DNA Update

Kroening and Ponczoch Family

As happens every year, the DNA kits that were gifted across the US over the holidays start returning results in February and March. I have my DNA on Ancestry.com and I started getting regular notifications about new matches a few weeks ago. Exploring most matches is honestly not that helpful because so many people have no tree information attached. I see a name and a degree of relationship but cannot even begin to figure out where they fit in my tree. However, there are usually 1 or 2 that pop up that DO have value.

This year there was another match to the Ponczoch side of the tree. This match was on a line different from my direct ancestor, John Ponczoch. The match appears to be a cousin on the Fred Ponczoch line. This is good information because I had a previous match with cousins on Frank Ponczoch’s line. Fred and Frank were brothers and both have documentation linking them to parents Adam Ponczoch and Augusta Wiglinski. I only had relatively circumstantial evidence connecting John Ponczoch to Fred and Frank – I was suspicious these men were all brothers. The genetic links to 2 of the sons of Adam Ponczoch with the correct familial relationship is more proof that John’s father was indeed Adam Ponczoch. Another name officially added to the tree!

On the Kroening side I also had some new matches. There are cousins from a Kroening family that lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin area and whose patriarch immigrated from Pomerania in the 1880s. Another match is through a Kroening who lived in Jefferson County, Wisconsin in the late 1800s. Another Milwaukee Kroening family from Pomerania in the 1890s matches. I also match with a Kroening family from Pomerania who settled in Brown County, Wisconsin in the 1880s.

The interesting thing is that these families all come from a common area in Pomerania and are people who are not already in my tree (they are NOT descendants of Johann and Friederike Kroening who lived in Marathon County, WI). It seems that this allows me to narrow in on the home village area of Johann Kroening and this branch of the family in the old country.

This line is tough because the records seems to be spotty in the area of origin. The Kroenings from Brown County can be found pretty readily in the German registers online, but our Johann Kroening does not appear in those books. This will be a puzzle that will take time to piece together but it seems that we are slowly adding in more pieces!