A Path to Poland

Tracing an immigrant ancestor's way back to the home country may not seem that difficult. Records abound with assurances of our relatives' origins—everything from census enumerations to naturalization records. Everything, that is, as long as those records can be found—and as long as those oral reports were true statements.

In tracing the origin of my paternal grandfather, however, we've noticed a few aggravating things about him. First, of course, was his reticence to admit his true national origin. This was not simply a case of politically-correct reporting in an era when Polish immigrants were documented as part of the domain of the German empire; in many of my grandfather's records, he deliberately chose to use a name more common to an Irish ethnicity than a Polish heritage. This name change, in and of itself, became a second snare to me in researching his roots.

And yet, unrelated to anything I've managed to learn about this ancestor in New York City, I've stumbled upon another clue to his true identity. That gift came courtesy of several DNA matches over the summer, each of which contained one single name in common: Michalski.

Don't think for a moment that Michalski figures prominently in the family pedigree I've managed to eke out for this mystery man. It doesn't even count as a blip on his genealogical radar. But not one, but about six separate DNA test takers turned out to have that surname somewhere on their family tree. And somewhere on that joint family tree is a node to which my paternal grandfather likely attaches. My task is to figure out just where that precise connection lies.

To determine that path from the old country to the new likewise seems simple: find passenger records from either the port of departure or that of arrival. In theory, that would provide an answer. In this man's reality, even the ships' captains seem to be part of his immigration conspiracy; I can find no records. Not for my grandfather. Not for his supposed sister, the family's beloved Aunt Rose. And not even for his mother, the unfortunate Anna of the many possible surnames.

One link in the family's chain of events, though, was one my grandfather couldn't conceal: his genetic identity. Just as when I look at his photograph, I can see his details in my own facial structure, the genes that made that similarity so visible also coded some other, more hidden, connections.

Those connections lead to several family members whose landing place in this New World was not New York City, as had been my grandfather's arrival, but Milwaukee in Wisconsin. Whether their path to their new home included a trip through the Great Lakes—and thus, possibly, passage through a Canadian port—I can't yet say. What I can say, though, is that this extended family of DNA matches has been able to isolate their originating location in Poland as one particular spot in the region known as Pomerania, a village called Czarnylas.

As much as my mind struggles to comprehend the viability of a genealogical detail without a supporting paper trail, I also stand in awe over the connections provided—seemingly out "in the ether"—by DNA. Yes, I can understand the science of how it works, but I also appreciate the serendipity of being able to connect with a match, a person who also had to independently come to the decision to see what taking a DNA test might turn up, genealogically. But for those matches, I might never have learned of this possibility. It certainly would not have been among my highest guesses for what else might have been my grandfather's immigrant saga.

And yet, just as many people from that pre-Internet era still have the need to touch and handle the paper upon which their information is stored, I find myself needing the tactile assurance of that research path back to Poland for my ancestors, whoever they were. Perhaps that is a symptom of transference, that my mind finds necessary a proxy for its inability to take confidence in a science based not in records compiled on paper, but embedded in microscopic codes comprising the essence of life, itself.

Adding New Leaves to an Old Branch

I've built plenty of family trees before, but not one quite like this. My new project is to build a tree of a family I've never met, but who, strangely, all are related to me. I started out with a handful of DNA matches whose trees all contained one surname in common: Michalski. Only problem: I don't have Michalski in my family tree.

Somewhere out in the ether of several generations removed, that branch's Michalski ancestor must have collided with an as-yet unnamed ancestor on my paternal grandfather's murky side of the family. What does one do in a genealogical scenario such as that? Simple: sketch out a family tree. And that is what I did—albeit secretly and hidden in a dark corner of Ancestry, under guise of private and unsearchable trees.

My tree, so far, has 106 individuals listed in it. One of those "quick and dirty" trees for use in cases such as this, unlike my regular work, it does not include many documents or other forms of verification (although I just can't help myself and sometimes do add a few records to each profile page). Just for the moment—and since this is my day to tabulate my biweekly research progress—I'll add that to my count, though it may not be an ongoing project, once I conclude just where to plug that as-yet unknown ancestor into my father's own tree. Then, I'll gratefully add the entire content of this Mystery Michalski tree into my dad's lineup.

As for the rest of my dad's tree—the part I already know about—I haven't really made much progress. I have been stuck at 620 names in that tree since the beginning of last month. Obviously, my energies have been diverted to this new project of a branch without a tree.

But the other family trees I've been working on haven't fared too well in the past two weeks, either. My father-in-law's tree is likewise frozen in position, with 1,551 since nearly two months ago, when I spotted an obituary for a distant cousin.

My mother-in-law's tree also received a research boost from the discovery of a distant cousin's social media message last month. Only, in her case, having added the names of the large family connected to that match, the resulting additions led me to realize it has been a long time since I last wandered down that branch of her tree. There's a lot of clean-up chores still to be done, so I've added 152 more names to her tree in the past two weeks. My mother-in-law's tree now totals 17,131.

And my own mother's tree—the one I'm supposed to be focusing on, in preparation for that SLIG class next January on research in Virginia—has made only modest progress lately. Like, only forty three new names added. Despite realizing her tree now holds information on 19,166 profiles, I can see I will not be prepared the way I'd like to be, come time for that Virginia class, if I don't zero in on the one specific branch of her tree that leads back to Virginia. Time to double down before the holidays create research havoc.

All that said, my immediate task for this month is to juggle all those names from the DNA matches which point to my paternal grandfather's roots, and use them to guide me to some record sets in a tiny village in Poland where his family originated. To be able to add some solid information to what has, essentially, been a branch stripped bare of all greenery, will be an unspeakable thrill. I'm ready to get some new leaves pinned to that branch soon!

Turning Over a New Leaf

By the time you read this—especially if you, like me, are not an early riser—you may have missed the debut of Ancestry.com's newest genealogy program added to their television lineup, A New Leaf. But that's okay: I will have missed it, as well. As touching as such programming is, I'd rather spend my time actually, you know, doing that genealogy research. I don't need help to feel good about myself as a family history fan.

Still, I do need to turn over a new leaf. I've amassed an entire library of genealogical programming I've been meaning to watch—but haven't. Last summer at Jamboree, for instance, I signed up for a year's subscription to Legacy Family Tree Webinars, including their thousand-plus archived online classes. Do you think I've gotten down to doing anything about that? I didn't even catch that Bloopers session, despite the enticement of the hilarity alongside a well-deserved celebration of their thousand-mark milestone. And despite the need to brush up on such topics as Blaine Bettinger's class on phasing, I haven't yet gotten busy on this learning to-do list.

The quandary with to-do lists is that each of us gets only twenty four hours in a day. We have to make choices as to how we use those hours. And, inevitably for those of us for whom the glass is far more than half full—like, overflowing already—that means having to say goodbye to something we are already doing before we can say hello to new opportunities.

In my case, I may have to include continuing learning in my biweekly status—a kind of accountability report of how I've progressed in my genealogy goals over a two week period. Say, adding a column for weekly online learning. Perhaps that can become my mid-day breather, or my weekend morning alternative to sleeping in.

It all depends on what I'm willing to give up to squeeze in something new. And that isn't easy. I've already discovered one thing about myself: sleeping one hour less a night isn't an option.

Thus, my own personal need to turn over a new leaf. It's almost as if I've inherited a million Genealogy Bucks—but can keep it only if I find a way to spend it all in one year.

The Joyride of "Creative" Spelling

What a joyride creative spelling can be for the desperate genealogist. The suspect linking me with several recently-acquired DNA matches on my beleaguered paternal side could have spelled her surname Krauss. Or Krouse. Or Krause. Or...well, you get the idea. There are several choices I could pursue.

All I know for sure about this woman was that the given name she went by was Anna. And that she once lived with a woman who was known to my father and his sister as "Aunt Rose." And that she killed herself one night, late in September, ninety eight years ago.

Anna, I suspect, was Aunt Rose's mother. It says as much in the 1915 state census for New York, and again in the 1920 U.S. census. But finding Krauss—or Krause, or Krouse, or any of several other spellings—made it impossible to locate any other record of Anna, especially in a place as large as New York City.

I had a worse time of it when I tried to figure out what her maiden name might have been. Her son's death certificate listed Anna's maiden name as Zegar. But then, a much later discovery popped up in which I discovered Anna's current name, at least on her own death certificate, was Kusharvska, and that her own parents were unknown—at least by her daughter Rose, the reporting party at the time she discovered Anna's horrible death.

I sometimes feel like I have circled the drain on this search, the many times I've attempted finding the truth about Anna's origins before. But this past summer's revelation of several new DNA matches at the several companies where I've tested has been encouraging. The best part of this situation seems to be the joy of being able to ditch this impossible task of finding Anna affixed to a married name of Krauss—or however it is spelled. Thanks to DNA, I may be able to zoom past "Go" and get to that unknown maiden name, based on hints in the trees of at least six already-researched families.

On Monday, we'll begin by looking at the nexus in those DNA matches' trees, a surname of Michalski, and the tiny hometown all these families left to immigrate to a settlement near Milwaukee, Wisconsin—far from both that hometown in Poland and the adopted home of my Anna and her daughter Rose in New York City. It seems a stretch, yet everywhere I look, I see anything but Krausses. But I do see possibilities. And that's just what I need right now in this latest attempt to solve a longstanding family mystery.

Party's Over; Now, Back to Work!

Conferences and other learning opportunities—and chances to socialize with other genies—may shift my mind into overdrive, but there comes a time when all the fun and festivities must give way to more serious work. So, I set aside my many musings and return to some unfinished business: who on earth those people were who were my paternal grandfather's ancestors.

You may remember my many groans over this near-impossible line to trace. I recapped my many trials and tribulations in a post at the beginning of this summer. I've also partied over the discovery of several recently-appearing DNA matches, all of whose family trees contained the same exact surname: Michalski. But today, as I pick up the research trail again, I want to focus on one detail which I had glossed over in my previous excitement to find at least one glimmer of hope, after all these years of finding nothing: a census record which I had thought contained a mistake. Now I'm thinking, maybe that wasn't a mistake.

The census was from the 1905 New York State enumeration. It showed a household in Brooklyn which included my paternal grandmother's two brothers and their parents. It also included my grandmother, by then recently married, and her husband and newborn son.

It's the name of Sophie Laskowska's husband, as it is shown in this particular census, which I want to focus on today. Remember, this is the man who supposedly changed his name from something Polish to the name all of us—my older siblings and my cousins—remember him by.

From the discoveries starting with a cousin's research, years ago, we had figured that his very Irish-sounding name was a self-made invention, and that his real name was Americanized to be Theodore J. Puchalski—or, losing even the "ch" sound in German or eastern European phonics, a surname spelled Puhalski. After all, that's the way I found him listed in the 1910 census.

But that was Theodore Puhalski—the name I had decided to stick with, once I found it in the 1910 census—and the 1905 enumeration didn't have it quite that way. The odd thing was, the first name had been somehow corrected in that census, in a smaller hand, to show as Thomas, not Theodore—why, I wasn't sure. I had also written off the surname spelling as a case of an impatient American enumerator not willing to put up with the accent of foreigners during his duties, and just spelling what he heard as quickly as possible to be done with this stop and move on to the next.

Puhalski or Puhalaski? That was the case that I arbitrarily brushed off as operator error. But maybe it just wasn't so. Now that I have these several DNA matches which contain the same surname—Michalski—I am seeing a potential other surname which may be similar to that of a woman who was tangentially connected to a part of my grandfather's circle in New York. That surname, much like the case of Puhalski versus Puhalaski, was similar to the aberrations of surname of this woman in New York. It just so happened that there was a woman back in Poland—in the same village as these Michalski connections—who married a man with a surname almost like Puchalski...but not quite.

Now I'm thinking it would be a good time to go back and see if I can find that Polish marriage record that I—crazy me—had discarded out of hand, the first time I saw it. Maybe this New York State enumerator didn't get that surname spelling wrong, after all. I'll need to see if I can go back and take a second look.

Above: Excerpt from the 1905 New York State census for the Brooklyn household of Thomas and Sophie Puhalaski; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

. . . And the Verdict Is

Keep it even more simple.

Yes, the KISS formula can be improved on—or, looking at it another way, reduced even further to its basics. When we think we have things boiled down to the right size to fit the right group in the right amount of time, we (or at least I) tend to miscalculate. Overestimate? Underestimate? Whichever descriptor for the end result, I always end up beyond the edges of what I needed.

Perhaps that comes from Thanksgiving Dinner phobia. When it was my turn to host the family's Thanksgiving Dinner as a newlywed, I was terrified we'd run out of food. So I fixed four different salads. And just as many side dishes--besides the usual mashed potatoes, yams, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Nobody was going to go hungry at my feast. I was prepared.

Seven days after that triumphal Thanksgiving performance, we gave up on the heroics of trying to eat it all and tossed the leftovers in the garbage.

So, yesterday was the big day for my class: I was going to try my hand at another way to evaluate what my beginning genealogy students had absorbed from four weeks of class. I styled an escape-room scenario—adapted for genealogy settings, of course—similar to the one by Legacy Tree genealogist Paul Woodbury that I had experienced at a recent conference.

Only problem: Paul's scenario had seven steps to complete before the first genealogy team could escape to freedom, but I had exactly half the time Paul had allotted for his conference session. Still, I can vouch for it that mine was much simpler than the DNA puzzle Paul had constructed for his APG audience.

Because my current class is a four-week session on how to use Ancestry.com, I wanted the students to try their hand at looking up a variety of documents to solve a puzzle involving a common surname, plus the twist of having two different wives of the targeted ancestor. The downfall—and what I continually urged my students not to do—was that the class could easily look up other family trees on Ancestry, and reach the end goal without having to look up any documents at all. Boo. Hiss.

I loved how this collection of near strangers self-organized into small groups yesterday and established their own teams. It was gratifying to see each group talk through the problem, step by step, offering their reasons for how to approach each problem and study each clue given. It was surprising to see one team take an early lead and zoom far ahead of all the others, making me wonder if the tasks were actually too easy for this class—and equally surprising to see how others were stymied with what I had thought would be the easier steps to navigate.

It all comes down to trying to see things from fresh eyes: the eyes of our own students. It's hard to see what a beginner sees in a subject the instructor has been swimming in for decades. What has become second nature to us as teachers might turn out to be what some commentators have dubbed "the curse of knowledge." It's a bias teachers naturally acquire by immersing ourselves in a subject for so long: although we can empathize, we no longer can see what it's like to encounter a subject afresh the way a novice would.

That's why I wondered whether taking on this exercise might be more of a lesson for the teacher than the learner. It became a chance for my students to teach me how they saw, for the first time, details that by repetition have become invisible to me. Teachers need to learn a way to put back into words the "second nature" experience we so take for granted. Our students certainly have no idea how to take that stuff for granted; it's all new to them. In some cases, we can't make it simple enough for first-time attempts at learning.

The best way to build confidence in learning is to learn how to deliver the learning process in even simpler steps. It's a drag to have to take a giant leap for that first step, but such an encouragement to find the process start out with steps small enough for us to race at with a flying leap. When we find that kind of entry to learning a new task, we're so much more ready to tackle step number two.

The Teacher as Learner

Western culture seems to have adopted the notion that, once we study enough to be awarded a degree, we have achieved a pinnacle and have no need to return to the classroom for any more learning. The learner has become the teacher, the expert.

Actually, as many have realized, when we stop learning, we stop growing. That sobering thought has been turned on its head with several "lifelong learning" programs, such as the collective efforts across the United States known as OLLI.

Beyond that, though, many teachers now know the way to keep their approach fresh is to continually be learning, themselves. That's why I've always valued conferences and institutes: when we expose ourselves to new ideas, we grow and improve.

Last week, I experienced a week full of learning. Of course it was inspiring, and I rode on that high for quite a few days. But now, it's time to apply what I've learned. I've gathered up my notes on one particular applied learning session and tried my hand at producing a hands-on learning exercise for my own students. Untried, untested—at least by me, the perpetual genealogy guinea pig—this experiment in learning the techniques of family history research will be launched in my classroom later today.

How it will turn out, I have no idea. That's where I become the learner: I will learn by my students' success...or failure...at demonstrating that they grasp the concepts we've been discussing. Nervous? You bet! This will all be exhilarating fun, or an excruciating flop. The key to the real learning—at least for this teacher—will be in the feedback received after the close of the exercise. Did it help? Was it confusing? What would make the effort more clearly understood? How can it change for the better?

Those are the test questions for this learner. The feedback loop will hopefully lead to improved quality for the next attempt. And the teacher-as-learner will be brave enough to repeat the learning cycle once again.