Only a Genealogist Would Know

 

Only a genealogist would be the one to spot the appearance of a name in a family tree and realize it matches one from a relative over a hundred years ago. As I've been planning my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, behind the scenes, I've been scurrying to complete a year-long project to confirm the relationships in my entire Tilson line—for those ever-present DNA matches, of course.

In the process, what should I run across but a twentieth century woman whose married name became exactly the same as my third great-grandmother's birth name from a century ago. Before she married, this more modern Rachel was a Clouse, but in marrying a Tilson, she acquired a name which has resonated in my ancestral history. What was more curious was that this Rachel Clouse also happened to be a Tilson descendant, herself, as well as a new Tilson spouse. How did that happen?

You know I couldn't resist this rabbit hole. I had to check out her husband's family history. It took rewinding his family's story for five more generations before I found the connection: my fifth great-grandparents William and Mary Marcie (Ransom) Tilson. I descend from their son Peleg and his daughter Rachel Tilson, while this more recent Rachel descended from Peleg's daughter Jennet through her grandson Peter Clouse's line. And that Rachel Clouse married a Tilson named Thomas, who came from a long line of Tilsons descending from—you guessed it—Thomas Tilson, son of William and Mary Marcie.

Whether they knew it or not, that Rachel, born in 1905, married her fourth cousin once removed, Thomas Tilson. They spent their life together in Texas, far removed from either the Washington County, Tennessee, home of my ancestral Rachel Tilson, or the original Massachusetts settlement of her Tilson forebears. Whether removed by distance or time, the familial connection of this Rachel and Thomas was likely one they weren't even aware of when it came time in 1924 for the couple to say "I do." Unless, of course, they—like all genealogists—kept track of their family history.

Building out that branch of the Thomas Tilson line—one I hadn't yet tackled in my year-long project—served to add several new names to my mother's tree, just in time for this first biweekly count of the new year. Make that 388 new names, to be exact. Now my mother's tree has a total of 36,599 individuals documented.

As I worked on plans for the Twelve Most Wanted for this year, I also added names to my in-laws' tree. Though there were only sixty six new names added—I stumbled upon an undone branch of my father-in-law's Kelly line—that tree is starting off the new year with 34,157 people, enough to help connect a few more DNA matches to that line.

Again for this year, I'll be checking back every two weeks to get encouragement from the mounting numbers and research progress. It helps to see the numbers. And it certainly is inspiring to find the stories—even the unexpected little details like discovering that my fourth cousin once removed married her fourth cousin once removed.

 

Ancestor #12: Family Trees of the Rich and Famous

 

Nah, just kidding. This won't be about those rich and famous. Besides, there's already a program for that. A far less exotic set of people is involved in the project I've recently launched: building the family trees of the settlers who arrived in my county after we achieved statehood, some of whose descendants gained recognition locally for their own name and achievements.

Face it: finding suitable subjects for this year's Twelve Most Wanted—my attempt at organizing my genealogy research for each upcoming year—has become more challenging. Not that I've "finished" my family tree—there is always just one more generation to find—but a good fifty percent of the ancestors I'm seeking lie cloaked in the shroud of international intrigue. 

Well, let's say I'm intrigued. And the ancestors do involve a search across borders. The problem is that American genealogical organizations seem to focus most on the records at hand in their own country—then, perhaps, the rest of the same continent. Then, too, what can be said for wars and other dastardly destruction of records, not to mention all the other signs of life? Problem is, I'm having trouble digging any deeper on the two men in my annual quest for ancestors: my dad and my father-in-law.

In the meantime, I've been involved in a "First Families" project with my local genealogical society, partnered with our county's historical society. We are building an archived resource for those researching the early settlers in our county—not really a daunting task, since we only achieved statehood in 1850.

As I work through the applications sent by descendants of those early settlers, I realized something. It is far easier for me to visualize the data required if I sketch it out on my preferred database management system (and if you can't guess from prior posts, it's Ancestry.com). Rather than hunting and pecking through Ancestry's vast collection of documents to confirm or deny an application sketched out on paper, I found it far easier to just set up the applicant's tree online in a private, unsearchable mode, and do my work from there.

Meanwhile, realizing we could make it far easier for future applicants to participate in the project if they found a toe-hold to start their application, I wanted to set up a shareable database of those ancestors whose records have already been entered into our program. 

That, of course, takes work—far more than just one person can handle. While I am organizing the project behind the scenes already, hopefully more of our genealogical society's members will volunteer to work on the "tree" soon. And by the end of the year—and that twelfth month, which would normally be time to review Ancestor #12 of my Most Wanted—I'll have some stories to share of the intrepid settlers who chose to make their home in our central California county.

Ancestor # 11: Collateral Companions

It was only thanks to a one-line mention in his son's New York City death certificate that I even knew the name of my second great-grandfather. Like so many others in my father's family, any detail about the family's history was a well-kept secret. Though he never said anything about Mateusz Laskowski, that was the name of my dad's great-grandfather—a man who fathered at least two other children who, like my dad's maternal grandfather, left Poland to seek a better life in America.

As many of us know who have researched our ancestral lines, when confronted with a "brick wall" ancestor, one of the best ways to make an end run around that research road block is to study the collateral lines—what became of those siblings of our direct-line ancestor. And for those of us who include DNA testing in our research bag of tricks, we know that the DNA matches we seek will often be the descendants of those collateral relatives. When it comes to researching immigrant families, add in the concept of the "FAN" Club—those family or friends, associates, and neighbors who traveled with our roaming ancestors—and we can supercharge our efforts to find missing ancestors, even those who have just crossed an ocean. These are the collateral companions I'd like to focus on as I wrap up the research year of 2024 on my father's family.

Specifically, I'll be looking at the family line of Mateusz Laskowski and his Polish wife, Elżbieta   Gramlewicz. This couple was born, married, and died in the place they called home in Poland, a small town called Żerków. Yet, despite their stationery position in life, three of their children embarked on the not-so-certain adventure of leaving home and family to travel thousands of miles to another continent filled with people who spoke a language they didn't know. While I've figured out what became of the one sibling—that's my father's maternal grandfather—I want to trace the lines of descent for the other two siblings. Not only that, but I would love to discover their family stories, as well.

By the time I reach the month designated for this year's final paternal ancestor, I will have reached the end of what can currently be found on this family's Polish lines. By then, I will have been working on my Twelve Most Wanted for five years. Not that I am saying I'm "done" with my family tree—that work is never done—but I am limited by the resources and capability of reaching back another generation on this foreign branch of my family's history. By the time we enter 2025, I will most likely have to rethink my research approach for future projects.

In the meantime, for the twelfth month of this year, I will test out a different topic to explore—one based not on my own family, but on a project I've recently launched. This will hopefully be of help to many others, as well as an enjoyable way to ply those research skills, even if I can't use them on my own family.

Ancestor #10: Olej Olej Oxen Free

 

Okay, ancestors, y'all come out from your hiding places. No penalty. I promise.

I couldn't help myself, seeking for a specific ancestor to research this coming October, as I comb through all my father's Polish forebears. I just wish they'd all come out of hiding. It's not that I've discovered every fact about every paternal ancestor that's out there—far from it. My problem is that I do have plenty of research questions—but few resources to guide me to the documents I need.

At the beginning of 2021, I had designated Franziska Olejniczak as one of my Twelve Most Wanted to research that coming November. She was my father's maternal grandmother's mother. When that year was done, I can't say I had found much on the woman.

I'm pretty sure Franziska never left her homeland, though at least two of her three daughters married and left her for America. For the third daughter, I found a marriage record and several baptismal records showing she had a large family, but whatever became of those children, I can't say.

The fact that I have a few—a very few—DNA matches whose family tree includes that same surname, Olejniczak, begs me to dig deeper on this line. But where to look? Those DNA matches appear to live now in France, not Poland. There are a lot of blanks to fill in that story line.

It's time to revisit Franziska's story again for my Twelve Most Wanted this coming October, now that I've found a few additional Polish records resources online. In fact, there are other branches of this family which could use some TLC in the records department. While that sounds like a daunting task right now, whether Franziska is "it" for this month's research task or I expand the task to revisit the rest of these Polish great-grandparents, it may only be by dint of will that I make progress on my father's history. For this last quarter of the year, my research mantra may well be, "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

Ancestor #9: Hats Off to a Step-Mother

 

Fairy tales have ravaged the image of the step-mother. This, despite the prevalence of step-parents in so many family histories, tends to ruin the notion of selecting such a topic as an enjoyable focus for a research project. Here, for September's issue of my Twelve Most Wanted, I hope to make an exception.

When I first began interviewing Uncle Ed, the "keeper of the stuff" for the Stevens family, about the historical details he had gathered for my father-in-law's forebears, he gave me a great jump-start on my own research. However, I suspect I topped him with one discovery: the woman who raised his father was not the one who gave birth to him. She was actually his step-mother.

Theresa Blaising was the only grandmother Uncle Ed ever knew—which was a result of family circumstances. His mother was the baby of her family, whose own mother had passed away only a year after Uncle Ed was born, hardly the stuff of vivid memories. As for Uncle Ed's paternal grandmother, she died one month after his father was born. His paternal grandfather, left with an infant, did what many men of the 1880s would do: he married again, quickly. That wife, Theresa Blaising, entered the family when her step-son was barely three years of age. She was indeed the only mother he ever knew.

There were a few other details I've found about Theresa Blaising, but not many. She was, for instance, from an immigrant family in Indiana—but was she from France or Germany? Her family's home was that oft-disputed geographical region sometimes called Alsace-Lorraine. We will need to wrestle with her family's history to come up with the answer to that one question.

In the process of exploring the overarching picture of immigrants from that war-torn European region, we'll pick up some details which will be helpful for so many other ancestral lines in both my in-laws' family trees. And we'll give some recognition to a woman whose place in the family as step-mother was far from the abused image projected in so many childhood fairy tales.

Ancestor #8: While We're in the Neighborhood

 

When we've already cleared out the easy pickings on the family tree—thanks to those census records, birth announcements, and obituaries—it takes a different kind of sleuthing to make any research headway. And that's where I'm stuck now.

I've been turning to more broad-based research now to help point the way to find those elusive ancestors. Exploring social history and delving into the details of an ancestor's locale are rising high on my go-to list. Since we will have already spent a month exploring the records for Lafayette, Indiana, in the quest to find any sign of Hugh Stevens, number seven of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, we may as well capitalize on already being in the neighborhood. We'll make another Lafayette neighbor the focus of our family history quest for next August.

In that neighborhood, I need to look for more signs of the Kelly family. In particular, the descendants of James and Mary Kelly have been showing up in my DNA matches. The problem is, despite ThruLines' assurance at Ancestry.com that these matches descend from this couple—my father-in-law's second great-grandparents—I can't seem to find any confirming documentation.

Another issue with James and Mary Kelly that they share with our previous ancestral challenge is the missing sections of passenger records at the port where they arrived in America. Just like Hugh Stevens, our research challenge for the preceding month, James and Mary arrived at the port of New Orleans. It's been a while since I searched through all the available passenger records for New Orleans, so this August, in hopes something new materializes, that will be on my to-do list, as well as the DNA exploration.

Granted, it would be lovely to discover just where in Ireland James and Mary Kelly originated. That has been my forever dream, yet I realize with names as common as theirs—and their Irish-born children—this might be an attempt repeated with the same outcome once again. But if we never give that search another try, we'll never make any further progress.

Ancestor #7: What Happened to Hugh?

 

Among the tools added in the past year at Ancestry.com, one I appreciated the most was their beta offering which included the option to view a family tree in "fan view." Just changing the way the pedigree chart looked helped me spot areas in my trees which needed more work. I took that viewing option one step further, and made a fan view version for each set of eight great-grandparents for my parents and my in-laws, and posted then on my desktop for instant reference (and hopefully, inspiration to get busy on needed research projects).

Some of the diagrams were indeed perfect for that inspiration, such as the diagram for Thomas Taliaferro Broyles, my mother's great-grandfather whose diagram I shared in a post when Ancestry unveiled that beta version back in September. You can easily spot those empty family branches screaming for attention. But today, as I shift focus on my Twelve Most Wanted for research projects in 2024 to those missing ancestors in my father-in-law's roots, the diagrams I spot for his family look more like what I call "egg-head" drawings than the half-eaten pie-shaped diagram for someone like ol' Tom. How do you plan a year's research strategy from hint-less diagrams like those Irish ancestors in my father-in-law's roots?

There was one exception, thankfully. I had entered an unnamed father for my husband's second great-grandfather, John Stevens. The reason for that unnamed entry was that I had found an immigration record for a man named Hugh Stevens—a man who had taken the exact same route from Ireland's County Mayo to Lafayette, Indiana, as John Stevens had done at almost precisely the same month in a previous year. While I had no idea of the relationship, the coincidence was almost begging me to assume they were brothers, and that was exactly where I placed him in my father-in-law's tree, after creating a place holder for the two brothers' father.

The only problem was that almost immediately after Hugh arrived in Lafayette, he seemed to disappear. What happened to Hugh after that point?

Of course, it would be redundant to say he died; people traveling anywhere in the world in the 1850s would be dead by now. But how soon after his arrival would that have happened? Did he acquire a malady from his trans-Atlantic passage and collapse shortly after greeting his relative in a new world? Or could he have moved on, perhaps marrying and starting a family of his own before his demise?

I have ulterior reasons for wondering about these questions. Even though I attempted this same research poject two years ago, I still can't place the Stevens family's specific townland of origin in County Mayo, and hope to trace Hugh to discover more about John's roots. In addition, it would be doubly helpful to find any DNA matches from another branch of the Stevens line. Right now, there only are three matches from John's line but nobody else—not even guesses as to who might have been in the previous generation. Finding any sign of Hugh might be very helpful, indeed.