There Were Three Brothers . . .

 

Why is it American immigrant stories always seem to start with that same opener? Perhaps there was some truth in that stereotypical "three brothers" line.

No matter whether it was always so, in today's case, it did turn out that way. How do I know? I was led there by yet another DNA trail pointing to the ancestors of my mystery grandfather, the man who showed up in New York City but refused to divulge anything of his past.

This trail, however, is a much weaker lead. Of the DNA matches who trace back to these three immigrant brothers, the strongest match shares with me a modest sixty six centiMorgans, and the weakest—at least of those who know this immigrant surname is in their family history—holds a token twenty five centiMorgans. Distant matches, indeed—at best, perhaps fourth cousins.

But it is those distant matches which can prove most helpful in building out our family tree. When we collaboratively pool our family history intel, we make so much more progress than what we, alone with our lack of personal resources, could accomplish. And that is exactly what I am hoping, as I message these DNA matches and invite them to compare notes.

All those DNA matches—there are a key eight matches I'm most interested in pursuing—claim as their ancestor two of those three immigrant brothers. All three brothers brought to American shores the rather unwieldy Polish surname Krzewinski—perhaps explaining why some of their descendants opted for the more Anglo-friendly version, Kerwin.

Thanks to our online genealogical resource back in Poland—the Pomeranian Genealogical Association—we can pull up the baptismal details for these three Krzewinski brothers. The oldest of the three, Isidor, was baptised in Czarnylas, Poland, in 1855. His younger brothers Peter and Andreas were welcomed into the family in 1861 and 1866.

Like my other Czarnylas relatives, the oldest of the three brothers—Isidor—headed for Milwaukee, arriving there in 1884. He did not, however, travel alone. Apparently, by that point, Isidor had married (in 1880) and was now the proud father of two daughters, one of whom made the trans-Atlantic journey as an infant. Interestingly, listed right after Isidor's family on the outbound passenger listing from Hamburg was another family whose descendants have proven to be DNA matches—I spotted them right away by the German listing for their homeland, "Schwarzwald."

Isidor may actually have followed in his brothers' footsteps. His brother Peter arrived in Milwaukee about 1880, although he did not settle down to family life until 1887—that marriage bringing Peter a very large family of fifteen sons and daughters, most of whom lived to adulthood. Isidor's youngest brother, Andreas, born in 1866, arrived in Milwaukee in 1885, shortly after his older brother's family—at least, according to his report on the 1900 census. And like his brother Peter, Andreas—or Andrew, as his records in Wisconsin dubbed him—arrived in America a young, single man and didn't marry until he was established in his trade as a tailor.

Though all three Krzewinski men married and had children, as far as I can tell, I only have DNA matches with descendants of two of the brothers. Of course, there may be others whose trees do not yet reach back far enough to reveal the connection—or for whom surname changes, like Krzewinski to Kerwin, have caught them unawares.

That, however, is what we know now. The question is: how do we push back farther in time? And the key is this: Isidor, Andreas, and Peter have one particular connection to my family's own story, but it is one I have yet to figure out.

The key rests with one clue: their mother's maiden name was something like Woitas. In all its spelling permutations throughout online transcriptions of Pomeranian records, it matches one particular name in my theoretical family tree, as well. That name Woitas is shared by the Krzewinki brothers' mother Anna and my Zegarska sisters' mother Marianna. But how were the two Woitas women related? For this is the only link I can find that would merit a DNA match between the Krzewinski family and mine.

Taking Another Step Backwards

 

DNA testing has done much to introduce into the pursuit of family history unexpected surprises. Not all of them are negative, of course. That's precisely why so many of us spring for those pricey tests: we're hoping to uncover a clue that will give us an end run around our intransigent brick wall ancestor. Those stubborn ancestors can refuse to reveal their secrets no longer.

Yet, the answer still does not come easily. Take that tight-lipped paternal grandfather of mine—the one who refused to tell his adoring grandchildren any stories of his origin. His own children, even as grown adults, would not divulge any details, themselves. But DNA can tell, at least part of his story.

After testing at five different DNA companies—and convincing my brother to do so, as well—I now have multiple indicators that my paternal grandfather's roots led back to the region around the Polish port city of Gdańsk known as Pomerania. I didn't learn any of that from my grandfather, of course, but from the several DNA matches who eventually appeared in my accounts at three of those companies.

All of the matches I've discussed so far descend from two brave sisters who, shortly after their marriages in Czarnylas, Poland, emigrated with their husbands to Milwaukee. I've traced those matches' trees from the present, backwards in time to their baptismal records in Czarnylas. Those sisters' mother was likely herself a sister to my grandfather's own mother, the "Anna Krauss" who showed up in New York with her two children.

There are, however, another set of DNA matches who somehow relate to this same root in Czarnylas, but whose pedigree does not point to the sisters of my Anna, but tantalizingly to someone who might lead us to a previous generation. To find more about this woman will require us to step back even farther in time to a woman whose maiden name was the same—well, if you don't mind a liberal hand with Polish spelling variations—as my Anna's own mother. Could it have been Anna's aunt? Or an even farther-removed relative?

For the next few days, we'll consider the story of an immigrant family surnamed—at least before they gave up on the challenges of Polish spelling—Krzewinski. Hopefully, we will press through the roadblock of unavailable Polish documentation to see what can be found about that founding Krzewinski ancestor's wife's birth name—but be prepared to face several iterations in this search as we look for a woman baptised Anna Woitas, or Wojtas, or Woytas, or Wojtasz, or.... Well, you get the idea. Whether you add in any of the Polish diacritical marks or not, we have our work cut out for us, this time. 

Focus on Growth Potential

 

If, in talking about the buildup of water pressure behind a dam, we were to put the situation in euphemistic terms, we could have said we were examining its "growth potential"—but that would only be an accurate assessment if the dam were flexible enough to accommodate the added pressure. Most dams are not.

Genealogy, on the other hand, always seems flexible enough to absorb the added "volume." There is always room for another branch on the family tree, no matter how many names and corresponding dates suddenly appear on account of our newly-discovered relatives.

That, of course, is good news for me, as I am about to add several hundred names to my father's family tree, all at once. I just need to build up the courage to plug this huge new branch into the right spot in the tree.

In the meantime, work on that one project has slowed all my other research tasks to a near standstill. Work on my mother's 23,616 person tree: zero. For my mother-in-law's 19,334 person tree? Zero. Nothing on my father-in-law's puny 1,813 person tree, either. And if it weren't for discovering another DNA match on my father's side of the family, that tree would have been stuck at zero, as well. As it was, that DNA match led me to nine additional family members I hadn't been aware of, so his tree now has 740 people in it...but not for long.

Where all my work focus has gone in the past two weeks was into building a new family tree, a tree connected to the first few of what has now grown into a dozen DNA matches who all have one thing in common: they are related to ancestors who were apparently siblings of my paternal grandfather's mother. As more and more of them appear in my various DNA accounts (I've tested at five different companies), it becomes increasingly clear that that is the connection.

So, in this past two week period, while I did practically nothing to augment my four longstanding family trees, I've been working to get to know this really big family from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which I had absolutely no clue existed before the age of DNA testing. Over the past two weeks, I've managed to assemble a family tree of strangers, large enough to include 732 names (plus supporting documentation), 341 of which I added only this month.

Of course, I'm nowhere near done yet. But is anyone's family tree ever done? The focus of my goal is all those founding Zegarska sisters from Czarnylas, Poland, the backbone of this family tree, so I can trace each one's descendants down to the present day. Included in that task, of course, will be the main point: flagging each DNA match to demonstrate the route connecting that match with my great-grandmother, the woman known to my family only as Anna Krauss.

That is one woman who took a lot of her story with her to her grave. While I'll likely never find the explanation to many of the details I did uncover for that woman, at least these many DNA tests are serving to confirm the answer to one mystery which the paper trail could never provide: Anna's origin and parentage in Poland.

Trifling with True Believers

 

When it comes to labels, the term "true believers" may carry baggage. Nevertheless, whether seen negatively or positively, those who are vocally committed to a concept, a cause, or even a product are a powerful force to reckon with.

Over the years in the genealogical community, we've encountered some product-oriented changes which have raised a hue and cry. We depend on the various tools which streamline family history compilation, and when a tool proves useful, the only acceptable change is true improvement. Witness changes to the product lines at Ancestry, especially those for genetic genealogy, and the outcry when such decisions were perceived to be a step backwards.

Lately, another DNA testing company, 23andMe, has been the recipient of the outcry over retracting some product features. Whether genealogists are indeed the majority of the core constituency at 23andMe, I can't tell, but they comprise a committed and vocal customer base—"avid users," as genealogy blogger and speaker Shannon Christmas has graciously called them.

Like a similar decision last summer at Ancestry DNA, 23andMe announced their decision, weeks ago, to cut the maximum number of DNA relatives to an arbitrary 1,500 matches. This, understandably, had some genetic genealogy bloggers—Roberta Estes, for one—concerned about negative impact on customers. Customers had felt their longstanding good will shown toward the company through such actions as voluntary participation in scientific surveys had been violated—not to mention, realized the impact on their main reason for testing in the first place.

Fortunately, as did Ancestry last summer, 23andMe realized the people they serve through the sales of their product are not "just customers," but what can be called "true believers" in not only their product but their mission. A company may not realize—or may have forgotten—who actually comprises their core constituency until a crisis point such as this, but having crossed the line, they know now.

What has been heartening about the latest move by 23andMe—although they are far quieter about this than I'd hoped to see—is their willingness to work to make a compromise which will step closer to a win-win resolution. A recent blog post by Shannon Christmas detailed a brief company statement which appeared early this month in the 23andMe forum. 

To view the statement in the forum, you will need to be signed in to your own 23andMe account, although a facsimile of the announcement may be viewed on "Through the Trees," Shannon Christmas' blog. Basically, if you, as a 23andMe customer, wish to retrieve the data lost upon the reduction in match count, you can contact their customer service through that forum entry. The company is performing a beta test to revise how they handle the issue, and are requesting fifty customers willing to volunteer to work with them on testing that revision.

For better or for worse, customers are becoming an integral part of product development and revision with their feedback throughout this ongoing process. How can it be surprising that products enthusiastically endorsed by that core customer base at their introduction can be revised—or even disappear—without as energetic a response? Once the genealogy community found its voice, we apparently haven't, since  then, been afraid to use it.

Alternate Annas

 

Theories always seem to wrap puzzles nicely in a box. When a perfect fit, they provide the precise alibi to trick us into accepting as true what might turn out, upon closer inspection, to be a flawed conclusion.

Take my struggles with figuring out the origin of my paternal grandfather's family. Discovering his undocumented name change, sometime after his arrival in New York from his native Poland, it only very slowly led to concluding—once again, without a paper trail—that his mother, listed on paper as Anna Krauss, was more likely a woman by the maiden name of Zegarska.

How do I know this? Only a theory. Yes, it is based on the fact that I now have several DNA matches which point to that Zegarski surname from a small town called Czarnylas in the northern Polish region of Pomerania.

Confounding that tempting theory is the fact that one line of descent from that Zegarski origin was linked to another woman known as Anna Zegarska. If that Anna Zegarska was sister to my Anna, something is obviously wrong with that theory. Could the Anna Zegarska, born in 1859 in Czarnylas, who married Tomasz Gracz and then moved to Milwaukee have had a sister whose full name was shortened to a nickname Anna? There were, after all, three other sisters whose names could lend themselves to such a theory.

One of them, Susanna, was baptised only two years previous to her sister Anna. With that in mind, though, unlike her sisters, Susanna would have married at a younger age: only eighteen at the time of her 1875 marriage to Mathias Machlus, rather than the typical twenty one. 

Could that have been the right Susanna? There was no trace of any Machlus baptismal records in Czarnylas listing a mother with a maiden name of Zegarska. 

There was an answer to that short-lived dilemma, though: soon after, the bride and groom moved closer to the port city of Gdańsk, where they, too, raised a large family of at least fourteen children before Susanna left off childbearing in 1899—or, as I rather suspect, the record set's transcriptions ended.

It is unlikely that, given how well-established the Machlus family became in over twenty years of residence in their adopted hometown of Dzierżążno, Susanna and Mathias would have then chosen to remove to America. Indeed, checking my DNA matches at Ancestry, there were none having the Machlus surname in their direct line. Susanna would not have been my Anna in New York.

Susanna's sister Marianna might also have been an alternate Anna. She, however, married a man by the name of Franz Krocz and, like her sister Susanna, moved from her native Czarnylas to nearby Bobowo, and then in the opposite direction to Skórcz. How do I know that? By following the baptismal records of her many children from 1865 through 1888. Again, an unlikely candidate to follow that with an immigrant journey across half a continent and an ocean. Marianna is not going to be my Anna in New York, either.

The remaining possibility for Anna among the three Zegarska sisters could only be Anastasia—and not just because of the similar name, but also because her husband's surname was so close to the Puchalski originally claimed by my paternal grandfather. Then, of course, there were those baptismal records linking Anastasia and her two children to my Anna in New York and her two children of the same given names, which also helped.

Despite all those other Annas—except one—remaining in Poland, there was at least one other Zegarska relative who eventually moved to Milwaukee. That I also know, thanks to only one reason: the DNA matches left in this Zegarska's trail. But for that particular woman, we'll need first to take another step backwards to understand how she connects to the bigger family picture.

Coming From a Large—and I Mean Really Large—Family

 

I think the prime reason I took an interest in genealogy was owing to the size of my own family: it was small. Like, really small. I often wondered, where are all the relatives? Unlike all my neighborhood friends, I had only one set of grandparents, and since they lived over six hundred miles away, I didn't see them often. My mother's only sister never married. My father's sister had two children, but since she and my father were nearly in their fifties when I was born, their children were old enough to be my parents. It was their children who seemed more like my cousins—and there were only a few of them.

Fast forward several decades until someone gets the brainy idea that we can use DNA analysis to determine family relationships, and suddenly my puny family tree sprouts a new branch. And it's not just an average sized branch; this one is huge. I have no idea how it connects with me, but the DNA tells me it has something to do with my paternal line, and leads me back to one particular person: my paternal grandfather's mother.

That woman, whom I only knew on paper as Anna Krauss, turned out to have many siblings, back in her homeland in Poland. Of course, I never knew anything about that Polish homeland because that fact was well hidden from my family by my paternal grandfather. And yet, that DNA points back to a family named Zegarski from a small town in the region of Pomerania known as Czarnylas.

With the help of another family researcher whom I met online, thanks to DNA-led discoveries, I began exploring a Polish website devoted to genealogical information for that specific region of Pomerania. Just searching for Zegarski ancestors in Czarnylas, I was able to zero in on the family of one couple. That led to discovering that the woman I knew only as Anna Krauss came from a big family. Like, really big. Consider this:

 

This is the results of a search at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association website for all the children born in Czarnylas to a father named Zegarski and a mother named Marianna. I set the parameters wide for that search between the years 1830 and 1870, and used those specific terms because the father was sometimes entered as "Jan" and other times as "Johann," depending on who was drawing up the record. Likewise, the mother, Marianna, had her maiden name spelled differently, depending on how the various clerks decided to render the pronunciation.

Despite spelling variations—not to mention the size of the family—I feel certain this readout represents just one family unit. This helps guide us as we review yesterday's list of marriages for each of those Zegarska sisters, to confirm their relationship to each other. This is necessary, in sorting out those DNA matches, since those matches lead back to different Zegarska sisters.

For instance, when I started this process, my first match led me to a Milwaukee family with the surname Michalski. That, in turn, connected me with an ancestor's maiden name of Czechowska, which ultimately brought me to the oldest Zegarska sister in the list above, Pauline.

In contrast, another line leading to a Milwaukee DNA connection claimed as their Zegarska ancestor Pauline's youngest sister, Anna. Born in 1859, according to marriage transcriptions at that same Pomeranian website, Anna eventually married a man by the name of Tomasz Gracz. Together, they welcomed their firstborn daughter into the world in Poland in 1880, naming her Rosalia. Two years later, Rosalia was followed by a brother, named after his father, Tomasz.

Just after the next Gracz infant arrived, the family was on their way to a new world—but not via the customary route. Tracing the Gracz family led through a different research route, not only because they traveled first to Canada, but because of the way their surname was rendered on records. Their 1884 crossing to Halifax, Nova Scotia, showed the family under the name Gratz rather than Gracz. That passenger entry also provides the clue that son Tomasz must have died before the family's decision to emigrate, but it also adds the name of a third Gracz child, Angelka.

While the next document in which the Gracz family appeared was not recorded until 1900—thus missing both Rosalia and Tomasz, with no explanation to help us conclude we are looking at the same family—that census record did include the note that, of Anna Gracz's twelve children, two had already died before the enumeration. One was most certainly their son Tomasz. But Rosalia? Perhaps as thanks for surviving whatever befell the family in Poland, plus the long crossing to North America, firstborn Rosalia became Sister Mary Atalia of the Notre Dame Convent in Elm Grove, Wisconsin—likely before 1900.

Those, however, were not the only complications in following this immigrant family through the generations after settling in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As did many other immigrant families from Poland, some of the Gracz descendants chose to default to habitual spelling permutations—such as Gratz—requiring careful attention to tracing each line through to the present era of DNA testing. Other family members have mentioned to me that another surname variation was Grace.

Bottom line, though, is that at least one descendant of Tomasz and Anna turned out to be my DNA match—and for no other reason that I can ascertain than this Zegarska connection. For this match, Anna Zegarska Gracz turns out to be a second great-grandmother, thus leaving her parents to be the most recent common ancestor we share. With that third great-grandparent set in common, that indicates our relationship as fourth cousins, still quite reasonable for the thirty five centiMorgans we share, according to our DNA tests.

The only problem with this particular connection in that Zegarski family was the name of the very woman I thought would be sibling of my great-grandmother: they both claimed the name Anna. However, when I looked through the twelve siblings listed on the family's baptismal records for Czarnylas, I spotted some others whose name could have been shortened to Anna. There was Marianna, Susanna, and Anastasia. The question was: could I trace any of the others to North America as well? And if so, were there any DNA connections leading back to that ancestral "Anna," too? 

Before That Leap of Faith

 

Do you ever get to the point, despite hours and hours of due diligence in your genealogical research, of doubting that you had done "enough"?

Wrapping my head around the six hundred names I've now added to a new family tree, dubbed "Michalski DNA Link," you'd think I'd feel confident the pedigree has enough built-in support. After all, I'm the one who can't just do "quick and dirty" trees like my Search Angel friends who work with adoptees. I had to make sure each name in that family tree had census records, marriage records, death records and obituaries, and (mostly for those born in the 1900s) birth records attached to the corresponding individual.

The key, though, is the nexus between the originating ancestors in that family tree: sisters from a small town in Poland who all claimed a maiden name of Zegarska. Somehow, those sisters connected to a woman whom I never met, and whose name wasn't quite the same as Zegarska, but close enough. From just one certificate from my own family's collection, I have a paper which claimed her maiden name was Zegar. 

Close. But close enough?

It's at this point I felt the need to retrace my steps from that beginning point, back in the town where the Zegarska sisters originated: Czarnylas, in the Polish region known as Pomerania.

Fortunately, there is a website focused on the genealogy of that region, providing a searchable database with transcribed records from the time period I'm seeking: working from my paternal grandfather's date of birth around 1876 backwards through baptismal and marriage records.

Specifying a broad range of dates, I was able to pull up all records for Czarnylas involving marriages for women whose maiden name was Zegarska.

 

From that, having the name of each woman's husband, it was easy to recognize some of those married names as surnames I had spotted on the pedigrees of several of my growing list of DNA matches from that corresponding branch of my own family tree. It was, for instance, Czechowski which was the name of two daughters of "Pauline"—who probably was named Apolonia as her Polish name—who immigrated to Milwaukee in the early years of their marriage. Likewise for the tongue-twisting surname Krzewinski, along with Gracz, which I also spotted in some DNA matches' trees.

Likewise, I checked on births recorded (via transcriptions of baptismal records) in that same website, to see which couples welcomed children into their families before beginning that long immigration journey to America. That step helped guide me to ensure that I had located the right families in Milwaukee—especially for those families which later changed their identity (and surname). Thankfully, those oldest of their children still appeared to confirm I was working with the right family constellation.

 

The DNA link tree I'm building is for one purpose: to connect those present-day descendants who match my own DNA with their Zegarska roots in a well-documented tree...and then to hope that is enough proof for me to steel myself and actually pull the trigger to shoot that whole tree into my father's own tree. And say we are all one big—albeit long-lost—family. Humor me with the patience to retrace our steps on those Czechowski, Krzewinski, and Gracz lines this week while I build up my courage to take that final leap of faith and instantly expand my dad's family tree with an additional six hundred family members I've never met.

 

Images are courtesy the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, with the first image representing marriages extracted from the database for the maiden name Zegarska, and the second image being of births to women with that same maiden name.