Jason's Genealogy Blog

Every time one Mystery is Solved, Three more take its Place

2010-02-05T17:21:00.000-08:00

I finally found the church record for the death of my ggg grandmother, Marianna Mroz in 1908. It was at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago. However, it says that she was born in Gostycyn, Tuchola, West Prussia. I know that she lived in Starezyn, Juncewo, Posen; at least she got married there twice and had at least four children. It makes me wonder why she would say she was born in a different village. Unfortunately, the baptism entries for that village are not microfilmed and probably do not exist. And to make matters worse, I am not even sure what her maiden name is. I have seen at least four different variations of it in the few records I have of her that list a maiden name, Januszewski, Janoska, Janusziak, and Janowszka. Anyone who understands Polish knows that these are fairly independent surnames of each other, so I don't even have that basic information. I guess the search continues.

1808 Marriage Find

2010-01-20T20:29:00.000-08:00

My focus right now in Polish records is the Prussian partition, and the other day I was working with the parish records of Trzemeszno. I was browsing the death records hoping to find my ggg grandmother who died some time before 1878, according to my gg grandfather's marriage record, and I re-discovered that the registers of 1808-1809 survived the blazes of war and time. Anyone who has studied the history of Poland knows that 1806 was the year that Jan Henryk Dabrowski made his famous march to liberate the Poznan province from its Prussian overlords. In 1807 the area got annexed into the Congress Kingdom of Poland, and Poznan adopted the Napoleonic code for record-keeping.

The code is bad for me because I do not read or speak Polish, but it is an awesome resource, especially considering that before 1800 the records get scarcer and more illegible. Well, I did not find a direct ancestor in the 1808-1809 book, but I did find one of his siblings. My gggg grandfather, Augustus, had a brother named Stanislaw, and Stanislaw got married in 1808. I did not translate the whole record, but I saw that my ggggg grandfather, Anthony, was a gospodarz (land owner) and thus so was Stanislaw. Hopefully I can get this thing translated to see if Anthony or his wife Mary were still alive in 1808. What's even more incredible is that Stanislaw's baptism record was attached to the marriage document! Yes! A copy of his actual baptism record from 1779 was attached in the book. I know that it is original because the handwriting is identical in 1808 and 1779 (I saw it when I found Augustus' baptism record in 1772.)

This was truly a remarkable find. Thank you Dabrowski for liberating Poznan province (albeit for a short time) and thank you to Napoleon for instituting his code in Poznan (albeit for a short time.) I learned more from that one record than all of the baptism documents for all of Anthony's children. It doesn't help that the priest labels everyone "laborioso" or "nobilis" with no indiciation what kind of "laborioso" the people are... The records of Trzemeszno go back to 1588, so I am hoping to continue my line as far as I can. Unfortunately, they lived in the surrounding lands... the city records are better, but hey, just the fact that a parish's records exist from 1588 in Poland is incredible when you consider Poland's harsh weather, wars, and lackluster opinions when it comes to records.

An Introduction

2010-01-13T15:32:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems like the current trend with genealogy is to create a blog to tell the world about your progress, so I decided to hop on the bandwagon and make one. This is actually my third blog, but the first two I only used in high school. I'll throw a shout out to Chris Gales, my biology teacher, who got me interested in the world of blogging. Thanks for incorporating the latest technology in our class, an innovating teaching method to say the least.

A little bit about myself - my name is Jason, and I live in Illinois. I'm currently a sophomore at Benedictine University, and (obviously) my passion is genealogy. I got involved in family history about a year and a half ago, and I have been working dilligently since that time to gather as much material as I can about my ancestors. I think that this will be a good spot to shout out my triumphs (as well as vent) because as most genealogists know, non-genealogists really don't care about this stuff hahaha.

Hopefully, I will post fairly regularly in this blog. I am a history major with minors in secondary ed and Spanish, so figuring out what my family's place in history is right up my alley. What is my goal with all of this genealogy work? Well, I guess you can say it's to go as far back as I can. The records stop at different times in different places, so we will see where that takes me. My Spanish helps me considerably because Catholic church records are usually in Latin. Plus it helps to have a good knowledge of history in order to see what was going on at the time.

All in all, I know that this is an unusual hobby for someone my age. Don't worry, every time a new volunteer is at the Family History Center in Naperville, they always ask me if I know how to use the microfilm machine. Ah the stereotypes of my age (and having a boyish face doesn't help.....) I don't know if anyone will ever read this, but it feels good to get my thoughts down on paper errr keyboard. A show on PBS, Ghostwriter, once said that it helps to write your ideas down because it will help you to organize them. How wise they were. Hopefully this blog will do just that for me.