Moving Toward that Silent Night

 

Sometimes, the world needs that "silent night"—the lull before the anticipated celebration. Perhaps, with a year like this one has been, though we need a celebration, this one will be different than all those we've enjoyed in the past. It certainly has provided time for reflection.

In such times, I often return to those images from art's history which convey a sense of peace or contentment, and for Christmas, this image by Philadelphia chromolithographer Joseph Hoover is one I come back to, year after year. Though we no longer travel by horse-drawn sleigh—and we certainly won't be entertaining at large family gatherings—just looking at this scene evokes that settled feeling of satisfaction often evoked by the culmination of the Christmas season.

No matter how hectic, or disappointing, or devastating this year has been for you, I wish you a capstone holiday weekend which transforms it all into that small haven of peace we hope for in Christmas.

 

Above: "Christmas Eve" lithograph by J. Hoover, undated; courtesy United States Library of Congress via Wikipedia; in the public domain.

A Year in Review—and What a Mess!

 

If you ask people what their thoughts are on the year of 2020, at best you will get a groan. Worse opinions may border on unprintable. Still, it is a worthwhile effort to take a look backwards, before springing into resolutions for a new year—even if this year was such an insufferable mess.

In the "twelve days of Christmas" leading up to the start of 2020, I decided to take one day for each of those twelve to describe one ancestor for whom I would like to discover additional details. I called the resultant list my "Twelve Most Wanted."

Well, it's been nearly a year since that point—and almost time to repeat the process—so it would be a worthwhile exercise to evaluate my progress. First, though, a caveat: since we can't ever tell what a year may bring us, those plans may suffer a rocky ride through the research seasons. Exhibit A: news reports of 2020, beginning about March. Still, that risk is not sufficient to knock us off track, or prevent us from detailing goals. Just because we can't reach for the stars doesn't mean we shouldn't try. 

So, how did family history research in 2020 go for me? Here is a brief rundown. Keep in mind, the research schedule was formed by taking three ancestors from each of the four family trees I've been working on: my mother's, my father's, and one tree apiece for each of my in-laws. Thus, first quarter was devoted to my mother's ancestors, second quarter to my mother-in-law's ancestors, third quarter to my father-in-law's line, and the final quarter to the struggle over my own father's shrouded ancestry.

January was slated to researching my second great-grandfather William Alexander Boothe of Nansemond County, Virginia. I selected that ancestor because I knew I would be attending a SLIG course in Salt Lake City, where I could consult documents at the Family History Library. Result: I attempted the F.A.N. Club approach and did scout out some neighbors, thanks to tax and land records, but was unable to convincingly identify the right Boothe family.

February's goal was to discover anything further on Frances Reed, wife of Aaron Broyles of Anderson County, South Carolina, and my fourth great-grandmother. While I did review all the footnotes on the Broyles family in a journal kept by a likely Reed relative—Emmala Reed's A Faithful Heart—that and other resources failed to lead to documents allowing me to confirm connections.

In March, my goal was to research the line of my third great-grandmother, Rachel Tilson. My prime reason for that was to document her connection back to her grandfather, William Tilson, as well as link her marriage to James Davis to the Davis family which moved to northeastern Tennessee. My reason was simple: that is the line which would gain me entrance to membership in the Mayflower Society. The sticky part was the fact that these pioneers had long since left their home in Massachusetts and, after wandering around in the southwestern corner of colonial Virginia, surfaced in Tennessee. How to connect that family line via documentation was—and still is, unfortunately—my research albatross. However, knowing this would be a tough challenge, I had doubled up and pulled documents on my January trip to the Family History Library—thinking I'd be back for the NGS conference in May to wrap up that goal. Thanks to COVID-19 plan changes, I'll need to take that one up again in the future.

April and the start of my mother-in-law's line: I pursued Simon Rinehart without much success, though I did find a few documents of interest.

May: same story, only not as beneficial, for the early Ohio settler Elizabeth Stine.

June shows up—still in confinement with this "shelter-in-place" restraint—and my goal for finding Mary Carroll's parents was stymied, though I did find a few interesting details about her husband's family, the Gordons of Pennsylvania, thanks to finding a used-but-useful book at SLIG, back in January.

By the time I leaped into my father-in-law's family tree in July, I had left a miserable research track record behind me. Yet, the goal to discover any details on my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey had one bright spot going for it: DNA matches. Having research collaborators can put a wonderful boost to one's work, even if the results aren't as stellar as hoped. In fact, I poured so much energy into considering all the options that that project spilled over into the next month—and then yet another month more. I blew past my goal of researching Irish ancestors James Kelly and Stephen Malloy in that dogged determination to find an answer on at least one research goal. At the end of September, I finally had to relinquish my iron grip on that research goal from July.

For the last quarter of the year, I pursued discoveries on my father's side. The most gratifying, in October, was using DNA matches to deduce the true identity of my paternal grandfather's mother—and, from that point, her husband, in November. And, once I got the hang of using some Polish websites—hand in hand with Google Translate and several sets of maps, both current and historic—I expanded my understanding of the extended Gramlewicz family in December.

Had it not been for that final month's discoveries, the research year would have been a solid disappointment. But don't think that would be reason to never try again. The practice of lining up a set of research goals for the year is still a worthy process, and I certainly intend to do that again for the new year. The focus is beneficial, as well as a tool to zero in on specific lines which need more work. After all, I have well over twenty thousand people in my family trees—hardly a number small enough to keep each incomplete individual entry uppermost in my mind. It takes some review to see where further work is needed, plus some analysis to determine which goals are most reachable.

Perhaps it is that last sticking point which I need to work on more: determining what goals are do-able, given the current resources. With the unfortunate promise of another year closed up like the quarantine situation we've endured for the past nine months, next year's goals will have to be limited to what can be obtained online. 

In addition, there are other aspects of research which I've realized I also want to plan for: time for reading to glean background information on the time periods in which my ancestors lived, and to learn about the location and the customs of those hometowns. For those of us with limits to the time we can devote to research—in addition to the limits of accessing relevant documents—honing our focus can help shield us from disappointments over lack of progress.

Considering all that, I'm primed to spend some time after a Christmas break to determine those research goals for the upcoming year. There is a certain psychological energy to considering "what's next" that I look forward to. What about you? 

 

Reflections on Family Discoveries

 

When we begin our family history journey, we seldom expect to stumble upon deep, dark secrets—let alone unspeakable tragedy. But that doesn't guarantee we will never find it. The pathos of discovering the fate of distant Polish relative, Father Edward Gramlewicz, leaves me pondering the deeper, more meaningful moments in our ancestors' lives.

Finding such vignettes, of course, depends on such personal histories being there in the first place, but it also requires that we mount a search thorough enough to discover what was there to find. And such details will seldom be found, even by the most diligent researcher, unless someone has taken the time to record not only the passage of such events, but the thoughts our ancestors held of having experienced such situations.

For some of our ancestors, we owe a debt of gratitude for the newspapers which catalogued the events in our predecessors' lives—even if the reporters bumbled the spelling or other minor details. At least a record was left to be discovered by the curious among our ancestors' descendants.

For others in our family—usually the unobtrusive, the average, or the downright boring—such research clues may not even be there to be found. In other cases, significant flashes of generosity may only have been captured in history's footnotes—I think here about the footnote in a history journal which, found only by the grace of a search engine's thoroughness, gave me the slightest hint about the man I was researching (and will revisit again, soon), King Stockton.

Yet another set of the ancestors we seek may have been fortunate to have descendants diligent enough to preserve their writings—the letters, journals, diaries in which they recorded their feelings about passing through trying times in history. I think, in that case, of the various members linked to my Broyles line in South Carolina, for whom mentions in such preserved private communications, now shared publicly, enable me to better understand the difficult times in which they lived.

While seeking solid data on the full names, complete dates of significant life markers, or precise locations in which those events occurred may be part and parcel of the genealogical pursuit, I've always sought more. I want to learn what my ancestors were thinking while enduring the experiences in life which befell them. Yes, discovering that Father Edward Gramlewicz suffered an unjust end is a sobering revelation, but understanding what led to that final event grounds the micro-history of my personal family line in the macro-history of world events. That has always been what I've sought in researching family history.

In the coming days, I'll revisit this year's Twelve Most Wanted ancestors to reflect on research progress, and analyze what can be done differently for next year. Then, beginning the day following Christmas and continuing for twelve days, we'll start the whole process over again, selecting twelve new focal points for the upcoming year. I hope you'll consider joining me in the process.  

 

In His Footsteps

 

When we research the collateral lines of our family tree, we seldom expect to run into biographies of those caught in the middle of history's low points. And yet, in following the strands tying together the life story of a man connected to my paternal grandparents' land of origin, the saga points straight toward the early years of the second World War.

Father Edward Gramlewicz, nephew of the Polish-American priest we discussed last week—Father Ignacy Benevenuto Gramlewicz, pastor at Nanticoke, Pennsylvania—was, at first, a name I picked up, only thanks to discovery of a genealogy website in Poland called BaSIA. There, I was gleaning information on every entry I could find for the extended family named Gramlewicz in the tiny town of Żerków. 

My original plan was to piece together a chart which could outline the lines of relationship between my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz Laskowska, and another Gramlewicz-Laskowski marriage of the same time. If I hadn't discovered a young Gramlewicz woman declared as a niece in my great-grandparents' Brooklyn, New York, household, perhaps I wouldn't have begun such a research journey, but the further I became enmeshed in the research, the more tangled it became.

Thankfully, the discovery of a lengthy memorial article upon the passing of parish priest Father Benevenuto Gramlewicz helped confirm the relationships I had found on the BaSIA website. That niece, Annie Gramlewicz, did indeed have a fascinating heritage, as I discovered when I pieced together her connection all the way back to Blasius Gramlewicz. 

From her connection to Blasius, I simultaneously discovered his grandchildren Marianna Kujawa, Stanislaus Weinert, and Edward and Hedwig Gramlewicz—all nieces and nephews mentioned in Father Benevenuto Gramlewicz's obituary. That same article mentioned that nephew Edward was also a priest, so I searched to see what information could be found about him, as well.

To say that Edward Gramlewicz followed in his uncle's footsteps is one way to explain the outcome of his life—although the accolades at his life's end were greatly delayed and offered under far different circumstances. To be sure, both nephew and uncle dedicated themselves to serving their Lord in the Polish way of seeing integration of church and life—a viewpoint I can appreciate only after immersing myself in reports of church life written during their era.

Like uncle, nephew Edward was said to have been a passionate social activist. Not unlike the elder priest, for whose newspaper mentions journalists often included imputations of controversy, the younger priest also was said to have had a "hot tempered reputation" and seemed incapable of—or perhaps unwilling to—avoid conflicts, "neither with parishioners nor local authorities."

In a land of freedom of speech, heated discourse might have meant merely that two parties disagreed, but not in Poland. Father Edward Gramlewicz, ordained in Poznań in 1907—only three years before his uncle's passing in Pennsylvania—served in various parishes in western Prussia. By the end of the first World War, during the Greater Poland Uprising, Father Edward was deeply involved in the risky business of sheltering fellow priests targeted by various German terror programs designed to quell Polish opposition.

Perhaps that was a foreshadowing of events to come, both for that Polish homeland and for Father Gramlewicz and his fellow priests. Almost immediately after Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, various German "operations" detained the "intelligentsia"—teachers, professors, politicians, priests, physicians, community leaders—and destroyed them in mass murders. Estimates of how many Polish leaders and influencers were killed through such Nazi programs reach up to one hundred thousand.

One of those who faced such a fate was Father Edward Gramlewicz who, after being detained, was held in various prisons by the Germans until moved to the concentration camp at Posen, Fort VII, where he died in 1940.

While being outspoken in one's religious duties may brand someone like Father Benevenuto Gramlewicz as "controversial" in an American setting, obviously life's twists did not turn out so well for Father Edward Gramlewicz in German-occupied Poland.

Though memorialized years later in various websites—including one ten-page biography which includes a photograph (on page nine) of his mother, Antonina Nawrocka Gramlewicz, and the same sister Hedwig we've already discussed—the inability of his people to mourn their priest's passing publicly when it happened makes my borrowing these documents for family history research eighty years later seem incongruously chirpy. And yet, I cling to such reports to help me understand—and perhaps all those fellow researchers who bemoan our Polish ancestors' unwillingness to talk about their past life in the land of their birth—why they might have been so tight-lipped.

After all the horror of those years in their homeland—whether for those who lived through World War II, or the Great War, or the many Prussian battles which ravished their town for decades before that point—those (likely German-perpetrated) maligning epithets about Polish people which followed them post-war seem an unfairly-borne after-effect, considering the indignities already suffered. Even in my childhood, long after the close of the second World War, I can remember demeaning jokes about the supposed ineptitude of Polish people. How far I was, at that point, from even knowing I was one of those people, myself, let alone gaining the empathy to understand why such experiences would silence a people so displaced from ever speaking again of their heritage—or sharing its legacy.         

Of Christmas Cards, Holiday Lights, and Hopes for a Better Year

 

December has always been an introspective month for me, a time to reflect on where the past year has brought me, and where I'd like to go from here.

Yesterday was a typical example. I started the day off, thinking of Christmas cards. Not many have arrived at our home so far, but then I haven't sent out my traditional batch for the year, either. Perhaps we can chalk it up to that lame excuse of the "pandemic" and how it has hobbled Life As We Know It, in even as small a token as a holiday greeting card—until I think of how many people are no longer on my card list because they are no longer here to check their mailbox.

We went out last night—before our ten o'clock curfew, of course—to view the holiday lights around town. Like everyone else, we needed to see something to bring some cheer to life. In our city, there are usually certain streets which go all out, and we just needed that kind of sight to perk us up. But I was curious to see how many others had decided to add to a public celebration instead of retreating into the year's ongoing morass.

I've entertained a personal theory over the years that people indulge in personal shows of holiday exuberance when the economy has treated them well—and refrain from the usual external show of Christmas lights when times are bad. I didn't think my theory would hold, this season. There are far more reasons besides money for what we saw on our drive. This reason to keep separated—to "social" distance—is not going to overcome our need to connect. That is the real social.

With schools now out for winter break, instructional duties may be over for the year, but teachers still need to grade those final exams. This is the time, too, when some professors ask for student feedback. One plaintive request this week asked for more face time with other people—with other students or even the instructor. Anyone.

Our collective story has become one of pleading for ways to "see" each other—to connect with each other. We miss our friends. Maybe we even miss strangers. Anybody to talk to. I often wonder whether that was the driving force urging all the people who faithfully attended our genealogical society meetings this fall—all of which were presented virtually through a video conferencing service. Amazing how quickly staunch technophobes can adapt to new media when they have enough motivation.

To make plans in this age of uncertainly—how to do it? When, a year ago, I laid out my research plans for 2020, travel to major repositories such as the Family History Library in Salt Lake City was no obstacle—until March hit. Granted, major concessions have been made this year by key online services—I think of the opportunities opened up for researching articles through JSTOR, for instance—but uncertainty hobbles the surety of plans.

On the other hand, if we don't make plans, how much can we accomplish without direction? Perhaps the best approach is to plan with the proviso of being prepared to pivot—to be able to change direction at a moment's notice, to shadow the evolving signals of our situation.

Perhaps, just perhaps, those plans need to be a bit more reflective of the times in which we live—to break with the breakneck speed of accomplishment, the need to progress, to include time to reflect, to connect, to learn from the stories of our past. Perhaps with all the adversity encountered by our intrepid ancestors, they can offer some lessons we can glean from their experience.

 

   

We Start Small

 

When we start small, it can mean all the world, just to see us smile. 

When we leave, a lifetime of treasured memories is left to capture—but only for those who  know how to preserve them.

It takes a lifetime to build a life worth living—but by then, all that's left is the telling. That life worth living, that life once lived, only means something to the ones who received its gift. But the only way that gift can keep giving is if someone takes the time to perpetuate that legacy, to remember and repeat and pass it on.

For Maureen Sander, remembering her life full of love, one year since she left.

For Margaret Stevens, remembering ninety eight years of love and generosity.

 

The One Who Left

 

From time to time when I discuss researching family history with others, I run into people who mention how tight-lipped their immigrant ancestors were about the homeland they left. It is not surprising to learn that some of these ancestors came from the same location as mine: the land that eventually became known as Poland.

I am beginning to realize there may have been a reason for that obstinate refusal of these immigrants to mention anything about the land of their birth. To learn just what it was they refused to speak of takes a willingness to learn more about the history of that land and to then put ourselves in the shoes of people living through such experiences.

Following the story of Father Ignacy Benevenuto Gramlewicz and his nieces and nephews is illustrative of that point. We'll take a glimpse today of what life back home might have been for the young Catholic priest before his decision to leave the land of his birth. On Monday, we'll continue the story with a review of the nephew who, in many ways, followed in his uncle's clerical footsteps.

Thanks in great part to the extensive article in The Wilkes-Barre Record following Father Gramlewicz's 1910 death, we glean some details of the man's early life—details which, in some respects, could not have been documented in any other way at this point, due to lack of available records.

According to that June 6, 1910, article, Father Gramlewicz was born on July 31, 1837, in Żerków—the same small town in Poland where my paternal grandmother was born. Only then, the town was part of a region called by the Germans, Posen. And that region was—depending on the year, the war, and the political decisions—part of a country known as Prussia.

Father Gramlewicz's formal education was completed at the College of Ostrow, located in a city which was recognized as an important center of Polish education—and which eventually became a center of Polish resistance and their national liberation movement.

In 1857, Father Gramlewicz was ordained to the Franciscan order, and assigned his role in the priesthood at Pelplin in 1862, where he said his first mass that April.

His years of finishing his education and entering the priesthood were not particularly peaceful years in Poland's timeline. Prussian politician—and, eventually, Chancellor of the unified German Empire—Otto von Bismarck was deep in the midst of power struggles with the Catholic Church, instigating by 1871 in Prussia a difficult struggle which became known as Kulturkampf. The Chancellor, in essence, blamed the Catholic priests, particularly in the province of Posen, of fostering Polish nationalism—directly in opposition to von Bismarck's diplomatic goals for a unified German empire.

As the Pennsylvania newspaper, The Wilkes-Barre Record, later reported, Father Gramlewicz was one of those who took an active part in opposing the Chancellor's policies. It is no surprise to learn that, in 1875, he was forced to leave his homeland—fled his homeland, as the Saint Stanislaus Church centennial history put it—because he had "helped a brother missionary escape over the border to flee from religious persecution."

At that turning point, the newspaper article reported, Father Gramlewicz's choice was to head to America, "the home of Washington, of freedom and of tolerance of religion."

As outspoken as he was—"fearless in his defense of the Catholic Church," as the Record phrased it—perhaps he was fortunate, as a young priest, to be given that second chance to serve in ministry to "his people" in America. For his nephew—Father Edward Gramlewicz mentioned in the elder Gramlewicz's obituary—his time had not yet come to face a similar ecclesiastical showdown. At a similar decision point in the younger priest's life, the ultimate outcome could not possibly include the same sort of accolades, as we'll see next Monday.