2024 – Page 5 – It's All About Family

My Family Influencer

The theme for week 5 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is “Influencer”.

The definition of Influencer is “a person or thing that influences another”. That person could be none other than my mother, Elizabeth Posluszny Jakiela.

She was born in 1922, the youngest of five children with an age gap of five years between her and her sister.

After high school she went to a business school and learned bookkeeping and worked at one of the several silver factories in the area. She got married while working there and continued to work until pregnant with my older sister. Eighteen months later, she had me and my twin sister.

When I started fourth grade, she went back to work, first for a temp agency and then a permanent job so she juggled family and work.

When my dad purchased the paint store he had worked at for years, she jumped right in to take care of the bookkeeping, heading to the store after her day was done at her paying job.

Even with this, she found time to volunteer at school events, participated in women’s church groups, school groups, and was an assistant troop leader for our Girl Scout troops.

When our church began running a carnival in the early 1970s, she jumped right in to volunteer wherever she was needed. Only a few years went by before she was selected to be the chairman of the event. She never backed down from a challenge and she loved being a part of it and continued to volunteer up until she passed away.

My sisters and I all got married and raised our children, found the time to volunteer in their schools and in our community.

Personally, I went to school to be an administrative assistant and have worked with my husband for 25 years in his remodeling business as his bookkeeper and office manager. I definitely inherited that from her!

My mother will be gone 37 years on April 4th and I know she would be proud of the influence she had on her three girls, and her grandchildren in turn.

Living Through The Day of Infamy

The topic for week 4 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, is “Witness to History” and for this there was no other story to tell but this one.

My uncle, Walt Jakiela was 19 years old, fresh out of Navy radio school as a seaman second class, and in Hawaii for only three weeks on the morning of December 7, 1941.

As Walt walked out of the barracks, he noticed smoke billowing from burning sugar cane fields. He didn’t think much of it, and headed into the hanger.

Not long after that, the hanger began to shake and there were muffled sounds of exploding bombs as the Japanese bombers struck the ships in the harbor. He and his mates rushed out of the hanger to see the bombs and torpedoes dropping on the ships, which were like sitting ducks on the water. Fighters strafed the decks of the ships, and sailors were mowed down from above. At first, he thought the planes were Russian and then he saw the rising sun emblem of Japan.

There was a lull in the attack and he said that’s when he really became scared.

When the second wave hit, some of the soldiers had the presence of mind to set up machine gun batteries to shoot at the planes. Walt shot at quite a few but he didn’t think he shot any down.

He said the second wave was more like a clean up and the Japanese were picking off the targets that weren’t destroyed with the first wave. Planes which never got off the ground, barracks, ships, boats, and servicemen were shot at by planes flying through the thick smoke which Walt said made it feel like a tunnel, not knowing which way was which. All around were bodies of his fellow servicemen, injured or killed in the attack.

After the second attack, Walt helped with the treatment of the injured soldiers. He went along and marked the boots of the soldiers who had been given morphine injections. He and the rest of the survivors were asked to volunteer for mortuary duty but he chose instead to volunteer for the dangerous duty of flying out in search of Japanese planes. He just couldn’t handle seeing all the death.

“It changed my whole life” he said when speaking about his experience 50 years later.

When he spoke about the attack, he said it wasn’t exactly a surprise to the higher ups. They knew something was coming, they just didn’t know when.

He was a radio/gunner for U.S. Navy Patrol Squadron 23, which was made up of 12 patrol bomber seaplanes called “Catalinas”. They were used primarily for attacking submarines. His squadron was assigned to 12 hour daily search missions for over a week, but the men were never informed what they were searching for and the missions ended on December 6th.

Walt had joined the Navy in February of 1941 rather than be drafted into the Army and he stayed in the Navy for another 20 years. He saw the entirety of World War II as well as the Korean Conflict from various bases around the world.

Pearl Harbor wasn’t the only time he was a witness to history. In 1945, he was stationed at Saipan air base when the Enola Gay delivered the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6th. He said when the crew of the Enola Gay landed, its crew members said, “you can go home now.”

He earned two air medals with gold stars for his 50-plus missions throughout World War II, as well as the rank of chief petty officer, before his retirement in 1960.

After he retired from the Navy, he went to work for Grumman Aircraft company. He started as a field service representative, then a worker with the space program, and then a part of the program which developed the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet.

This information came from a newspaper article he sat for in 1991.

My Uncle Walt retired from Grumman in 1980 and he and my Aunt Eleanor moved to Ruston Louisiana to be near his older son. He died in 1997 at the age of 75.

I likely only met him a few times, but I wish I had known him. He was so young to experience what he did and I’m sure it did change his whole life. He’s a hero to me.

My Favorite Photo

This subject is number 3 on the list of “52 Ancestors in 52 weeks for 2024” created by Amy Johnson Crow. Week wise, I’m a little late to the party, but who cares – as long as I show up!

So my favorite photo is this one:

This is a photo of my dad, John, and his oldest brother, Steve. It was taken approximately 1936 when my dad was 12 and Steve was 23. Look at the smiles, look at Steve’s arms over my dad’s shoulders holding him close, and look at my dad’s hands reaching back to hold his brother’s legs.

If my timing is correct, this was about a year after their father was killed in a hit and run accident not far from home. Eight years previous to that, in 1927, their mother died from pregnancy complications when my dad was not quite 3.

That hit and run left 5 children, ages 23, 21, 15, 14, and 12 orphans. Life was definitely not easy for them before their father died, but it got worse the night the policeman banged on their door to tell them their father was dead.

Steve, at 23, became their guardian. Family stories say the priest at the church they attended, St. Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church, offered to be their guardian (in name) in the event there was an attempt to break them up. John and his brother Walt were alter boys and Helen cleaned the alter during the week so he knew them well. I don’t think it ever came to that.

They continued to live in the little brown house on Prince Street in Wallingford and Steve had a job as a meat cutter nearby. In 1937, Steve married Florence whose family lived on the corner and he brought them into the marriage.

Steve was a father to all of them and I’m sure it was difficult as a newly married couple to have teenagers in the house so soon! Life wasn’t always easy but he and Florence made a home for them.

I see such true affection in their expressions and that’s what makes this my favorite photo.

Family Lore: Fact or Fiction

This is the first of my posts for 52 Ancestors and the topic is Family Lore. The moment I read it, my mind went back to the year 2000 when I started my journey to research my Jakiela, Liro, Posluszny, and Ingram family history.

The definition of Lore is: “a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.” I don’t think that rings any truer than for my Jakiela side of my family.

Charles and Antonia, my grandparents married in June of 1912. They had two children, Steven in 1913 and Edward in 1915 by the time Charles headed off for World War I in 1917. When he returned, they had three more children, Helen in 1920, Walter in 1922, and John (my dad) in 1924.

The short version: in 1927, Antonia died from a miscarriage and after a move from Southington to Wallingford, CT, Charles died in 1935 in a hit and run accident as he walked along the side of a road at night. That second family tragedy made 22 year old Steven and four siblings orphans. What would they remember of family stories and traditions? What would they pass down to their children?

The children of my Uncle Steve have give me the most information. As the oldest, Steve would have been “the keeper of family possessions”. My Uncle Eddie and my Auntie Helen both gave me information in sit-down interviews I did with them and I would ask my Auntie Helen all sorts of questions to get her talking when I would take her to the grocery store or a doctor’s visit.

Here is some of that family lore:

My grandmother Antonia and her sister Aniela in Massachusetts were twins. They were NOT twins, in fact, Aniela was born in 1871 and Antonia was born in 1890.

Charles had been a writer for a Polish newspaper in Chicago before moving to Southington. No, Charles’s destination from Poland was Southington but there’s no record he settled there before heading to Palmer, Massachusetts to work in the textile mill where he met Antonia. Now, he might not have been a newspaper writer but according to Auntie Helen, on a regular basis he would write to the government asking for his pension from WWI to be increased.

Charles was injured in WWI when a forgotten ammunition exploded under their train as they were heading home from France and he had a scar on his head from front to back. I don’t know the truth of this, but it was relayed to me by Auntie Helen. He was flung into the river and would have drowned but he was saved by fellow soldiers.

Steven left school after his grammar school graduation, after his siblings had been scattered among relatives, and gathered them together to live as a family again. Very “Party of Five”-ish but no. The story might be mistaken for what happened when their mother died in 1927. Steve and Eddie stayed with their father. Helen and Walt went to Uncle Joe Mikula who was the widower of Antonia’s sister in Palmer Mass. John was not yet 3, and he went to the home of his godmother, Amelia Marcieniec in Southington. Once Charles, Steve, and Eddie got settled in Wallingford, Charles went and brought the younger siblings back home.

Steve, at 22, kept the family together. The priest at St. Peter’s and Paul Church in Wallingford said he would sponsor them if anyone tried to break the family up. The first is very true. Eddie was 20, Helen 15, Walt 13, and John turning 11. The family remained together. John and Walt did spend time in Palmer Massachusetts with their Uncle John in the summer, and their cousins Walt and Stanley Mikula were known to have spent time in Wallingford. Eddie got married in 1936 and left the family to live in Meriden. Steve and Florence Liedke who lived on the corner of their street, got married in 1937 and Helen, Walt, and John moved in with them.

Steve “fibbed” his way into a job as a meat cutter at a market. The 1930 census when he was 16 says that he was not attending school and was working as a salesman at a meat market, so there might be truth to the story he left school after 8th grade. Very possible, as his father had trouble keeping his jobs. It’s likely that’s how he got the job and he went on to become the premier meat cutter at Caplan’s Market in Wallingford until he retired. The man knew his cuts of meat!

Cousin Steve’s Liberty Deli in Southington was in the same location that the family lived at in 1918. Oh yeah, that’s true! Not really family lore, more of a Fun Family Fact. 31 Liberty Street.

We are of Polish royalty. Well, I can’t deny that all we Jakiela girls are Queens, and Jakiela in Polish is Jagiello (Ya-GAY-wah), and The Jagiellon dynasty, family of monarchs of Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary became one of the most powerful in east central Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was ruled by King Wladislaw II Jagiello and Queen Jadwiga. So maybe there is some truth to that tale.

This is some of the family lore that has been accumulated over the 23 years since I first started researching my family. It’s been fun putting it all in one place and I hope you enjoy it!

It’s All About Family All Year Long

I’m starting, and hopefully I will complete, a “challenge” called 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks #52Ancestors.

I’ve been spending more time on my other site Thoughts From the Passenger Seat writing about thoughts that pop into my head, or answering the daily prompts. It’s easier! I don’t have to dig through the paperwork or get frustrated searching on Ancestry.

But I miss it….and I bet you do too!

Starting this week I’ll be writing one story a week based on the prompt provided. It won’t always be dates and facts and it could be about any one in my family – maybe even you!