Filling in the Blanks

 

Searching for Uncle John's mother-in-law has been only a partially successful effort. While I've found some records on Aniela Zielinska and the family she and husband Felix—or Anton—Aktabowski raised in Jersey City and New York City, there are large gaps in that paper trail. Filling in the blanks has become harder than I would have expected, even given the opportunities for misspelling a surname like theirs.

For instance, while I could find transcriptions of birth records for the older Aktabowski children and a digitized copy of the 1900 census after their move from New Jersey to New York, Aniela disappeared from federal census records beyond that point until the 1940 census—and then, once again, from any mention from that time forward. Indeed, if it weren't for widowed "Nellie" Aktabowski's appearance in New York State enumerations with her remaining children in the interim, she would have vanished from my view entirely.

Vanished, that is, except for one strange detail: a New York City municipal marriage license index in 1908 for one Aniela Aktabowska and a man whose name was carefully written as Joseph Sadzriewicz.

The curious thing about a surname such as this is that I have not been able to locate it in any records digitized in a number of online resources. Instead, I've found records for Sadziewicz, or Sadzewicz, but not with that "r" inserted in the middle of the surname. In fact, though I looked in a number of newspaper archives, the only version in which I could find that surname in that time period was in a Lithuanian newspaper, Lietuva, located through the Old Fulton New York Post Cards website.

Yet, in state census records after that supposed marriage date in 1908, I could find Aniela in the enumeration for 1915, still under the name Aktabowski. Without being able to locate anything more on that 1908 marriage, I had no way of knowing the ages of the bride and groom to guide me in guessing whether this might be our Aniela, or someone much younger. This was, after all, New York City where a population of that size was sure to present many opportunities for name twins.

Still, I wasn't able to find any death record for Aniela under the name Aktabowski, either. I was stuck, not knowing whether to believe that marriage record was for our widowed Aniela or for another bride.

That's when I remembered that odd entry on the Social Security Application completed by her son Gustave. 

The form had shown Gustave's mother's name to be Nelly Sagwit—an odd entry, given that Aniela was likely born in Poland, a place where a name like "Sagwit" didn't seem to fit.

Deconstructing the information on the transcription, I already knew that some of her sons had changed their name from Aktabowski to Hark, supposedly because they were trying to market themselves as stage performers. Gustave was already using that shortened, Americanized surname by the time of the 1930 census, and certainly when he completed his World War II draft registration card in 1942. So Gustave Hark was certainly Aniela Aktabowski's son. Despite Gustave's father's surname being spelled with a "u" instead of a "w," that was not a problem, and seeing his father's name given as John instead of Felix—his dad died when he was eleven years of age—can be overlooked.

But Nelly Sagwit?? That was a puzzle—until I considered how Polish pronunciations might sound to American ears. The American treatment of the suffix "wicz," for instance, has easily been misunderstood as "witz"—which if omitting the "z" could end up as "wit." 

That's the easy part. The "Sag" might seem a bit more of a stretch. What the "dz" in Sadziewicz might have sounded like—to a less careful ear—could have been a soft "g," somewhat like the word "judge." Could some clerical worker have heard the name pronounced and interpreted the first syllable to sound like "Sadge"—but compound the problem even further by writing only the "g," which we then read as a hard consonant, literally like sag-wit?

While I considered that possibility, I popped over to FamilySearch which, as one reader has already commented here, sometimes provides more complete transcriptions of retracted documents. Sure enough, there was the typewritten version of Aniela's 1946 death record from Brooklyn, filed under the surname Sadzewicz—close enough to convince me that it was our Aniela who had married Joseph "Sadzriewicz" back in 1908.

Though the death record had provided her burial place as Holy Trinity in Brooklyn, I have yet to find any confirmation of that information—but I'll keep looking. As death records go, I'll also keep in mind that the names given for her parents—Felix and Anna Zielinski—might have mistakenly swapped the reporting party's father for that of the decedent's. But I now have far more than I did when I began this search a month ago.

And that's a start.

Just Passing Through?

 

Today is one of those days when looking—and then looking again—produced nothing of note. Now that I've found a possible birth entry for Uncle John's mother-in-law Aniela Zielinski near the Polish hometown she revealed in the 1940 census, I can't find anything further on her parents. It is almost as if they had stopped in Radzanowo to have their baby, then picked up as if they were just passing through.

You know I'd be game to search further for this Aniela's possible siblings—if, indeed, her parents were Josef Zielinski and Anna Kwiatkowska, as the transcription at Geneteka seemed to indicate. After all, finding such a cache of information only required that I repeat the search steps using the two surnames of her parents to find any likely siblings. From that point, I could fast forward a couple decades to explore census records in Jersey City where Aniela had settled after immigrating to the United States.

Search results: nothing.

Just in case this Aniela Zielinska was not our baby, I double checked this mysterious absence of any siblings by looking in the readout for deaths, both hers or possible siblings. Nothing.

Um...how about marriages for any couples named Zielinski and Kwiatkowska? Nothing related to her supposed parents, Josef and Anna.

On and on it went, conjuring up any possible searches which might reveal anything about the extended family. Any clues. Anything.

At the close of the session, besides becoming frustrated, I gained nothing...except a list of where I already had looked and what I had tried to find. That, I suppose, is valuable, if only to prevent me from repeating those searches again in the future. Or maybe trying again might work to my benefit on another day.

At least for today, I can say I may have broken out of the research rut where I had been stuck. I do have a possible family grouping for Aniela. Why the family disappeared, I can't say. I can guess that maybe the family moved somewhere else in Poland, or possibly all moved to America, or maybe all died except orphaned Aniela. There are so many possibilities, it is hard to say at this point.

However, there is one more research question I need to attempt: the question of where Aniela's husband was born. Aniela married a man whose given name has been listed alternately as Felix or Anton. The fact that his surname was unusual—Aktabowski—was counterbalanced by the difficulty of rendering that name in writing. Sometimes, the "w" was there, sometimes not. The first syllable was sometimes spelled "Ak" and sometimes "Ach." Lots of variables to play with mean that finding his roots will present another challenge—one I hope to work on in our last remaining week of this month's research project.

Before we grapple with that puzzle, though, there was one other detail about Aniela herself that I need to confirm: the possibility of a second marriage. We'll take a look at what I've found—and what's still missing—tomorrow, before heading into the Thanksgiving holiday. 

Try it Again

 

I knew this before, but it took a bit of research difficulty to remind myself that this is useful to practice: if at first you don't—yeah, I know you are saying it along with me—try, try it again.

That's what I ended up doing when I couldn't find any birth records for Aniela Zielinski, Uncle John's Polish-born mother-in-law. I couldn't tell from American records—probably gleaned without the help of a fluent translator—whether her maiden name was Zelinski or Zielinski. I couldn't tell what her year of birth might have been, since the only two census records in which I could find her didn't agree (born in 1861 versus 1869). And looking at the only Polish website I could find which offered any records for the region where she might have lived—Geneteka—gave me no options.

So I went back and looked again. 

Of course, I had inspiration. I looked at FamilySearch.org for the very microfilmed record set which Geneteka had mentioned for Płock, and realized once again how much I need to take a vacation to Salt Lake City—or at least my nearest FamilySearch Center. Finding what I thought might be the records of birth, marriage, and death for Płock—or, more specifically, the akta urodzeń, małżeństw, zgonów—I scrolled through the search results to locate Catholic Church records.

What I found was that the record set was actually, according to the notes, a civil transcription of Roman Catholic parish records. Further notes warned me that, rather than having to gear up for deciphering handwriting drawn up in Latin, the transcriptions were written in Polish—and, after 1868, handwritten in Russian.

Not to worry: scrolling down the listing of each individual microfilm, I quickly saw that lock and key icon. I couldn't have looked at the files, even if I could understand Polish or Russian.

But keeping my new mantra "try again," I kept scrolling down the list of film numbers. As I scrolled, the key icon magically gave way to several camera icons without any sign of restriction. I was free to look!

Since Aniela's death record gave her year of birth as 1871, that was the first film I took a peek at. What I saw might have been beautiful handwriting, but it was clearly not in Latin. I was pretty sure it wasn't even in Polish. I've never seen a handwritten version of Russian, but that was what I thought I was viewing. I closed the window and tried something else: thinking again. There just has to be another way.

That's when it struck me: go back and try the Geneteka website again. And I did, thankfully. First, I learned that, when a website offers the button labeled "clear," take them seriously, even if it seems redundant. Then, I tried several different ways to search the collection. I experimented with Zelinski versus Zielinski—hint: there weren't any entries for that first variation. I broadened the search to a fifteen kilometer radius. I played with the date option. I even tried looking at Aniela's married surname Aktabowski, to see if her husband had come from the same region (apparently not). 

After several iterations—and I have no explanation for this—returning to my original search terms of Zielinski and then the feminine form, Zielinska, the website gifted me with two pages of results. Why it was so generous with this iteration, I can't say, but I'm glad I tried it again. This time, out of all the entries, there was one—and only one—line containing the given name Aniela.

Born in 1865, this Aniela was the daughter of Józef Zieliński and Anna Kwiatkowska. They were from a small town called Radzanowo. Northwest of the city of Warsaw by what today would be considered a moderate commute distance, the village was within the fifteen kilometer (or nine mile) radius of Płock designated in the search terms at Geneteka.

Could this be our Aniela? I can't say for sure yet. At least on this one of many tries, it was the only option, but perhaps that is my warning to try it all again another time. However, it certainly is worth taking a closer look.

 

The Hunt and Peck Method

 

When all the usual research methods yield no answers, what's next? Two options are thinking things through, and making a methodical review of all resources already available. I call that the "hunt and peck" method, going page by page through all the available possibilities.

In the case of Uncle John's mother-in-law Aniela, I was fairly certain her maiden name was some sort of spelling variation of Zielinska. I already knew by her husband's answers to the 1900 census that the couple had been married in 1887. Since their first child, Benjamin, over the years had reported his place of birth alternately as New Jersey or New York, that answer causes us problems in trying to determine just where Felix Aktabowski might have met and married Aniela. However, second-born Bronisława, Uncle John's future wife, was born across the river in Jersey City, New Jersey, as were several others of the Aktabowski family.

I wondered whether there were any family connection to Jersey City. Was it just a job that drew Felix to move the family there, or did either he or Aniela have relatives who lived there?

I have an ulterior motive for asking such a question. If Felix married Aniela after their immigration to the United States rather than beforehand, how—and where—did they meet? The "after" scenario would also mean that Aniela would have been a single woman when she took the long ocean voyage from her native country to the New World. While there have been some exceptions, in that time period, it was far more customary for single women to travel with others, such as family members. Could Aniela have come to New Jersey with other Zielinski relatives?

I started looking in census records for Hudson County, where Jersey City is located. This is where the "hunt and peck" method comes in, because I have no idea who such relatives and traveling companions might have been. I simply entered the surname Zielinski—or, alternately, the spelling as Zelinski—and limited the search to Hudson County, paying particular attention to any families by that name living specifically in Jersey City.

Since Aniela reported arriving in America in 1886 according to the 1900 census, I was delighted to discover that New Jersey did indeed conduct an enumeration in 1895, the closest I was going to get to the date of her arrival. However, searching that record, the only name approximating her maiden name in that 1895 census was that of a Zelinsky family whose ages, best I could decipher from the record, could have made the head of household eligible to be a brother to Aniela, but without further information, it was a very tenuous link. 

The New Jersey enumeration for the next decade provided several more possible connections. There was a Zelinski family whose heads of household could well have been of an age to be Aniela's own parents. A different Zielinski couple could have represented an older brother—as could yet another couple. In fact, with a county population at that time nearing 387,000 people, with a bit over 200,000 belonging in Jersey City alone, searching for any surname by a hunt and peck method might reveal little more than vague clues, if even that.

As I stumbled along, trying to find answers from what is already available online, I did discover that the ongoing work of Reclaim the Records might have benefited me in my search for birth and marriage records in New Jersey—except that the earliest date I could find in their cache of Freedom of Information victories in that state was 1901. I'd need to push back a few years before that date to find Aniela's marriage record or Bronisława's birth record.

With that realization, I thought maybe now would be a good time to transfer my hunt-and-peck efforts across the ocean to see if I can find any possibilities in Aniela's theoretical home in Płock, Poland.

Retracing Steps

 

When it turns out that no further information materializes for a brick-wall ancestor, what do you do? In my case, looking now for wedding information on Uncle John's parents-in-law, I've been drawing a blank, so now it's time to review what documents have already provided details on their lives. It's time to retrace my research steps.

One reason for this is the need to confirm Uncle John's mother-in-law's maiden name. Last week, we discovered that Aniela—or Nellie, as she preferred to call herself in later years—may have come from a city in Poland now known as Płock. While that may have been a fortunate discovery, the trouble with searching for birth records in an ancestor's home town is that, at least for searching women, I need to know what the person's birth surname might have been. In other words, I am now looking for a viable maiden name for Aniela Aktabowski.

To find this, there are two research routes I can take. One is to look at the record of Aniela's marriage to Felix Aktabowski. The other is to examine the records left by her children which might include details about Aniela's maiden name.

I can already say that the latter search option has left me with doubts. For instance, the death certificate for Aniela's daughter Theresa—the one who married an Italian immigrant who changed his surname from Cappadona to Captain—reported Aniela's maiden name to be Kordecka. However, I am fairly certain that the reporting party for that death certificate—Theresa's husband Thomas Captain—was not present at Aniela's marriage, let alone her birth, so that response is already in question.

Further convincing me that Kordecka might not have been the right answer—yet creating another puzzle—are the records left behind for Aniela's other children. A transcription from the Social Security Applications and Claims Index entry for Aniela's son Gustave reported her maiden name as Nelly Sagwit. While memory of an aging son may have been impaired if he completed his paperwork for the recently-created Social Security toward the end of his life, I suspect handwriting issues and transcription problems may have conspired to create such an unbelievable response. Thankfully, several other children's records—mostly from their birth—agreed that Aniela's maiden name was more likely to have been something like Zelinska or Zielinska, in its proper feminine form according to Polish tradition.

While I will certainly keep those other two possibilities in mind—both Sagwit and Kordecka—my next quest is to find any confirmation of a Zielinska or Zelinska in marriage records from about 1887, the year indicated in the 1900 census as the possible date for the wedding of Felix and Aniela.     

Tapping Into That Root System

Sometimes, the answer to our genealogical questions seems so close, we can almost feel it. And yet, delving deeper, we realize how tangled in myriad details the answer seems to be—almost as if we are no closer than when we first began.

When I realized that, in 1998, Poland redrew their boundaries for their counterpart of what we call provinces, those leads from the helpful Herby website didn't seem so promising, after all. Now I had to figure out where those locations might be in the current scheme of geo-political things.

There were some other tools to use, of course. I took my hint from the surname mapping entry on ISOGG's wiki, and headed to the resource they listed under the heading for Poland. This brought me to a website's page called...um...Mapa nazwisk.

Okay, so that's "Map names." Thank you, Google Translate. You are my Best Friend Forever.

By now, I had already learned that "Szukaj" means "Search," so I entered "Gramlewicz" in the dialog box beside that term, and came up with the results at moikrewni.pl.

They weren't helpful. While I had already learned at Herby that my key targets in Poland would be Katowice and Bydgoszcz (if you have no idea how to pronounce that jawbreaker, you can listen in to a quick demonstration here), this new site advised me to look to Warsaw and Żnin.

With all these new Polish city names swirling in my head—and twisting my tongue—I didn't feel like I was making any headway. I did, though, take the time to read up on each place in hopes of gaining a sense of their relative location in respect to each other within the boundaries of Poland. And I noticed one thing: there might be something in common between some of the regions that were popping up.

Time to use one more surname mapper, though. I had found this third resource while researching my husband's Irish surnames and realized that it was a site that was international in its scope. So, trying Public Profiler's World Names site, I compared the other results with this third option.

Entering Gramlewicz in their search bar, I saw results showing me that there was no other country on earth boasting that surname other than Poland—a surprise, considering so many former residents of Poland now live in North America, not to mention those recently emigrated to other nations within the EU.

I clicked through on the map of Poland to zoom in on the specific regions in the country with highest frequency of occurrence of my target surname. According to the World Names utility, there were three regions of interest, although only one of them had a moderately high incidence of the surname.

That region was called—get ready for another jawbreaker here—Kujawsko-Pomorskie. Of course, I copied and pasted that one right into my search engine to see what I could find. Besides my customary stop to read up on the topic at Wikipedia, I discovered that the State University of New York at Buffalo hosts a website called infoPoland, which includes a section on that very (unpronounceable) region.

According to infoPoland, Kujawsko-Pomorskie is a province which includes a region known as Kujavy—hence the reason the place is also known as the Kuyavian-Pomeranian province. You can imagine my ecstasy when, checking into this location further, I stumbled upon the name Bydgoszcz once again, and realized all these different—and very unfamiliar—names all were encircling that same city in Poland. Could this be the location for my family's roots?

Another encouraging sign was when I clicked further into the website at the Public Profiler's surname utility and brought up yet another page in their resources: a listing of the top surnames in Kujawsko-Pomorskie. Among them was Zielinski, yet another surname on this side of my family tree—one which had intermarried into my Laskowski line more than once, apparently.

All this might seem quite exciting, except for one thing. Remember that distant Gramlewicz cousin who found me online and with whom I had exchanged quite a bit of family research? Well, according to her, the family was actually from another location: Żerków. Whether that city was within the shifting boundaries of any of these other locations or not, it was a sure thing that I needed to brush up some more on my Polish geography. Or try to uncover whatever the discrepancy might have been.

     
Above: The map from the Public Profiler readout for the name Gramlewicz, showing the highest concentration of that surname (in the darker blue) in the province of Kujawsko-Pomorskie.
  

The Sparseness of Those Northern Lines

While there are so many resources with which to track my mother's Southern lines, heading up north to reconstruct my father's family history has not been successful. For one thing, this line includes fairly recent immigrants, confronting me with the challenge of reaching across an ocean within less than one hundred fifty years. Coupled with that is the immigrant's penchant, in hoping to blend in, of changing names—often unexplained and without legal documentation.

Still, for the sake of this exercise and to provide a surname summary, I'll play along.

The best chance of finding anything on this extended family lies with my paternal grandmother's line. It was with the Laskowskis that "going home" often meant ending up at their place.

My maternal grandmother, Sophie Laskowska—the female form for the surname, in Poland, took on the "a" ending—came to this country as a child, sometime shortly after her 1885 birth. All I have to go on, for her parents' own histories, was the documentation left on their death certificates in New York City. If that is correct—and I make that a very tentatively qualified if—it means her father Anton was son of Mateusz Laskowski and Elzbieta Gramlewicz, two Prussians who likely never left their homeland as their son had done. Other than having one gratifying email contact with a Gramlewicz descendant who had found me thanks to Google, I have found no sign of the roots of that family, on either side.

Not as if that were enough to keep me puzzled, Sophie's mother has given me a research challenge, as well. I suspect that is partly owing to my hunch that someone got the information wrong when reporting it for a family death certificate. I have one record indicating her father's name as Francis—or whatever the Polish form for that is supposed to be—Jankowsky, but another record shows Sophie's mother as having a surname Zelinski. I toyed with the notion that she might have been previously married, but haven't yet found any corroboration.

One thing I do know: Sophie's maternal grandmother was an Aktabowski—a name I was exceedingly thankful to stumble upon. That was the ticket I was hoping for: a name that was not too common, giving me hope that anyone I would find would likely be a relative. Not that that has borne out steadily in my favor—sometimes, it became a little too hard to trace—but it has helped me flesh out the cousins in this sparsely-populated family tree.

As for the other side of my father's family tree, well, there isn't exactly even a tree to show. That was the domain of the mysterious "John T. McCann" who turned out to really be Theodore J. Puchalski—or maybe Puhalski—whose origin and arrival in this country I've yet to discover. Even doing the Y-DNA test (thanks to the willingness of my brother) has not helped uncover the story, nor has the autosomal DNA test helped much, either. There simply aren't that many cousins closer than the level of fourth cousin to trace—and, in my experience concerning this messy family line, there isn't even a way to bring the documentation back enough generations to engage tentative cousins in a meaningful dialog.

While I hope to plug away at this mystery line, I likely won't find any more key discoveries. But I'll keep trying. After all, maybe another English-speaking paternal distant cousin from Poland will once again Google her family's surnames and land at my electronic doorstep, willing to compare notes.   

To “A” From “Z”

When I start thinking that researching this extended Laskowski family is like wandering around in the dark with a paper sack over my head, I need only remember I have yet to do Sophie’s in-laws. That will make this effort seem like child’s play.

Before we leave off poking at every possible hint for Sophie’s roots, there is one more detail I need to re-visit. I had mentioned, in examining her brother John’s in-laws, that his wife’s mother had had the maiden name Zielinska. If you remember, John’s wife Blanche was herself an Aktabowska, but her mother’s maiden name, Zielinska—or at least a spelling variant—had popped up for another part of this extended family: Sophie’s own mother, Marianna.

That may not be entirely true. Not that it’s false. It’s just that I’m not sure. I have one document asserting that Marianna was from the Zelinski family. That was what was listed on Sophie’s own death certificate in 1952.

If, however, you reach back to the previous generation and examine Marianna’s own certificate in 1939, there is no mention of the Zelinski surname. That document identifies her father’s name as Frank Jankowsky.

And there I’m left: with no explanation for where the Zelinski entry came from—nor why it disappeared.

This is where you have to take a long look at the fine print. In Marianna’s case, the informant was her daughter, Sophie. In the case of Sophie’s own death certificate, the informant was her husband. Perhaps he was not as familiar with the intricacies of his in-laws’ lives, back in the Old Country.

It wasn’t until the other day when I got the brilliant idea to crosscheck this with Sophie’s brother’s own death certificate. After all, unlike when I first obtained those snail-mailed records for Sophie and her mother, we now have instant research gratification. With the click of a mouse, we can do this.

No sooner said than done—and bringing up the information on John’s death record reveals his mother’s maiden name was listed there as Jankowska.

Good old John, traditionalist at heart to the end. For him—and for his Polish-American family—a woman’s surname would always end in “a,” just as it had in his native Poland. Jankowska, of course, would be his mother’s counterpart to her father’s Jankowski.

But what of the Zelinski entry? Where did that name come in? Perhaps Sophie’s husband, knowing that his brother in law, John, was married to someone who was doubly related to Sophie, chose the wrong surname. Remember, John’s wife Blanche was daughter of Aniela Zielinska.

Aniela, however, was married to an Aktabowski, and that surname ends up being the one Sophie’s husband should have remembered. For, as it turns out, Sophie’s mom, Marianna, had one other detail on her own death certificate: her mother’s maiden name. Listed right below Frank Jankowsky—Marianna’s father—was the entry for Marianna’s mother.

I’m sure you are already guessing what that name might be. While it was listed on the document as “Aktaboska,” I have never found Americans of that generation, struggling with Polish pronunciation, to be particularly careful to render their spelling correctly. That, plainly, was the equivalent of Blanche’s own maiden name: Aktabowski.

Just like that, we’re taken from Z to A—from Zelinski to Aktabowski—yet still left with the tantalizing possibility that, somewhere beyond the grandparents of Sophie and Blanche, there was a link that made them distant cousins as well as in-laws.

What I Think I Know

Back in 1929, would it have been considered unusual for the bride's father's parents to be absent from her wedding? In the case of the wedding of the daughter of John and Blanche Aktabowska Laskowski, that is apparently what happened.

In trying to figure out why Frances Laskowski’s paternal grandparents weren’t in attendance at her wedding, I have to return to the things I already know about the couple. These things, as you can imagine, are precious few.

When I first began this quest, decades ago, one of my oldest cousins shared a childhood memory of hearing this man being called something that sounded like “Joshja”—but then we wised up and realized that was probably the Polish word for “Grandpa.” Sure enough, if you enter the word “Grandpa” into Google Translate now, one of the choices coming up, in Polish, is “Dziadzio.” Clicking on the speaker icon allows you to hear what that word sounds like in Polish. I’d say “Joshja” was a pretty close approximation for a little kid to remember.

Now, I know that Frances’ paternal grandfather’s name was Anton. It has also shown up in census records—at least the ones legible enough to read—as Antone, Antony and Antoni. The best I can figure, so far, is that he was born in what is now Poland, sometime in the early 1840s.

When Frances’ grandfather came to this country from “Posen” is hard to determine. While I’ve recently been ecstatic about finding passenger records for Anton’s wife and children, I still come up empty-handed when it comes to his own immigration.

Likewise, it has been difficult to trace his wife. I have two conflicting reports about her maiden name—and that of her parents. In American census records, she always was listed with the simple American name, Mary—but as we discovered upon finally locating her passenger records, her name was more likely Marianna.

The trouble with her records is a discrepancy between her own death certificate and that of her daughter, Sophie. On her own death certificate, her father was listed as Frank Jankowsky. Since she died in 1939, four years after her husband’s passing, the informant on her records was her daughter, Sophie.

However, when it came to Sophie’s own records, her mother’s maiden name was listed as Zelinski, not Jankowsky. The informant, in that case, was Sophie’s husband, so granted there was a possibility that he wasn’t well versed in all the fine details.

Interestingly, that Zelinski surname surfaces in another family member’s history: Sophie’s brother John’s wife’s mother. (There: confused yet?) Her maiden name was also Zelinski—although on her death record, it was spelled Zielinski.

So, if Frances Laskowski was doubly related through both her grandmothers, why wasn’t Marianna Zelinski Laskowski at her granddaughter’s 1929 wedding?