Mykolas Kisielius

Last April I wrote about some information I received about my Kisielius family from a contact in Lithuania. He had sent me a transcription of a death record after I had located an entry for Mykolas Kisielius, my 2x-great-grandfather, in a set of photos he had posted online. The information he sent me was just a transcription of the record, not an image of the record itself. Since I always like to see the record myself before being sure about anything, I planned to have a look during my visit to the Lithuanian archive. And so I did.

Mykolas Kisielius, death 26 Feb 1938
(full page view)

All of the information he gave me checks out, including the fact that Mykolas (supposedly) had two sons named Jonas! I actually still suspect that this is a clerical error (and one of the sons was actually called Juozas) but the mistake must have been made by the person creating the original record, not my contact who passed the information along to me. Of course, there is also a chance that they are both called Jonas but only one of them is a son (the other being, perhaps, a nephew).  There is, after all, a 12 year gap between the second Jonas and the next youngest child.

Now that I have this record, I am able to confirm the names of my 3x-great-grandparents: "Petras and Ona Mikulyte Kisieliai" - that is, Petras Kisielius (note that Kisieliai is the plural form of Kisielius) and Ona Mikulyte. This means that the theory I laid out here might actually be true, "John Kiselius" who died in Bellshill Scotland might have been a relative. It all depends on whether or not you're convinced that "Piotras Kiselius" is actually Petras Kisielius and "Ona Mikoliute" is actually Ona Mikulyte (see record here). It's a fairly safe bet.

If it is true, it means that the things I wrote here and here are also true, and more descendants of my Kisielius family are here in Scotland, in fact right here in Edinburgh!

I'd like to find more evidence to support this theory (e.g. a Lithuanian record showing that Petras and Ona did, indeed, have a son called "John" born in 1867), but the trouble is only a very limited number of records for Vilkaviškis survive. Almost nothing is from before 1922.

I do know that "John" married his wife Magde Pausziute in November 1901 in "Russia" (Lithuania was under Imperial Russia at the time), and a marriage record would list his parents, but again the Vilkaviškis records are limited. There's a small chance that the 1911 Scotland census would show where they are from (though it usually isn't more specific than "Russia"). Transit records sometimes list next-of-kin, either in the destination or the origin, so I could search both for their transit or those of Kazimiras Kisielius or Marijona Kisieliute (though these records are partial, at best). My best hope might be a Lithuanian death record for either Piotras or Ona, but the odds that either died after 1922 are slim.

The search continues.


UPDATE (25 Sept 2013): I had another thought. If I could match addresses across records and show that "John" lived with people I know to be my relatives, there's a good chance that he is family. I haven't found an exact match yet, but I did find that "John" lived right nearby my great-grandfather's sister, Marijona. He lived at 3 Pitt Street in Mossend in 1913, and she lived at 8 Pitt Street in 1915 (note that "Kisieliute" is her maiden name and the -te ending is just how maiden names are signified in Lithuanian). And in 1921, "John" is still living in the same place. In fact, I've even got a record that shows he was there in 1915 as well. It's hard to imagine they didn't know each other. And it's also hard to imagine that two people with the Kisielius name ended up just a couple doors from each other just by chance. I know from my great-aunt Kitty Kisieliute that Marijona was brought to Scotland with the help of other Kisielius relatives that were already there. Might that include "John"? I'm becoming more and more convinced.