From Known to Unknown

 

It's a long, unwinding chain that leads us from our known ancestors to the next step beyond—at first, an unknown next step. That's where I am in seeking information on my father's great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak. Here's what I know about her so far, mostly thanks to details sprinkled throughout the records of the children she left behind.

Franziska was born in Poland and, as far as I can tell so far, though some of her children did, she never left her homeland. It was only because of a daughter who did leave—Marianna—that I even knew what her name was. From a granddaughter she never met, I had the first clue of what her name might have been, further supported by what I could find on her daughter Marianna's records.

It was Marianna's own marriage record which confirmed her mother's maiden name—if, that is, you could actually read the handwriting on her marriage document. According to that 1879 record, Marianna's parents were Franz and Franziska Jankowski—with Franziska noted to have been born an Olejniczak.

Thanks to records at the Poznan Project and BaSIA, the Database of Archival Indexing System, I learned that Franz and Franziska had at least two other daughters: Stanisława, who, like Marianna, left for America, and Antonie, who didn't. There may be other children in this Jankowski family, but I have yet to find any documents to guide me on that issue.

Home for Franziska was the tiny town of Żerków in the central region of Poland. If it weren't for the few transcriptions and document scans shared online in those two websites mentioned above, I would have had no further way to trace her family. It was only through exploring those websites that I found information on Franziska's other daughters—and likely, this will be how I will find anything more on the family.

However, that will not stop me from exploring further on the one website which has been known to include digitized records from around the world: FamilySearch.org. Thus, one must-see stop I'll be making early in this month's exploration will be to check availability of records in Żerków for any further members of this family—and for any possible descendants who might have become my own mystery DNA matches.

Another Month, Another Ancestor

 

Some researchers may set out a single research question and wrestle it to the death, rather than give up gracefully when lacking access to records. In my case, I set a time limit to each research plan, knowing I am playing with hard-to-find ancestors. A few years ago, I designed a plan I call my Twelve Most Wanted—those twelve making up a list of the hard-to-find relatives I would devote one month each to pursuing for the coming year.

To further organize my research approach, I also divided up the year so that I would equitably pursue those ancestors: three months each for my mother's line, my father's line, and then each of my in-laws' ancestors.

Today marks the shift from the search for my father-in-law's ancestors to those of my own father. With that shift, we move from the stress of lack of records in Ireland for famine-era immigrants to the stress of having to decipher records in a language I don't speak and which appears to have far too many consonants per each vowel for my English-speaking mind.

With the start of October, that means we will now spend time exploring whatever records can be found from a place nearly six thousand miles from my home, written in a language which, for me, could just as well have been from a different universe. We'll head to Poland—virtually, of course—and see if we can find anything new about my second great-grandmother Franziska Olejniczak.

To pinpoint details more accurately, we'll be searching for information on my father's maternal grandmother's own mother. If I were fortunate enough to have a relative in this matriline willing to volunteer for a mitochondrial DNA test—an mtDNA test, as some people abbreviate the long name for the mother's mother's mother's ancestral line—perhaps I could learn more about the maternal side of Franziska Olejniczak's family, but I'll have to be satisfied with results from my own autosomal DNA test. That result, though I've waited for years to see increasing numbers, has only drawn in eight matches—all of whom are cousins I already have charted on paper. More are likely out there, but lacking the means to draw connections with previous generations in a foreign country, I have no way yet of knowing.

Tomorrow, we'll take a quick peek at what I already know about Franziska Olejniczak and her family line. Then we'll formulate a plan for next steps to take, in hopes of pushing that family tree further out—at least in search of more collateral lines and, eventually, distant cousins.

Old Family Stories Dislodged From Memory

 

Struggling over the Kelly family of Irish immigrants James and Mary, a vague memory dislodged from the back recesses of my memory. Family stories being the possible myths that they may be, I still want to record this one, in case I—or another distant cousin—need to follow up on it in during future research attempts.

For this memory, we'll go back to Uncle Ed, the keeper of the family "stuff" for the Stevens family. It was this couple, James and Mary Kelly, who were his and my father-in-law's second great-grandparents. Their daughter Catharine was his direct line ancestor, and he was the one who shared the family stories with me when I first began sketching out the family's ancestral lines.

The problem was that Catharine Kelly married someone named John Stevens, and their son John eventually married a woman by that same name: Catherine Kelly. When Uncle Ed first walked me through the family tree details, this became a point of confusion; I could sometimes lose track over which Catharine Kelly we were discussing.

I eventually discovered the younger Catherine Kelly came from County Kerry. As to the senior Catharine Kelly, Uncle Ed never provided a specific place of birth. He did, however, say she came from Dublin. 

Well, Dublin is a sizable city—at the time of the 1851 census, the entire County Dublin claimed 405,000 people—so if Catharine, her parents and siblings were born there, finding them might be a challenging task. But Dublin was also a key port for emigrants bound for a better future away from the devastations of the Great Famine. Could Uncle Ed have simply meant that the Kelly family sailed to America from Dublin? When I asked him, he couldn't say.

Looking at online resources now, I can find notes that the port at Dublin was among three Irish locations with the "majority of departures"—but that, according to the National Museum of Ireland, was before the 1830s, long before the Kelly family came to America. Still, Ireland's capital city could also have been the launching place for Irish immigrants to head, first, to the English port of Liverpool, another possible route for the Kellys.

Whatever the case, as I took up the last-minute research project this past weekend to find any possible baptismal records for the Kelly children, I was particularly swayed by some entries in various Catholic parishes in Dublin. Initial searches turned up several Dublin parishes, but on closer inspection, the first few produced false leads, such as a James and Mary who had daughters Bridget and Catharine—but in reverse birth order.

There is a long list of possible baptisms yet to go—piecemeal, one by one for each Kelly child—but starting the search helped me realize the one value of continuing this quest. Each baptismal entry reveals the mother's maiden name, as well as the names of sponsors, who most likely would be siblings or in-laws of either parent. These details can help extend that family tree yet another generation—if I can find a family with all children listed, record by record, in the same general area.

With at least six children to be accounted for, such a project will take far longer than the remainder of this last day of the month. With tomorrow's post, we'll not only move to another of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, but shift from our focus on my father-in-law's ancestry to that of my own father. This final Kelly project will be duly noted and reserved to pick up once again in another research year. 

Putting the Brakes on

  

Apparently, some research projects put the brakes on progress far more than other projects. For this past month's Twelve Most Wanted project—finding the ancestral home of Irish immigrants James and Mary Kelly—progress on building my father-in-law's family tree came to an abrupt halt. Sure, I looked all over the web for a variety of online resources in search of the answer, but found very little. In the meantime, that task gobbled up the time I would otherwise have invested in building out his tree.

It is no surprise, then, to learn that I was only able to add forty eight additional relatives to my in-laws' tree in the past two weeks. That number hasn't been so low for my biweekly tallies since the beginning of this year, when I was focused on my own mother's tree. It's actually a rare fortnight that has seen any results dipping below one hundred for the time period. Still, my in-laws' tree has 36,799 documented individuals included, which is the culmination of a multi-year project in its own right.

It won't be long, though, and we'll be moving on to another research project with the coming of a new month, this time shifting our focus to my own father's side of the family tree. Before I do that, though, I'll have some concluding observations to share tomorrow about that last minute research approach I decided to try just the other day. Talk about last minute inspiration....

 

Off the Shelf: Loonshots

 

I am sometimes amused to see how my genealogy pursuits seem to mimic real life in current times. While I've been struggling to discover—if it is even possible—the origin of my father-in-law's Irish ancestors, James and Mary Kelly, I've been reading a book called Loonshots. The book comes with the subtitle, "How to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries." 

I'm not sure I'll ever be the one to cure diseases or transform industries, but one thing's sure: I often nurture crazy ideas—like pinpointing a Catholic family in Ireland with a name as impossibly common as  Kelly. Author Safi Bahcall defines a loonshot as "a neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged." Yep, that would be me.

The book itself promises to talk about "a new way of thinking about the world around us." The author speaks to "any group with a mission." While I am not a group, I do have a mission—and it sometimes seems impossible.

Of course, the book delves further into the science of physics and what it can teach us about the importance of structure—rather than organizational culture—in transforming the capabilities of groups to succeed. While the business-oriented side of me sees the importance in this shift in thinking, I can't say it applies much to my genealogical pursuits. There's something about history that remains the same, despite the centuries. But I find it ironic that my book choice for this month involves thinking about one-in-a-million chances at success, and the project I had selected for myself for this month's research pretty much mirrors that.

The Kelly family? In Ireland? That may indeed be my genealogical "loonshot." With tenacity, I'll revisit this research problem again in the future. But I can't really say I'll see any more success, the next time around. Sometimes we need to be graceful about releasing some of these puzzles back into the wilds of history from whence we once found them.

Thoughts on Wild Chases

 

Despite the fact that the attempt engendered thoughts about wild goose chases—what's a goose, and why are we chasing it anyhow?—I couldn't set that Kelly research problem aside. I had to chase that Irish immigrant Kelly family back to Ireland one last time.

Using my plan yesterday, I began the exploration. Ancestry.com, for instance, has a search setup which partially accommodated my wild plan. Searching all Irish Catholic baptismal records for each of James and Mary Kelly's children, my plan was to harvest the most promising results, baptism by baptism. Then, compiling a list from each set of results, I'd scour each lengthy list for possible locations in common shared by two or more of their children. When I'd find the one location shared by all six of the children, bingo! That would be my answer. What could possibly go wrong?

It sounded like a reasonable methodology—until I realized the many pitfalls on that research pathway. Even though I was searching for one child's name at a time, it was coupled with both parents' names—but computer searches being what they are, those machine brains take things literally. For instance, I not only had to look for "James" but also the common abbreviation "Jas." Although many Irish Catholic parishes entered their records in the English language, some adhered to the more traditional Latin; thus I had to add "Iacobus" to the search. And the English letter "J" having its own peculiarities, that also meant seeking entries labeled "Jacobus" as well.

Though not as many records seemed to have trouble finding entries for a mother named Mary, there still were some hiccups there. The most logical deviation might be to find Maria instead of Mary, but there were other considerations. Having spent time in the past looking for baptismal records for babies whose mother's name was Margaret—often abbreviated "Marg"—I knew that sometimes that "Marg" might be read incorrectly and transcribed as Mary. Hence, my search expanded to include all mothers named Margaret as well as Mary, requiring visual verification of the right name.

The actual names of the children could themselves cause trouble with searches. Second-born son Thomas might have been entered by a common abbreviation, "Thos," thus requiring me to broaden those search terms once again. And, no surprise here, Catharine might have been abbreviated as well to "Cath."

There were other complications, too. Having researched such records in the past while traveling in Ireland, I had picked up a few tips there of other anomalies to watch for. Priests doing rounds in the outback, such as might happen with circuit riders in early American history, would go from house to house, baptizing newly-arrived infants—and possibly joining in the celebration afterwards. Perhaps then, the son's name might be confused for the father's name, or the daughter for the mother, resulting in the official marking of that information on a piece of scratch paper shoved in his pocket, to be forever recorded such for our "benefit."

Since I knew the difficulties facing some Catholic parishes in Ireland during the late 1820s and 1830s when James and Mary raised their family, I started searching first with their middle children. I thought that perhaps the earlier births—such as eldest son Matthew's birth about 1825—might not have been preserved in registers lasting until our day.

Then, too, I wondered whether the later births, such as baby of the family Ann's arrival in 1839, might have occurred after the Kellys left their home parish and traveled toward the British port from which they'd eventually sail. My goal, after all, was to determine where in Ireland the Kelly family had once considered their home.

But even taking that middle of the road approach didn't yield much hope of finding the answer. The usual challenges of seeking information in those two hundred year old registers are compounded by the fact that paper does eventually crumble, or sustain ink spills, or nibbles from mice, or...or...or...

I'm far from finished with this Irish version of a quixotic mission. But while I was still in the process, it did dislodge a memory from my mind about an old story that keeper of the family stuff Uncle Ed had told me. I don't know whether to trust it or not, family legends being what they are. But when we close out the month next week, I think I'll revisit it, if nothing else but for the sake of recording it to remember for future directions on how to find James and Mary Kelly the next time I try this hide and seek research game.

Last Thoughts on Hopeless Tasks

 

How do you search for a Kelly needle in an Irish Catholic haystack? Sounds like a hopeless task to me—unless I can come up with any last thoughts on the process. And, surprise, I have—but they will likely have to wait for a future attempt at finding these Kelly ancestors.

Much like researchers have realized the value of searching for clusters of family members when seeking, for instance, an unknown ancestor's will, I can see the value in designing a search which looks for not just one baptismal record, but a cluster of the entire family's baptismal records for a specific—and limited—geographic area. In other words, while I might not be able to confidently point to the baptism of one baby named Catharine Kelly—the name of my father-in-law's great-grandmother—if I could find several Kelly family members baptized in or near the same parish during the right years, that could point to the right family for me.

Because of census records and other documentation in the Kelly family's adopted home in Lafayette, Indiana, I do know the names of James and Mary Kelly's children. Their oldest—as far as I can tell—was a son named Matthew, born about 1825. He was followed by three sisters: Rose, Catharine, and Bridget, who arrived between 1827 and 1834. His brother Thomas was born in 1837, and the baby of the family, Ann, made her appearance in 1839.

Could all of them have been born in the same location in Ireland? While I have seen signs that some family members of other branches of my father-in-law's Irish heritage might have moved from one townland to another, it is far more likely that geographical changes would be minimal than widespread. What are the chances that all of them could have been baptized in the same church?

As far as I know, there is currently no search protocol to find such a cluster in one set of keystrokes, so I'll be left to the grunt work of comparing results, one baptism at a time, across the whole of the island of Ireland. But it would be a possible plan to help flush out some possible families to target for future research efforts on that Kelly family's origin. And, with not many other alternatives available to me, even an option filled with repetitive busy work may be better than giving up entirely.