Granny Never Knew She was Older Than She Thought!

My Favorite Discovery: Maria Paprocka Skalska's Birth Record

Trust in Intuition

I have heard the urging of my intuition many times in my life and every single time something amazing happens afterward, I am still awed by the experience. Oftentimes ‘Big Renata,’ my ego, jumps in and tries to think things through, and then usually the opportunity passes. In the genealogy world, one can find a myriad of webinars and books focused on trying to break down the brick walls in one’s family tree...those ancestor’s who no matter where you search, you can not find the document you need to establish a fact. I have many such brick walls, but finding my Granny's actual birth date haunted me ever since I became captivated by genealogy. I could never have imagined that listening to 'Little Renata,' my intuition, would help me break through it one day! 

Portrait of Maria Paprocka-Skalska at age 69, Krakow, Poland 1971,
painted by Helena Skalska-Potaczek

The Wrong Date on All Documents

Conspicuously absent from the pedigree chart assigned by Mr Cobb in the 8th grade was the name of the Granny I had known as a little girl: Maria Paprocka-Skalska, nicknamed Mania. The simple reason is that she was not my blood grandmother, but rather my grand aunt, who raised my two mothers Zofia and Helena when my grandmother died at the age of 39. Due to the circumstances of war and being orphaned, Granny Mania lived her whole life not knowing for sure what her true birthdate was and thus she "picked" and clelebrated a date that seemed to be close, 3 August 1904. When she learned that the Parish church in the town she believed herself to be born in had burned down and with it the records, she had to have friends "attest" to knowing the facts of her birth in order to get her official documents. Of course these friends had not known her as a child, but obliged her to help out. So, all of her official documents including birth, marriage and passport issued in Poland, all have the incorrect information. In the US, her death certificate and even her headstone, reflect this as well. 

Polish government document issued with incorrect birth date.

What She Did Not Know...

About thirteen years after she passed away, I read a recently published book called Polish Roots by Rosemary Chorzempa and was instantly hooked. What I learned in those pages blew me away because I learned that Granny was mistaken. What she did not know is that every Parish priest in Austro-Hungarian occupied Galicia had to send a copy of all records to the diocese at the end of every year. The idea that a copy of her birth record *had* to exist somewhere began to germinate, and I began to voraciously learn about genealogical methodology. I made a vow that, before I died, I would find this out for her and correct it on her headstone if need be. 

1904 listed as her birth year on her headstone at the Shrine of Czestochowa in Doylestowm, PA.

The Search Begins

By 1997, I had learned about a repository in Warsaw that held metrical records from the areas of Galicia that had been ceded to the USSR at the close of WWII. I wrote to that repository with all of the information I knew regarding my grandmother's family and waited. Three months later I heard back, not from the repository, but from the Polish Consulate in New York informing me that of the eleven siblings of interest to me, they found records for three of them and would send them to me as soon as they received a check for $175. At the time, that was almost two weeks pay for me, but I sent it out and waited with bated breath. What I received was unexpected. One of the certificates was for my own grandmother, created from the copy of the original certificate I had sent *to them!* The other two were for a brother and a sister, but not Maria. Even worse, they were formulaic extracts, not photocopies of the actual pages in the metrical books. I was bitterly disappointed.

The three birth extracts I paid a king's ransom for, and still no information on Granny's birth.

I Do Not Give Up

After that, life happened. I had children, cared for my ailing second mom, and began to hear about wonderful things happening on the internet. Records were beginning to be digitized and shared on sites such as Ancestry and one could look up and order microfilm online, saving a trip to a Family History Center, which was not always close by. In 2015, I ordered the microfilm for Toustobaby, the parish Granny believed she was born in, drove an hour to the LDS affiliate library in Pittsfield, MA and meticulously searched the entire reel. Not a single Paprocki was mentioned in almost a decade of records. I was perlexed. Where were the entries for the two siblings that I paid a king's ransom for? I was crushed and at a loss as to where to continue to look. I was out of ideas and in I 2018 eagerly signed up for a week long course entitled "Tackling Tough Research Problems" at the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh. Finding her birth date and place were, of course, my research objectives. It was a dream come true to attend and the classes were amazing, and yet, I was no closer to knocking down this brick wall.

It had been twenty years since that disappionting packet from the Consulate and I was beginning to think I might not live long enough for her record to be indexed on Geneteka, a Polish indexing website staffed by volunteers. I continued to work on my husband's genealogy and researching Granny's two sisters who emigrated to the US and even tracked down some long lost second cousins! But the problem of Granny's birth was constantly in the back of my mind. Through local Polish Genealogy conferences I heard of an agency in Poland that would do research in the Ukraine and I began to toy with the idea of investing the $500 towards this goal. I thought I’d let the idea percolate a bit, when one day I watched a webinar specific to Galicia which mentioned the Status Animarum books, basically a census of the parishioners in a parish.

The Auspicious Day: 10 March 2021

Intrigued, I decided to try FamilySearch again and see if these Family Registers existed for Toustobaby. Despite my negative results in searching the records in the past, I could not give up on the place that Granny had been convinced was where she was born. A list of microfilms popped up and I noted two record sets with the correct date range which to my delight, were now accessible from a home computer! “Little Renata” was insisting that I go back and check these digital images in case I missed something that first time in 2015. The lack of the known two siblings records had constantly nagged in the back of my head! Where were they? 

I began in the year 1900 even though I knew that would be nearly impossible since my grandmother had been born in December 1899, but it allowed my eyes to adjust to the handwriting style of the priest. The first set of records was as before...nothing. But, there was another item which caught my eye. This set of records mentioned "Births of people not belonging to the parish and of converts 1881-1905." The date range was a match and 'Little Renata,' despite the late hour, was insisting that I search them. 

Eureka!

The sloping slightly heavily inked writing was thankfully very neatly written, but by this time my eyes were burning and I knew I had to get to bed as I had a morning doctor's appointment the next day. I went through about 10 pages, and shocked by the late hour, vowed that I would only do one more image, but when I finished that one I was compelled to click onto the next page. I had been fastidiously reading the parents column looking for the surname Paprocki all this time but the thought popped in my head to search for just Maria under the less crowded name column. Oh, how much easier it was on the eyes, why hadn’t I thought of this 3 hours ago!. By that time it was nearing 3:30am and I knew I had to be sensible and get some sleep. “One more,” Little Renata said. Ok, but this was truly it! I scanned the left side of the register... nothing and then I looked at the right side and about 2/3 of the way down there was another Maria. There had already been so many, but I dragged my eyes to the parents column. The first word was Marcellus! My heart skipped a beat. There it was! Marcellus Paprocki and Constantia Pryznerska, written in the most beautiful clear cursive writing that there was absolutely no chance of a mistake. Eureka!

That Sweet Moment

“Oh my God, I found it, I found…” I kept saying over and over to myself uncontrollably. Tears coursed down my cheeks as the reality of what had just happened burrowed into my brain. “Granny, I found it, I found it!” played like a skipping record in my head. I don’t know how long I sat there taking screenshots of the page, zoomed in, very zoomed in, zoomed out. I did not want to ever lose this image. Ever. 

1902. She was born August 8, 1902. Five days plus 2 years off of what she had always celebrated. Granny had lived a full 80 years, not 78. I laughed and thought, well how about that! Thinking you are two years younger than you really are!? And to think that none of her siblings ever corrected her thinking. It boggles my mind. And the town? Konczaki Nowe, is 12 km away from the town she thought she was born in. The record was there in the metrical books associated with Toustobaby, yet set enough apart that if not for my "Little Renata" insisting I try again, the record may never have been found. 

Twenty-seven years after I began my genealogy journey and vowed to find the date, and almost thrirty-nine years after Granny passed away, I finally found it. I kept my promise and the moment was sweeter than just about anything else in my life!

Birth and baptismal record for Maria Paprocka. Place: Konczaki Nowe. Birth date: 8 August 1902. Baptism date: 17 August 1902.

As for those two siblings' records from the Consulate...I still have not found them as of yet! Isn't genealogy crazy?