Whoo hoo!!!!
I hit a genealogical gold mine last night, and still feeling like a super detective today. :)
I have been helping my cousin Rabbit to try and track down his dad's family. Here is what we started with. His grandmother, Pauline M (married name) came to America in the early part of the 1900s from Lithuania with Rabbit's uncle Anthony, who was a small child. His grandfather Joseph M came a few years before, from a town he listed as Serios. We had her birth date from her US death record, but those are notoriously unreliable. We thought her father's name was Vincent, and that she had a brother also named Vincent who came over. We knew the names of her kids. And Rabbit thought his grandmother was from Kaunas. He had heard that her father worked in the shipping industry.
So, after a fair amount of searching, last year, I thought I found evidence of Pauline's immigration via the Ellis Island website, where she is listed as Paulina Milkowitz, the Polish version of her Lithuanian married name. (And dear God, Lithuanian names are hard. They are not only Americanized but they are sometimes restyled in the Polish or Russian equivalents, which can be quite different.And for women, the last name gets a different suffix depending on if she is single or married. Argh.) She was listed with her son Antanas (Anthony) and was joining her husband Joseph in New York, where they briefly lived before relocating to Pennsylvania. The city she came from as listed on the ship's roster was hard to read, but eventually I determined that it was a tiny farming town called Paserninkai in the south of Lithuania - which was near a large body of water, a lake called Seirios - and a nearby town called Seirijai.
Rabbit was skeptical, as he had never heard of this place. He had always heard Kaunas.
What I found in my years of doing genealogy is that people tend to say they are from the nearest big city, or even, in the case of immigrants, they will sometimes say where they left the Old Country from. I don't typically tell people I grew up in Arbutus, which is a tiny suburb of southwest Baltimore. I just say I'm from Baltimore. My mother for years thought that her mother's family was from County Cork, Ireland. No, I discovered, they LEFT from County Cork. They were actually from a tiny village called Blacksticks that my mom had not heard of...but more distant relatives HAD heard of the place. So I was pretty sure that Paulina was living in Paserninkai when she left Lithuania, at the very least, not Kaunos.
I started looking for the closest Catholic churches near Paserninkai, and found Holy Mary of the Scapular Catholic Church. That would be the place to check for things like baptismal records. However, my understanding was that many of the Lithuanian records were lost in the many political upheavals the area went through as well as wars, and that most of the extant records were kept at a genealogical repository in Vilnius. You could write there and pay a tidy sum for the research to be done, but the wait time was over two years and you needed specific dates and parishes, which we were unsure of.
The other issue - most of the records from that time period were in either Polish, Lithuanian, or worst, Russian, so you are dealing with not only a different language, but a different alphabet! Ay yi yi, and I thought dealing with the Latin in Catholic records was bad.
I had joined a Lithuanian genealogy message board, and got regular updates there. Most of them were individuals trying to puzzle out their family trees, but occasionally some general information was shared that was helpful, so I kept up with the board. This week, I read that new files from the repository in Vilnius were starting to be uploaded onto the internet, and that if you had a parish name, you might get lucky enough to find pertinent records.
I went to the Lithuanian records site, which of course, is in Lithuanian, but they had a somewhat bad translation button into English for the newest files page. I scanned it, and sure enough there was Holy Mary of the Scapular Church in Seirijai. I was able to figure out the Lithuanian words for "birth" "death" and "marriage" so that I could at least tell what type of file it was and what years, and sure enough they did have records for around the time we thought Paulina was born, so I went looking.
And then came the next big roadblock. The writing was in a very antiquated and rather difficult to read handwriting. Was that an R or a K? An M or a W? Hard to tell. And of course, all of it was in another language that I could not read. I skimmed the book online and was able to tell which pages were indexes, just by the setup of text. So I started scanning those for Pauline's maiden name, which was Ajauskas...a name we were never quite sure of the spelling. Over years of research I found Pauline's maiden name Anglicized about six ways to Sunday: Ajaskas, Eyeowskas, Agesky, Ayewskis, Iowskus, you name it. So I was looking for anything remotely like Ajauskas, and finding nothing.
I then realized that at least part of the entries were using Russian script. Off to find the Russian alphabet! Still, it was very hard to tell if I was coming up with a last name even close to Pauline's. So I queried the list of folks on the Lithuania boards, and someone wrote to tell me that Ajauskas would be more like Aevski in Russian, as the E letter makes a Y sound. So I convert Aevski to the closest I can estimate in the Russian alphabet and start scanning again, but hitting a huge brick wall between the difficult handwriting, the lack of Russian language and the alphabet substitutions. Still, I called my cousin Rabbit that morning to let him know the records were online, and if he had an acquaintance who spoke Russian, perhaps he could find someone to look at the records for him.
Later that day, a kindly man named Gedrius from Lithuania who occasionally peruses the board wrote to me to tell me that he had looked through the records for me, and though he did not find Pauline, there were lots of other Ajauskases, maybe they were cousins. I wrote him back and asked if he could tell me the first names of the cousins, as we could see if any shared the first names of Pauline's children and maybe make a connection.
Last night, I got a wonderful email back from Gedrius. He had made a mistake. Pauline WAS there. Because the records were done via the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian, her birthdate was off - late September rather than early October, so he missed it during his initial scan. He also found the birth record of her brother Vincent, AND the marriage record of her parents, which when translated also gave the names of all four of her grandparents!
What a treasure trove of information!!! I was able to go back to the entry of Pauline's birth and sure enough, I could read the name of her father, Vincentas Ajeski, and her mother Ona (Anna) Jasinskaite. I never ever would have found them trying to scan all those Russian words on my own. Gedrius even sent me the names of the other Ajauskas entries in that ledger who are likely cousins, as they have the same godparents as Pauline.
Now I may be able to find more connections for Rabbit in the States if any of Pauline's cousins also immigrated. I called him late last night and he was in disbelief that I was able to find and send him the scan of his grandmother's original birth record in Russian from 1888 in this tiny Lithuanian fishing / farming village, with so much more info. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, a kind Lithuanian man to whom I am much indebted for the translation, and some tenacious sleuthing over the years from yours truly.
In genealogical research, you hit so many frustrating seeming dead ends, that when you can knock down a brick wall - especially a brick wall over half a world away - it feels pretty awesome! :)
I have been helping my cousin Rabbit to try and track down his dad's family. Here is what we started with. His grandmother, Pauline M (married name) came to America in the early part of the 1900s from Lithuania with Rabbit's uncle Anthony, who was a small child. His grandfather Joseph M came a few years before, from a town he listed as Serios. We had her birth date from her US death record, but those are notoriously unreliable. We thought her father's name was Vincent, and that she had a brother also named Vincent who came over. We knew the names of her kids. And Rabbit thought his grandmother was from Kaunas. He had heard that her father worked in the shipping industry.
So, after a fair amount of searching, last year, I thought I found evidence of Pauline's immigration via the Ellis Island website, where she is listed as Paulina Milkowitz, the Polish version of her Lithuanian married name. (And dear God, Lithuanian names are hard. They are not only Americanized but they are sometimes restyled in the Polish or Russian equivalents, which can be quite different.And for women, the last name gets a different suffix depending on if she is single or married. Argh.) She was listed with her son Antanas (Anthony) and was joining her husband Joseph in New York, where they briefly lived before relocating to Pennsylvania. The city she came from as listed on the ship's roster was hard to read, but eventually I determined that it was a tiny farming town called Paserninkai in the south of Lithuania - which was near a large body of water, a lake called Seirios - and a nearby town called Seirijai.
Rabbit was skeptical, as he had never heard of this place. He had always heard Kaunas.
What I found in my years of doing genealogy is that people tend to say they are from the nearest big city, or even, in the case of immigrants, they will sometimes say where they left the Old Country from. I don't typically tell people I grew up in Arbutus, which is a tiny suburb of southwest Baltimore. I just say I'm from Baltimore. My mother for years thought that her mother's family was from County Cork, Ireland. No, I discovered, they LEFT from County Cork. They were actually from a tiny village called Blacksticks that my mom had not heard of...but more distant relatives HAD heard of the place. So I was pretty sure that Paulina was living in Paserninkai when she left Lithuania, at the very least, not Kaunos.
I started looking for the closest Catholic churches near Paserninkai, and found Holy Mary of the Scapular Catholic Church. That would be the place to check for things like baptismal records. However, my understanding was that many of the Lithuanian records were lost in the many political upheavals the area went through as well as wars, and that most of the extant records were kept at a genealogical repository in Vilnius. You could write there and pay a tidy sum for the research to be done, but the wait time was over two years and you needed specific dates and parishes, which we were unsure of.
The other issue - most of the records from that time period were in either Polish, Lithuanian, or worst, Russian, so you are dealing with not only a different language, but a different alphabet! Ay yi yi, and I thought dealing with the Latin in Catholic records was bad.
I had joined a Lithuanian genealogy message board, and got regular updates there. Most of them were individuals trying to puzzle out their family trees, but occasionally some general information was shared that was helpful, so I kept up with the board. This week, I read that new files from the repository in Vilnius were starting to be uploaded onto the internet, and that if you had a parish name, you might get lucky enough to find pertinent records.
I went to the Lithuanian records site, which of course, is in Lithuanian, but they had a somewhat bad translation button into English for the newest files page. I scanned it, and sure enough there was Holy Mary of the Scapular Church in Seirijai. I was able to figure out the Lithuanian words for "birth" "death" and "marriage" so that I could at least tell what type of file it was and what years, and sure enough they did have records for around the time we thought Paulina was born, so I went looking.
And then came the next big roadblock. The writing was in a very antiquated and rather difficult to read handwriting. Was that an R or a K? An M or a W? Hard to tell. And of course, all of it was in another language that I could not read. I skimmed the book online and was able to tell which pages were indexes, just by the setup of text. So I started scanning those for Pauline's maiden name, which was Ajauskas...a name we were never quite sure of the spelling. Over years of research I found Pauline's maiden name Anglicized about six ways to Sunday: Ajaskas, Eyeowskas, Agesky, Ayewskis, Iowskus, you name it. So I was looking for anything remotely like Ajauskas, and finding nothing.
I then realized that at least part of the entries were using Russian script. Off to find the Russian alphabet! Still, it was very hard to tell if I was coming up with a last name even close to Pauline's. So I queried the list of folks on the Lithuania boards, and someone wrote to tell me that Ajauskas would be more like Aevski in Russian, as the E letter makes a Y sound. So I convert Aevski to the closest I can estimate in the Russian alphabet and start scanning again, but hitting a huge brick wall between the difficult handwriting, the lack of Russian language and the alphabet substitutions. Still, I called my cousin Rabbit that morning to let him know the records were online, and if he had an acquaintance who spoke Russian, perhaps he could find someone to look at the records for him.
Later that day, a kindly man named Gedrius from Lithuania who occasionally peruses the board wrote to me to tell me that he had looked through the records for me, and though he did not find Pauline, there were lots of other Ajauskases, maybe they were cousins. I wrote him back and asked if he could tell me the first names of the cousins, as we could see if any shared the first names of Pauline's children and maybe make a connection.
Last night, I got a wonderful email back from Gedrius. He had made a mistake. Pauline WAS there. Because the records were done via the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian, her birthdate was off - late September rather than early October, so he missed it during his initial scan. He also found the birth record of her brother Vincent, AND the marriage record of her parents, which when translated also gave the names of all four of her grandparents!
What a treasure trove of information!!! I was able to go back to the entry of Pauline's birth and sure enough, I could read the name of her father, Vincentas Ajeski, and her mother Ona (Anna) Jasinskaite. I never ever would have found them trying to scan all those Russian words on my own. Gedrius even sent me the names of the other Ajauskas entries in that ledger who are likely cousins, as they have the same godparents as Pauline.
Now I may be able to find more connections for Rabbit in the States if any of Pauline's cousins also immigrated. I called him late last night and he was in disbelief that I was able to find and send him the scan of his grandmother's original birth record in Russian from 1888 in this tiny Lithuanian fishing / farming village, with so much more info. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, a kind Lithuanian man to whom I am much indebted for the translation, and some tenacious sleuthing over the years from yours truly.
In genealogical research, you hit so many frustrating seeming dead ends, that when you can knock down a brick wall - especially a brick wall over half a world away - it feels pretty awesome! :)