Unraveling the Mystery of Josephine Bellavi's Last Name

By Lorene Seman

In various family trees on Ancestry.com and the Church of Latter Day Saints genealogy websites, Jacob Seaman’s wife is listed as Josephine Bellavi. Seaman family genealogists and I wrestled with the spelling of Josephine’s last name. It sounded Italian and not Polish. Why would an Italian woman be living in Prussia in the early 1800’s? Searching in various Polish databases, I could not find Bellavi as a surname in Poland.

To unravel the mystery, I obtained the only known source document containing Josephine’s last name, a copy of Nicholas (Ignatz) Seaman’s death certificate (attached). The informant was Nicholas’ wife, Mary Seaman. On the death certificate, it appears that her name is spelled BEllavi. The second letter in her name looked like a backwards “3” or capital E. Why would the author capitalize the second letter of her name? Other e’s on the page did not look like this backward 3. I examined the i’s written on the page, such as the i in Josephine and noted that the author often dotted the i with a backwards comma-like dot. I concluded that the second letter in Josephine’s last name was not an “e” but rather an “i” with the comma-like dot coming too close to the “i” and the transcriber of this document mistakenly transcribed it as an E. There is no “v” in the Polish language, but the “w” in Polish is pronounced like a “v.” I revised the spelling of her last name to Billawi and entered it into the Pomeranian church database under “rough” translation and Bielawa was one translation.

I believe that Mary told the physician who completed the death certificate what Josephine’s last name was and he wrote it as it sounded. Mary may not have known English and it is interesting that she didn’t actually sign the document because her “signature” is written in the same handwriting as the rest of the document. Using the Pomeranian database, I was then able to locate a Jacob Cyman who married a Josephine Bielawa on November 21, 1825 in St. Catherine of Alexandria Catholic Church in Stezyca and believe this is our great great grandparents. I was then able to request the LDS film 72746 and photocopy the marriage certificate which is very difficult to read. Their entry is the second on the left side:

To see a picture of the church from the Wiki, click here.