[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Two different people or the same person

[Susie Lewis]

It amazes me how many times, back in those days, that two brothers married either two sisters or two girls with the same first name and further more to have both families with the same last name pregnant around the same time and then give their newborns the same first name.  They must have thought that this was amusing back then.
It is really confusing when individuals names are the same, birth dates are a week or so off, the parents don't 100% match but the grandparents are identical.   Was one parent using a first name in one record and a middle name on the other?  What about the date?  Calendar difference? Is it the same person?  It seems like a number of us have pondered this conundrum of finding an additional record and wondering if it is the same person or not.
In my case it turned out, I had two brothers who married two sisters in a double wedding (same wedding date) and then they got pregnant a week apart from each other and then gave their new born daughters the same first name.  Here though, it was fortunate that these two brothers and their families lived in two different towns but only a couple of minutes away from each other (different birth towns for the identically named newborns).  Further children where thankfully given different names.
I had another case where two brothers married two girls with totally different names but when one family had an infant die the other named their next new born after the child that had died, then the same thing happened again but in reverse.   It took a while to figure out who lived, who had died and who belonged to whom.
If anyone is pondering such a case it is good to know that these kind of things did happened a number of times in the 1800 & early 1900's in the Lublin area.
Even today 2009 in North America, I know a family of four boys, three of which married girls named Laurie! (but I must add that particular family descended from Germans from former Russian areas)  This kind of humor may be genetic.  :)



> Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 00:33:50 -0400
> From: sofasurferlinux at charter.net
> To: ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org
> Subject: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] How to find passenger lists returning to	europe
> 
> In searching for immigrate relative I came across to strange manifests. 
> On April 19, 1905 Karoline Harke came to the U.S. with 2 children, 
> Emelie and Emma. On May ?, 1905 Karoline Harke came to the U.S. with 2 
> children, Friedrick and Emma.
> 
> This confused me bacause of the similarities especially when, on both 
> manifests, they were listed on lines 4, 5 and 6. And on both manifests 
> they were traveling to the same address.
> 
> Turns out that their husbands were brothers. Both brothers were married 
> to a Karoline. The families were previously living in U.S. and the wives 
> apparently traveled back to their original homelands of Plock and 
> Bobrowniki, I assume to show the children to their Grandfathers. After 
> what I assume was a month or two visit (because they listed there 
> previous residences as Bobrowniki and Plock) they returned to the U.S.
> 
> I found this to be very interesting and a bit of a mystery for a time.
> My question is, how do I find the ship list from when they left America 
> to return to Poland?
> 
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