FACEBOOK – March 22, 2014
I’m sucked back into my family search on Ancestry.com
Poor great-uncle Bronislaw Liro and his wife Mary. They became a reality last night when their marriage record popped up – but nothing else.
Then a quick google search of his name gave me two deaths – one for their son at 8 days old of infant cholera, and another for their daughter at 8 months old (4 years later) of Infant Cholera.
And not a trace of them anywhere else going forward. It’s always 1 step forward and 2 steps back.
This post written in 2014 popped up for me the other day on Facebook. I’d forgotten all about it posting it and want to share what I found out a few years later.
Just some background – I had the names of Louis, Joseph, and Mitchell Liro floating around in my research notebooks because their Massachusetts locations fit with what I knew about Bronislaw. I might have sent a letter to one of them with no response.
“Joseph Liro” popped up as a DNA match in 2017 and I sent him a message through Ancestry. Sadly, not many people respond to messages! But I got lucky this time.
Joseph is the grandson of Bronislaw and Maria! Here’s a refresher on Bronislaw and Maria:
Bronislaw was born in 1881 and immigrated to the US in 1905, and headed to Three Rivers, Mass his older sister Aniela and her husband Josef Mikula.
Maria came to the US expecting to be joined by her sweetheart but she never heard from him, met Bronislaw and married him. Then oops! Turns out the sweetheart had trouble raising the money for his passage and when he finally made it to the U.S. Maria was already married to Bronislaw.
They were married sometime prior to 1908. They had a son John who died at 6 days old in August of 1908 of Infant Cholera. Joseph’s father Louis was born in 1909. A daughter Katy in 1911 was 6 months old in July of 1912 when she died of Infant Cholera. Following that, Mitchell Stanley was born in 1913.
So right there, Joseph brought together the names that have been circling around each other all these years!
Two to three years later (1915 or 16), Bronislaw and Maria (unlike my grandparents and great aunt and uncle) have a little nest egg from working in the textile mills and decide to GO BACK TO POLAND.
We all know what happened shortly after that – World War I broke out. Bronislaw fought in the Austrian Army and the “victorious Soviets” took him prisoner and sent him to Siberia.
As the war raged on, Maria was afraid that her sons, Louis and Mitchell would be called up to fight in the Polish Civil War even though they were American citizens, so she sent them back to the United States to live with a friend of hers.
In the late 1920s/early 1930s, Bronislaw escaped Siberia where he tended the horses at the camp. He appeared at the family farm in the village of Turza in southeastern Poland saying “I escaped and have come home”. Life went on and they had more children.
What happened to Louis and Mitchell? It sounds like Louis never saw his father again because he never went back to Poland. Mitchell fought in Italy during WWII and traveled through Poland but I don’t know if Bronislaw was still alive or if he went to their home.
After WWII, Maria came to the United States for a short visit, lived with Louis and his family but she returned to Poland in 1962 “to die”. Louis traveled to Poland often in the 80s and 90s and met his Aunt Katarzyna and her children and visited his grandparents’ graves.
Based on their birthdates and the dates of WWI, Louis and Mitchell would have been young when the war broke out! Louis said, “my father and his brother were so grateful to this woman (who took them in) that they had her buried in our family plot in Indian Orchard, Mass. which is a neighborhood in Springfield. I think it’s sort of a Yalesville to our Wallingford.
So that’s the story of Bronislaw and Maria. They all lived years longer than Aniela and Antonia but it was still fraught with heartache.
It's All About Family 