Ratajczyk/Bednarkow surnames

I am looking for any information regarding Frank Ratajczyk and his wife, Agnes Bednarkow. I have very little information, but we show they should have been around the Grodziec area in/around the 1850's. I have searched everywhere and I cannot find any information, not even on the polish sites. Their son, my grandfather, was Stefan Ratajczyk who married Josephine Guzniczak and immigrated to America. She passed away and he came back to Grodziec to bring her sister, my grandmother, Helena Anna Guzniczak to America. They married in Poland and immigrated in/around 1933. We are desperate for any information on our lineage. I wish we had more information to supply. I do know that Stefan did have many sibilings. Any Ratajczyk's out there that can shed some light on this????

To start with - which Grodziec do you refer to? There are eight villages of this name in Poland, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grodziec. You need to get some other data, like names of neighbouring villages, a town nearby, etc. to decide on this. At this point the first names of the family members are less important than the name of the right village.

But today's name distributions can be helpful in selecting the right Grodziec. For example, the Ratajczyk names are distributed mostly around Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) Province, and £ódż Province. District of Konin, where 167 Ratajczaks live today, is part of Wielkopolska and this is where the candidate #1 for the right Grodziec is also located, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grodziec,_Greater_Poland_Voivodeship

To confirm it: there are only few (13) Guzniczaks in Poland, but three of them are in Konin.

Better luck comes from the name Guźniczak (with z-acute). There are 1010 such names in Poland, most of them (173) in Konin.

Sadly our luck changes with the name Bednarków or Bednarkow. Our database "Moi Krewni" (My relatives) does not show any of such names in contemporary Poland. But it does not mean that there are not such people in Poland. They simply have not been registered in "Moi Krewni" database.

Double check this name, whether or not it is in fact Bednarek. Due to Polish grammatical rules the family Bednarek could have been referred in plural as Familia Bednarków.

Thank you so much for that information. The only thing that I was able to find out from the Ellis Island was that Frank and Anna's son, my grandfather, Stefan was born in Warelesyn but I don't know which village. I looked on the marriage license for Stefan and my grandmother, Helena and it is possible that they got married in Lodz. The Guzniczak side has been traced and we can show lineage. I can't read Polish so I'm not too sure on the Lodz part, I tried to attach their marriage certificate to see if you could decipher it, but it would not allow me to. If you would be willing to send me your e-mail address, I can e-mail you their marriage certificate.

We have researched YEARS for the Ratajczyk name along with Bednarkow and we have NO information on them at all, no birthdates, no exact towns...nothing. On the marriage certificate, it does say Bednarkow or Bednorkow for the spelling.

Thanks,

Nancy

New users are subject to some limitations. You will get all privileges after five posts or so. Just be active and patient :-)


The name Warelesyn does not sound right, but it is important to find its correct name, because it will help us to identify the correct Grodziec (out of eight possibilities).

I found it, assuming that only the first three and the last two characters of your "Warelesyn" are correct. In other words I was searching for a village name in Poland having this pattern War????yn. To be exact the search GREP pattern, specific to an XML database I was using, was this: >Wa[ąęćśńóżźa-z]+yn\b . For those in similar needs - the database is in the form or two zipped XML files SIMC and TERC, available from Central Statistical Office (GUS):

stat.gov.pl/broker/access/prefile/listPreFiles.jspa

Expecting that the mysterious village is located in Great Poland Province and Konin County, I found their codes - 30 and 10 respectively - from the TERC file. There are several villages listed in SIMC files, that match the above pattern, but only one is located in Konin County. So here comes the disclosure: Wardężyn, repeat WARDĘŻYN (E with ogonek and Z with dot above).

So now we can be sure that your great grandparents, Franciszek and Anna, are from around the village of Grodziec, Gmina Grodziec, Konin County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, in west-central Poland, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grodziec,_Greater_Poland_Voivodeship

We also know that your grandfather Stefan was born in Wardężyn, Gmina Rychwał, Konin County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward%C4%99%C5%BCyn

And the google maps show that Wardężyn is very close to Grodziec, about 10 km by road.

This is a good start.
BTW, Wardężyn belongs to Grabienice Parish, 4.5 km away. But according to wikipedia the parish keeps only post 1945 archives.

A propos Bednarkow
Bednarkow is not a typical Polish name, although admissible as a Russian male surname. But please check again, whether or not the name is actually written as Bednarkowa, with an "a" at the end. This would make sense, because according to Polish naming tradition the following was an acceptable norm:

Bednarek - a man
Bednarkowa - his wife
Bednarkówna - their daughter
However many a time the surname Bednarek would be equally applied to a man, his wife and their children.

I searched for surname Bednarkow in one of the best databases of marriages, covering Great Poland Province and the years 1800-1899. Unsurprisingly, there was no exact match for that name. There were however 330 approximate matches, which can be broken as follows:

+ Bednarkowa: 31 cases, of which 23 were explicitly declared as widows. Well if a Bednarkowa woman marries a man, she had to be previously married to a man named Bednarek. Makes sense.

+ Bednarkówna: 6 cases. Also makes sense, according to the above rule.
+ Bednarka: 9 cases. Those were also widows, probable after a man named Bednarz.
+ Bednarek: 279 cases, of which 91 referred to brides.

But none of those Bednarkowa, Bednarkówna and Bednarek married any Ratajczyk man in the Great Poland Province.

Among those 330 matches for both men and women, there was not a single Anna. But there were nine Mariannas, one Martianna and one Julianna. The name Agnes/Agnieszka was quite popular too:

+ Agnes Bednarkowa, a widow, married Casimirus Gebler in Sośnica in 1823
+ Agnes Bednarek (43), a widow, married Martinus Krzyżaniak (51), a widower, in Biezdrowo in 1829
+ Agnes Bednarek (21) married Stanislaus Błaszyk (25) in Brodnica in 1862
+ Agnes Bednarek (18) married Franciscus Malek (25) in Brzyskorzystew in 1867
+ Agnes Bednarek (23) married Nicolaus Gronek (28) in Dębno in 1863
+ Agnieszka Bednarek (24) married Tomasz Broniecki (30) in Błaszki, in 1864
+ Agnieszka Bednarek (22) married Andrzej Chmiela (26) in Boleszczyn in 1854
+ Agnieszka Bednarek (17) married Andrzej Zapłotny (22) in Cieszęcin in 1854

See Poznan Marrriage Indexing Project, poznan-project.psnc.pl/project.php

Very very interesting, I appreciate all of your help with this. In speaking with my mother, she claimed her dad used to speak of the "black forest", does that have any meaning that you are aware of? I have been reading a lot about the jews that were buried in mass graves in the forests,I do not know if my relatives were jewish, but could that be a possibility and that is why I am having trouble locating them?

Thank you for checking on the Bednarkow angle, as far as we know on the marriage license of my grandmother, that is the correct spelling. I know the spellings differ and it is very hard. I am wondering if they may have spelled my great grandfather as Ratajczak instead of Ratajczyk. I know my grandfather had brothers and since he was born in 1886, obviously the marriage was before that year. I don't know where in the line he fell with his brothers. I am having my mother call her cousin, her father Andrew was my grandfather Stefan's brother and see if she has any information on Frank and Agnes.

Not really. Black forest is a popular place name in many countries in Europe. The best known Black Forest is Szwartzwald,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Forest
a wooded mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany. There are 11 villages in Poland called Czarny Las (Polish for Black Forest) - one in Great Poland Voivodship and three in £ódź Voivodship,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czarny_Las

Forget your little "Jewish" theory, just focus on facts.

So, do you have the Stefan Ratajczyk birth/baptism certificate? Is his birth place listed there as Wardężyn? Do you now see how you misread it as Warelesyn, interpreting "d" as "el" and "ż" as "s"? Are his parents listed there? Are they Ratajczyk and Bednarkow(a)? If yes, you have to focus on searching through Polish databases.

I made reasonably complete job for you - searching for marriages in the Wielkopolska Province (capital Poznań, Posen Provinz of Prussia) - only because some good people digitized data coming from various sources (Catholic, Augsburg-Evangelic parishes, etc.) in that region.

But I did not search for birth/baptism certificate of your grandfather Stefan (possible Latin name Stephanus). It would be nice to do it now - just to confirm answers to those questions I rhetorically asked above. Here is what you could do.

Go to "Pradziad" database; I already filled it partially for you:
Parish: Grodziec (I realized that Grabienice is a new parish for Wardężyn, the old one was Grodziec)
Gmina: Grodziec (gmina=municipality)
Old Voivodship, selected from a pull down list: konińskie (Konin)
baza.archiwa.gov.pl/sezam/pradziad.php?l=&miejscowosc=Grodziec&gmina=Grodziec&wojewodztwo_id=30&wyznanie_id=0&rodzajaktu_id=0&search=szukaj

You will see 12 records there: four Evangelic-Augsburg records, and eight Roman-Catholic ones, covering various types of documents and periods. Focusing on RC, and births (urodzenia) you find that the birth year of your grandfather (1886) fits - thats the fifth row from the bottom. Press on "więcej" (more) and you will get the detailed description where to look for your grandfather birth certificate. The description is in Polish but it basically says where to find the birth certificates:

Place: Grodziec
Gmina: Grodziec
Old voivodship: konińskie (Konin)
New voivodship (since 1999): wielkopolskie (Great Poland)
Faith: Roman Catholic
Dates: .... 1880-1898
Microfilms: ... does not apply since none of them covers the year 1886,
Storage location: Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu Oddział w Koninie; 62-500 Konin; ul. 3 Maja 78, tel (63) 242-92-77, 246-71-32; fax: 246-74-56; email: konin@poznan.ap.gov.pl

It looks like you would need to find someone in Poland to do the search for you there, but you may try to query them by email first.

A professional researcher could also examine the marriage certificates from various periods [1809-1855, 1857, 1859-1862, 1864-1902] just in case your grandparents were married in Grodziec, and my sources missed it somehow.

If this still does not work you would have to try your luck with the £ódź Province, and that might mean spending a lot of time in various archives.

If you have any specific question, ask me, but basically you are on your own. Genealogy search is a hard job. It takes a lot time and luck sometimes.

Well, good luck to you.

Thank you, I think luck is what I am going to need. I may take the advice of finding a polish researcher to hunt the trail for me as I cannot afford to go to Poland and really would like to trace this all down. My mother is the last surviving child of Stefan and she is 78 so I would like to get some information for her.

The spelling of Warelesyn came off of the Ellis Island records that we have from Ancestry.com, But, it would not suprise me if it was spelled wrong, a lot of records had incorrect spellings of towns, names etc. I do not have his birth certifcate, I only have a copy of his passport and his marriage certificate. We have nothing further as far as any documentation. This is why it is such a mystery.

Oh....and I'll forget about my little "jewish theory", I was just throwing it out there as a possibility. :-)

Thanks again from the bottom of my heart for EVERYTHING you have supplied me with, I am very grateful and will be checking those websites you suggested.

Take care,

Nancy