When Everything Gets Translated

 

What do you do when every document involving your ancestors is in a foreign language you don't speak? You use Google Translate, of course.

What else was I supposed to do, when one of the few hints on Ancestry.com that popped up for my Polish family said: 

W Styczniu 1919 R. Wstąpił Jako Ochotnik Do Pleszewskiej Kompanii Powstańczej, Którą Dowodził Ppor. Pamin. Brał Udział W Walkach Pod Kobylą Górą, Czarnymlasem, Mijamnicami I O Miasto Kępno. Po Zawarciu Rozejmu Powrócił Do Domu.

Do you understand that? I didn't think so; neither do I.

The family member in particular was the son-in-law of one of Bartholomaeus Olejniczak's daughters, Franziska, whom we discussed just the other day, so I really wanted to know what those words meant. Finally—and quite unexpectedly—after poking around the details on this collateral line of my second great-grandmother, I had finally broken through the brick wall keeping me from twentieth century information—and I couldn't understand even one word of that information.

The route for the family connection was this: from Bartholomaeus, my second great-grandmother's brother, I examined what could be found on each of his children. We've already discussed how I had no clear leads for either of his sons. Right now, I am in the midst of exploring what can be found on each of his four daughters.

From the eldest daughter—Franziska, possibly named after my second great-grandmother—I found two marriage records. From the first marriage, to Adalbertus Kondoła (or possibly Kondeła), I then found a baptismal record for their daughter Catharina Agnes, which included an added line noting Catharina's subsequent marriage.

When I looked up the name of Catharina's husband, Joannes in church records, I again was treated to more information: that he was the son of Stanislaus Zajdel and a woman whose maiden name was by now quite familiar: Julianna Mikołajczak. I transcribed his parents' names and his date of birth—May 16, 1885—into my trees at Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and MyHeritage.com. 

Then other hints began popping up, finally bringing me into the world of records for the 1900s. Billion Graves gave the date of death for Jan Zajdel as October 26, 1969, with his date of birth in agreement with the record I had found previously. Billion Graves also mentioned that Katarzyna Zajdel died in 1961, and provided a date of birth in harmony with the date I had found for Catharina Kondoła, granddaughter of our Bartholomaeus Olejniczak.

Being careful to enter all this newfound information into each of my trees, I then returned to Jan's entry at Ancestry.com, and discovered another bonus in the hints there. It was the readout in Polish I had printed above. Since I had no idea what any of that passage said, I copied and pasted the entire paragraph into Google Translate, and learned something new about this small branch of my third great-grandparents' line. 

According to the translation, here is what the link at Ancestry was telling me about Jan Zajdel:

In January 1919, he joined the Pleszew Uprising Company as a volunteer, commanded by 2nd Lt. Pamin. He took part in the battles of Kobyla Góra, Czarnylas, Mijamnice and the town of Kępno. After the conclusion of the Armistice, he returned home.

Of course, I had no idea what the Pleszew Uprising Company might have been, so once again, I took my question to Google, and found this entry at Wikipedia, in which this particular uprising was noted to have been one of the two most successful uprisings in the long history of occupied Poland. For this, according to the hint at Ancestry.com, among others, Jan Zajdel became a recipient of the Greater Poland Uprising Cross.

That unexpected foray into one branch of my Polish roots finally brought me as close to present times as I had ever managed to go. While I certainly have a long, long way to go to find the rest of the family's story—let alone any Polish DNA cousins—it is encouraging to have found at least one token of what became of my ancestors' family members who chose to stay behind in Poland.

 

Finding Another Franziska

 

Working through the line of descent from ancestors and then combining that with a search through all the family's collateral lines can begin to reveal patterns. I have yet to determine just who it was whose name Franziska echoed down through namesakes in the generations of my paternal grandmother's matriline, but I am finding that name repeated. Surely this is a sign that someone, somewhere in my family's past, had a favorite ancestor to be honored that way.

Whether Bartholomaeus Olejniczak decided to honor his sister—my second great-grandmother—by naming his oldest daughter after her, I can't yet be sure. Perhaps Bartholomaeus and his sister Franziska had a grandmother by that name—a generation which is, so far, beyond my research reach.

Thankfully, Bartholomaeus' daughter Franziska can be traced through a couple records from the now-nonexistent country of Prussia. According to a transcription found at the Polish website BaSIA, I was led to the scan (#86) of the actual 1889 marriage document for a twenty-five year old Franziska Olejniczak, daughter of Bartholomaeus and Katharina Orszulak Olejniczak.

In that record, I learned that this Franziska's husband was known by two possible surnames: either Kondoła or  Kądala. To complicate matters, his given name—Adalbertus in Catholic church records—was not exactly a Polish name. That Latin version appears to have been the substitution of choice for Prussian sons known in Polish as Wojciech. Thus, the search for the couple's seven (or more) descendants gets complicated—until, of course, Franziska's husband died and she married, next, a man known as Anton Bogaczyński, with whom she had three more children.

Did any of these ten children live to adulthood? So far, I know that at least one child did. Born to Franziska and her first husband on March 22, 1892, in Ludwinow, the child was baptized Catharina. A note below her record on the top line of the page in the register for the parish in Żerków revealed that her full name was Catharina Agnes Kondoła and that she was subsequently married to Joannes—or Jan—Zajdel.

Following documentation and links on various online resources led me to the Billion Graves website, where an entry for someone with that same identity—Jan Zajdel, born May 16, 1885—showed his death on October 26, 1969, and burial in western Poland in Grodzisk Wielkopolskie. 

That makes this the first person related to descendants of my father's Polish line whom I've been able to trace into relatively modern times. Whether he was indeed the husband of Catharina, and whether this couple ever had children, I have yet to discover—if I find out anything at all.

Progress for such a research goal—finding descendants of my Polish ancestors' collateral lines—seems so incremental and piecemeal. Here a little, there a little, each breadcrumb of information preserved eventually will add up to substantial information. But so slowly it unfolds.