Or, at least, I tried to visit her grave.
Born in 1748, she is my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
In the Grandma Online database, she is simply (name unknown).
In her marriage to Abraham Peters, her name was erased.
She became Mrs. Abraham Peters.
She died when she was only 34 years old, giving birth to her fourth child.
Only one of her children survived infancy: Maria, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
Because her daughter was named Maria, I believe her name must have been Maria as well.
So I will call my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Maria.
I don’t know where she was born, but she lived and died in Schoensee, in rural Poland.
So Andrew brought me there.
In our research before leaving on our trip, we found this location on Google Maps satellite view — we could see the actual sign for the cemetery!
A few weeks later, there we were.
I was about to race into the cemetery but Andrew made me turn around for this picture first.
We took nearly identical pictures of each other.
The cemetery is on a wild treed hill, with farms on either side.
So let’s take a moment to think about what this place means to me.
I was privileged to meet and interact with my great-grandmother Helena Buhr Heinrichs pretty regularly. (She was the only one of my Greats that I ever met, and I was a teenager when she passed away.)
Maria, who I believe is buried here, would have been Helena’s great-great-great-grandmother.
To get to Maria in my family tree, I trace a line of women. Helena’s mother was Gertruda, and her mother was Gertruda. Her mother was Maria, and her mother was Maria… and that brings us to Maria of Schoensee, who died here, without a name, in childbirth, in 1782.
So, what happened in this village, to Maria, her only daughter (and only surviving child)?
Maria Peters was just two years old when her mother died.
Little Maria was three years old when her father remarried soon after, in 1783. He and his new wife had three children together… however, it seems they did not survive infancy. (I take everything on Grandma Online with a grain of salt, as records can be tricky sometimes.)
Records show that all three of Maria’s half-siblings were born in Schoensee.
They must all be buried here, also. Perhaps next to her three siblings.
What happened to my ancestor Maria Peters, who was seemingly the sole survivor of this family?
She was 22 years old when she married Jacob Wiens, a 29-year-old brewer from Rosenort.
That same year, 1803, they left Poland forever.
While I was wandering and dreaming about Marias I am descended from, Andrew and his parents were making their own discoveries.
These signs point out that a headstone for Leonhard Bartel, 1858-1897, had been removed from this site and was on display in a lapidarium at the edge of the cemetery at the Olender Ethnographic Park, which we had just visited.
To give me a bit of time alone in the cemetery, Andrew and his parents stepped outside the gates — and in that moment, a peloton cycled past. (I’m not sure if this is a thing, but it seems to me cycling is a big deal in Poland — everyone bikes, and the roads and pathways are in amazing shape.)
Note: I have relied heavily on www.grandmaonline.org for this information, and am deeply grateful to its many volunteers who comb through records and expand the database daily.
Also of note, it looks like there is also a strong Rosenort (village in Poland) connection for Maria Peters and Jacob Wiens. I’ll get into that when I post about our visit to the Rosenort cemetery!