Recently, one of my favorite bloggers wrote about what she is thankful for.
I’ve been thinking the same lately as I leave my house in the morning. It helps to ease my everyday anxiety by getting me to think about something other than what happened in high school or where I’m going to be 10 years from 6 months ago!
It might have something to do with the book I’m currently reading, “Solito” by Javier Zamora. It’s a memoir of his travels in 1999 with a group of 8, originally strangers, led by a coyote from La Herradura, El Salvador, to the United States when he was 9. His parents were already in “LA USA”. Everyone thought the trip was two weeks long which, at the point of my spot in the book, is three months.
It also brings to mind the people in North Carolina who suffered through Hurricane Helene. Many are still living in tents and others, in homes, just recently got potable water. It was such an unexpected weather event that hopefully they will never see again in their lifetimes.
We’re heading over to celebrate Thanksgiving with family of family, people whom we’ve been sharing this holiday for over 20 years, and hopefully there will be 20 plus more to come.
I’m grateful for my family, my home, my health, fresh water, inside plumbing, food readily available, a vehicle to get from place to place, and our business.
The Week 35 Topic for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is All Mixed Up.
If you’ve ever known twins, if you are a twin, or if you have family members who are twins, you know what I’m talking about.
My mother asking Janice to pick out a specific twin
Through elementary school and beyond we have been mixed up. Our children have turned to “the other one”, and people in grocery stores are embarrassed when they realize we’re not who they think we are, no matter how much we reassure them “it’s ok! Just tell me your name and I’ll tell her you said hello!”
I’m dealing with an All Mixed Up situation as I’m combing through Birth, Marriage, and Death records of my grandfather’s birthplace in Poland. A distant cousin received the records from a researcher and he passed them on to me. I’ve added information to Charles Jakiela’s immediate family including his sibling’s birth records, and his father’s remarriage after his mother died. But the jpg file are out of order of the books so I’ve been flipping back and forth trying to follow the dates. I finally made a list showing the page numbers in the books along with the file number.
My intention is to go through the records and chart the family names, dates, and house numbers to see where the matching parental names are. There are so many Jakielas, Murdzeks, and Pernals, all names I know are part of our ancestry. Then I plan to take names and birth dates and cross reference them to naturalization records and enlistment forms processed in Connecticut because I know there is a Lubatowa connection from looking through them in the past. There is also a Jakiela and Murdzek connection in Pennsylvania that I’d like to finally uncover. It would also be sweet to finally figure out where connect on the family tree!
This kind of research is what I love to do so hopefully it will be fruitful.
The topic for week 34 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is Member of The Club. I looked at that and thought SWEET! It was a subject I wanted to share.
The Improved Order of Red Men is a national fraternal organization that goes back to 1765 and was one of several patriotic societies founded before the American Revolution. Other groups included The Sons of Liberty and the Sons of St. Tammany. Originally known as Red Men, the members concealed their identities and worked “underground” to help establish freedom and liberty in the early Colonies. After the War of 1812, the name was changed to the Society of Red Men and in 1834 to the Improved Order of Red Men. In Baltimore, Maryland in 1847, the various tribes came together and formed a national organization called the Grand Council of the United States. With the formation of a national organization, the Improved Order of Red Men spread, and within 30 years there were State Great Councils in 21 states with a membership of over 150,000. The order continued to grow and by the mid-1920s there were tribes in 46 states and territories with a membership totalling over one-half million.
The organization believes in: *Love and Respect for the American Flag *The American Way of Life *Keeping alive the customs and legends of a once-vanishing race *Creating and inspiring a greater love for the United States of America *Linking our members together in a common bond of Friendship and Love *Helping those in need with organized charitable programs
The Women’s Auxiliary of the Improved Order of Red Men was The Degree of Pocahontas. It was believed that Pocahontas’ brief life presented a touching and beautiful picture of grace, beauty, and virtue, as well as “constant friendship to the palefaces.” The group patterned itself after the virtues of the original Pocahontas, those virtues of teaching kindness, love, charity, and loyalty to one’s nation. (information from the official website http://www.redmen.org)
The first “tribe” in Connecticut was the Hammanssett No. 1 tribe in New Haven established in 1880. Within 50 years, there were 38 additional tribes of seven thousand members along with the Degree of Pocahontas with several thousand members of its own. The Wallingford men’s tribe was Owenoco and the local women’s tribe Cheyenne Council No. 20.
Notable Connecticut men involved in the group included three Connecticut governors – Raymond Baldwin, Marcus Holcomb, and John Trumbull.
My Aunt Tootsie became involved with this organization in the early 1940s and was very active in it for over 40 years. Until I saw the article below, I didn’t know another aunt, Florence Jakiela, was also part of the group, so that was an interesting find!
In addition to meetings, the Red Men and Pocahontas groups held fundraisers and presentations such as this one from 1955. (Notice the ad about Caplan’s being closed for George Washington’s birthday!)
Tootsie met her first husband Lester Schmitt through the Red Men organization. Lester is 2nd from left in the photo below and I thought he looked a little like Bob Hope in one of his movies. They dated for many years before they married as he lived with and cared for his mother in Torrington and she did the same for my grandmother in Wallingford.
Years after Lester passed away, she married her second husband in 1978. He and his first wife were friends with Tootsie and Lester through the Red Men organization.
It was in the late 1960s that the Degree of Pocahontas decided to create a girls’ group, Silver Cloud Council. It was made up of nieces, granddaughters, and neighborhood friends of the Pocahontas members, and we met one Friday night a month. My mother was likely happy to have us out of the house for that one Friday night!
The Red Men building was located at 50 South Whittlesey Avenue in Wallingford and, at the time, it was incredibly dark and scary. Our meetings were on the second floor and they were very ceremonious. We had to be reminded of the process at every meeting. The parts of those evenings I remember the most were: 1) wanting to watch The Brady Bunch and Partridge Family (no DVR back then!), being annoyed that we couldn’t, and trying to get it tuned in on an old television set there; 2) running around the building with the other girls; creeping up the stairway to the cupola at the top of the building; and 3) sneaking down the basement stairs to peek at the organization’s bar!
In addition to meetings, we marched in parades including our town’s Tercentenary (300 years) parade in 1970. We definitely weren’t thrilled about that!
My sisters and I moved on from the group after 2 years at the most and I don’t have any memories of Aunt Tootsie participating after that. Two of the ladies in the group passed away in 1973 so that would have definitely shrunk the local Pocahontas council.
The Improved Order of Red Men tribe in Wallingford disbanded and the building was sold and now houses a law firm. There are still active tribes in Connecticut and 126 tribes throughout the United States.
The Week 33 topic for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is – My Favorite Discovery. I’ve had a few discoveries over the last 25 years. My favorite discovery has a good side / not-so-good side, but it makes me happy.
The road to this discovery started in 2004, when my cousin Judy Posluszny Behme passed away and her husband brought me all her ancestry paperwork. She and I were working parallel, we didn’t share information or ask questions about what we had. I knew she was also working on it, but not much more!
The papers included email correspondence from someone named Joanne. Judy had sent a letter to Anna Engram, Joanne’s mother. I don’t know whether the letter was ancestry-related or just perhaps a Christmas card to Aunt Tootsie’s list of people. Who knows how long it had been since cards had been sent out but it was a smart idea to use the list for information too!
The top 2 emails are from Joanne to Judy in February 2001, 2 weeks apart, and the bottom one is my email to Joanne in November of 2004.
Joanne responded right away. She still didn’t know who she visited as a young girl but recalled a wedding in Wallingford “of a woman relative who was marrying at ‘mid-age'” and “this may have been a cousin? to my Dad”.
Through our emails, she told me about her father, Jacob Engram Jr., and his father, Jacob, who immigrated from Austria-Hungary and was a farmer. While growing up her father lived in the vicinity of today’s Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and later on a rented farm in the Pelham Bay area. I knew there was some family connection because my grandmother loved her flowers and tending to her gardens.
My Aunt Judy helped put some pieces together in a phone conversation in November 2004. According to Judy, Uncle Jack Ingram had a farm “in Long Island”, and her parents would go there from Yonkers and help out. Uncle Jack had a son, Jack, who was in World War I and Aunt Judy remembered her mother kept up her Christmas tree until February, when “her nephew” Jack came home. The dates don’t add up but it’s interesting how that story got passed down. Jack served overseas during World War I from July 18, 1918, to July 13, 1919.
We continued our correspondence through the remainder of the year and determined that she attended my parent’s wedding on November 9, 1952. 72 years ago today! Joanne was only 7 years old so an older bride and a partially bald groom would be considered “mid-aged” in her eyes!
We emailed back and forth a few times and then didn’t talk again until 2016 and again in 2018. Life is like that sometimes!
And then, her kids gave her a DNA kit for Christmas in 2018. In March of 2019, we confirmed we were related. Oh boy, were we related! We were so much related that she and I shared twice the cMs compared to me and my first cousins. It also explained why some DNA matches were only between us and not between my maternal cousins.
I went to the experts – the Ancestry DNA Facebook group. My question “Why do I share 1,040 cMs with this person and only 527 and 467 with my first cousins” was met with “You need to talk to your mother”. Since my mother had been gone for 32 years by 2019, I answered my own question.
Joanne was my half aunt and her father, Jacob Engram, Jr., was also my mother’s father.
Jacob Engram abt. 1918 22 years old
Shocked is putting it mildly.
My initial reactions were: 1) The work I’ve done on the Posluszny and Straub side was all for nothing!, 2) All the DNA matches associated with the last name “Duy” made sense because that was Jacob’s mother’s maiden name and, 3) not only were Julianna and Konrad Posluszny related (3rd cousins perhaps), but geez, Julianna and Jacob were related as well!
If there was any question of being related, I have the photographic proof:
Betty 1934Jacob and Joanne 1951Janice 1964
That would probably be the bad side of the discovery because it did shake me up a bit.
I’m fascinated by the timing because my grandmother and family were living in New Britain in 1921 when she would have become pregnant. Did she know? Did she tell him her suspicions? Did their relationship continue after my mother was born? This is where I’d love to be a time traveler (and I’d have to let it happen again so that I would be assured I exist!).
The good side of the discovery is that I have an aunt! Jacob married in 1934 and had a daughter in 1945. Although she and my mother never knew each other, they did meet and/or knew about each other as a part of the family. Joanne lives in Pennsylvania and we have not met face to face yet. We are Facebook friends and we share any ancestry information we come across.
So this event would definitely qualify as my favorite discovery!
It's All About Family 