The Mysterious Skrabulis Family

One day my cousin and I were extracting information from the records of St. Anthony's church in Beckemeyer, IL. According to the person who was helping us, the records were in German, and for privacy reasons we could not view the records. So we were having the entries read to us. We were verifying baptism dates of our moms and their siblings, and gathering names of godparents and information about some marriages.

And then, we learned of a previously unknown family. The entry was extracted as: Joannas Skrabulis son of Joannas and Rosa Mazeijka, born 26 Oct 1910, bapt 13 Nov 1910, sponsors Guiehelmus Skimodus and Maria nee Skrabulis. (In Latin, Joannis=John.)

This entry was fascinating to me because I knew nothing about this family. No one had every mentioned them before. John and Maria were not siblings of my grandfather Antanas Skrabulis. We knew of all his siblings, both in America and in Europe. There was no brother named John, and Antanas' sister Maria stayed in Lithuania. The name Skrabulis is not a common one, even in Lithuania. And Beckemeyer was a rural town, not a large city with a large Lithuanian population. So it doesn't seem likely that this is an unrelated Skrabulis family who happened to end up attending the same church as Antanas' family.

I think John and Maria were cousins of my grandfather, but I have not been able to prove or disprove that theory. In fact, so far I have been unable to find this family in any other record. But my search continues! I hope someday I will be able to correctly attach John and Maria to our Skrabulis family tree, and maybe even find some long lost cousins--their descendants.