked up every instance in which any of my paternal ancestors' surnames showed up, linked to the area around Żerków, their ancestral homeland, the place I had discovered through various passenger records. Each time there was a mention of the surname Gramlewicz, for instance in the Poznan Project marriage transcriptions, I would write down who that person was, who that person was marrying, and names of any parents or witnesses.

Eventually, that mass of names, clustered in groups of surnames like Laskowski or Gramlewicz or the several other affiliated families, sorted itself into logical categories. For instance, since I already knew from my great-grandfather Anton Laskowski's death certificate what his parents' names were, all I had to do was isolate all the marriage records—and later, the birth records from BaSIA—to see who else claimed Mateusz Laskowski and Elzbieta Gramlewicz as parents.

As it turned out, there were four children in that group: Anton, of course, and the sister whom we discovered became the direct line ancestor of Annie Gramlewicz, the one who returned to New York City to marry after her family returned to Poland. And there was the brother I mentioned last week, as well.

There was, however, yet another sibling to account for. Her name was Agnes, and from what I could find in those Polish websites, she was born in 1852 in Żerków. Fortunately for me, I could also find additional records showing me a glimpse of the rest of her life. She was married in 1874, for instance, to Alexius Szumski. Even better, those Polish websites revealed that she and Alexius had at least three children: Victoria, Ludwig, and Joseph.

Life must not have been kind to Agnes, however, for the Szumskis lost their firstborn within six years of her birth, and their youngest—Joseph, born in 1881—lived barely a year. He died the same year as his father, Alexius, leaving Agnes with her then-four-year-old son, Ludwig.

As often happened to young widows in such situations, Agnes eventually married again. This time, it was five years into her widowhood when, in 1887, she married a man from the same village with the impossible-to-spell name of Ignatz Giernatowski.

From that point onward, there was nothing to be found in those Polish websites—not a surprise, seeing they had a limited date range for the collection. This also, however, presented a research dilemma: though the process was tedious to search through those Polish websites, they did, in the end, give me exactly what I was looking for—but nothing more. I could find anything about those surnames I wanted, as long as it was a transcription of a birth, marriage, or death record within a very limited time frame. What became of those people after that point, I couldn't tell. The record set's silence about such answers was reasonable to expect, but frustrating for someone wanting to know what happened to her ancestors' families.

From that point onward, in searching for what became of this family, I had two hopes. One, of course—you knew this would pop up again at some point—was DNA testing. The other, a much less scientific approach, was to take a leap of blind faith.