Genealogy Story – What was that name again?

I was working on putting together a family tree for someone recently, and I to get started I asked for the names of their parents and grandparents as well as places and rough estimates of dates of birth. One of the grandparents was Regina Andrews with a birth year of approximately 1915. Okay, I thought, that’s a pretty English sounding name. So, I thought that I would perhaps find a long lineage in the US with an eventual tie back to England. But I was very wrong!

I quickly located Regina in the 1940 census when she was married. But she was listed as age 34, meaning the birth year I had been given was off (not unusual). It was also a coincidence that she was one of the people selected to give additional information that year (just two people out of the 40 on each page of the census). So, it showed that her parents were both from Pennsylvania. Things were starting to take shape.

But then as I started going back through prior year census records (1930, 1920, 1910), it got quite confusing. In 1930, I found her with her parents and two siblings. But her parents (who would have been the ones giving the census taker information that year) listed her father, John W Andrews, as being from Germany (and his parents being from Germany as well), and her mother, Margaret A Andrews, as being from England as well as her parents. Then in the 1920 census it showed her father being from Poland. And in the 1910 census it showed her father as being from “Russ Polish”, i.e., the Russian part of Poland!

[Andrews 1930 census]

[Andrews 1920 census]

[Andrews 1910 census]

Now, I had seen this combination of countries and changes before in some of my wife’s ancestors. The country we now call Poland has gone through a lot of changes over the years. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it has very desirable ports on the Baltic Sea. And second, the western part of the country has many German speakers as well as Polish speakers, and the eastern part of the country has many Russian speakers. So, it has been the subject of conquest and subjugation by German on the west, Russia on the east, and Austria on the south (which is landlocked and for which those ports on the Baltic would be very valuable). So, it appeared that the indication of “Pennsylvania” in the 1940 census was incorrect and that John Andrews was very likely from the eastern part of Poland as that part of the country would have gone through the change of ownership indicated on the successive census records. But John Andrews is a decidedly English name, not a Polish one. Did he change his name?

I’ve noted before in my blog that even when only trying to construct an ancestral tree that it’s important to look not only at the other information in the census records, but to look at information on other individuals in the family. Thus, I began looking at Regina’s siblings to see what else I could find. Pay dirt!

Because Regina’s brother Clements had been born in Pennsylvania, there was a birth record online for him. And this birth record was particularly revealing. It gave the names of his (and Regina’s) parents as John W Andrzejenski and Margaret A Extitus with birth place of Russian Poland and England respectively. Now Andrzejenski is decidedly a very Polish name, especially compared to Andrews.

[Andrews birth certificate]

Now to see if I can get the names of John’s parents. I had his year of birth as roughly 1876 and an immigration year of 1891 (from the 1920 census), so I went looking at ship’s registries for that period. I did manage to find him – under the name Johann Andres – coming with his older sister Bertha. But there was no other information about him. So, I had to end my search there.

But I still wanted to trace the mother of Regina, Margaret Extitus, and her English ancestry. After all, that was consistent in all the census records. But assumption turned out to be wrong as well. She was born in about 1879 and immigrated to the US in 1881 when she was only 1-2 years old. And I was still bothered by wondering how a Polish immigrant would meet and marry a girl from England! I was initially unable to find any other records of her. Since she arrived the year after the 1880 census, the 1890 census was lost in a fire, and she was married by the 1900 census, I would not be able to locate her in any federal census records with her family. But, rather fortunately, there was a state census taken in NJ in 1895 – so I started looking there. I was initially unsuccessful at locating Margaret, so with Extitus being a rather unusual name, I removed Margaret and just looked for families with that name. I found the family – but with Margaret listed as “Maggie Extidus” (with the typical misspelling of the last name but with a different first name which is why my initial search was unsuccessful), and her parents and younger siblings.

[Extitus 1895 census]

I then found an entry in the 1910 federal census for Margaret/Maggie’s father. In it he lists his and his parent’s place of birth as “Russ(Pol) Lithuania”. This rather convoluted location is indicative of being in the far NE corner of Poland where the modern-day Poland comes together with Russia and Lithuania. Again, one of those places where there has been much border shifting over the years.

[Extitus 1910 census]

So, at last we have a pretty complete story – and not an English one at all that I thought I had at the beginning. Here is the synopsis:

Matthew/Martin (he has different first names in different records) Extitus was from NE Poland. He was born in 1847 and sometime in the mid-1870s he married a local girl, Anna Pushinski, who was a few years younger. They emigrated to England where they only stayed a few years (after the 1871 census but leaving in early 1881 before the 1881 census). While there they had a daughter, Maggie. When she was not yet 2, they emigrated again to the US in early 1881. Here they settled and had two more children. (Note that Maggie only remembers that she was born in England and thinks that’s where her parents were from too – which is why she said that on the later census forms).

Meanwhile, the Andrzejenski family was living in western Poland. Johann was born in 1876 and, for reasons not known, emigrated to the US in 1891 with his older sister. He quickly learned English, then in 1897, at age 21/22, married another girl from the local Russian community in New Jersey, Maggie Extitus. Johann changed his first name to John, Maggie changed hers to Margaret, and the two of them changed their last name to Andrews – all very much more “American” sounding. They had three children, Alfred, Regina, and Clements, the first born in NY, the latter two born in PA.

In the end, this was a somewhat typical story of families emigrating to the US from eastern Europe in the latter part of the 19^th century, learning English, becoming citizens, and participating in the “melting pot” that this country was at the time. But it was certainly not the story of an English family that I thought I was researching when I began. And that’s some of the fun of genealogical research – finding unexpected stories in our ancestral trees!