Regrouping on the Gramlewicz Line

 

Getting ahead of myself when I fell down that research rabbit hole last month, I discovered I have a DNA match with someone descended from the Gramlewicz family of Żerków, Poland. Conveniently, my planned research goal for the next month was to connect some dots regarding my Gramlewicz ancestors. And today is the start of that next month.

So, what about the Gramlewicz family of Żerków? One thing I know for sure: my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski called someone by the name of Elżbieta Gramlewicz his mother. Though she never came to America—dying in Żerków in 1886—her name as mother was recorded on Antoni's own 1935 death certificate in New York City.

It is only thanks to websites developed and maintained by volunteers from genealogical societies in Poland that I discovered Elżbieta's parents' names, Andrzej and Katarzyna Gramlewicz. And while Katarzyna had shown up in record transcriptions on those Polish websites under two different maiden names—either Nowicka or Zakrzewicz—I've tentatively concluded that Nowicka was the correct designation, making my new DNA match's ancestor sister to my second great-grandmother Elżbieta.

That, however, is not the reason I decided to delve into this line's overall history for November. You see, in addition to this Gramlewicz line, there is apparently another by the same surname, coming from the same small Polish town. And it isn't simply a matter of someone else in town coincidentally bearing the same surname. This other Gramlewicz family also included someone who married a Laskowski—but how they are related to either my Gramlewicz line or my Laskowski line is currently unknown to me.

An even closer brush with this other Gramlewicz family was the discovery, when examining the passenger list of the Żerków families traveling to New York with Antoni's wife and children, that they were accompanied by a young man named Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz—a name which popped up later concerning other New York records connected to Antoni Laskowski's family. But who was he? My efforts in the past to discover how the two families were related did not reveal a clear answer.

This month, my hope is to find just how those two Gramlewicz families from Żerków were actually connected.  

Pulling Out That To-Do List Again

 

Spending a month of focused research on only one ancestor can sometimes lead to great discoveries. Not so, this past month. While there has been a great deal of exploration on volunteer-powered genealogy websites in Poland—for which I am grateful—I have yet to find enough information to flesh out the Laskowski family tree in their homeland in Zerkow.

Time to pull out that to-do list once again, in the hope that more records will be added to those Polish websites in the future. After all, there are several gaps of time in the records used to create the transcriptions available on the websites. As long as those records are somewhere in the archives which provide the original source, checking again in the future may lead to further discoveries.

For now, I know where my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski once lived. I know his parents were Mateusz Laskowski and Elzbieta Gramlewicz. I know he had a brother Lorenz and a sister Agnes, both of whom followed Antoni to New York and settled there, as well. I have a fairly complete listing of each of their families' descendants up to the current time. Fortunately, since I have eight DNA matches connected to Antoni's Laskowski line, I have been able to attach each one of them to my family tree.

I am fairly sure there is more to the Laskowski family story. I can already see that there were other Laskowski surnames in the tiny town of Zerkow during the time Antoni lived there. Who were those people? How did they connect? That will be for another year's research project.

Besides that, I know that Antoni's grandparents were Bonaventura Laskowski and Orszula Wroblewska. But I don't know anything else about those people. Included in that to-do list should be some research on the Wroblewska family, finding any other reference to documents containing that Wroblewski surname in the Zerkow area. Perhaps stretching back that additional generation will also provide me with the link to attach those unexplained other Laskowskis to this tree as well—or, at least, definitively reject them from inclusion in the family line.

While that seems like enough of a list to keep me occupied for another month in a future research year, keep in mind that, beginning tomorrow, we'll resume our exploration of Antoni's mother's maiden name, Gramlewicz. After all, that is the surname which yielded me a DNA match at MyHeritage. But it is also a surname which seems to have other Laskowski connections, as well. Before next month is out, I may make some collateral discoveries on Antoni's extended family, as well as that of his mother. I'm eager to get back to the chase on Antoni's in-laws. We'll do that, tomorrow.

Deep or Wide

In this year's research goal to delineate DNA connections with literally thousands of distant cousins, my family tree has been growing rather wide, though I can't really say growth was deep. Working this month, for instance, on my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski's Polish ancestors, I found far more to fill in the blanks on his siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews in his collateral lines than I did for his parents or grandparents.

That work on collateral lines has produced results for my biweekly count, and that's no surprise. That continual, gradual effort brought me 338 new names in my family tree in the last two weeks, and that tree now contains 30,436 individuals.

That progress wasn't only on my Laskowski line, of course. The going has been slow and hard-won for those Polish ancestors, mostly because of the research barriers making it hard to locate the actual documentation (instead of transcripts). What helped add to those numbers has been a behind-the-scenes secondary goal I have of connecting all the collateral lines in my Tilson roots in Tennessee.

Meanwhile, as my research focus for the remainder of the year will be on my own family, my in-laws' tree has been languishing. I can't exactly remember how I gained that one new name on their tree, but it now stands at 30,211 individuals. I will return to working on that tree next spring.

The virtue of this wide versus deep approach is that collateral lines can be a valuable route to accessing missing information regarding earlier generations. Primary example is examining DNA matches with distant cousins to discover support for previously unknown ancestors.

Collateral lines can produce a bountiful family history harvest, when it comes to pushing backwards in time. And with 2,266 DNA matches at fourth cousin or closer currently at Ancestry.com, I'll need a lot of help to map out those collateral suggestions. While I have documented all sixteen of my second great-grandparents, I've barely scratched the surface with the next generation, finding only twenty one of the possible thirty two third great-grandparents. Most of the missing identities, incidentally, come from the Polish side of my family.

As we wrap up my exploration of what can be discovered on my Laskowski side tomorrow, we'll move to Antoni's mother's line for the upcoming month's goal, exploring what can be found in Polish records on the Gramlewicz family. We'll give those Polish transcription websites a workout in the next thirty one days. 

Fond Memories of Someone I Never Met

 

Today I want to share a story of a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law. For those of us who grew up in the sixties, I realize the topic of mothers-in-law became the era's target for a wide range of public commentary, hardly any of which was flattering or even politely understated. Thus, any time I run across a story of a daughter-in-law nurturing a positive, ongoing relationship with her mother-in-law, I know I'm making the acquaintance of some special people.

Last week, I received an email from such a daughter-in-law. But before I can tell you about that, I need to step backwards nearly five years to a blog post here at A Family Tapestry, introducing the subject of an abandoned photograph of someone I called "The Man With the Moustache."

I had found the 1880s era cabinet card featuring the likeness of a resident of Walnut, Kansas, named John Blain in an antique store not far from my home in California. Someone, I reasoned, would like to be reunited with the photograph of this ancestor, so I began researching the history of John Blain. As it turns out, his was not a happy story, for tragedy left his wife a widow with four young children when John was only forty four.

Eventually, John's family left Kansas for California, where his children grew up, married, and had families of their own. I knew that, because my goal in reuniting this "orphan" photo with the Blain family's descendants meant I needed to research his family line. It wasn't long before I found a subscriber on Ancestry.com who turned out to be a diligent researcher of the Blain family. I sent her a note through Ancestry's messaging system, offering to send her the photograph of a young John Blain. I received an immediate reply: "As I read your message I got chills down my spine...."

My correspondent, though not a direct descendant, was daughter-in-law to Helen, John Blain's granddaughter. Now well into her nineties, Helen had never met John Blain, herself—her mother was only about four at the time of John's tragic death—but her daughter-in-law was positive Helen would remember his story. 

Helen's daughter-in-law had a plan. Since Christmas was approaching, and Helen was traveling to spend the holidays with this daughter-in-law's family, I would quickly mail the photograph so the family could present it as a special surprise gift to Helen.

The minute Helen saw the picture, her daughter-in-law told me, "The first words out of her mouth were, 'That's my grandfather!' She knew right away."

With that post-holiday exchange of emails about that unusual Christmas present, Helen's daughter-in-law sent me a photograph of Helen, holding her gift. While the photo was a wonderful way to illustrate the full-circle journey of an abandoned family portrait, I am always shy to share information on living people without their explicit permission. In this case, arranging such a written release might have been complicated, and so I left the story with a final post, calling it "On its Way Home."

This Christmas season will mark five years since that exchange, as I mailed off the photo on December 20, 2017. Thus I was somewhat surprised to see a familiar name pop up in my in-box the other day, asking if I remembered sending the photo of John Blain to Helen, and whether I still had the picture her daughter-in-law had sent me, showing a smiling Helen holding her grandfather's portrait.

This is the kind of poignant email which can be hard to receive. Granted, I never met Helen. But I still felt like I shared a small—incredibly tiny—part of her life through that recovered picture of John Cunningham Blain. When her daughter-in-law wrote to give me permission to use Helen's photo, I knew what was coming next in that email: the family had just lost a beloved mother, grandmother, and, yes, mother-in-law.

Rest in peace, dear Helen. What a story your family had to share.

Above: Photograph of Helen holding picture of her grandfather, John Cunningham Blain, given by her daughter-in-law on Christmas, 2017; photograph used by family's permission.
 

      

There Were Three Siblings

 

While many family stories about immigrant ancestors may start out with "There were three brothers," in my great-grandfather's case, I guess I'll have to open my family tale with a less story-like "three siblings." Nor did they arrive on one ship. In Antoni Laskowski's case, that immigration story was more of a serial immigration.

It is sometimes hard to pin down the exact date of an immigrant's arrival. Apparently, you can't simply rely on the report captured in a census record. For instance, the 1900 census pins Antoni's arrival ten years earlier, in 1890. Checking with the 1910 census, that arrival date had been modified to report 1888. And the 1920 census moved that date still one year earlier: to 1887.

What did the actual passenger listing show? Though the handwriting on the document bordered on illegible, I was fairly certain that "Anton Laskowsky" was the right man when I saw the confirmation that he was traveling from Żerków. According to that record, Antoni arrived in June of 1887. None of his fellow travelers were from his village, so it appears he was traveling alone.

That, of course, was for Antoni's arrival only. His wife Marianna and his three children followed him in February of 1889. As I suspected, Marianna was traveling with other family members, or at least neighbors from the small village of Żerków. Though the handwriting was near impossible to read on the passenger list, what looks like Mieczysław Gramlewicz was the name entered right above Marianna's listing—if I am reading that handwriting correctly. Same goes for the young man Andreas Langner, also traveling with the party from Żerków.

What about Antoni's siblings? For his brother Lorenz, I face the same dilemma. Depending on which census record I view, Lorenz's arrival in New York City was given as 1883, 1884, or 1888. Considering Lorenz and his wife Anna welcomed two children into their family before their emigration from Żerków—with the second child said to have been born at sea in 1886—I'd say none of those census reports were correct. I'm still looking for the passenger records to see whether the family traveled all together, or whether Lorenz went on ahead to prepare the way for his wife and two children.

Antoni's sister Agnes had a different story, one which poignantly illustrates the sheer difficulty of life back in Żerków before the siblings finally made their exodus. Agnes had been married in the 1870s to a man in Żerków for whom she bore three children. All three children died by the time her husband also died in 1882. Marrying a second time five years afterwards, Agnes and her second husband, a man with a name destined to keep American record keepers stumped for decades to come, arrived in New York City before the birth of their second daughter in 1890.

Like her brother Lorenz, Agnes and her second husband Ignatz Giernatowski have yet to show up in passenger records. Given the unusual surname, though, a search for any documents bearing their names is not only hampered by handwriting woes, but by spelling challenges, as well.

There are other ways to overcome such research obstacles, however. Thankfully, I've found several of Lorenz's descendants in my DNA matches, as well as one line from the Giernatowskis. Finding records for immigrant families in New York proves to be far easier than looking for those relatives who stayed behind in Żerków, but it is more encouraging to discover demonstration of a genetic connection, as well.  

Fell Down that Rabbit Hole — Again

 

Researching family history outside the confines of familiar resources like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org can mean faltering progress. After all, exploring websites in other countries means struggling with a foreign language, as well. Perhaps, given my research goal this month of locating more resources to confirm my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski's roots, I may have wandered a bit astray. Like, far from the beaten path.

In my defense, the idea this month of looking for a DNA match who actually resided in Poland seemed a logical step to take. How was I to know that the most promising connection would lead to Antoni's maternal side with a Gramlewicz descendant? With the first sighting of that lead, I was off, chasing all the Gramlewicz documents I could find for residents of Żerków claiming connection to that surname. Yep. Down the rabbit hole.

Only problem: guess what my research goal for next month is supposed to be?

Right.

So, we rewind. Bookmark sites where we left off the chase. We'll resume the Gramlewicz chase again next month. For now, I have four more days to catch up on my original intentions. Let's see what we can gather up—and quickly—so we can spruce up the Laskowski line.

Part of my goal for October was to clean up and update all the Laskowski profiles I've already entered into my Ancestry account. Those, for the most part, belonged to the Laskowski siblings who left their homeland for a new life in New York.

Antoni's parents, Mateusz Laskowski and Elżbieta Gramlewicz, had three children that I am currently aware of: Antoni and his brother Lorenz, and a sister named Agnes. All three of them immigrated to the United States. While I don't have copies of actual passenger lists, by other reports, it seems the two brothers may have traveled together to New York, possibly in 1884. Antoni's wife Marianna and children traveled later, most likely after Antoni sent word—and travel funds—back to them. Along with Marianna, a possible traveling companion might have been Antoni's sister Agnes who, after being widowed and losing several children, had remarried and was likely ready to start a new life in a new land.

Between the three siblings—Antoni, Lorenz, and Agnes—there are ample descendants whose profiles at Ancestry.com need updating. Besides Antoni's three children, Lorenz had five, and Agnes had one or two who survived to adulthood. All those children became residents of the United States, making it easy for me to spruce up that branch of my family tree, adding records which were not part of the Ancestry universe the last time I passed through this way.

Besides this, though, there are likely more Laskowskis who remained behind in Poland. While access to records there may be limited, my next step will be to thoroughly check for any indication that there were other descendants of parents Mateusz and Elżbieta. From that point, if there is more time, I'll step back one more generation to see what can be found on Polish websites regarding children of Mateusz' parents, Bonaventura Laskowski and Orszula Wroblewska.

I just won't touch Antoni's maternal Gramlewicz line—at least, not for another four days. No sense getting tempted down that rabbit hole yet again. 

 

Zakr . . . what? Getting Negative About Half Siblings

 

Zakr.... Okay, take a deep breath and spell it out: Zakrzewicz. Only in Poland could I have run across a surname like that. And the only problem with that has been the question of whether that name represents a different mother for Katarzina Gramlewicz, or simply another alias.

Katarzina Gramlewicz was the direct ancestor of my recently-found DNA match at MyHeritage. On paper—at least, according to this match's tree—Katarzina's father had the same name as my second great-grandmother's father, Andrzej Gramlewicz.

That, however, is where things begin to break down. According to what I've struggled to find online, my second great-grandmother's mother had a maiden name of Nowicka. For the tree of this DNA match, though, Katarzina's mother had a different surname: Zakrzewicz.

Where did that come from? Does that mean Katarzina is only half-sister to my Elżbieta Gramlewicz? I had to go searching for any sign that Andrzej was married twice—and to two different women who were both named Katarzyna.

There are problems with such a search, at least with what is currently available online for Polish records in the Catholic parish of Żerków. There are two resources I can use. One is the Poznan Project, which is strictly limited to transcriptions of available marriage records, both church and civil, during the 1800s. The other resource, which includes baptisms and death records as well as marriage information in their transcriptions, is the website known as BaSIA. 

In addition to the hazards of relying on transcriptions, the collections include significant gaps in dates. For those reasons, I looked for signs of any family members in Żerków with the surname Zakrzewicz. I discovered a few unexpected details. For one, a man by the name of Adalbertus Zakrzewicz showed up with surprising regularity as the godparent at several baptisms for children with a variety of other surnames. None of those baptisms linked that surname to Nowicki. And only once was he a godparents to a Gramlewicz baptism—but not connected to Andrzej.

Another near brush with familial connection was the 1819 baptism of a Kraska baby, when a different Zakrzewicz identified as Martinus was named as godparent, along with a woman surnamed Gramlewiczowa. Close, but still not our line.

This is where things turn negative. I found no record for anyone named Zakrzewicz marrying a Gramlewicz, nor any baptismal record for a child of such a couple. Nor have I been able to identify a premature date of death for Katarzina Nowicka, mother of my Elżbieta, or even Katarzina Zakrzewicz, named as mother of Elżbieta's supposed sibling Katarzina.

The key, at this point, is that the only place I've seen mention of a wife of Andrzej Gramlewicz being named as a Zakrzewicz was years after the fact, when the younger Katarzina died in 1887. There, she was named as a married woman—her husband being Wincenty Cichocki—and the reporting party was listed as her daughter Agnes. As sometimes happens when such information is gathered, it is likely that the reporting party provided incorrect information.

On the other hand, when we review the dates where transcripts provided mother's maiden name, the elder Katarzyna was consistently listed by the maiden name Nowicka:

• in 1820 for the baptism of daughter Apolonia
• in 1822 for the baptism of daughter Josepha
• in 1823 for the death of daughter Josepha
• in 1824 for the baptism of son Joannes
• in 1827 for the baptism of son Piotr Paweł
• in 1827 at the death of son Jan (Joannes in Catholic records)

The record gap in question, though, is for the dates preceding that 1820 entry. Based on various other records in which the younger Katarzyna appeared, we can calculate her year of birth as either 1812 or 1814. A record at the Poznan Project indicates that her parents were married in 1810. And that 1810 document indicates the elder Katarzyna had a maiden name of Nowicka. Despite the gap in other records prior to 1820, until I am able to locate any other supporting documentation for another wife—or another maiden name—from the Zakrzewicz family, I'll call Elżbieta and Katarzyna two sisters from the same mother.