It’s a frustrating thing to start with basically nothing. My grandparents found all they could when they were researching in the ’70s and ’80s but I still felt a little peeved at my great -grandfather and his father for not writing down anything about their relatives who were not in Pennsylvania. More so at my great-grandfather who I’ve been told liked to fudge the truth or just claim ignorance. We weren’t entirely sure what our surname had been before our ancestors immigrated to America; all we had was Nikola and Josephina.

Finding documents on my family members were there, but it seemed like they used a different surname spelling every time they needed to fill something out. There were plenty of Ancestry suggestions, the only problem was that there were many times was their last name spelled incorrectly. “Solay” and “Saly” were common, and eventually there were a couple “Salie” documents as well.

The one that was really confusing was their entry for the 1920 census. This is the first census my family appears on and by this point my great-great grandmother, Josephina, and her eldest daughter Marija (a.k.a Mary) had died. Not only that, but my great-great grandfather Nikola had gotten remarried to a woman named Anna Kiefer who had three children from her previous marriage (she was widowed as well, I would later find out). This census was the only time “Golay” was listed in the search results as a possible match, which is so far off the mark that going in I really did not think it would be a match. I looked at it as a last-resort type of thing. Looking at the actual document itself I can see where the confusion happened. The “S” in “Salay” runs into the “B” of the name above it giving it the appearance of a cursive “G”. If you’re just glancing at it you could mistake the letters, and how could the indexers know that they were bungling name of the exact people I was looking for?

“Golay” wasn’t the only thing that threw me off with the 1920 census. One the big issues with it is that when Nikola and Anna were giving their census data they also gave Anna’s three children his last name. It is the only case in which that happens as far as my research indicates. Anna also had a daughter named Mary who was older than Josephine, so for awhile I was trying to find “the missing Mary”.

Spoiler alert: one of them was dead. But that is a story for another post.

With other branches of my family misspellings were not quite as big of a deal because there were other indicators I could look at to affirm that, yes, they were exactly who I thought they were. I used things such as birthplace, native tongue, and age. But the problem with this group was that there was basically no consensus among the documents of where they came from. I was seeing Germany, Croatia, Yugoslavia, and Austria. To add to the confusion, I knew from my grandparents’ research that our family lived in in a town called Sremska Mitrovica before coming to America and Google was telling me that was currently located in Serbia.

It’s amazing what a difference 100 years can make. Currently, Sremska Mitrovica is in Serbia, but 14 years ago it was within Yugoslavia’s borders. 50 years before that it was part of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, the year before that Socialist Yugoslavia, and Croatia before that. From what I can tell, that was not the first time Sremska Mitrovica change hopped borders, so to speak.

From that alone I had my work cut out for me. Unfortunately, not many records from that area are available online to my knowledge and I do not speak Serbian. I also cannot guarantee people I try to contact there speak English which makes contacting churches and people a much more difficult task for me. I was in the process of trying to find email addresses for local churches and contemplated shifting my focus to a different family branch when the genealogy gods threw me a bone. I found something that I didn’t even know I was looking for: the S.S. President Grant. Specifically, a manifest for a trip made from Cuxhaven, Germany to New York, New York in October of 1912. Of course it’s not the ship that was important so much as the people who were on it.

Sailing on the President Grant that fall of 1912 was Nikola, Josephina, and their two daughters. And the closest relative of theirs from the country whence they came?

Mihail Salaj, father.