The Dziurzyński Brickwall

I have been searching for years for information on the ancestors of my paternal grandmother, Marianna Dziurzyńska .  When I hired a professional genealogist in Poland to find records of my ancestors in Dubiecko, Poland, he found precious little about my grandmother, but he found enough to keep me hopeful of finding more information about these ancestors.

The only record of the Dziurzyński family the researcher found in Dubiecko was the Marriage Record for Jan Dziura and Magdalena Jara, my grandmother’s parents .  While the surname was Dziura, not Dziurzyński, the researcher was fairly confident that this was the correct couple .  He also found the birth and baptismal records for two of my grandparents’ children: my Uncle Jan (John) Dańko and my Aunt Zofia (Sophie) Dańko .  (Note: Zofia (Sophie) Dańko was to later become the second wife of Clark Gibson, see yesterday’s post.)  The record that the researcher did not find was the marriage record of my grandparents, Michał Dańko and Marianna Dziurzyńska.

Recently, I searched the Ancestry.com message boards for “Dziurzynski” and “Dubiecko” and found an interesting message:

RE: Galicia/Podkarpackie/Dubiecko
Author: Paulette Mackuliak
My great grandmother’s name was Zofia Kopacka, daughter of Tomasz kopacki and Marianna Pulinska. She was born in Silenica, Dylagowa, Poland and died in Grebocin, Turinia, Poland. Zofia married marcin Dziurzynski and had 7 children. Jan, the oldest, lived in England and put my grandmother on a boat to come to the US around 1905-1910. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Keep in touch. Email me at pmack@alltel.net. thanks.

Well, there were two positive references in this message: the village and parish of Dubiecko and the surname Dziurzynski .  I sent an email and discussed the family similarities with Paulette .  She told me that her Dziurzynski ancestors lived in the town of Sielnica in the Dylagowa parish and that they had changed their name from Dziura to Dziurzynski. I took a new look at the marriage record of my great grandparents, Jan Dziura and Magdalena Jara .  I noticed some odd notations in the margins of the record that I hadn’t paid much attention to before:

The bride was apparently from the Dubiecko parish, but the groom was from Sielnica (a village that wasn’t in the Dubiecko parish).

There is a notation about the Dylagowa parish that appears to be a record of the Banns of Marriage read “in Dylagowa as well as in Dubiecko”.

I was astonished!

My ancestors seemed to have changed their surname from Dziura to Dziurzynski and were originally from Sielnica in the Dylagowa parish, just like Paulette’s ancestors!  Well, Paulette and I have kept in touch by phone and email .  Our family trees don’t seem to have any common ancestors, but we’d both like to search the records in the Dylagowa parish to see how we might be related .  Unfortunately, these records are not available at the Family History Library, so we will either need to travel to Dylagowa or hire a professional genealogist to search the records for us.

In any case, if the Dziurzyński’s were from Sielnica in Dylagowa parish, perhaps my grandparents were married there, in my grandmother’s home parish .  That would explain why their marriage record wasn’t among the Dubiecko parish records .  After their marriage, they settled in my grandfather’s village of Nienadowa in Dubiecko parish to begin a family.

Although this brickwall isn’t demolished, the information I have accumulated on the Dziurzyńskis is making more sense, and I have found a way to move forward.

Copyright © 2006 by Stephen J. Danko