About Those Tight-Lipped Ancestors

 

The virtue of finding cousins through DNA testing is that we often get to connect and discuss those brick wall relatives who've kept us stymied. Having now found about a dozen unsuspecting cousins linked to the ancestry of my mystery paternal grandparents, I haven't missed any opportunities to talk with such potential resources. I ask them such things as, "Well, did they tell you anything about their past?"

In my case, the few relatives I did know on my paternal side recall their parents refusing to talk at all about their roots—going so far as to deny their ethnicity. 

Being the ever-curious sort that I am, I still am not willing to take no for an answer, even to my childhood questions, so when I found those DNA cousins, I saw that as my way around those tight-lipped relatives. I asked if they had heard anything about their Polish immigrant ancestors' remembrances of the "old country." My newfound cousins put it this way: nice people, but tight-lipped.

There was clearly something to this sort of story. Why did none of these immigrants ever want to talk about their past?

Perhaps it takes being faced with a genealogical brick wall to inspire us to take any research detour which could potentially lead us to answers. Since I haven't been able to glean a direct lead, I've tried everything, including taking the broader approach of learning Polish phonics (in case I could discover a new way to incorrectly spell those challenging Polish surnames), and informing myself of the timeline of Polish history.

It was in the process of examining the history of the area once known as west Prussia that I've begun to gain an appreciation for why people might never, ever, ever want to remind themselves of such a past: it may have been too traumatic a memory to relive.

As far as my Gramlewicz connections went—the surname from my family tree I had set as my research goal for December—there was one person claiming that name who kept surfacing in my research for years. I could never quite figure out why he kept showing up when I researched those distant Gramlewicz relatives in Brooklyn—that niece Anna and her family who returned to Poland—but this time, finally, I may have found a connection. If not to my line, at least it is a connection which ties together one branch of that family in a way I can document and verify.

It doesn't hurt to realize this was a person well-known enough to have been mentioned occasionally in newspaper reports spanning a few decades. Apparently, he was considered controversial in his circles. No matter the cause for such controversy, eventually everyone dies, and this man was no exception. Thankfully, noted as he was in his life's calling, his passing was also noted in regional newspapers, including a mention about his origin in Poland and the names of family members.

You can be sure I was on that one, once I discovered it—and despite the tenuous resource of a newspaper article, we'll see this week what connections we can make back to that tiny village both he and my Polish kin once called home: Żerków.

Counting on It

 

There is one thing I can say for setting research goals and steadily plugging away at those goals: eventually, we make progress.

Although I may be tangled up with this month's research goal—the last of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2020, my Gramlewicz connections from Zerkow, Poland—I am nonetheless making progress. That alone is gratifying, although it would be nice to find the answer to my specific question about family connections. After all, how did that collateral Gramlewicz-Laskowski marriage connect to my family? I still don't know, but I have only two more weeks to arrive at the answer.

Thankfully, there is a bit more left to this month (minus the holidays), so here's where I stand after the last two weeks plus the ongoing tree-merge results from last month's research conquest. News flash: combining two trees can make it look like one researcher has been incredibly busy. In the last two weeks, my mother's tree—now my unified tree with roots of both parents blended in, thanks to discoveries about my paternal grandfather—grew by 653 names. The tree now has 24,594 names.

That may seem like a lot accomplished, but it actually wasn't work completed solely in two weeks. Remember, this is a project I've been plugging away at for more than a year, once I started seeing DNA matches who could link to none other than my mystery grandfather. It's just that I finally got brave and connected the nearly 800 names in a private, unsearchable tree I had been constructing with the public tree I had used for my mother's family. The past two weeks has shown the result of finishing that great migration of data.

I made the change in tree configuration to accommodate the change Ancestry made months ago—the one in which subscribers can actually tag and link a DNA match to the specific position in the family tree. Since only one tree could be used for this feature, I had to ditch the idea of keeping a separate tree for each side of the family.

I'm making the same change on my husband's tree by rolling over my father-in-law's smaller tree into my mother-in-law's robust database. Thus, numbers will also seem to grow by leaps and bounds, once I begin migrating her husband's information to her tree, as well. For now, since my Twelve Most Wanted goal focuses on my father's family, there was not one bit of work done on my mother-in-law's tree. It still sits at 19,334, as it has since the beginning of November. With the new year, numbers will begin to pick up there, as well.

With the close of this year and the upcoming holidays, the addition of new DNA matches has dried up to nearly a dribble, making me look forward to the (hopeful) surge of new tests arriving at all five DNA testing companies after the gift-giving season. Those who were curious enough to spring for a DNA test last year have not only gifted themselves with the grounding of knowing more about their own roots, but they have contributed toward others' discoveries, as well. I know I wouldn't have been able to discover where my own grandfather came from, if it hadn't been for nearly a dozen people who decided to try a DNA test for themselves. Sometimes, when we do something for ourselves, we end up benefiting others, too.

While this year begins to wind down, I look forward to planning research adventures for the upcoming year. While discovering new DNA cousins may be fun, there are so many other ways to find answers to our ancestry questions—but to find them requires some focus. By the time I do my year-end wrap up two weeks from now, I'll be launching the planning process for next year's Twelve Most Wanted.

Being Responsibly Social

 

While this online space at A Family Tapestry is devoted to sharing stories of our family connections, this holiday season, of all times, brings us some reasons to consider making those connections more tangible. As we enter what some people have dubbed the "most wonderful time of the year," I'm recalling reminders that perhaps we need to stop and do a welfare check with each other to make sure this season doesn't turn into something far different.

Just over a week ago, an eleven year old boy in a community not far from my home turned off the mic and camera during a break in his online school session and did the irrevocable: he killed himself. In the aftermath, wonderful accolades poured in about how cheerful, kind and considerate that young student always seemed to be as shocked neighbors, school associates and extended family members tried to grapple with the unthinkable.

No matter what the underlying causes might have been, there is no denying that incident was a tragedy which will leave several scarred for the rest of their life. Coupled with a doubling-down of quarantine orders in the face of a relentless pandemic, some are pointing to the negative effects of isolation upon students, and renewing calls for vigilance to combat the devastating side-effects of social distancing upon the emotionally vulnerable.

This, of course, is not something only experienced by eleven-year-olds. On a recent trip to a small rural cemetery, a family friend remarked on his conversation with the manager there. He had asked whether the coronavirus had precipitated a noticeable increase in burials there. On the contrary, the manager replied, there were far more deaths in that community of the despondently healthy than of those who had contracted the virus.

No matter how introverted a person may be, we all have a need to connect with other human beings. Some of us, admittedly, more than others. Think of this need on a sliding scale—I claim introverted status, myself, but even so, cannot abide this continual isolation and need relief from my "house arrest" every once in a while. This pandemic has upset our normal course of affairs, no matter how gregarious we may—or may not—be.

What this latest course of affairs has reminded me is that no matter what age we are, or how introverted we may claim to be, we all are at a vulnerable point at which we need to be more mindful about reaching out and connecting with each other. "How are you?" may be a cliched question we dutifully mumble in perfunctory social interactions, but there isn't a time in which we've needed to reach out more than now and mouth those very words. The ones we know need to know that someone else is thinking of them.   

Checking That List Twice

 

In our ever-ongoing quest to learn more about our family history, sometimes we choose research goals which, in retrospect, remind us of that old saying about "biting off more than you can chew."

For the grand finale to this year's "Twelve Most Wanted" of my ancestors, I had hoped to get a clearer picture of just how all those Gramlewicz relatives actually related to my Laskowskis from Żerków, Poland. The deeper I get into this month, the more I realize how far short I will fall from the hope of completing this goal. I need a longer month.

Goal setting can be like that: if we "bite off" more than we can "chew," but set a time limit on how long we work on that goal, we'll need to face up to the need to revisit that goal in a future research iteration. I never dreamed a tiny town of barely two thousand people could have so many Laskowskis! I am not certain yet just how they all intertwined in their family relationships, but they are not leading me as conveniently as I had hoped to those Gramlewicz kin.

As for the Gramlewicz families in Żerków, I am still at a loss as to how two branches of that surname connect—if at all. While I've had to make some adjustments to that surname in my family tree database, there are still several questions. Perhaps that is the benefit of reviewing one's tree periodically: there are some honest mistakes which would otherwise remain uncorrected. Or details which would otherwise have been neglected.

And so I proceed, slowly, line by line through the family tree, adjusting, updating, and completing what I know about that Gramlewicz line—and tying in the Laskowski family where appropriate. Since I am also migrating my father's separate family tree over to one master tree for DNA-linking purposes, that "list" from my dad's tree is also getting added, one by one, to the master list, as well.

In the meantime, as the tedium of this list-checking continues in the background, there are other tasks which will need to be attended to in this last-month-of-the-year review time. We are about to spring into a new year, a year complete with a whole new set of research goals and plans. It certainly won't be like the year we were planning for, twelve months ago when traveling to, say, Salt Lake City for hands-on research was still a possibility; research plans for next year will certainly be curtailed on account of the same restraint. But plan we must, so that we will have a list to double-check at the end of next December.

A list of goals would not be worth much if we didn't also review what we did accomplish, and reflect on how that process went. It's informative for future goal-setting to know how the last year went, how much was actually accomplished, and what happened to those goals which fell short of the month's mark. I'll be saving some time later this month to reflect on that, as well.

In the meantime, it's back to checking off that Laskowski list in Żerków, and seeing how many of those relatives lead me to connections with my Gramlewicz lines.

Because We Can

 

Ever wonder whether old friends' paths cross again?

Not just because a conscientious researcher should check out all possible angles—F.A.N. Club and all that—but because I was curious, I couldn't just pass by that discovery yesterday of the trans-Atlantic traveling companions of my great grandmother and her three young children. I was fairly certain the Miecyslaus Gramlewicz listed in the passenger records was one and the same as the father of Annie, the eighteen year old "niece" who ended up living with my great-grandparents at the time of the 1915 New York State census. But the other guy: who was he?

I had thought the name didn't quite sound Polish, even though he had declared his residence to be Żerków in the then-Prussian province of Posen. The way it was written on the German passenger record, the name looked like Andreas Laryner. However, I had done enough poking around at the various Polish websites now featuring transcriptions of century-old documents from Poznan to know that Andreas—or its Polish form, Andrzej—was a name which featured in my great-grandparents' extended family.

Just because I can, I decided to take the bait of this rabbit trail and see if any of the Andreas names in that family might include a surname like the one in that passenger record. After all, why would these people be traveling together, if they didn't know each other closely?

Thankfully, search engines allow researchers to manipulate search terms to umpteen permutations, and this is what I discovered. First, that there was a surname in Żerków which was very similar to "Laryner." And second, though it took me a long time to move past the several records, including a man named August with that same surname, there was indeed a young man by the name of Andreas which would fill the bill.

The surname? The not-much-more Polish-sounding family name Langner. After scrolling through decades of transcribed records providing the name August Langner, by the time I reached the late 1880s, I began to see sporadic mentions of someone named Andreas Langner. 

But then—could this have been the wrong person?—the name kept appearing, even after our Andreas Langner supposedly had boarded a ship in Hamburg, bound for New York City in 1889.

A key document transcribed on one of the Polish websites was that of the 1891 marriage of Andreas Langner and a twenty one year old woman named Stanislawa Kalczyńska. Added bonus: Andreas' parents names were supplied and we now know who that oft-appearing August Langner was: the father of Andreas. Witness to the marriage was a man by the name of Peter Gramlewicz—although unhelpfully not one from that family which I had already identified.

So, what became of the Andreas Langner who traveled across the Atlantic with my Gramlewicz relative and my great-grandmother, Marianna Laskowska? Could he have been traveling to New York in the hopes of establishing a new life for his future bride and family before his return home to bring her with him? I had to take a look and see.

Fortunately, there was another passenger record to augment the original one I had found, completed by the German shipping company. It was the more-carefully transcribed record produced by the American officials at the port of New York. There, clearly, Andreas' surname was written as Langner. From this record, we also learn that he was a butcher by occupation.

But what became of Andreas after his 1891 marriage to Stanislawa? Returning to one of the Polish websites—BaSIA—from records dated later that same year, I spotted an entry for the birth of a son, whom they named Stanislaus. So they didn't return to America.

Or did they? I had to consider the possibility that they might have. First, I checked to see what could be found for an Americanized form of Andreas—Andrew—with a wife named Stanislawa. Predictably, her name got mangled in the process, but this 1910 entry in Brooklyn was likely theirs.

While the ages roughly corresponded, as did the length of the marriage, the census showed a life with many sorrows in the loss of eight of their ten children. Although the census did confirm that this Andrew was indeed a butcher, same as the record we had found of a much younger Andreas when he first landed in New York, the enumeration also revealed that Andreas didn't actually return to the United States until 1906—likely several years after his original plan.

Just to confirm, a passenger record did account for Andreas, plus wife and two children, arriving on the S. S Amerika in February of 1906. According to records, they were coming to live with Andreas' brother Casimir in Brooklyn. But Andreas did not remain long in this country he had first seen as a young man's dream; by February 26, 1915, he—or another man with exactly the same name—had died in Queens, the borough just to the north of his brother's Brooklyn home. He was forty nine.

What goes into the individual immigrant stories of our ancestors—and their extended families, friends and associates—is sometimes hard to figure out. Or to fathom. Who knows what entered into the decision making process that led them to their eventual choices. As far as I can tell, that early journey Andreas Langner took across the Atlantic with my ancestors and relatives was, perhaps, because he was young. And hopeful of a better future. Or, maybe he took the journey just because he could.

Indulging in Daydreams

 

My mind can't help but wander, as I comb line by line through all these transcribed records of my Gramlewicz relatives of a prior century. Perhaps it's the tedious task which that mind wishes to escape, but as I review records and check them against what I already entered in my father's family tree, I think of what it must have been like to endure the events which now are reduced to mere lines on an aging page.

As I cross-check each detail, the research trail has me doubling back along lines which I've long since documented. Somehow, in reviewing these Gramlewicz relatives, an online resource led me once again to the digitized page listing my great-grandmother's trip across the Atlantic with her three children, all of whom were eight years of age or younger.

I had grappled with this passenger list quite a while ago, when I struggled with the naturalization record drawn up years later for John Laskowski, Marianna and Anton Laskowski's oldest son—having had a good laugh at the realization of what the ship's name actually was, as compared to what an eight year old boy might have remembered hearing. 

Looking at the document once again, I realized my paternal grandmother Sophie was listed in that passenger record as an infant—best I could tell from the angular German hand completing the required information. That's when my mind began to wander—to what it must have been like for my great-grandmother, leaving her hometown in Żerków to board a ship in Bremen, Germany, and then traveling across the Atlantic in February, on her way to meet her husband in a place as huge as New York City.

It wasn't exactly like I wondered who might be traveling with her to provide assistance on the journey, but somehow as I revisited the document once more, my eye caught the details on the lines above her family's entry. Someone else had reported their hometown as the same one Marianna Laskowska had. Who were these other people claiming that same small town as their home?

One of the names I didn't recognize. It hardly even looked like a Polish surname—Laryner, if I could read the handwriting correctly. But the line below that entry made me realize: hey! I know that guy!

Oh, that confounded handwriting! Could that name have been Miecyslaus? The last name, as poorly rendered, was surely Gramlewicz—or at least the typical misspelled version I have seen before, Gramlewitch. That was the same name Anton and Marianna had given their second-born son—a name he changed to Michael by the time he grew up and completed his own Declaration of Intention.

But this other Miecyslaus: I had seen him before, in family records. This, at least according to the age as well as the town of origin, was most likely the same man who later, with his surviving family in tow, decided to leave New York City and return to his native Poland. This was the same Gramlewicz whose daughter Anna later decided, after moving back from New York to Poland, that she really wanted to call the city of her birth her home—the very one whom I later found living in Anton and Marianna's apartment in Brooklyn, listed as their niece. 

My research had found a way to come full circle: the daughter of Marianna's traveling companion in 1889 had come back home to New York to live with her in 1915. And I hadn't seen that clue, the first time around, because I didn't yet know to even look for it.

 

Above: Excerpt from passenger list of the S. S. Wieland, arriving in New York City from Hamburg, Germany, on 16 February 1889; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Seeking Inferences

 

What do you do when the foreign database you are relying on includes an enormous gap, right in the middle of the dates you need? That's when we need to look for inferences.

I'm still hard at work, piecing together the Gramlewicz family constellation in a little town in Poland called Żerków. Somehow, my paternal line is related in two different ways to that surname, but I have yet to discover the connection.

I was delighted to find a Polish website which at least provided transcriptions of Polish birth, marriage, and death records for the region including my family's town of origin. The BaSIA website provides a useful way to search through the data by surname and by location.

However, as I studied my search results line by line, I began to realize something: there was a gaping hole in the details. Record dates for documents containing the surname I was seeking—Gramlewicz—began with the year 1818 and continued steadily through 1828. And then...nothing.

Well, at least nothing until 1874. Then the litany of vital records resumed its steady thrum of names and dates, all the way through 1913, suffered a hiccup or two until the war years passed, and then sputtered to a whimper with a few records to wrap up 1919 and 1920.

All told, an amazing span of material, but not for the bulk of the records I was hoping to find. After all, my relatives were gone from their homeland shortly after the records picked up in 1874. What was vitally important to me was whatever happened to my ancestors and their related lines during the years of that gap.

That's when I decided to go back and comb through those records carefully. After all, not only were there birth records, but marriage records. And the marriage records, for the most part, identified the parents' names—including mother's maiden name—for both parties in the wedding. While the gap prevented me from finding birth records for the generation prior to that of the relatives I know, it at least could allow me to infer the details I'd otherwise miss from lack of baptismal records.

Going through the record set another two times helped fill in the family group records for two sets of Gramlewicz families. The only trouble is, there are two other Gramlewicz families which I still diagram, but can't find a way to connect to the lines I know. Living in a town which, even now, only has about two thousand residents, they can't be unrelated people with the same surname. Most likely they are either siblings or cousins—thus I'm faced with the same dilemma I wrestled with last month, concerning my Pomeranian family line. Without any other guidance, I won't be able to determine the right connection.

And yet, the exercise did serve to fill in several blanks and develop some lines through two generations. Depending on availability of records, that may be the only recourse available to me right now. I'll repeat the process over the next few days with the other surname I'm researching—Laskowski, of which two people of that surname married into those Gramlewicz lines. While the Laskowski surname is far more common than Gramlewicz—and thus will take more time to complete—hopefully, the inferences found will help sort out these intertwined families for my own records.