This is a photo of Andrew and Adam Poltorak. Andrew was born in 1853 and Adam was born in 1854. Adam is my Great-great-grandfather. Their parents were Stanislaw and Marianna (Naborski) Poltorak.

I always assumed that Andrew and Adam were the only children of Stanislaw and Marianna. I had a rather complete family tree that my cousin had researched from family members. I uploaded the tree to Ancestry.com but balked at the annual subscription price. I looked for several alternatives and found a free version of a product called My Heritage.

The free version works but has limits on the number of entries. I eventually abandoned it and found an open-source product called Gramps.

Gramps does the job but lacks one feature that the expensive software provides.  Ancestry and MyHeritage find matches with public records and other family trees and generate email messages detailing the new information or discrepancies. Normally the information is trivial but today I learned that there might be an entirely new branch on the tree.

Did Andrew and Adam have a brother?

MyHeritage sent me this email attachment:

[photonic type=’flickr’ view=’photo’ photo_id=’50772049177′ user_id=’22463805@N04′]

Who is Maciej? He was born in 1858 which makes him the younger brother to Andrew and Adam. I’m sure it is a match because the names and dates match so closely. I wanted to contact the owner of this tree but I would have to upgrade my “free” membership to obtain the email address of the owner. Even then, it would be up to them to answer.

I missed adding Andrew to the MyHeritage site, but corrected myself on Gramps.

[photonic type=’flickr’ view=’photo’ photo_id=’50773078562′ user_id=’22463805@N04′]

Google Knows

The answer is out there. Perhaps the owner of the other tree will Google “Poltorak”. Maybe they will find this posting. We are all family here.