back to Family Stories, Fall 202

by Ed Lacinski

My background knowledge of my family past my grandparents has always been rather lacking. This is true especially on my paternal side of the family. We have records of my grandfather Eugene Lacinski of him living in both Philadelphia and Germany shortly after his concentration camp was liberated by the allied forces. But anything before him is a complete black hole. Problem solving is a huge piece of putting together a family tree. Because not all my family members will fall into my lap or into Ancestry’s Databases. So at the time of writing this the goal was to try to make headway on my paternal line, specifically, the patrilineal line. But I was able to make progress on my paternal grandmother’s side of the family because I found a family member that had a tree that involved her sister and was able to trace back from there. My findings were proven via ThruLines which showed that I had a DNA match to those people in the other family tree due to someone adding their DNA to the dataset. But there was still nothing to go off of for my paternal grandfather’s line. So I decided to do what is best and consult with my professors. I decided to use third party sites that match DNA results to other databases and data sets. 

After a good deal of waiting for the third party platforms to process and analyse my DNA, I received some interesting results. On the platform MyHeritage, I have DNA matches and relatives in Finland, Germany, France, Sweden, UK, Canada, Norway, and basically everywhere else in eastern Europe. My ancestry did have a big presence within Eastern Europe, but I interpreted it as most of my heritage comes from Poland. Not that I could have this much family in Eastern Europe. For the most part Ancestry has been only matching me with other US based family members but MyHeritage has been matching me with the US family AND the Eastern European people as well.

But these could only get me so far. Some of what i need is is some guess working, one example of what I did this by looking up graves in all of Poland that contain my last name then used the my grandfather (paternal) to cross reference which people would be in the age to have a child, then I shortened the list even more by being realistic about the age and brought the number from three to two because I do not believe that someone would be thirty-five and having their first, and evidently only, child. But those turn up to be dead ends.

It is quite strange that while the documents may have been destroyed when my grandfather was in a concentration camp, I have been told stories from my sister when she would grow up in my grandmother’s home unknown women would knock on my grandmother’s door saying they were pregnant with my grand father’s child. So if he has been actually committing these acts there should be a distant relative that I would share DNA with and I would get some results. Using the collateral relatives can help solve some mysteries through the process of elimination.