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. 

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.