Always, Always, Always: Read the Document

 

It wouldn't be possible—if you know me, you will realize this—for me to wind my way through such a rabbit-trail-laced research project as this saga of the Zegarska sisters, and not stumble across at least one beguiling detail. The one I want to talk about today, as our story winds to a close, is a powerful reminder that if you wish to find a family history story, you must always—and I repeat, always—look at every document you find about those ancestors.

Let's rewind to the beginning of this saga. It was the appearance of one single DNA match, then a few more, then several from multiple family lines, which pointed me to the possibility that my mystery grandfather's mother—a woman whose name I was told had been Anna Zegars—might actually have been born Anastasia Zegarska.

I've spent the better part of a year—and an especially focused month—of intense research both in American and Polish databases to compile what appears to be a reasonable argument concerning that identity. The last of those DNA matches, however, led me to a different line in this same family constellation: not to the descendants of one of the Zegarskis, but directly to what may have been their mother's sister (or at least a cousin). 

As I do with all my DNA matches, I fill in the branches of the family tree with all collateral lines. Working on the descendants of this Anna Wojtaś linked to that last DNA match, I finally came to the youngest of her children, one of the three Krzewinski brothers who emigrated from Poland to America. Andrew—or Andrzej, the name he left behind when he left his home in Czarnylas—was only nineteen when he arrived in Milwaukee, and he waited another ten years before marrying another Polish immigrant, Monika.

What I hadn't mentioned, while writing about those three Krzewinski brothers, was that Andrew's story of married life had its own pathos. Yet, I wouldn't have spotted it, if I hadn't opened up a file at Ancestry.com and actually looked at all the details it contained.

Thanks to those ubiquitous "shaky leaf" hints at Ancestry, I found—and opened up—a document which was supposed to show the death record for Andrew's wife, Monika. One glance at the heading, though, and I realized it wasn't just something about Monika. The header said, "Certificate of Death," sure enough, but the line after "full name of deceased" wasn't Monika. It read, "Child of Andrew Kzenski."

Perhaps genealogists are a heartless lot. When I realized what I was seeing—besides wondering if that were just a misspelling of Andrew's surname rather than a document for the wrong family—I scrolled down the readout only to see what the child's name might have been, and whether I had already accounted for that child in the family group record. It wasn't until I reached the bottom of the page that I was able to recoup my humanity.

It was an unnamed daughter for whom the document had been drawn up. She was born—and died—on April 20, 1902. The primary cause of death was listed as "death of mother before delivery."

That, of course, interjected yet another question as my eyes silently scanned the rest of the page: what had happened to the mother? Almost as if to answer my unspoken question, and yet in a way, not answer it at all, line #25 inquired, "Other important facts not above stated," and the response followed: "one of triplets."

The scenario painted—a frantic attempt in the Milwaukee household at 746 Second Avenue to save at least the newborn children, if not their mother—was sadly broadcasted not only in the local newspaper, but picked up by wire services and reprinted in newspapers across Wisconsin, throughout neighboring states, and even as far away as Arkansas and Mississippi. The three children were buried with their twenty five year old mother in a single grave at Saint Adalbert's Cemetery a few days later.

While it was only a matter of a few lines in a document, the story hidden between those lines would most certainly have been lost to me, but for one well-entrenched research habit: always, always, always read the document. 

Don't just accept a website's offer of a "hint" and blindly plug it into your database. Make the commitment to inspect the whole document, not just the "punch line" of names, dates, and locations. Include all the other lines of the document—lines which most certainly would not have been included in the typical indexing project at genealogical websites. If there's ever a story to tell about your ancestors, that's where you are most likely to uncover the opening lines.

Above: Excerpt from unidentified Milwaukee newspaper clipping regarding Monika Blynska Krzewinski shared online by an Ancestry.com subscriber.

  

Pulling the Trigger on the Family Tree

 

News flash: three more days and, at least in the United States, Thanksgiving will be upon us. Following that event—assuming we all survive the weekend which brings consumer-oriented Americans an extended "Black Friday"—there is only one more weekday left to the beleaguered month of November. That means—for those who have been counting this year—I have precious few days left to get back on track with my research plan for my "Twelve Most Wanted" ancestors for 2020.

In other words, for my great-grandmother Anna—whoever she was—I need to decide whether to pull the trigger and add a pile of DNA matches to my family tree, or defer the decision yet another year.

The preponderance of DNA fingers pointing to a blood relationship with the Zegarska sisters of Czarnylas in historic Pomerania—now part of present-day Poland—seems convincing. And yet, I hesitate. Why, for instance, did all the Zegarski relatives of "Anna" head to Milwaukee while my great-grandmother ended up in New York? There are just too many loose ends in Anna's own story leaving me in doubt. Untraceable subsequent marriages for Anna and a death certificate riddled with "unknown" responses don't inspire any confidence in a paper trail. Then, too, what if there was a missing other explanation for why all those Zegarska descendants connect to my DNA test?

Perhaps I am waiting for "evidence" which is non-existent. If there is no paper trail, what else can be said for the family in a proof argument?

And yet, I promised myself I'd spend a month each on twelve of my brick wall relatives. Sometimes, we gather all the information we can find, and then...wait. There are always new databases coming online, new record sets digitized and uploaded to genealogical websites, and other ways to reach out and connect with relatives who might have private collections, as well. While I wish for the smoking gun to clinch the genealogical argument, I have to remember that, first, I need to pull the trigger on the loaded apparatus I'm already holding.

With that, I will hold my breath, cover my eyes, and click whichever button it takes to upload my private, unsearchable DNA match tree to my main DNA-linked tree on Ancestry. That means that combined family tree will increase by 840 individuals, all somehow related to my Milwaukee DNA matches in that private stash I've been growing on the dark side of Ancestry.

In the meantime, in the remaining few days left in this month of November, I've got a small bit of unfinished business to attend to on the other half of this Zegarska partnership: the husband of Anna, er, Anastasia, who came into the family's picture with his 1868 marriage to Anastasia, and somehow disappeared after the last recorded birth for the couple in 1876. 

 

Above: Entry for the 1868 marriage of Thomas Puchała and Anastasia Zegarska in Czarnylas, Poland; transcription of original records provided by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association.

Jiu-Jitsu for Genealogy

 

Perhaps everyone knows, in the world of family history, that local genealogical societies are small organizations with limited resources—but then again, maybe they don't. Genealogical societies of the local sort are gatherings of people who share the same enthusiasm for researching their roots. Sometimes, that enthusiasm reaches altruistically beyond that, to thoughts of preserving records so others can find their family, too. Or maybe even to helping others learn how to find their family's history.

No matter what, exactly, a local genealogical group claims as the specifics of their mission, it's safe to say those county or city groups are small. Sometimes, very small. Definitely not adequately equipped to take on the giants of adversarial systems. These volunteer-operated organizations are sometimes run by unproven "Davids" in the face of system Goliaths.

At least, that's the way it seems for us when we are unequipped for the next crisis that comes our way. And for this one local society I'm involved with, that armored opponent made its appearance in the last month in the guise of a seemingly invincible—or at least impersonal—system through the anonymity of the Internet.

We got labeled as spam.

It appeared our handy-dandy website-based email system—now a lifeline to our membership during this Zooming year of social isolation—had been flagged as impresarios of junk mail, our correspondence summarily dismissed to recipients' trash bins. Unbeknownst to our members, our regular dispatches—the monthly newsletter, or key announcements of the link to attend the next online meeting—were now rerouted to members' spam boxes. How to tell members to look for our communication there? Another email certainly wouldn't do the job. And the task of having to make nearly one hundred phone calls when our volunteer board was already stretched too thin was hardly achievable.

And yet, perhaps there was an easier way. In martial arts, when faced with an overwhelmingly powerful opponent, such as the samurai in Japan's feudal history, the weaker side learned that the most effective way to take on such a powerful opponent was to use the attacker's energy against him, rather than to directly oppose it—the origin of, and concept behind jiu-jitsu.

How does a tiny organization like a genealogical society take on a nameless, faceless "enemy" like electronic mail systems? Of course, we are working through channels to resolve the issue on many fronts, but in the meantime, one way to marshal assistance is to "crowdsource" the answer. 

Finding the momentum which works in our favor leads easily to seeing that our own members have a vested interest in hearing in advance about activities we are offering on their part. Why not have those who already receive emails, despite the current difficulty other members are experiencing (sometimes without their own knowledge), take the email they do receive from us and hit "reply" to send us a quick response? From that, for instance, with one click on their part, we automatically let our members do the heavy lifting of building a mirror mailing list—those who do still get our emails—and then by process of elimination, determine who among that smaller group needs to be contacted.

In the online genealogy world, we already see examples of companies which are using crowdsourcing to have others provide the muscle to get the work done for their organization. For example, any time you see a poorly indexed newspaper article, due to the failures of optical character recognition, and you submit a correction to that service provider, you are participating in crowdsourcing efforts to improve that company's labeling of news articles. 

Shared actions like this make the resource even more helpful for the next customer if the organization learns from our input and passes it on to benefit the next person—a win-win situation for both company and customer. Rather than turn customers into opponents, irate over details which don't seem to work correctly, these companies have learned how to make their customers their allies in improving their services. That's the beauty of crowdsourcing: using the energy of positive momentum to face what otherwise might have been the difficult, overwhelming problem of an OCR system which is less than impressive.

In our tiny organizational worlds, we can use that same mindset to overcome our system obstacles, as well. Adopting the mindset of jiu-jitsu—going with the flow of the problem's energy in a way that changes it to our benefit—and combining it with a win-win philosophy, small organizations like genealogical societies can leverage the power of forces beyond us to work in our favor.

 

Instead of Indexing, Trying Something New

 

Usually, I try to spend one Saturday a month "giving back," as I call it, for all the helpful genealogical resources which volunteers have shared online over the years. We often forget, now that we benefit from subscription services to aid our family history quests, that for many years, it was only thanks to volunteer efforts that we could find many of the records to piece together our family's story.

Now, besides volunteering for my local genealogical society, I try to focus some of that "giving back" time through what is likely the largest volunteer genealogical organization in the world: the people behind the website we know as FamilySearch.org. That's where you'll generally find me doing that monthly project called indexing.

Today, however, when I went on the FamilySearch website to index records, I spotted this button on the landing page:

I decided to check it out. After all, I do have a weakness for rabbit trails, and this one looked intriguing—not to mention, my latest foray into Polish geography already had me warmed up for this exercise. With Google Maps and Wikipedia, I was ready to tackle anything!

When I clicked the button labeled "Try It," unlike Alice in her adventures chasing the White Rabbit, I didn't shrink to microscopic size, nor grow to gargantuan heights. In fact, my adventure was quite tame and even predictable.

The first page that tentative click led me to was a list of simple instructions, explaining that I would be shown a "user-entered place" from the FamilySearch family tree. Along with that would be some examples of related lifetime events which might also contain that same place name. My mission was to identify which of several standard place names might represent the name listed in that user's part of the universal family tree. Decision made, click the choice and move to the next in a short series of entries needing verification.

To start the process, I could exercise the option to select a location to work on, mainly by country. I opted for the tame route today, and selected United States for my choice. It's been a rough research week in Poland, and I just needed to stay closer to home for this maiden volunteer voyage.

Jumping into the program itself, it was clear some of the examples came from headings on census pages—you know, the type which lists not only the city of Toledo, for instance, but the specific ward in the city. Some entries mentioned lesser-known places—like Pigeon Roost, Kentucky. A quick search via Google led me to the Wikipedia page for Clay County, Kentucky, where a subheading under the Communities section showed a listing of historic place names used in previous census enumerations—including Pigeonroost, spelled all in one word, solving the puzzle for that one entry. Easy.

All told, I think the batch of place names to verify included about ten. I was done with the set in no time, even including detours to double check place names via Google and Wikipedia. Hopefully, FamilySearch will keep offering these quick and easy volunteer options, giving willing volunteers bite-sized pieces to dispatch in a matter of moments. And the genealogical community will find ways to fit in these easy-to-complete tasks in their own personal "giving back" profile.

 

Images above: First, the "Try Me" button from the home page at FamilySearch.org; below, John Tenniel's illustration of "Drink Me" in the Lewis Carroll children's story, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

 

Almost a One-in-a-Million Name

 

With all these Polish surnames dancing in my head (but not like visions of sugar plum fairies), it's time to take a step back and reassess just what it is I'm seeking. The one constant in this assortment of DNA matches linked to my paternal grandfather's mother is her mother's maiden name. Sometimes, it was spelled Woitas. In other documents, it included the Polish diacritical mark to look like Woitaś. Still other times, the "i" was substituted by a "j" to render Wojtas. What can we learn about a surname like that?

When I plugged that name into the Google search engine, one result mentioned the name was the 52,389th most common name on earth. That means it's a one in 746,063 chance that I'll come up with a Woitas somewhere in the world.

That's almost a one-in-a-million chance of finding someone with the surname I'm most interested in, genealogically speaking, right now. Of course, that's the assessment of one website, assuming I don't search using the Polish version, Woitaś. For plain ol' Woitas, we can see a wide distribution of that surname around the world—not unsurprisingly, using that very spelling in countries with languages based on the Latin alphabet.

If we move to Polish spelling, Woitaś results in a much more limited distribution as a surname: other than two outliers in England and one in Ireland, the rest can be found—at least, as of 2014—in, you guessed it, Poland.

Perhaps that tells us nothing more than that if you wish to continue writing your name as your countrymen did back in Poland, you'd better plan on staying close to home.

Many Woitas descendants did, apparently. Looking at Ancestry's examination of the surname in the United States, only records from the 1920 census could be used to extrapolate information. In 1920, there were only eighteen households in the entire country with the surname Woitas—and only four in Wisconsin, despite so many of my DNA matches' ancestors settling there. If you search by the spelling Wojtas, oddly enough the number of families in the U.S. increases to fifty one, with Illinois having the largest percentage of that surname.

While it is nice to know that the surname Woitas was likely derived from the given name Wojciech, it is unlikely that I'll stumble across a close relative by searching American records for that surname at Ancestry. What I really need to find is some way to demonstrate just how Anna Wojtas, wife of Jan Krzewinski and ancestors of my DNA matches, was related to Marianna Wojtas, likely maternal grandmother of my own grandfather.

Once again, I turn to the only online resource which might provide answers: the site of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. There, searching for variations on the maiden name Woitas, I find these marriage results from the entire region of Pomerania between 1830 and 1850:

Just looking at this listing, we can observe a few details which might turn out to be helpful. First of all, other than the one outlier of a parish called Lignowy Szlacheckie, the rest represent transcriptions of documents from Czarnylas, where my own family originated, or documents from a village called Pączewo. 

Since I have no idea where those villages were located in Poland, I check Google Maps to get oriented to possibilities. Other than noticing that the other village names are repeated in the readout, we learn that the sole entry for Lignowy Szlacheckie represents a location which was nearly thirty kilometers away from Czarnylas—today, a half hour's drive. Putting it in the perspective of that time frame, it would have been nearly a five hour walk. I'd say it is less likely that the Woitas woman who married in that village would be related to my Woitas ancestor.

The Woitas women from the other two villages, however, are a different case. For instance, take a look at the first entry in that chart: Johann Zegarski and Marianna Woitas. Those are my ancestors, parents of the Zegarska sisters I've already written about, from the village of Czarnylas. And yet, Marianna Woitas was married in Pączewo. Perhaps the Woitas household was in Pączewo, and the Zegarski couple established themselves in nearby Czarnylas to raise their family—a likely scenario, considering the two villages are three kilometers apart, easily walked in less than an hour.

Taking a closer look at the readout for the Woitas marriages, we notice a few other details. One is that there is more than one Marianna in that listing. Both weddings were in the same village, one in 1833 and the other in 1839, but I already know from other documentation that the same Marianna wasn't married twice. Could this indicate two Woitas families in Pączewo? Could these two women be cousins? Is there a way to sort out which Woitas children belong to which of the two families?

Another detail to spot in that readout: although there was an Anna Woitas who married in the same town as our Marianna, there was another marriage for an Anna Woitas—that one in Czarnylas, the one with the Krzewinski man whose three sons and one daughter left for far away Milwaukee. 

Can we infer from that 1848 marriage of Anna Woitas and Johann Krzewinski in Czarnylas that Anna followed her older, married sister Marianna to Czarnylas? Or would it be the 1836 marriage back in Pączewo which represents the more likely sister to Marianna? It's still too soon to determine any relationships without more details, so we're back to sorting through all the records we can find online. 

Above chart from the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association via search for marriages for women surnamed Woitas, limited to dates 1830 through 1850.

My (New) Constant Research Companions

 

What do you do when your need to research family history takes you to new locations—and even new languages? That's when I keep three tools close at hand at all times: Google Maps and Google Translate, plus Wikipedia.

While these tools may seem the most basic of services, when research leads us into unknown territory, I find myself constantly checking these tools with one question in mind: "Is that true?"

Take this Krzewinski family I'm following from Pomerania in northern Poland to the American city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin. When taking a multi-generational view—from baptisms to marriages to deaths, and then all over again—it seems the family jumps from one location to another. Concerned that I'm still following the right family, I've learned to check distances from one documented residence to another.

Take this one Krzewinska sister, Marianna—the one who, in Milwaukee, was sometimes recorded as  Marie. To make sure I was following the right person, I traced her from her baptism to her marriage and the birth of her first children in Poland until she arrived in the United States. Transcriptions of those records at the Pomeranian Genealogical Association's website showed Marianna marrying a man by the name of Stefan Czaplewski in Czarnylas—the same location as so many of the DNA matches who align with the family of my second great grandmother.

No surprise there, but when I go looking for baptisms for their children, the only ones I can find are located in a place called Piaseczno. Where on earth is that? Of course, I have no idea, so I head to Google Maps, which brings me to a location south of Warsaw.

If you are as uninformed about Polish geography as I am, you can see the utility of this tool. At first, it caused me to think perhaps I had, amazingly, found another couple with precisely the same names during that exact time period. But looking more carefully, Google Maps pointed me to a second option, a location listed as Piaseczno k Gniewa. 

And what might Piaseczno k Gniewa actually mean? That's where the second handy tool at my fingertips comes in. Checking with Google Translate, I  quickly see that Polish phrase means "Piaseczno near Gniew." Google Maps tells me that location is only a half hour drive from Czarnylas, so much more reasonable to assume I've got the right couple than if they really had lived four hours away past Warsaw.

It was tools like these which I used to muddle through the puzzle about Stefan Czaplewski's supposed mother-in-law. In trying to determine whether American Marie was the same person as Polish Marianna, some trees on Ancestry gave her mother's maiden name as Julianna Wesotowska. This, of course, causes me trouble, because the only DNA connection I can see to the descendants of "Marie" would be through the mother I had found listed for Marianna Krzewinska. Remember, my theory is that Marianna's mother was sister to my second great-grandmother, so I really needed to find out who this Julianna Wesotowska was.

This is where we cue the entry of an admittedly jealousy-inducing document. As proof of that mother's maiden name, some Ancestry subscribers had posted this record from the collection, "Eastern Prussian Provinces, Germany, Selected Civil Vitals 1874-1945."

Just taking a look at this excerpt from the register below, we can immediately see one depressing detail: it's in a language I don't speak.

 

Not only is it in German, but we'd have to decipher handwritten German, as well—not a task I have any appetite to devour at the moment. Still, with Google Translate, plus a cameo appearance by Google Maps, I could determine a few pertinent clues. 

For one thing, the location mentioned Marienwerder, which was a historic region in West Prussia. Included in that region were many cities which, in historic maps, were labeled with their German names. Not to make things any easier for us, those German city names are not what those places are called today. For instance, a sample map of the region clearly shows a port city of Danzig—a place we now call Gdansk. This is the same difficulty I first encountered when I discovered my father's "Aunt Rose" declared she was born in "Schwarzwald"—the German name for Czarnylas.

The capital city of that Marienwerder region, just to keep it easy, was also known as Marienwerder—but only back then, to the Germans. Now, the Polish call it Kwidzyn. How close might that be to Czarnylas? About a forty five minute drive in our current times, according to Google Maps. So—maybe this document has something to it.

But of the other details for which I could ferret out details (thanks to Google Translate), I also noticed what appears to be a date some time in the early 1900s, not the 1800s. It also seems to be a document regarding someone named Catharina Lettke, born Krzewinska. It was apparently she who was the daughter of a Krzewinski man whose middle name—possibly—was Johann, and whose mother was this mystery Julianna "Wessolowska." Oh, if only the entire document had been printed, rather than the key points written in.

Could this Catharina have been a sister of the Marianna we know immigrated to Wisconsin? If so, unless they were half-sisters, we have contradicting information on the name of Johann's wife. Yet, given the distance between the town where I found Marianna's marriage record and that of this German document, we could be talking about two separate identities. Of course, questions yet to be asked involve whether the city where the records were kept would always be one and the same as the city where the reporting parties actually lived. Then, too, if the Germans called their place names by entirely different terms, could they also have "Germanized" Polish surnames, as well?

Clearly, it would be helpful to obtain a reliable translation of this entire document, just in case. I may find myself chasing after another rabbit trail to see just who this Catharina Lettke was, and whether her family led back to the Krzewinskis I have been researching. But I also need to maintain my focus on one research question in particular: if Anna Woitas was in the picture in this DNA match's ancestral line, how did she relate to my line's Marianna Woitas?  

 

Above image excerpt from the collection, "Eastern Prussian Provinces, Germany, Selected Civil Vitals 1874-1945," courtesy Ancestry.com.

 

. . . and Maybe a Sister, Too

 

Don't you just love it when DNA test matches seem to all align in unison and point the weary researcher in a hopeful direction? After years of testing and waiting—and coming up empty-handed—this past year has finally yielded some results for my patience. Remember, it takes two relatives to make a match. No distant cousins who tested, no resultant matches. Simple as that.

The flip side of that scenario is that asking the cousins we know to test won't necessarily provide us any further clues. We already know how we relate to those cousins. And discovering an unknown close cousin—or ruling out the cousins we thought we knew—may include an unexpected surprise we hadn't anticipated. It's the distant cousins, in my opinion, who provide us with the most helpful genealogical direction to build out the branches of our family tree.

Kerwin-surnamed DNA matches whose Milwaukee-based family line traces back to the decidedly Polish-sounding Krzewinski family were not the only ones who descended from those three immigrant brothers we discussed yesterday. There may have been one more immigrant addition from that same family: a sister.

How do I know? Because another DNA match is pointing me in that direction. The only problem is: that particular match's family tree attributed a different mother to that Krzewinski daughter—plus it claimed a variation on her given name, as well.

So: sister? Or cousin? How was this woman related to those three Krzewinski brothers who left home to move to Milwaukee?

If sister, that particular Marianna Krzewinska, baptised in Czarnylas in 1859, was also daughter of a woman I suspect might have been sister to my second great-grandmother, Marianna Woitas. If cousin, her name does not show up in the baptismal transcriptions I can find for the region of Pomerania in northern Poland, entering another knot in this ever-expanding family tangle.

If sister to the Krzewinski brothers, our most recent common ancestor would point to my third great-grandmother, making this sole DNA match from that sister my fourth cousin. Since that woman's descendant and I, as DNA matches, share twenty eight centiMorgans, it is quite possible for us to be fourth cousins. However, at that same shared amount, it is also possible for us to have been fifth cousins, as well—meaning the count alone cannot guide us in determining how Marianna (or Marie) Krzewinska was related to those three immigrant Krzewinski men in Milwaukee.

Let's turn from DNA numbers for a bit and consider what can be found of family records in Czarnylas. Remember, we've already learned that brothers Isidor, Peter, and Andreas were sons of Johann and Anna (Woitas) Krzewinski. Each of those brothers was baptised in Czarnylas at about the same year in which subsequent records in America claim.

In addition to those three brothers, parents Johann and Anna had several other children listed in those transcribed baptismal records, as well. Among them were daughter Anna (1848), son Johann (1850), son Joseph (1853)—all before the birth of the oldest of the immigrant sons, Isidor, in 1855. In addition to Isidor's younger brothers Peter and Andreas, there was another son, Franz (1857), and another daughter, Marianna (1859).

It just so happens that the tree of my DNA match claims that same baptismal date for his direct line Krzewinski relative, despite listing her name as Marie and giving a different name for her mother. For that other mother, I cannot locate entries for any Marie or Marianna who was daughter of Johann (or Jan) within a reasonable latitude of that birth year, not even if I extend the search to all records still existing for the entire region of Pomerania.

Of course, the name change could have occurred following immigration—and one quick glance at records in her adopted home in Wisconsin revealed her headstone recording her given name as Maryanna. In this case, yet another member of the family of Johann and Anna Krzewinski arrived in Milwaukee—and provided a descendant whose DNA matched mine.

Check: Krzewinski sibling, not cousin.

That still leaves me with a research question, though. Now that we know Isidor, Peter, Andrew, and Marianna all share a claim in Anna Woitas as their mother, what can we find about that mother to reveal her own roots? How close a relative was she to the woman in my own direct Zegarski line, called Marianna Woitas? That is, after all, the only genetic connection I can find between our two family lines.

The unfortunate difficulty, so far, is that I cannot find any records among the Pomeranian transcriptions to give me any further direction on that Woitas question. The challenge now is to see whether there are any other resources to answer that question.