Lingering on Newfound Ancestors

 

If, in a matter of one mere week, I've already discovered the names of my second great-grandmother's parents, what is the next step? Obviously, the quest in family history is always to push back another generation, but in this case, I'm not going to be so greedy about this month's research goal. For one thing, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep up this momentum through the generations, given the difficulty in accessing some Polish records. But there is another reason to take my time and linger on this new discovery about Marianna Wojtaś' parents' generation.

That reason is simple: it has to do with DNA testing. But not any kind of DNA test. I'm specifically thinking of my matches at one genealogy company: MyHeritage.com. The reason is simple. While Ancestry, whose tree-building system and record access I prefer, provides me with plenty of Wojtaś  descendants among my DNA matches, they are mostly descended from the family members who chose to immigrate to the United States—specifically to Wisconsin. MyHeritage, on the other hand, has a more international reach for their DNA testing program, which is handily demonstrated by my matches who still live in Poland, or at least live in a country far closer to that homeland than Wisconsin.

I would like to know how those foreign DNA matches connect to my branch of the Wojtaś family. And there may only be one way to do that: build the family tree back to Marianna's parents, then reverse direction and trace all the descendants of each of her siblings.

In many cases, I've found that challenge is not as daunting as it sounds. Sadly, for those Catholic families claiming many children, many of them laid their children to rest in the church cemetery not long after their birth. There were so many childhood deaths, and if not then, often a loss of life in early adulthood. But for the few who lived a full life, it's time for me to build out those collateral branches and document their descendants.

The easiest step will be to select the one sibling who had children who also migrated away from their Polish homeland. We'll begin next week by reviewing what I've discovered about that one specific Wojtaś  collateral line, thanks to DNA testing.

Step by Step — and Stumbling Upon

 

Standard genealogical advice is always to go step by step, but how many times do we find ourselves "stumbling upon" an accidental discovery? Perhaps that is just the way genealogical research sometimes progresses.

Discovering the identity of my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś was not that difficult, once I remembered the standard advice for starting a family tree. I started from what I knew—my great-grandmother Anastasia, whose maiden name was Zegarska—and moved step by step back a generation. That way, I learned that Anastasia's father was named Jan Zegarski (or Johann in Catholic records), and that he married a woman named Marianna Wojtaś.

This Zegarski family was the one I stumbled upon only thanks to DNA testing. All I had known of my great-grandmother before that point was that her maiden name was supposed to be Zegar. It was all those DNA matches with roots leading back to the Zegarski surname who convinced me to take that critical spelling detour in researching documents on my roots.

In that discovery, I suddenly was gifted with what seemed like a multitude of Zegarski aunts and uncles, for Jan and Marianna had at least thirteen children that I could find. Anastasia was almost right in the middle of this spread of siblings. This gave me ample opportunities to find versions of their mother's name, whether spelled as Marianna Wojtaś, or Woitas (for daughter Pauline), or other variations.

Knowing those spelling variations helped, as my first stop in researching this Pomeranian family was the website hosted in Poland by the Pomeranian Genealogical Association. By using their database, I found transcriptions of records for many of the Zegarski children. The family was living in a town called Schwarzwald by the Prussians in the 1800s, but now known as Czarnylas in Poland. That was a great start, but I still wanted to know more—especially about previous generations.

Last January, when I was outlining my research plans for the 2025 Twelve Most Wanted, I had wondered who Marianna's parents might have been. Knowing how difficult researching these Polish roots could be, I decided to name just that as my goal for this November. Silly me: I already have found my answer within a week, thanks to some records microfilmed years ago by FamilySearch.org. Though I still will need to go to a FamilySearch Center to view the documents, I am currently working with the same level of assistance as I was for PTG: transcriptions.

This week, I have now discovered who Marianna's own parents were. Finding the record of her baptism on June 29, 1815—an actual digitized document this time—I discovered her father's name was entered in Latin as "Martino" and her mother listed as Anna. It is challenging to read Marianna's baptismal entry because the date was overwritten, and her mother's maiden name somewhat mangled, but by enlarging the record image, it appears to be spelled Szczygielska.

As best I can tell, Marianna was likely born in the village of Wolental, and baptized in the Catholic parish known in Prussia as Ponschau—or, now, called Pączewo. Whether Marianna moved as a bride to live in Czarnylas or whether her parents moved there during her childhood, perhaps I'll be able to tell when we find information on her actual marriage. Through the transcriptions at PTG, however, I found the year of 1896 given as the date of Marianna's death in Czarnylas, complete with her "family name" given as Wojtaś. 

One Name; Several Spellings

 

When it comes to searching for a specific ancestor, having one name to seek can provide the assurance that we're chasing the right person. But several different names? That starts plaguing me with doubts whether I've found the right person.

With this month's research goal—to find more about my second great-grandmother Marianna Wojtaś—I discovered it was possible to find someone. But that someone named Marianna often appeared with a different spelling to her surname. Sometimes, it was Woytas. Or it could just as likely appear as Wojtasz.

Were these different people? That could be a reasonable question, especially for someone unfamiliar with researching Polish surnames. Having a basic understanding of Polish phonics, however, helped fortify my confidence that I was following the right trail, despite all those spelling variations.

Years ago—once I discovered that my paternal roots grew toward Poland and not the greenery of the Irish coast my grandfather claimed—I decided it was time to brush up on Polish phonics. The diacritical marks had me stumped, for one thing, and I don't feel comfortable with simply ignoring ignorance.

Beyond educating myself on, say, the use of the "ł" for my paternal grandfather's surname Puchała, I did a quick tour of the universe of Polish phonics. If nothing else, I wanted to know how to pronounce those surnames. After all, they are part of my heritage.

Since then, I've kept those resources close at hand, cheat sheets to remind me how to handle what otherwise would look like tongue-twisters. Names like Blaszczynski, for instance, no longer have me stumped.

So when it comes to entries like my second great-grandmother Marianna's maiden name, Wojtaś, I now understand why the multitude of record keeping officials—German-speaking Prussian government workers and Catholic priests rendering records in Latin—sometimes come up with different results. All of those results are variations on how the name was pronounced, but each one is a possible representation of the same sounds: "y" for "j" or "sh" for "sz" or even the diacritical "ś." 

With that understanding, let's launch into what can be found about Marianna Wojtaś and her years in the Pomeranian region of Poland.   

The Eleventh Ancestor

 

When I chose the eleventh ancestor out of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, it was not an easy choice. This was not because several others were clamoring for my attention; this was more a matter of wondering whether I would be able to find anyone. 

The way I plan out my research for the upcoming year is to set aside a season to devote to each of four branches of my family tree. For two quarters of the year, I work on members of my in-laws' families. For one quarter, I have ample material to pursue on behalf of my mother's roots. But for my father's line during the last quarter of each year, I always know I'll be stumped for yet another year, no matter which ancestor I select for the designated month's struggle.

This November's ancestor, I decided, would be a natural outgrowth of my research project for the previous month. In searching for what became of my great-grandfather Thomas Puchała, I would likely need to trace the migration path of his wife, Anastasia Zegarska. Thus, for this coming month, I reasoned it would make sense to move back one more generation and research Anastasia's mother, Marianna Wojtaś. 

All I could find about the Zegarski family centered around a small town now known as Czarnylas in the Polish region of Pomerania. As I noted last year in planning this month's research project, 

Just even finding the identity of that hometown took years to accomplish, so I need to take that as a reminder that some research projects take time—like years—to evolve into a shape roughly comparable to an actual answer. If I arrive at the end of this coming November without an answer to my question about Marianna's parents and siblings, I know I can return to this puzzle again in a future year—and that, eventually, more records will help guide me through the maze and point me in the right direction for my next step.

Thankfully, that hopeful wish has already turned out to bear fruit. I have indeed found more records which will be of great use. We are at least set for a smooth launch into a month of exploring the life of Marianna Wojtaś, my second great-grandmother, whose life spanned nearly the entire nineteenth century in the Polish region of Pomerania. We'll start tomorrow with an overview of some details which can help us navigate Polish genealogical research.

November, Doubts, and Needles in Haystacks

 

Back at the beginning of this year when I was deciding which of my Polish ancestors to research in November, I had just broken free from those hindering doubts—the kind which prod people with the rhetorical question, "Why try?" After all, Polish records—or more accurately, Prussian records—are not exactly the forte of my primary genealogical resource, Ancestry.com. Finding such records at FamilySearch, where admittedly they could be in the collection, was akin to snatching up the proverbial needle in the haystack. Only this haystack had billions upon billions of strands of information.

The one resource which shook me loose of my doubts last year was an obscure website hosted in Poland. In English, it is listed as the site of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association, but its web address beginning with "ptg" hints of the name by which it is known in its home country: Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne.

If you can read—and understand!—Polish, the home page of that website offers up helpful articles on researching Polish ancestors, specifically from the region known as Pomerania. Alas, I am a mere mortal and can only understand one language, and it certainly isn't Polish, let alone any regional dialects. But I try.

Embedded within that maze of helpful Polish material on the PTG website is the capability to search through a database of transcribed vital records from the region of Pomerania. And yes! That can indeed be done in English, provided you first click on the flag for the corresponding language translation.

That is how I found the 1896 entry in the index of local death records for my second great-grandmother, Marianna Wojtaś Zegarska. It was Marianna who was the mother of my unfortunate great-grandmother Anastasia Zegarska whom we studied last month. Thankfully, that index of Polish records included Marianna's "family name" in their readout. Despite that clue, however, I've yet to find a digital copy of the document which, presumably, provided that detail.

Finding the PTG website was indeed encouraging because it turned around my despondent concern that I would never find anything more about my Polish roots. With that transcribed and translated entry from one small website, I was encouraged to try to find more information. That is what inspired me to name Marianna Wojtaś as my November selection for the Twelve Most Wanted this year. I may indeed be able to discover more about this branch of my paternal ancestry this month, thanks to the availability of resources from this northern Pomeranian region of what is now the country of Poland.  

Taking the Long View

 

How often we discover one record, one document, one slip of paper, and assume in the victory of locating it that we have found the whole of an ancestor's story. In the case of several of my ancestors—especially those women of previous centuries—that simply isn't so. An example like that serves to remind us all to take the long view when documenting an ancestor's life story.

I had mentioned that problem in reviewing the research difficulties concerning one paternal ancestor, my grandfather's sister, whom the New York family called Aunt Rose. Rose went by three different married names, in addition to the name under which she had been recorded at birth, back in Poland.

To my horror, in trying to add Rose to the FamilySearch.org universal family tree, I discovered there were actually three different women entered instead of the one woman I knew by three married names. Only by demonstrating through documentation will I be able to rectify that situation and blend the three identities into one. Unfortunately, some of those documents are still beyond my grasp.

A situation like this, however, is not isolated to the irregularities of my Polish immigrant ancestors, who, to begin with, were quite reticent about revealing their true identity. Just the other day, as I experimented with a new-to-me research tool at Ancestry.com, I alluded to another example where it takes more than one document to tell the whole of a woman's story.

In eliminating duplicate entries on my in-laws' tree, I ran across several such women whom I had entered twice in that same family tree. As I reflect over the cause for some of these double entries and worked through the documentation to confirm the right display in my tree, it became obvious that following women through name changes due to multiple marriages takes time, patience—and a chain of record keeping. 

For instance—and this is a relatively easy example—my mother-in-law's great-grand aunt, Sarah Mooter, showed in one part of my tree under her maiden name with a marriage to someone named Gibson. In a separate entry, she was mother of a child with a surname of Ebner. How did all that connect? It took piecing together several documents to verify what I suspected: as often happened in that time period, a widow with children remarried, starting a second family.

While we can surmise such an expected outcome, we still need to put together the confirming paper trail. Instead of "filling in the blank," we need to insert documentation to fill in several blanks or the story is not completely told. Sometimes the fill-in-the-blank format of pre-designed genealogical programs doesn't seem to lend itself to this reality of researching our ancestors. Messy lives can't really be contained in a simple fill-in-the-blanks format. I know the still-missing parts of Aunt Rose's story are keeping me from telling her whole story. I suspect I'm not the only one whose family has such a history.

The Trial and Error of Collaboration

 

Yesterday, I mentioned getting together with a newfound cousin to compare family trees. We met at a coffee shop where we could spread out, equipped with two laptops and notebooks. This was not just a social get-together; this was a working session. We were on a mission.

Because we both are also involved in a locally-inspired continuing education program (similar to OLLI), we realized the possible application to future classes of what we were doing—the trial and error effort of collaborating to answer our own research question. We began discussing whether we could use that same approach for a small group learning project in genealogy.

Aside from the limitations of finding a hospitable space for several people and their laptops, such a workshop would need to begin with an agreement: that we'd be willing to be patient enough for the process to unfold organically as each member frames a research question or goal, and we collectively explore ways to resolve impasses.

As I mentioned last week, I believe that this part of the process is actually where learning begins. Not in sitting through lectures. Certainly not in studying for tests. But in the application of techniques as, by trial and error, we learn what works for our particular problem—and what doesn't work.

Launching such a program without testing it first would not be a good idea. It's an experiment; of course it would be messy. In our discussion of the possibilities last week, we talked about giving it an informal trial run. It's just a matter of gathering a few volunteers (and their laptops, of course) at a coffee or sandwich shop with wifi connection, seeing what works best for everyone. Even with just a few willing members from our local genealogical society, we should be able to try that—and then ask everyone what works best for them. What helps people make a breakthrough on their brick wall research problem?

Just hearing one person make a suggestion like this was validating. I've been teaching for a long time and frankly, it can be very disheartening to feel like a lesson is no more than so much "blah, blah, blah." The key is to find what makes a difference for the learner—and every learner is different. It is encouraging for the teacher and empowering for the learner to engage in an approach that becomes a catalyst to successful outcomes. I'm hoping we can find such a catalyst through this project.