52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #13 - Mapping Relationships

This is #13 in a Genealogy Blog Challenge issued by Amy Johnson Crow over on her blog "No Story Too Small." The challenge is to write 52 blog posts on 52 ancestors throughout 2014.

*NOTE: I am actually out of the country right now. This post was written in advanced and pre-scheduled which is why it isn't about a specific ancestor.

I am in the process of trying to verify a certain familial relationship between my 3rd great-grandmother Anna Slezinska (Wife of Anton Rossman) and a man named August Slezinska in the hopes that it will lead me back to Prussia and to Anna's parents. August and Anna both lived in Chicago and at one point attended the same church.

I was able to go through the church records for St. Joseph's Parish on Familysearch.org as they have the records available online. As they are not indexed, what I did was go through the records one by one from a few years before Anton and Anna moved to the US through the time of Anton's death in 1934. I looked at baptismal records specifically and examined both the parents' names as well as the names of the god parents.  I then drew a chart and drew lines to show me relationships through the church. 

Relationship Chart.  Red lines = godparents / god-children
dotted lines = descendents not verified

It really looks like a mess of spaghetti. While it still doesn't prove that August and Anna Slezinska were siblings, it shows me that there was SOME relationship there. Anna was the godmother to August's daughter, while August was godparent to one of Anna's grandsons.  It also shows just how tightly knit the whole extended family was. 

This exercise is also more proof that you can't stick with your direct lines, you sometimes HAVE to investigate siblings, cousins, and even farther out along the branches if you want to get any farther back.