Sometimes, it Isn't the Research That's the Problem . . .

 

Nestled deep in the midst of autumn right after the time change might seem a cozy moment to forsake all technology and curl up with a good book for the evening. After all, by 7:00 p.m., it already felt like we were approaching midnight. Well, despite that dreamy pumpkin-spiced notion, I got my wish, but not by choice. It was by wifi fiat: our Internet went down.

With no online access comes no chance to research. And for this genealogy guinea pig, no chance to research means no post. It all kinda brings to mind those pre-Internet research days when the only way to look up records was to plan a trip to the specific repository representing the hope of finding the right answer to our family history questions. My, how things have changed—at least when our technology company of choice doesn't encounter problems.

A little reminder of how good we have things...something I'll appreciate, I'm sure, once I get over the immediate frustration of lack of access.

 

Keeping in Touch

 

It's nice to connect again with family researchers we've met online in the past. Just this weekend, I received an email from someone whom I first met on account of our DNA match at Ancestry.com. The reason for the contact this weekend was apparently the wish to pass along something remembered about past generations of the family, gleaned from the kind of family conversations which are rarely documented, only passed along by oral tradition.

We need those sorts of remembrances. Strictly speaking, genealogy may be focused on the gathering of documents to verify the main points of life—when we were born, who we married, the names of our children—but that isn't truly the "stuff" of which life is made. It's the everyday occurrences, and even the upsets that jar us from daily routine, which compose the story of an ancestor's life.

After responding to the email and passing along a few family details I had discovered since we last chatted, I decided to take a look at my correspondent's tree on Ancestry. It turned out to be a treasure trove of family photographs. I gazed at faces I'd never before had the privilege of seeing. I marveled at just how much personality came through in those pictures, even a century after those ancestors were gone.

Just that brief moment of reconnecting reminded me that there is far more to family history than the documents we manage to locate which contain an ancestor's name and significant life dates. The only ones who really know the rest of an ancestor's life story will likely be their family members. Those are the ones we need to be chasing after—the living "documents" who can tell us the rest of the story. Our distant cousins who comprise our fellow family history researchers are a valuable network worth keeping in touch.

Like Riding a Bike

 

I just finished teaching another beginning genealogy course for a local organization. The course is a four-week series of lessons on the basics of compiling a family history, geared to use of a particular online service. It certainly is rewarding to see new people catch the excitement of seeing their own ancestors' names in decades-old documents.

Teaching such a course comes with its own set of frustrations, too—at least for me. Since students are welcome to repeat the class as often as they wish, the course is open-ended, designed partially according to results of a needs assessment interview conducted during the first session. The idea is to allow students to grow in their researching skills, no matter at what level they began the course.

Only sometimes, they don't grow. And that's where the frustration comes in: when I feel as if I am repeating the same basic concepts over and over, and yet, those concepts don't seem to be applied.

That's when I realized that "learning" genealogy is like learning to ride a bike: you have to do it, not just listen to someone talk about how to do it. It's an applied skill, not just head knowledge.

Not unlike riding a bicycle, or sewing your clothes, or making sure the seal sets just right on homemade preserves, compiling your family history requires "knowing" in a very different way than just learning dates and names in a history class. You have to get your hands on it, know how facts connect with people. More than that, you need to ask questions and discern how best to answer them.

There is no "cookbook" in the world large enough to contain all the how-to instructions for every research problem you'll ever encounter. A guide book with maps, perhaps, but the learner who wants to take the journey has to be the one who takes the steps.

Like learning to ride a bicycle, learning how to find your family's history is eventually a matter of getting your hands on it. Doing it. Falling. Getting up, dusting off. Trying again, generation after generation.

When Wandering in Circles, Learn to Ask Questions

 

Thanks to a "Theory of Family Relativity" posted at MyHeritage for one of my DNA matches from Poland, I've discovered a new branch in my paternal Gramlewicz tree. Thanks to transcriptions of Polish documents posted at the Polish website BaSIA, I have been able to trace this match's line back to a sister of my second great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz. Every step through the generations now has at least one document to confirm the connection, for which I am grateful. Access to Polish records from my family's specific region of Żerków is limited for researchers like myself located in the United States.

For someone used to a more document-rich environment like what we've come to expect in North America, I wish I had more. Working with documents written in a foreign language—or maybe jumping between two or three different languages—I feel tied to my cheat sheets with translations of key words. I still have questions.

Perhaps the more accurate way to put it is that I have "wonders." I'm wondering whether Catholic families in Poland keep the same types of traditions I've learned to watch for when researching my husband's Irish roots. I wonder about the possibility of traditions like naming patterns. Or which family members are called upon to stand with the parents at the baptism of their baby. For my father-in-law's ancestors in Ireland, I knew to expect who the firstborn son would be named after, or which people would most likely be named the baby's godparents.

My big question right now: do the Catholics in Poland have the same traditions as those in Ireland? If not, do they have similar traditions which might guide me in exploring, for instance, the names of those listed as "chrzestna" (godmother).

Sometimes, there are inferences provided in family records which, if we know how to spot them, may reveal a connection we'd otherwise have missed. Sifting through the records in Żerków and neighboring villages, I'm still on the hunt to spot patterns or any other clues to help determine just how this extended family line fits together. 

Nope, Nothing New

 

Bottom line: I've scoured the record transcriptions at the Polish website BaSIA for any new entries on my Gramlewicz question and found nothing. 

After a rollicking start like that, the question is: now what? The answer: I'm not sure.

Sometimes, when you need to sort through records, the best approach is not to be afraid to get your hands muddy with the mess. Don't run away from it. Look deeper to see if there are any patterns. Somewhere in the murky midst, you might find a clue.

The only clue I've found this go-round was that there may have been more Gramlewicz families in tiny Żerków than I had at first suspected. This may get messier than expected.

While wandering around, though, I realized a few things. First is that date gaps in record collections may mean the very records I'm seeking are somewhere in that gap. Don't give up the hope of finding something until the entire record set is available to use.

My second realization is that thinking phonetically is still an important research skill. Remember that there is more than one line of Gramlewicz-Laskowski marriages on my "most wanted" list. A funny thing happened on the website when, instead of searching only for Gramlewicz, I tried putting the website through its paces with the surname Laskowski: the search engine couldn't come up with a single Laskowski result for me in Żerków. I tried a different approach: do the same thing as happened to another line of Laskowskis when they immigrated to New York. I pronounced the surname like a Polish person might, then thought how an English-speaking listener might spell what he heard. Searching for Laskoski (from a misunderstood "Laskovski") instead of Laskowski suddenly produced results. I'll need to remember that for future searches.

My third thought was to make a note of all the other Gramlewicz family discoveries I saw on the BaSIA website, even though I can't fit them into my tree right now. Those search results might come in handy in the future, and having a catalog of those other Gramlewicz lines in Żerków will make it easier to plug them into my tree if and when I figure out the connection.

Bonus realization: there is a way to access the scanned documents from which the transcriptions were extracted. While the scans seem unresponsive to manipulation on my computer, at least I can try to read them for myself now.

While I'm grinding through that records search project in the background, though, there is one piece of unfinished business I can attend to now. It's time to revisit that Polish DNA match at MyHeritage and document the connection from the current generation back to the time of Elżbieta Gramlewicz's likely sister Katarzyna.

Detached and Still Floating

 

They kept showing up, this other family which seemed to be connected with mine, but somehow was not. Back in Żerków, the Polish town my great-grandfather called home, there were Gramlewicz names showing up in records but whom I couldn't connect to my tree. When my great-grandfather, Antoni Laskowski, moved to New York City and sent for his wife and children to follow him to their new home, there was a young Gramlewicz man named Mieczyslaw who traveled with them. And later, when Antoni's children were grown and gone from the family's modest apartment in Brooklyn, somehow the Laskowskis were able to squeeze in another Gramlewicz girl who had recently arrived from Poland.

Her name was Anna Gramlewicz. Although she was actually born in Brooklyn, after her parents tragically lost several young children, the whole family decided to return to their hometown in Żerków—only, after a few years, Anna changed her mind. Coming back to America in 1913, she lived in Brooklyn with Antoni and Marianna Laskowski. When the state enumerator came knocking at the door in 1915, Antoni reported Anna as his niece.

Only...she wasn't. At least, not as far as I could tell. Though I searched and searched on the Polish genealogy websites I had been using—BaSIA and the Poznan Project—I couldn't line up Antoni's mother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz, with Anna's father's parents. So, going back to my family tree, I had to detach Anna from the supposed connection to Antoni's mother's Gramlewicz line. Anna and her direct family line have remained that way ever since: detached and still floating in the Ancestry.com ether on my family tree.

My goal this month is to determine whether Anna and her direct line of ascent actually do connect with Antoni Laskowski's mother's family. After all, Żerków is a town of barely two thousand people—now. Surely two different families in the same town with the same surname—not exactly the Polish equivalent of Smith—would be related to each other, somewhere up the line. My question this month is: how far up the line would that be? Can I find the nexus?

For the record, Anna Gramlewicz, born in Brooklyn about 1897, was the daughter of Jan Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz, who in turn was the son of Wawrzyniec Gramlewicz and Marianna Laskowska.

Full stop. Whoever this Wawrzyniec Gramlewicz was, he married someone from a Laskowski family which I also can't identify. Do you see how desperately I need to locate some records hidden in the date gaps of those Polish website collections? Anna—and thus her parents and grandparents—could not only be related to my Gramlewicz line, but also to my Laskowski line. Doubly related. And yet, I'm doubly in doubt, because I can't locate any records to explain such a connection.

Yet.

Those are the tentative footprints I have already spotted. We'll begin examining what might have been added to those Polish websites since the last time I pondered this research question. Hopefully, there will be some updates. Perhaps, by the end of the month, we'll be able to re-attach Anna and her family to their correct place in this family tree—or have definitive documentation to explain why that would not be possible within those three generations.

Above: Portion of 1915 New York State census for Brooklyn in Kings County, showing Annie Gramlewicz living in household of Anton and Mary Laskowski, listing Annie as niece; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Regrouping on the Gramlewicz Line

 

Getting ahead of myself when I fell down that research rabbit hole last month, I discovered I have a DNA match with someone descended from the Gramlewicz family of Żerków, Poland. Conveniently, my planned research goal for the next month was to connect some dots regarding my Gramlewicz ancestors. And today is the start of that next month.

So, what about the Gramlewicz family of Żerków? One thing I know for sure: my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski called someone by the name of Elżbieta Gramlewicz his mother. Though she never came to America—dying in Żerków in 1886—her name as mother was recorded on Antoni's own 1935 death certificate in New York City.

It is only thanks to websites developed and maintained by volunteers from genealogical societies in Poland that I discovered Elżbieta's parents' names, Andrzej and Katarzyna Gramlewicz. And while Katarzyna had shown up in record transcriptions on those Polish websites under two different maiden names—either Nowicka or Zakrzewicz—I've tentatively concluded that Nowicka was the correct designation, making my new DNA match's ancestor sister to my second great-grandmother Elżbieta.

That, however, is not the reason I decided to delve into this line's overall history for November. You see, in addition to this Gramlewicz line, there is apparently another by the same surname, coming from the same small Polish town. And it isn't simply a matter of someone else in town coincidentally bearing the same surname. This other Gramlewicz family also included someone who married a Laskowski—but how they are related to either my Gramlewicz line or my Laskowski line is currently unknown to me.

An even closer brush with this other Gramlewicz family was the discovery, when examining the passenger list of the Żerków families traveling to New York with Antoni's wife and children, that they were accompanied by a young man named Mieczyslaw Gramlewicz—a name which popped up later concerning other New York records connected to Antoni Laskowski's family. But who was he? My efforts in the past to discover how the two families were related did not reveal a clear answer.

This month, my hope is to find just how those two Gramlewicz families from Żerków were actually connected.