Wide, But Not so Deep

 

Some research ideas may seem brainy at the first, but turn out to be nothing more than a rabbit trail. I'm hoping my latest foray into the Laskowski heritage in Żerków, Poland, doesn't turn out to be another example of the latter.

What I've ended up doing, now that I've found a couple online resources for documentation of that small village in what used to be Prussia, is building a tree which may be more wide than it is deep. Though it seemed at first that there was a date gap in records from about 1850 through the mid 1870s, by combining what I found at the Polish website BaSIA with church records from Żerków at FamilySearch.org, I'm actually making progress finding collateral lines in the extended Laskowski family.

The thought occurred to me that, once having found these Laskowski cousins, I should search for their partner's surname as well. Sometimes, abysmal handwriting being what it is in any language, surnames could be misread and mis-indexed, but if I also searched for the spouse's surname, additional records could be harvested from this wide search.

Thus, I've been exploring the surnames related by marriage to my Laskowski roots. This involves looking for Jankowski, Wroblewski, and Gramlewicz entries as well. With those extensions to my original quest, I've noticed that Wroblewski, for one, has been rendered at least two different ways in church records, making the search more convoluted. And now, I'm discovering the same for Gramlewicz, if for nothing more than the curse of abysmal handwriting.

Sometimes, for instance, searching for Gramlewicz brings limited returns, while if I searched by the other spouse's surname, I'd get results for more children, for instance. Yet, looking at the document itself, I could clearly see that the name written was what I was seeking, not the several permutations I had spotted in search results.

It is apparent that, in a town as small as Żerków, intermarriages were bound to happen over the generations. As I persevere with this adjusted research process, I'm ending up with a tree spread wide with collateral lines. The hope is that, at some point soon, I'll start seeing some of these family lines intertwine. 

It's a Small Town, After All

 

There are some research problems which leave me feeling as if I'm walking in circles. Pursuing my Laskowski ancestors in Żerków is one of those problems. The more I try to compile a listing of all the documents containing the surname Laskowski for resident of Żerków, the more I'm spotting relatives sporting the other surnames in my paternal line.

Can that be so surprising? After all, Żerków is only a town of maybe two thousand residents now. That each of the residents, over several generations, would be likely to marry spouses from the other, likely limited, families in the area should not be surprising. But I was surprised, nonetheless.

Take my new brick wall ancestor Bonawentura Laskowski. He's my third great-grandfather, so now I'm making progress, having moved into this new generation. But that's where I'm stumped. I cannot find any connections for this man who died in 1827.

I got the brainy idea that, if I couldn't make any progress on the Laskowski side of the equation, perhaps I'd find better luck looking at the other side of the family. That other side is represented by Bonawentura's wife, Orszula Wroblewska. With a name like that, I'm automatically folding in more uncertainty, because I've seen her name rendered several ways. Some records list her given name as Ursula, which would be understandable. But my doubt rises even further when I find only records spelling her maiden name as Wrobleska, not Wroblewska. Could this just be a case of simple misspelling? 

I did a search for documents on the Polish website BaSIA to see what would show up. I narrowed the search parameters to a ten kilometer area around Żerków, and lessened the similarity range to a more lenient level to capture any other possible spelling variations. 

With that, I began to pull in possibilities for this side of the family. I found a twenty six year old woman named Cunegunda Wrobleska who died in 1821, as well as a sixty year old woman named Franciszka with the same surname who died in 1818. But when I came upon the 1820 death notice for eighty year old Regina Wrobleska, something made me stop and consider.

Regina, I noticed, was apparently unlike the others with the surname Wrobleska, for this entry gave her maiden name. The record noted that she was born a Laskoska. Fortunately for whoever might be among her descendants, her parents' names were listed: Adalbertus Laskoski and Barbara. Although there was no maiden name given for Regina's mother Barbara, this was the first instance I had found in Żerków of someone this early in the century provided with parents' names.

But what was this? Besides Orszula Wroblewska, my third great-grandmother who married Bonawentura Laskowski, here was another woman whose life story also tied together these two surnames. Could there have been more?

Looking further, I also spotted another surname which has appeared in this branch of my family tree before: Gramlewicz. Only this time, instead of representing the line of Bonawentura's daughter-in-law Elzbieta Gramlewicz, this was the birth record for Laurentius Gramlewicz, son of Michael Gramlewicz and Marianna Wrobleska. Somehow, all three of these surnames are tied together in my roots—and more than once. 

Yes, Żerków is a small town, after all—so what was I to expect? Whether I can conclude that minor misspellings do not indicate entirely unrelated families, I can't yet be sure. But I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm slipping into the outer edges of some signs of endogamy in my family tree.