It's All About Family

How We Got Here

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

The topic for Week 16 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is – STEPS. This week I’m bringing my husband’s side of the family into the “It’s All About Family” family.

My husband Mark is a Benson with a lineage back to 1495 in Yorkshire England through 12 generations.

His 7th great grandfather, Christopher brought his family, including 6th great grandfather, John Benson to “the New World” in 1693. John married, lived, and died in Newport Rhode Island in 1722.

5th great grandfather John Hendrick was born in Newport RI in 1720. He married in the Second Congregational Church in Newport. He raised a family in North Carolina, and died in 1803 in Washington Georgia.

4th great grandfather, William Carroll Benson was born in 1755 in North Carolina. He married in 1772, moved to Barren Plains Tennessee, and raised 11 children. He died in 1831.

3rd great grandfather William Carroll Benson Jr, was born in 1783 in Barren Plains Tennessee. He made his way to an area of Illinois which is now Williamson County named for his donation of land. He was one of the original settlers of the area and there is a lot of information on him. He died in 1856 in an area of Williamson County Illinois

Joseph William Benson was born in 1825 in Marion Illinois and remained there until his death in 1876. He fought in the Mexican American War of 1846-1848 and was registered to fight in the Civil War but I don’t know if he did. He’s the only Benson that didn’t move away from his birth place!

Mark’s great grandfather, Archibald Lee Benson was born in 1867 in Marion, Williamson County, Illinois. He and his wife and children moved to Shawnee Oklahoma just prior to 1910 and he died there in 1948.

Grandfather Cletus Harold Benson was born in 1907 in Oklahoma. He and Mark’s grandmother divorced and He died in 1963 in Sacramento California.

*Archibald Lee and son Cletus Harold Benson*

Mark’s dad Cletus Harold Jr was born in Oklahoma and he and Mark’s mom made their way to Oakland California after their marriage in the late 1940s.

Mark was born in California and lived there until 1995 when we made our way to Wallingford Connecticut, my hometown, to live and here we are today. Not Leaving!

*The clockwise (sort of) travel route of the Bensons from 1693 to 2024!*

It’s funny to think that all those miles of travel, all those steps around the United States and we find ourselves one state away from where the Bensons began life in America!

Family Schooling

“School days, school days, dear old golden rule days; reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick….”

The topic for Week 15 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is School Days! This is fun because my parents and aunts and uncles all went to the high school that I went to and that my son went to! Besides the information I already had, I was able to access yearbooks through Ancestry(dot)com.

My mother’s three oldest siblings did not, as far as I can tell, graduate from high school. I’m basing my thoughts on their move to Wallingford from New Britain in 1924/1925. Aunt Tootsie would have been 16 when the moved to Wallingford and at that point I was told she worked as a maid for a Choate School household. In her early 20s, she began working at Wallace Silversmith where she stayed until she retired.

There is very little information about Conrad (Connie) and his brother Lou. They would have been 15 and 12 respectively in 1925 so perhaps they had a few more years of additional schooling. In the 1930 Federal census, Connie is 19 and working at a bakery and Lou is 17 and working as a laborer on a farm. Connie continued his baking career until his death in 1980 but Lou found his way into the Wallingford Steel Mill where he remained until he retired.

Aunt Judy graduated from Lyman Hall High School in 1935.

Some observations – her face is rounder than I thought and because of that and the lettering of her name, it took me 3 times through to find her! Her “chief interest” was New Haven – shopping?, a boyfriend?. Her activities – soccer, basketball, and volleyball! I think back then a lot of the sports were played between the different grade.

Betty, my mother, graduated from Lyman Hall in 1940.

Betty was a busy girl! Baseball, basketball, bowling, drum major, cheerleader.

During my yearbook perusing, I found my Auntie Irene who married my Uncle Lou I mentioned earlier! She graduated in 1933.

Turning to my dad’s side, there was a similar situation with a move from Southington to Wallingford in 1927 when Steve was 14 and Eddie was 12. The year books are not consistent and some don’t have names or pictures! Life with their father was not easy and it’s likely they both went to work in their teens.

My Auntie Helen graduated from Lyman Hall in 1938. Also graduating with her was a future great uncle, Victor Biega, who married Mary Posluszny and a cousin of Mary and my grandfather, Charles Burghart.

My Uncle Walt graduated with my mom from Lyman Hall in 1940. His future wife Eleanor Steiniger did too!

Uncle Walt went on after high school to join the Navy and I told the story of his experience at Pearl Harbor earlier this year.

My dad, John, graduated from Lyman Hall in 1942. He played baseball but had to give it up to go to work after school his senior year.

*John Jakiela Senior picture and activities*

*Lyman Hall School, Wallingford Connecticut*

The building that my relatives attended was located on South Main Street in Wallingford and it was built in 1916-1917. In 1957 a new high school was built and this building became one of the town’s junior high schools. When three schools were consolidated into two, the building became our town hall! It continues to be our town hall to this day.

Yummy In My Tummy!

The Week 14 topic for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is Favorite Recipe.

Growing up we had pretty basic meat, potato, and a vegetable dinners. So maybe it’s no surprise that one of my favorite meals was a one pot meal!

This “Texas Hash” recipe is one of my favorites. Once I started making it for my family I changed it up to one onion, one green pepper, and petite diced tomatoes. In addition, I add 2 cups of water after the spices, stir it up and let it cook on the stove top for 30 minutes and it comes out perfect! We add shredded cheddar cheese to our servings and it is delicious as leftovers.

Since I’ve written out the recipe, I never noticed that uncooked noodles could be used in the recipe. Personally I don’t think it would taste as good!

One of my favorite sweets that my mother made was Caramels! It was a family recipe but I’m not sure who it originated from. My aunt and cousin made them chewy but my mother made them super hard. Like, bite into it and you’ll break a tooth hard! They were handed out with that disclaimer!

I can picture my mother cooking them on the stove with the candy thermometer nearby. She would have a measuring cup with water to drop a piece of the candy mixture in to see if it formed a ball. If it did, it was ready to put in the pans.

The pans were 9” square metal pans and after they were filled she would put them out in the back hall to freeze because she only made them in the winter. They would stay there for a day or so until they were very hard and then she would cut them into squares or rectangles, or however they broke up. One time by mistake she put in root beer extract instead of vanilla and we liked those just as much as the regular ones! They got wrapped in wax paper and tossed into a paper grocery bag.

I’ve never made this recipe because when I make sweets, I’m usually the only one who eats them!

Family Worship

The topic for week 13 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is – Worship.

My maternal and paternal sides of my family have always been catholic. I have no church records of their marriages in the United States but I have baptism records for almost all of my parents’ siblings. My Posluszny family likely attended St. Mary’s Church in Yonkers New York as it was the oldest Catholic Church and about a half mile from their Jefferson Street home.

After their move to Wallingford, my Great Aunt Mary Posluszny Biega and her family attended St. Casimer’s Polish National Church. There was/is also a Polish Catholic Church, Saints Peter & Paul in Wallingford so I’m not sure of their decision to go to one over the other – possibly location. My Aunt Judy talked about my grandmother acting in the plays at St. Casimer’s with my Great Aunt Mary (her sister-in-law) directing, so I’m assuming she attended that church! At some point, my mother’s family switched to Holy Trinity Church. I speculate it had something to do with my cousin Judy, the first grandchild, attending Holy Trinity School in the mid-1940s. There would be 13 Posluszny related cousins attending the school over the course of 40 years.

The Biega family and my great grandmother Carolina Posluszny/Bonk continued at St. Casimer’s and are buried in its cemetery. While Holy Trinity has a beautiful spacious cemetery not far from the center of town, St. Casimer’s is off an industrial road on the south end of town near the highway and train tracks. In fact, you used to cross over the tracks at section WITHOUT ANY GATE OR SIGNAL. Yes, I put that in all caps because our neighbors (father, daughter, and son-in-law) were hit by a train while crossing the tracks in their car in 1992. That amazes me that the crossing was still allowed in the 1990s.

Interesting aside about Holy Trinity Church…I met an older woman years ago while on a work appointment. She was Italian and grew up in the Colony Street area of Wallingford. She said Holy Trinity Church was started by the Irish in Wallingford in 19847 and a brief rundown of the priests in the church’s history reads like a Dublin phone book – McGarisk, O’Reilly, Teevens, Quinn. The Italians were not made to feel very welcome in the church so they created their own women’s society within the church. Perhaps that’s why the town still has two Polish churches!

Once my paternal Jakiela side settled in Southington CT, they attended The Church of the Immaculate Conception where my Uncles Steve and Eddie made their first communion.

After my grandmother Antonia died, my grandfather and his five children moved to Wallingford and they began attending Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church. My dad, his brother Walter, and his sister Helen all made their first communion there. The boys were altar boys and Helen cleaned the altar for the priest.

*Helen – 2nd row 4th from left abt. 1930*

After their father died tragically in 1935 the priest worked with Steve, the oldest sibling, to be sure the family stayed together by offering to “be their guardian” in the event the state tried to separate them. Thankfully that didn’t happen!

My Uncle Steve’s family must have continued to attend Sts. Peter and Paul after their first two children were born. Charles, their oldest, wanted to attend Holy Trinity School. In order to get free or discounted tuition, they needed to be parishioners of Holy Trinity Church as so they did. That began a Jakiela tradition of all eight Wallingford cousins graduating from Holy Trinity School.

As a family, my parents, sisters and I went to Holy Trinity Church every Sunday for the 9:15am mass. We sat in the same general area and looked the back of the same heads every week. We also attended mass with our classes for holy days. I enjoyed walking down the hill to the church on those days! I was not crazy about going to mass every Sunday and wished that we took a summer break from church like we did with school. Even when we were on vacation, we went to Sunday mass at the local church!

After mass we would head to Boylan’s Market to pick up the Sunday newspapers – New Haven Register, New York Daily News, and a Boston paper – and drop off a paper to our grandmother and Aunt Tootsie.

We all made our first communion and I was annoyed we didn’t get to wear pretty dresses like Janice did! we made our confirmations and had our 8th grade graduations at church as well. Janice and Gail both were married at Holy Trinity.

When my mother died in April of 1987, her funeral mass was one of the last times I attended church before I moved to California that October. I didn’t stop because I was upset with God or anything but I was going because I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Weird I guess, but we do what we do.

My father continued to attend of course and looking back I really admire his faith. Not the “I have faith in you” kind, but his religious faith. It’s not always easy. He started attending the late Saturday afternoon mass and afterwards, he would drop off the mass bulletin to my Aunt Tootsie, my mother’s oldest sister. He probably did that right up until his heart surgery.

He died in 2010 on Palm Sunday. The nursing home distributed palms that morning and they were in his room when he died. I still have them. As he told the medium in the first reading I had, “I died an angel’s death Phil”, meaning he didn’t feel anything, he didn’t suffer. Fitting for a person who worshipped until the end.

Years of Technology

The Topic for week 12 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is Technology!

Who better to talk about how technologies have changed than me! I was born in 1960, 64 years ago and over that time there have been a lot of changes in technology.

In 1963, John Glenn orbited Earth, and in 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon! In the 1990s, the International Space Station was created and now in the 2000s, astronauts are living aboard the station for long periods.

Closer to home, 0ne of our first family cars that I remember was a Chrysler New Yorker, handed down from Aunt Tootsie. It had push buttons on the dashboard for P-N-D-R. Over the years, our cars have changed to transmission on the steering wheel, to on the center console, back to the steering column, and pushing in a button to park! High beams used to be a button on the floor and now they’re another lever on the steering column. And, let’s talk about automatic lights! That dial on the dashboard with an automatic option for lights is a lifesaver for people who forget to turn them on.

I learned to type when I was about 12, sitting on the floor using my Aunt Tootsie’s portable typewriter, typing whatever I could copy. When I was 24, the organization I worked for bought computers for the accounting department and an IBM Word Processor. It was big and clunky, and I had to name the document before I even knew what I was typing about and it was only for typing documents. Everything was saved onto 5-1/4 floppy disks. Since then we’ve progressed to desktop computers, laptop computers, Ipads, with or without their own keyboards, and cell phones that can do everything a computer can!

Growing up, we had one telephone in our house and it was in the kitchen. As we turned into teenagers, we got a very, very long cord for the phone so it could travel as privacy required. I don’t think it was until we moved back to this house that we had a second phone in the house! But along the way, we progressed to portable phones that you could walk around the house and talk on the phone! Now you won’t find many houses that have a “landline” because everyone has a cell phone!

I hope you enjoyed this trip down my technology memory lane!

Family Achievements

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.

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!

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!

*One of several articles on Charlene’s research*

How Do You Say That?

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!

Today Is My Twin’s Birthday

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.

*Gail (blue sneakers), Janice, Nancy (Red sneakers)*

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.

Story Update Mary Kukulska

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.

While doing some research, I saw information on a 5th cousin’s tree that didn’t match what I had so I checked in with her. Make sure you go back and read the original story!

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’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.

The Mysterious Mikula Family

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.

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 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.