Surprise! It's a girl

During the past few months I've learned a lot about my family in Poland with Dom's help. I thought that I had a pretty good understanding of Anna's life, but there was one more surprise in store.

In July Dom visited the State Archives in Przemsyl while at the same time the Archdiocese records, also in Przemsyl, were searched. The focus on the search was specifically to find a link between Anna and Count Hompesch, or any information that would indicate for certain who the father of Frank and Mary Janusz could be.

Piles of records searched by Dom in Przemsyl

No information like that was found in the state archives. There were no deeds that would indicate that Count Hompesch awarded Anna any land in Krzywdy ("The Wrongs"), but also no indication that he did likewise with any other women.

But something very surprising was found by the researcher at the Archdiocese Archives. The record of a birth of Anna's third illegitimate baby!

The birth record of Brygida. The left-hand column for the father's name is left blank

The baby was a girl, named Brygida and born January 27, 1887 in the house in Rudnik where Mary and Frank had both been born. Records were then searched up to 1905 to see if Brygida had died in her youth, but none were found. The conclusion we have made at this time is that Brygida elected to stay behind in Rudnik while her mother, stepfather and five siblings all immigrated to America. Brygida would have been 17-18 years old at the time her family left. Hopefully further research will tell us what became of Brygida and why she chose to stay behind. It is possible that Brygida is the one who sent letters to family in America. Our relatives in New England were sending letters back to Polish relatives up until the 1950s, a full 50 years after immigration.

In addition to Anna's new daughter, we learned more about Anna's childhood: She had three sisters Franciszka, Catharina and Maria and one brother, Franciszek. In addition to her parents, we now know the names of all of her grandparents as well.

More information regarding William has also been learned. William was Anna's last son whose parentage was a mystery as he was born in 1904, eleven months after Ignacy sailed for America, when Anna was nearly 50 years old.

William's birth record lists him as the illegitimate son of Elisabeth Jasnosz, whose surname is so similar to Anna Janusz's it seems that they must be related and the name simply misspelled. In America we are used to seeing our names in census records misspelled year after year by sloppy census workers, but in Poland the records were kept by parish priests, and they were done meticulously. There were no miss-spellings with their last names. A familial relationship between Anna and Elisabeth could not be found.

For a time we considered that William may be Anna's fourth illegitimate child, born during her marriage to Ignacy but at a time when he couldn't have possibly fathered her baby. The similar names made it seem the birth record was possibly fabricated to disguise Anna as the baby's mother and protect her from the shame of having another man's baby while her husband was away, blazing a trail for a new life in America.

Cleverly, Dom reverse engineered the search for William's parentage by looking up information on the inhabitants of House 449, which was the home he was born in, according to the church register. The home was occupied by the Jasnosz family, Elisabeth's parents Joannes and Agnes. Her brother Franciszek continued to live in the house in adulthood and raise his own children there.

So, if the Janusz and Jasnosz families simply have very similar names as nothing more than a mere coincidence, how did Baby William end up leaving Poland in the possession of Anna Janusz Busta?

The answer may be found in the research Dom has done on the Janusz family homes. There are three homes mentioned in the records: House 216 is the family home where Anna was born and grew up with her siblings. Anna's first four children were born in the same house, Frank in 1881, Mary in 1884, Brygida in 1887 and finally John in 1892 after Anna had married Ignacy. Anna's second legitimate son and last biological child Lewis would be born in House 242.

But there was another family living in the home where Anna had the majority of her children, too. Anna's sister Franciszka and her husband Clemens Socha also raised their own family in House 216. 

After I received the information from Dom regarding William's parentage, I had a thought that perhaps Anna and William had traveled to America under his birth name, Jasnosz. We have never been able to find the manifest of the ship that brought Anna and William to America, and it always seemed odd that she would choose to travel alone with the baby while Mary and Stanley brought over 11 year old John and 9 year old Lewis.

A search on Ancestry didn't reveal Anna and William, but I did find that at least 6 members of the Jasnosz family from Rudnik immigrated to America about the time that the Janusz/Busta family did as well. And the manifest of one Michael Jasnosz revealed something else interesting. In the column where the immigrant is asked to whom and where they are traveling he answered that he was immigrating to Wakefield Massachusetts, to live with his brother in law Ferdinand Socha.

Michael Jasnosz's ship manifest, showing his intention to move in with his brother-in-law Ferdinand Socha in Wakefield, Massachusetts.

I had just learned from Dom earlier in the morning  that Anna Janusz Busta was raising her family in the same home where her sister was raising her own family with her husband Clemens Socha, and now here was the evidence that Clemens Socha and his family were also related to the family of William Jasnosz.

It seems that quite possibly Baby William was passed from the Jasnosz family, to the Socha family, and then to Anna, who took him to America in order to guarantee a better life for both William and Elisabeth, his mother, who remained in Poland.