Salomea Kisczynska Born November 4, 1956

When checking my DNA matches on Ancestry as I started to do family history, it was hard to get started. There were very few matches to people related to Anthony Raczkiewicz. The matches I have also share very low amounts of DNA with me, meaning they are not closely related. Some currently live in Grand Rapids or had in the past so I was intrigued to find out more about them. In order to do that, I needed to build my family tree back farther and wider. ***** Salomea Kisczynska is a good example. She is my 2nd cousin four times removed. “Removed” refers to the number of generations of separations between Salomea and me. My fifth great-grandparent-- Jakub Wiciejewski and Anna nee Plebanska--are her great grandparents. I had her in my tree because I included siblings of each generation as much as I could. This helped when looking at my DNA matches. ***** One DNA match, in particular, was helpful. I discovered that we had a mutual person on our family tree--Salomea Kisczynska. The DNA match’s name is Patrice (Szymanski) Shay and she is my 5th cousin 1x removed. Salomea is Pat’s great-grandmother. Pat lives in the Grand Rapids area and her family tree was open for me to view. We corresponded and she shared some information that helped me with her “branch.” It was very satisfying to figure out this first connection! ***** Today is Salomea’s birthday. She was born on November 4, 1856, in Zawadki, Lubelskie, Poland, which is about 30 miles from the city of Tomaszow Lubelskie Poland. Her parents were Teofil and Wawrzyniec (or Lawrence.) Lawrence was a barkeeper and the two witnesses to her birth were peasant farmers from their town. Her mother died when she was 14. Salomea married Jakub Petryna on September 20, 1874, in Tomaszów Lubelski, Lubelskie, Poland when she was 17 years old. Jakub was born to a single mother, who was deceased when he got married. Jakub and Salomea had two children during their marriage, Antonina and Rozalia. Antonina married Kazmierez Syzmanski. Kazimierz is the grandfather of Pat! Hopefully, you can see the connection with the picture from the tree. *****