Week 11 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is about Achievements in the family. I know many family members past and present have done pretty impressive things so I’m going to focus of just a few of them.
Back in March during the topic of Professions, I told you how my maternal grandfather held a patent for a straw hat cleaning solution which is still in effect and pretty neat, but I don’t think he made any money off of it.
Straw Hat cleaning Patent
In more recent times, my cousin Bob who was a lieutenant in the Civil Engineer Corp of the US Navy has a “bight” in Antarctica named after him! He was part of Operation Deep Freeze in 1977 and 1978. A bight is “a curve on the shoreline with a less curvature than that of a usual bay”. They are shallow so they are clearly marked on nautical charts for navigation.
The bight is located on Brown Peninsula which is a nearly ice-free peninsula 10 nautical miles long on the north side of Antarctica. The Bellafronto Bight extends for six nautical miles and was named for him in 1999. I don’t know the nature of the naming but I think it’s pretty cool!
Location of Bellafronto BightX marks the spot
An even more recent achievement is my niece Charlene’s PhD in Food Science from Penn State University in 2017. She is now an Assistant Professor at Colorado State University as well as a Researcher at CSU’s Food Structure and Function Laboratory. She is focusing on phytochemicals as potential therapies for chronic inflammatory diseases of the gut. She is also working on a USDA-funded research into the relationships between sourdough microbial ecology and bread quality. She has been published in a variety of magazines and has been on the Today Show to discuss Sourdough bread. I think we’re going to be hearing and reading about her achievements for a long time!
The Week 10 topic for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is “Language”.
I’m on my 80th consecutive day of learning Spanish through Duolingo and trying to remember the possessives, the verbs, the subject pronouns, the “el”s and “la”s – whooo boy – I break out in a sweat as I get toward the end of the lesson and I know I’m going to have to type out the answer myself instead of picking words from a list!
I begin to imagine what my ancestors felt, coming to the United States, likely not knowing any English and hoping to find a job quickly. There were no ESL classes for them!
My maternal grandmother spoke German, Polish, and Russian and my paternal grandparents Polish. My Uncle Eddie spoke to me of being laughed at in school because he and his brother spoke only Polish (likely in the early grades, hopefully soon enough he learned English!). My paternal grandfather went off to World War I speaking little to no English.
I admire anyone who can speak a language other than their own. I’m hoping that someday what I’m learning will come in handy!
Monday, April 22nd, my twin sister Gail and I have turned another year older. There has to be some significance being born in the 4th month on the 22nd day. I think it makes us extra special.
I was born at 4:33 in the morning and Gail was born 5 minutes later at 4:38 am. We joke as to who is really the elder – me who greeted the world first, or her by being the elder, pushed me out. I think people who know us, think she’s probably the elder!
There is so much we don’t know about my mother’s pregnancy aside from the family story that she cried and wouldn’t tell my dad why she was crying. When she told him she was carrying twins, with a one year old at home, he was thrilled and told her not to be sad. Over the years he took so much off her shoulders on the weekends, taking us out for walks and rides to let her have some alone time.
It would not be a complete birthday unless I took the time to acknowledge “the other”, our older sister Janice who went from only child to oldest of 3 by the time she was 18 months old. She’s been there through the thick and thin of it, hugs and hair pulling included. Our lives wouldn’t be complete without her.
In January of 2020, I wrote a story about my grandmother Juliana Ingram Posluszny Taking in her cousin’s daughter after her cousin, Mary Kukulska Juszczak died in childbirth. Mary’s granddaughter sent me a copy of the court documents for the adoption that included my grandmother’s affidavit.
Come to find out, Mary successfully gave birth to her daughter Mary in 1910. Her husband John was the one who passed away in 1910 from an accident at the sugar factory.
With an infant to take care of, Mary married Michael Zupka in June of 1911. Shortly thereafter she became pregnant and gave birth in March of 1912 and, did you guess it? She died in childbirth. Their son Michael died as an infant in November of 1912.
I don’t know at what point Mary’s stepfather gave her to grandmother to take care of. Likely when her mother died, and I wonder who took care of baby Michael until his death 8 months later. My grandmother kept her until the strain of trying to raise three toddlers of her own became too much for her. Michael Zupka remarried in July of 1913 and went on to have 3 children. He passed away in 1955.
I relayed this new information to Mary’s granddaughter and she said her mother only knew her mother died in childbirth. It was just with the wrong child! When Mary got married to Michael Zupka it was using her married name Juszczak and I never thought the story was any different.
Mary Kukulska Juszczak abt. 1910
Mary’s daughter was adopted by a lovely couple who had lost their daughter in 1914 to diphtheria. She had a very happy life and knew she was adopted but never wanted her daughter to find her biological family. Her daughter found the adoption paperwork when she was cleaning out her grandmother’s house.
When I first started my family research in the early 2000s, Ancestry(.)com was in its infancy and information was not as readily available as it is now. Research involved either visiting town clerks office to requests copies of birth, death, and marriage certificates or mailing a request and waiting for a response.
One of the mysteries of my paternal side was my grandmother’s sister Aniela (also known as Nellie) and her husband Joseph Mikula of Palmer Massachusetts.
One of the crazy family stories was that she and my grandmother were twins but that was far from the truth as she was born in 1871 and my grandmother was born in 1891.
What little I know of them is they were married in Poland and Joseph arrived in the fall of 1902. I don’t have his ship passage record but Aniela arrived in December of 1902 and she was heading to Windsor Locks Connecticut where he was living. Since Walter was born May 30 1903, counting on my fingers, she would have been pregnant with him when she arrived. From there, or at some point in time, they moved to Palmer, Massachusetts.
Besides the “Aniela and Antonia were twins” story, I only knew they took in my father, aunt, and uncle when their mother died in 1927 and they had two sons, Stanley and Walter and one daughter, Catherine who were older than the Jakiela siblings.
I sent a letter to the two Catholic Churches in town and received a response along with four Certificates of Baptism for Mikula children – none of them named Walter or Stanley or Catherine. In hindsight, knowing Joseph and Aniela lived for a time in Windsor Locks, Ct, I might be looking in the wrong state for their birth records.
My past research told me that Walter was born in May of 1903, Stanley in November of 1904, and Catherine in 1908. The “new” siblings included: Bronislaw born 1909, Genowefa born in 1911, Zofia born in 1913, Kazimiera born in 1915, Antoni born in 1917, and Mieczyslaw born in 1918.
Just to put this in perspective my dad and his siblings were born in 1913, 1915, 1920, 1922, and 1924.
Joseph, worked in the cotton mills throughout his life and it’s likely they lived in millworkers housing in Palmer. What I found out about the family was either sad, or non-existent.
Antoni died by accidental drowning when he was 1-1/2 years old in August of 1918. He fell into a well.
Example of an open well
Mieczyslaw (Martin) died just short of 6 months old in September of 1918 from Infant Cholera “a disease of poverty”.
Through this all, their mother Aniela, was suffering from tuberculosis which eventually made its way into her bones. She died in May of 1919 from Tuberculosis of the Bone. Would she have been home with her children around her with this terrible disease?
Catherine died in 1934 at 26 years old of tuberculosis and was in the 1930 census as an inmate at the Hampden County Sanatorium.
Bronislaw is in the 1910 census at 1 years old and was not listed in the 1920 or 1930 census.
Genowefa, later known as Genevieve, married, had a child and lived her life in Vermont until her death in 1987. Besides Stanley, she is the only I found to have a family.
Kazimiera is on the 1920 and 1930 census at ages 5 and 15, but disappears after that.
Zofia is not in the 1920 or 1930 census when she would be 7 and 17 years old. However, my Auntie Helen recalled in one of our conversations that “Tootie” committed suicide but I don’t know when that would be as I’ve never found any information about her.
I would think something was amiss with these people and lack of information if I didn’t have actual church raised seal certificates.
One of the Mikula children birth certificates
What I realized after all this, was that Uncle Joe remarried after Aniela died and it was actually he and his second wife and Genevieve and Kazimiera that likely took care of my aunt and uncle in 1927. My dad was in Southington with his god mother (he was only 2-1/2 years old).
Walt, Uncle Joe and JohnJohn and ?
Walt and John were also brought to Uncle Joe’s after their father died in May of 1935. These pictures are from August of 1935. I can’t recall my dad ever speaking of being there but I bet it is where he discovered his love of the outdoors!
Uncle Joe outlived his second wife Anna and he died at the age of 67 from a cerebral embolism in 1945 while living in Worcester Massachusetts.
You might be wondering about Stanley and Walter? I actually have some information on them from family members and another interesting source. I’ll share that in another post.
The week 9 topic for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is Changing Names.
You may have a story or two in your family about how “their last name was changed/shortened by the Ellis Island worker that couldn’t understand what they were saying”. Although that probably happened to some people, many times it didn’t happen that way! Most likely it was done by the immigrants themselves trying to fit in, or tired of spelling their name or hearing people mispronounce it!
My maternal family last name was Posłuszny. That little line through the “ł” sounds like “whoosh”. The majority of misspellings I see is “Poslushney”.
Two of the five Posłuszny brothers, Joseph and Charles, changed their name to Post some time during the 1920s. John used Post for business purposes as a restaurant owner, but used Posłuszny in his personal life.
Frank, poor Frank, who spent decades in an insane asylum, remained Posłuszny for his lifetime as did my grandfather Konrad’s family. I recall hearing that my Aunt Judy wished her dad had changed their name because she got so tired of spelling her last name to people!
Left to right John, Joseph, Frank, Charles, (far right) Konrad
The topic for week 8 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is – Heirlooms.
The definition of a Heirloom is a valuable object that has belonged to a family for several generations. Since my great-grandmother was the farthest back generation to immigrate in the early 1900s, I’ll have to go with what I have, but I still think they are pretty important!
Pictures. I have a lot of pictures! Professionally taken including family groupings from the early 1910s, first communions from the early 1920s, weddings, and family photos collected in multiple albums by my mother growing up in the mid-1920s and early 1930s, and beyond. In addition to those, I have videos from the early 1930s through the 1970s which I wrote about in an earlier post here.
Posluszny Family abt.1910Connie and Betty abt. 1927Eddie Jakiela abt. 1920Ingram Family date unknownJulianna, Konrad, Antoinette abt. 1910
When I started research in 2000, my Aunt Tootsie (Antoinette) was the Family Historian. She was the oldest Posluszny sibling and lived in the family home on Clifton Street from the purchase in 1925 until she moved to a Judd Square apartment in 1989. I often sat with her to discuss the family and the people in the pictures. Dates and seeing how far your lineage stretches back are fun, but my interest has always been the stories and photos. Who they were as people and as a family. Who we most resemble. I try to imagine what life was like in Yonkers and Connecticut in that time frame. I guess that’s why I love where I live so much because this is where they lived their lives.
I’m grateful over the years to acquire more photos from my Jakiela cousins, through my ancestry contacts, and through unexpected DNA matches! I’ll continue to share more pictures and stories as I create some order to my accumulated files and notebooks.
It's All About Family 