Tuesday, June 7, 2011

premarital sex in the 1860's??

It has been a long time since I have updated this & since then I have not had a ton of time to work on my genealogy.  I did however get a chance to go back and go through my microfilms that I talked about in my last post.  To my surprise, Andrew has more than just the two older siblings I found previously.  With some more digging I found he has one or two younger siblings as well.  The reason for my confusion as to whether it's one or two is simply due to the fact that the baptismal records list both children (one born in 1869, the other in 1871) as boys, both with the name Joannes.  Now I'm assuming people do not name their children the same thing, that's just strange, so this assumption leads me to believe that the first Joannes (born in 1869) was no longer living when the second was born. So I suppose either way there are two younger siblings, but non the less I am still confused.  I also did some digging for a marriage record for my great grandfather's parents Valentine & Victoria.  When I found it, it too came with a surprise.  They were married in September of 1862, and my great-great grandfather's oldest sibling was born in February of 1863.  Now if you can do your math like I did, you'll realize that my great-great-great grandmother was 4 months pregnant when she got married, that seemed like a shocker to me to say the least.

Unfortunately the marriage records for Valentine & Victoria gives no indication of either of their parents' names so that is another search I am going to have to make.  It does however give me the ages of both, kinda.  It clearly says that Valentine is 24 years old, but when you look at the column for Victoria's age all that's there is a scribbled out number.  What I can make out is the number 2 at the beginning so I would assume she was in her 20's as long as she did not lie about her age.  I also would probably make the assumption that she is not older than Valentine, then again I could be wrong.  My next step now is to reorder microfilms from the library and look for the baptismal records for both Valentine & Victoria in hopes of finding their parents & tracing things back even further than that.  What I also would like to find is the answer to my problem of the two Joannes' and see if I can find a death records for the first boy names Joannes.

Now the funny thing about all these finds I made in terms of my great-great grandfather Andrew's parents & siblings, is that originally I ordered all these microfilms so that I could find baptismal/birth records for my great-great grandparents Andrew & Elizabeth as well as the 3 children they had in Poland before immigrating to America in 1900, as well as their marriage record.  Ironically I found non of those in my search, which confuses me.  Every record I have of the Panfil's states that they were from Gniewkowo, which is the parish & area that I ordered all the microfilms from.  What is a mystery to me, is that if they said that's where they were from & it's clearly where Andrew as born, where did they get married & have their first 3 children & why have I been unable to find an record of them so far?

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