Until recently, my research on collateral lines has been
limited to those living in the US – my great aunts and uncles The discovery of distant Polish relatives in
the US got me busy looking at collateral lines from a 3rd great
grandfather born in Poland in 1779.
I should have done this a long time ago! On the other hand, the information I found
may not have been easily available a long time ago.
Using information from The Poznan Project and BaSIA I was able
to locate and download records from The State Archive in Poznan. Adding this
data to my tree on Ancestry.com brought up a forest of shaky leaf hints.
My 3rd great grandfather, Johann Ganas, lived in
the small village of Czerlejno which was the estate of a Polish nobleman.
Johann’s sons had to look elsewhere for work but they stayed within a 10-mile
radius of their birthplace. In the next generation, some families moved farther
away but still within 20 miles of Czerlejno.
The Ancestry hints showed me that 3 Ganas families came to
the US between 1887 and 1891. Two of them settled in Buffalo, NY; and one in
Milwaukee, WI. My grandfather, Ignatz Ganas arrived in 1893 as a single man and
settled in St. Paul, MN. Maximillian
Ganas, a Roman Catholic priest, arrived in Detroit, MI in 1911.
WOW!! What fun! I have more Polish cousins in the US than I’d
ever imagined. With ongoing research, I
hope to be able to find living distant cousins.
Collateral research can be difficult, but sometimes produces fascinating stories and important genealogy leads. Isn't it wonderful what these new sources of information reveal?
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