Both And

 

When we're stuck on a family history research project, the temptation may be to go one of two ways. We can expand our search horizons, taking in far more general information in an attempt to better orient ourselves to the research problem at hand. Or, we can retrace our steps back to square one to reorient ourselves to the basics of that same research problem.

Actually, it's not a matter of either or. I say it's a matter of both and. In my opinion, they're one and the same approach, and I'm taking both sides of the road in search of an answer as I grapple with my research problem of the two Gramlewicz residents of Żerków, Poland, who married Laskowski descendants from their hometown.

While I'm grinding through the Gramlewicz and Laskowski data on the births, marriages, and deaths listed for the region surrounding Żerków—of which I promised I'd spare you the monotonous details—I've found some useful websites to help expand my understanding of the geographic area my ancestors once called home.

For instance, the Polish Genealogical Society of Connecticut and the Northeast, in their "Beginnings" page on their website, noted that "because of Poland’s turbulent history, the nation’s administrative jurisdictions have changed many times over the past three hundred years," and concluded:

In view of all these changes, it is necessary to study the historical geography of the region of Poland where your ancestors lived.

While much of the website's advice is geared toward American researchers who are just beginning their family history exploration, it does provide a solid overview of material available online in Poland. Among my small victories in going back to square one with this quest to expand my research horizons was the discovery on this website of exactly what the designation "USC" meant. I had seen that abbreviation in last month's research project, when the towns I was reviewing gave options of viewing records designated at the town name or the town name plus the letters USC. Answer: USC is the acronym for the Polish phrase, Urządy Stanu Cywilnego.

See? Easy! USC. Thanks to Google Translate, with a slight variation on spelling, that means "registry offices"—or, as the Polish Genealogical Society website puts it, "Vital Statistics Offices."

The Society website also reminded me of an old standby I had used in the 1990s, a website called Herby, which is a surname distribution chart based on Polish directories in 1990. Of course, 1990 is a far cry from the mid-1800s when my ancestors still lived in Poland, so I was not surprised to learn that, of the eleven individuals still claiming the surname Gramlewicz in Poland at that time, none of them lived in the province which includes Żerków—turbulence in Poland's history, indeed. (By the way, if you attempt using Herby, arm yourself with Google Translate—or at least remember that "Szukaj" in the little gray box at the top of the web page means "Search.")

Get comfortable with performing Google searches for the key terms in your family's history. Everything from the surname to the ancestral town or region, to the history of the area during the time preceding your ancestor's emigration can reveal a clue you might not otherwise have considered. 

It surely took a lot to convince someone, especially in those earlier centuries when travel was so difficult, to irrevocably leave their home and break ties with family and community. Something equally compelling—whether war, extreme poverty, or widespread disease—was likely present to convince our ancestors to choose such drastic measures as mounting such a difficult move. It's up to us to piece together the story on their behalf. Perhaps, in the doing, the process will lead us to realizations which also point us to the family history details which started us on this journey in the first place. 

The Afterglow of Giving Thanks

 

Cue the winter wonderland music; it's time for sending some holiday cheer.

I realize this is the time when most people who still hold to that Christmas-card-sending tradition get their Hallmark greetings ready to mail. But that's not the holiday I'm talking about today. I'm still basking in the afterglow of Thanksgiving. I've been sending messages, alright, but only because I want to keep connecting over the real gift I've received in the last month.

True, it's been a struggle over the past several months to piece together the real story of my father's ancestry. If you have been sticking with me as my research twisted this way, then that way, you know what I mean. Now that I've found the answer—well, at least come as close as I can to the truth—I realize there is one item yet to attend to: sharing my thanks with the people who made it possible to find an answer at all.

Of course, some of the thanks goes to those fellow genealogy enthusiasts who were willing to answer my messages and emails concerning details of their tree or my wild conjectures about possible connections. Most people find it hard to squeeze enough time out of their busy schedules to even research their own family history, let alone help someone else along the way, so I realize how generous their gesture of help really was.

But the main thanks goes to those who were willing to actually spring for a DNA test and share their results through one of the major services. People do have a choice, when purchasing a DNA test, whether to share the results with matches or to keep the results entirely private. Sharing helps others figure out their own research brick walls—especially those distant cousins who match just enough genetic material to point researchers in the direction of possible connections they might not have considered in the past.

In my case, I'm thankful for the dozen or more people who chose to test, whose shared results helped me find the truth about my paternal grandfather's origins. At first, it was a long wait, when no matching results showed up. I began to wonder whether my brother and I were the only ones in the world claiming our ancestral heritage.

That is not true, of course, but the several years' wait before matches showed up almost had us convinced otherwise. And that's where the thankfulness comes in. If it hadn't been for the unknown-to-us cousins who began testing almost two years ago, I still wouldn't have found the clues which led me to answers this year.

And so, while yes, it is high time to get ready for those December holidays, I'm still lingering over Thanksgiving. The turkey and dressing have all been polished off the platter, and the house is now primed for the next round of decorations, but I'm taking today to send some letters of thanks to some helpful DNA matches. I couldn't have discovered what I have without the help of some willing test-takers. After all, while we think we are testing for our own sakes, in doing so, we are generously helping those many cousins we have yet to meet, as well.

 

Pedaling as Fast as I Can

 

Don't look now, but four weeks from today, we will be well into not only a new month, but a new year. After all the research results that have been rushing at me in the last month, I have a massive family tree cleanup to attend to before crossing that new year finish line. Yes, I'm elated over the discoveries on the Zegarski and Wojtaś family connections—and I'm still grinding my way through the genealogical sausage-making endeavor over those Gramlewicz connections in Żerków, Poland—but sometimes, we just need to take a break from progress to clean up the mess strewn in our wake from our last research victory.

That said, the task at hand this weekend is not only to continue work on reconciling my one combined tree at Ancestry with my private unsearchable tree which I used to explore possibilities on those DNA links to my mystery paternal grandfather's line. I also need to link those DNA matches with the right spot in said tree. With that, I have a two-step process each stop along the way down that new branch on the family tree.

Do you take the time to link your DNA matches with their corresponding spot in your family tree? Ever since Ancestry introduced that provision, I've been working to keep up with that task. For one thing, it helps identify where matches belong in my tree, but that isn't the only purpose. Some of these DNA matches, people who remained a puzzle to me in the past, now seem to fall into place as I utilize the "shared matches" option at Ancestry DNA.

As I batch together matches with similar genetic material, it confirms even further what began as a hunch on my part. The results seem to multiply, not just add up one by one—hence the snowballing effect that the more I link, the more I need to double down to work on the rest of the set.

Add to that the fact that this new branch of my own tiny family tree represents a massive addition of relatives from a Catholic Polish heritage with several large families to trace. The few immigrant ancestors who came to Milwaukee to begin a new life there ended up having eight, ten, twelve children of their own—many of whom not only survived to adulthood, but went on to have eight, ten, or twelve children of their own. The expanding results are geometric.

The interesting realization is to discover how many of these distant cousins seem to share my fascination with our mutual roots. Now that I've found the connection, I've been making the rounds with these mystery DNA matches to let each one know I've finally figured out just how we connect.

It's been fun just making those connections—not just with the DNA matches at Ancestry, but repeating that process with my matches at each of the other companies where I've tested. Considering these are often relatives as distant as fourth cousins, I'm awed to see how amazing this DNA connection really is—a microscopic yet powerful way that leads us to the answers we could never quite conquer in the past. 

Searching for Patterns

 

Delving into the nitty-gritty on a surname from a small family has its research benefits: there are relatively few possibilities to sort through. When I searched through available websites from Poland to see what I could find yesterday on my Gramlewicz family, I was fairly certain all those who boasted that surname in the small town of Żerków would be part of my family.

Not so, now that I've moved to the other side of this Polish family. My second great-grandfather's name was Laskowski, a surname now claimed by one in every twelve hundred people in Poland. To make my search more challenging, depending on whether the records I'm seeking were kept by civil servants or church clerics—or worse, depending on the time period—the typical spelling used was variable. Add the most common spelling alternate—Laskoski—and even zeroing in on a very limited geographic area, there was much to review.

As the amount of data zooms upward, the need for an organizing system correspondingly increases. I can see how genealogy and spreadsheets can be a marriage made in research heaven. My goal in this part of my search for those Gramlewicz ancestors is to see if I can reconstruct the family constellation for each branch of the related families—thus, the need to include the Laskowskis, as well.

The challenge is that the website I am using right now—BaSIA, or the Database of Archival Indexing System—has some wonderful resources for the early 1800s, and again in the latter part of that century, but for that big gap in the middle, it will require harvesting inferences from death records and other records to reconstruct which Laskowski births belong to which set of parents. Hence, the search for family patterns. And thus, the need for a spreadsheet.

Essentially, the task requires a large amount of data to be dumped into some sort of magical organizing machine. Hopefully, on the other end of the process, I will at least discover which set of Laskowski children and grandchildren belong to which originating couples. As for those two Gramlewicz-Laskowski couples I am grappling with, this may be my only resource for sorting them out.

It's a tedious process, but one made easier with the right tools. In the meantime, while I grind through this genealogical sausage-making process, I'll spare you the step-by-step details. Though I'm appreciative of the wonders that can come from organizing large sets of data, we all know how little audiences appreciate watching any type of "sausage" being made.

Above: Still life with grapes, apples, sausages, cucumbers, bread and a bird; 17th century oil on canvas by unidentified Italian artist; image courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

 

Exploring Additional Resources

 

It is sometimes thanks to those informal connections we make with other family history researchers that we can find those tucked-away resources off the beaten path of the commercialized genealogy universe. That has certainly been the case as I have explored my Polish roots over the years.

Besides the Poznan Project I mentioned yesterday, there is one other resource I'm using. Again, it is based on transcriptions of documents, but the website also cross-links with actual scans of the documents used for the indexing project. The website is called BaSIA, or as the acronym is translated into English, the "Database of Archival Indexing System." 

For the intrepid researcher unfazed by random appearances of Polish without the reassuring accompaniment of English translations, this website provides exactly what one might need when researching the homeland records of our uprooted Polish ancestors. Though run mostly by volunteers, looking at their "about" page, one can begin to spot names listed who also play active roles in the other Polish website I've lately been using, the Poznan Project.

My task right now is to see if I can actually sort those Gramlewicz surnames from Zerkow into family groupings. I have a specific reason for this: I am grappling with not one but two marriages between Laskowskis and Gramlewiczes, and I would like some documentary determination to settle just how the two couples might be related.

Of course, despite search engine capabilities, this task still requires sifting through piles of records. So far, I've been able to sort some of those Gramlewicz surnames into two family groupings, but there are apparently more mentions of that surname without means indicated to link them back to their parental units. This is the nature of drudge work: tedious and boring, it's just a journey one must take, step by unremarkable step. Not the type of material to write home about, let alone feature in a blog post.

One bright spot, as I trudge along, was to notice the wide time span covered by the BaSIA collection. I've found mentions from the very early 1800s all the way through early 1900s. Not everything is included within that date range—I spotted gaps in the dates for a good chunk of the mid-century—but sometimes the story can be recovered by inferences, such as death records, which contain the age at passing as well as name of parents and spouse.

Sometimes, it also takes time to seek out the back story for why certain details are included in specific records. Why, for instance, are some people listed as witnesses for marriages? Or seemingly unrelated people included by mention in a death record? Knowing the reason why certain details are included in the document may help open up our understanding of how certain members of the community fit into a specific role. I've seen, for instance, one particular Gramlewicz man mentioned additionally in several of the community's documents, not just in those specifically involving his own family. Could that have signified a position of authority or respect in the community? Or maybe he was just the convenient guy to grab, who lived next door to the church or courthouse. These are questions to delve into, from the general perspective of local history, which may help reveal more about the family.

Meanwhile, I'll be back at the records, once again, from the Laskowski side of the equation, to see if there is anything else that can be gleaned to explain how the two Laskowski-Gramlewicz couples from Zerkow, Poland, might have been related.

Maybe, like they say in the South, they are just "kin."

"Start With What You Know"

 

It's still sound advice: when researching your family's history, start with what you know. Think of yourself as a contestant in the game of Geneapoly*: do not pass Go, do not collect 200 ancestors until you sequester yourself with your computer and some serious genealogical research into the documents supporting your relatives' assertions about their favorite family legends.

Thus, as we begin our exploration of just how my paternal grandmother's family was somehow intertwined with relatives claiming the name Gramlewicz, we will need to do just that: start with what we know.

What I know began with the discovery, thanks to my great-grandfather's 1939 death certificate, that his mother's maiden name was Elżbieta Gramlewicz. Well, that was not entirely correct; the certificate actually wrote the surname as Granlewicz. I envisioned it as an elegant French-Polish mash-up—you know, like Le Gran Wicz...whatever a Wicz was.

There is, however, no such surname as Granlewicz. It is a typo. Or poorly-transcribed evidence. But that is exactly how it was written on Anton Laskowski's death certificate.

Take, however, the surname Gramlewicz, and we are in business. In all the entire world—well, at least as recently as 2014—there are only fourteen people with that particular surname, a sobering thought on the one hand, but good news for someone like me, trying to research my roots now.

Of those fourteen Gramlewiczes in the world right now, thirteen currently live in—you guessed it—Poland. I can almost guarantee that ninety nine percent of those living Gramlewiczes are fourth cousins of mine. But I'm not quite ready yet to lay down any money on that conjecture. I have to do my research, remember? Start with what we know.

It was a long journey before I could confirm just where in Poland those Gramlewiczes originally lived. Wars and displacements and economic upheavals bring many changes, even to people accustomed to living in the same ancestral village as the last umpteen generations. But eventually, I discovered—through errors entered on U.S. census records, for which I am most grateful—that the family came from a place called Posen.

"Posen," of course, is what the Prussians called the region—and city—of Poznań. My first task, after this discovery, was to determine just where in Posen my great-grandparents bid their relatives goodbye before their long trip to America. That's where discovery of one useful genealogy website in Poland became my gold mine: The Poznań Project.

Officially the "Poznań Region Marriage Indexing Project for 1800-1899," the website offers search capabilities for surnames from that time period and locale. There are options for advanced searches, but in this case, knowing there likely weren't too many people with that particular surname, even back then, I tried the website's general search for the surname Gramlewicz.

Even setting the search parameters at 95% "similarity," the results included over thirty exact matches. Over twenty of those were either civil or Catholic parish records for a place called Żerków. That, in later conversations with a distant Gramlewicz cousin who found me via my posts in those so-nineties genealogy forums, was the place she confirmed as the family's original home.

Having this website available for further research has been helpful, despite the fact that they offer only transcriptions, not the actual documents, themselves. It's a start. I could find, for instance, both a civil record and a church record for my great-grandparents' 1879 marriage. The civil record, filed in nearby Żółków, was helpful in that it included the parents' names for each of the parties. Thus, I could see, once again, that Anton Laskowski's mother was a Gramlewicz.

From that, it wasn't difficult to also locate Anton's parents' marriage transcription. For that 1844 event, the transcription available was only the parish record from Żerków. The listing then showed the parties as Matthaeus Laskoski and Elisabeth Gramlewicz, likely a Latinized version of their Polish names.

With the ease of computer-based search options, I couldn't help but notice that, just one year prior to this marriage, there was another Gramlewicz-Laskowski wedding in Żerków: for Laurentius Gramlewicz and Marianna Laskowska. This is what got me wondering about the relationships between all the Gramlewicz entries from that same town of Żerków.

Indeed, the later marriage records often included entries for the parents of bride and groom. It was possible to glean from those entries the likely siblings of my known family members—once again, starting from what I knew and building outward from there. A second option, using the advanced search, allowed me to add parents' names specifically.

The only drawback was that this was a website dedicated to transcription of one type of record set: marriages occurring in the region of Poznań during the 1800s only. To build on what I now knew, I needed other resources.

Thankfully, the website itself provided links to some of those resources, introducing me to yet another Polish site to help me build out even further from what I had already discovered. Now, I could move on to the question of just how the one Gramlewicz-Laskowski marriage might have connected with the other one.

 

Image above from search results for term "Gramlewicz" at the Poznań Project.

*With sincere apologies to Hasbro, Parker Brothers, Charles Darrow, Lizzie Magie—and even Ralph Anspach.

 

A Fine Research Mess

 

If you get the picture, from following my genealogy escapades over the past year here at A Family Tapestry, that my research pathway is a jumble of zigging and zagging detours, your assessment would be spot on. Family history can lead us into such fine research messes.

Take this last "Twelve Most Wanted" family I'll be pursuing for the month of December. I first discovered that Gramlewicz was indeed a surname which linked to my paternal grandmother's roots, not by direct evidence, but by inference. My first discovery of the surname came in the guise of a census entry for New York State's 1915 enumeration. It was discovery of an eighteen year old "neice" in the Brooklyn household of Anton and Mary Laskowski that first raised my eyebrows: who was Annie Gramlewicz?

That particular Laskowski household was the home of my father's maternal grandparents. Born somewhere in Poland—a deep, dark secret kept from later generations—neither sixty nine year old Anton nor his fifty year old wife had been naturalized. But here in their household was an eighteen year old who claimed U.S. citizenship—but didn't even declare her specific place of birth.

The claim of a relationship as close as niece with uncle and aunt lured me into following the trail. At the point of that discovery, I knew nothing about Anton nor Mary. In fact, I was elated that I had made even that discovery. I figured Anna was either daughter of Anton's sibling or Mary's sibling. Simple. All I had to do was learn a little more about this Gramlewicz connection.

As you can imagine, tracing Anna to her parents—and even researching all her siblings, many of whom died shortly after birth in their native New York City—led me to zero answers. I still couldn't find the connection between Anna's parents and the Laskowski couple.

Meanwhile, upon receiving the copy of Anton's death certificate through a transcontinental snail-mail transaction, I was surprised to discover another Gramlewicz clue: Anton's own mother was a Gramlewicz. That—if it wasn't a mistaken entry provided by a grieving relative—was indeed a valuable clue.

Over the years, I've been able to piece together the connection between Anna Gramlewicz and Anton Laskowski—her father was actually Anton's nephew—and move beyond just that one familial connection. Thanks to websites in Poland much like the one which benefited me in my search last month for my paternal grandfather's line in Pomerania, I at least have access to transcriptions of records from Anton and Mary's native Żerków in the Polish province of Poznań.

However, a little bit of information can sometimes be a dangerous thing. As small as the town of Żerków might have been in the mid-1800s, assuming that all people with the same name belong to the same family can lead us down the trail to wrong conclusions. Discovering marriages in the collateral lines connected to my roots between more than one Laskowski-Gramlewicz couple has had me thinking it might be wise to revisit that website in Poznań to double check my work. Time to dig out that Google Translate device and keep it at my fingertips, once again.

While I am fairly sure that the Laskowskis in those marriages were siblings, I have yet to figure out how the Gramlewicz parties might have been related to each other. Were they siblings marrying siblings? Do we have a case of future double cousins? Or was it just coincidental that two Laskowski siblings married people with the same surname of Gramlewicz? We'll take some time this month to see if we can determine the extended family connections.

As for Anna, the eighteen year old Gramlewicz descendant who ended up in the New York City household of my great-grandparents, Anton and Mary Laskowski, she, too, had a convoluted family story. Anna was indeed born in New York City, as were almost all her surviving siblings. But by 1913, none of them had remained in the city—something I discovered when I found her passenger record from Bremen, Germany, to the United States. Apparently, the entire family returned to her parents' homeland in Poland. Anna alone opted to return from Poland to her own birthplace in New York—a difficult decision that must have been for someone so young.

The way I learned that last detail? It was partly thanks to a descendant of Anna's one surviving sibling I had no way of knowing about: the son who was born after the Gramlewicz family returned to Poland.

Following Anna's family back to Poland helped me figure out the actual connection to my great-grandparents, but we'll need to revisit that research trail once again. With tomorrow's post, we'll begin meeting the various Gramlewicz parties to the Laskowski marriages back in nineteenth-century Żerków.

Above: Excerpt from the 1915 New York State census showing the Brooklyn household of Anton and Mary Laskowski, with niece Annie Gramlewicz included in the enumeration; image courtesy Ancestry.com.