Jakiela – Page 4 – It's All About Family

Nicknames

The topic for week 21 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is – Nicknames.

Where do they start? Is it a shortening of someone’s name? Something someone said, something they did? In my family, it’s a little bit of everything!

In my mother’s family, there were some simple nicknames – Elizabeth was known as Betty and Conrad was called Connie. But Antoinette became Tootsie! In my head I can hear her being called T and maybe that turned into Toot and from there – Tootsie. I don’t think we ever heard the story of her nickname.

In my father’s family, their nicknames may have been more the version of their names. Steve was called Stas in a letter from their uncle. Walt was known as Vots, Helen was Helchie, and my dad John was called Yunk and Yunkie all his life.

When I was growing up we were told the names my sisters and I were given, Janice, Gail, and Nancy, were so people couldn’t make nicknames out of them! Of course, we are called Janny, Gaily, Nan or Nanner, so that theory went right out the window! Maybe my mother didn’t enjoy being called Betty instead of Elizabeth so she tried to prevent something like that.

In high school, my twin Gail and I were called JakTwin 1 and JakTwin 2. Eventually for me, it was shortened to Jak and is a name some friends still call me today. A few have said they didn’t know my first name was really Nancy!

My husband Mark, for much of his adult life was called Rocky. You might think it was because he was big and strong like Rocky Balboa. Unfortunately, no. It was for Rocket J. Squirrel, the pal of Bullwinkle because he was “flighty”. Friends said he would say one thing and do another.

Do you have a nickname? How do you feel about it?

The J. Lacourciere Paint Co.

The topic for week 20 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is – Taking Care of Business. I thought there was no better person to talk about than my dad, John Jakiela.

My dad graduated from high school in 1942. He was already working part time at the steel mill during high school and continued to do so until he headed to England during WWII.

When he came back to Wallingford, he returned to the steel mill for a brief time but said he was concerned about what he was breathing in so it was time to move on. He began working on a painting crew and that led him to working for The J. Lacourciere Paint Co. in Meriden and Wallingford Connecticut.

He worked on one of their painting crews and they painted and wallpapered hundreds of homes in Meriden and the surrounding area.

By the early 1950s, he was working in the Meriden store as a clerk.

There were 2 stores, one in Wallingford on Center Street at the current location of Cafe Luca and the Meriden store. The building the Meriden store was housed in was at 55 Grove Street in Meriden. It was an old brick building with very high decorative ceilings, a loft where the accounting was done, and an attic. Customers came in off the street through the front door and the back door – this old wood door with a bunch of locks – brought us in from the small parking lot in back. On the right side was the back of Firestone Tire which faced West Main Street and on the left side was the Capitol Theater. The theater was torn down for a parking garage in 1985 approximately.

While we were growing up, my dad worked Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm. He had a half day on Wednesdays and worked Saturday mornings. He also worked until 8pm on Fridays. Every Friday he went to Verdolini’s for a pizza pie. He’d eat it on his dinner break and bring home the rest where my sister’s and I would fight over who got the left overs. I think there were usually 3 pieces left?

*Verdolini’s Pizza – my introduction to GOOD pizza*

I remember visiting the store and we would love to flip through the wallpaper sample books and all the tubes of paint in the art supplies. We’d pore over the paint sample stand and pick out our favorite colors. The year he made us a doll house we used the sample pages to wall paper the walls. We also used the pages to wrap bricks (yes, bricks) for door stops and book ends in the bookcases he built us.

In 1971, Clarence Lacourciere passed away at 69 years old. Then in 1973, Royal, the remaining brother managing the Meriden store passed away at age 75. I’m sure at this moment my parents had concerns about the future of my dad’s job. I don’t know how it came about, but my parent’s bought the store (the contents, and name) from the family and my dad ran the store as he had since 1951.

*Advertisements in the Record-Journal 1975* *and 1976*

In the Lacourciere family there was also a sister, Viola. I was doing my newspaper search for this story where I finally made the connection to “Viola L. Flynn”, a woman who sent us postcards from her trips, gave us Christmas gifts of pins (I still have a few!) and bracelets, and books. It was their sister! It was such a sweet surprise when I realized who she was.

As I mentioned, there was a Wallingford Lacourciere store and that was run by Oryle, a younger brother, born in 1911. Judging by the advertisement that Oryle and his wife printed in the newspaper, it looks like, to me, that they wanted to take advantage of the fact that the Meriden store was no longer owned by the Lacourciere family! Oryle closed his Wallingford store in 1980.

*Ad posted by Oryle Lacourciere after my dad bought the Meriden store*

My parents ran the store from 1975 until they made the decision to close the store in 1981. By the early 80s (or earlier), box stores made their way into the retail landscape and it was more convenient to buy paint there along with whatever other home improvement items you needed.

Since they didn’t own the building, just the contents, they sold off everything. He was friends with a local Wallingford Antique dealer, Red O’Connell, who came in and took anything he could sell at his barn.

Right around the time he decided to close the store, my dad saw and answered an ad for a painter/wall paperer at Gaylord Hospital and Rehabilitation in Wallingford. With his talent and years of experience, of course he got the job! He loved it. No more worries about bills, or getting broken into, which was a common occurrence. He was closer to home and with a golf course next door, he’d go out there on his lunch hour and pick up lost golf balls or maybe hit a few. An added bonus a few years later, was my sister Gail getting a job there. He could visit her every day in the Occupational Therapy department! But the day he turned 65 – he was done, retired! It was off to the golf course nearly every day and usually more than one round! Weekends he’d put his bicycle in the back of his truck and ride the roads and bike trails in Old Saybrook by the water.

But he didn’t put his talents to rest. Even while he was working at Gaylord, he took the framing machine from the paint store, set it up in the basement and started his picture framing business. He was so creative when it came to mats and colors and frames! I would always say “just do what you think is best!” A couple of years ago, we were at a house nearby looking at a kitchen remodel and the woman offered up furniture and pictures in her basement. We liked one picture and when my husband took it off the wall and I saw the back, I got so excited because – my father had framed it! His stamp was on the back!

My dad was an incredibly talented man. He was creative with colors and style. He remodeled our entire house (we helped with the demo!), and built our kitchen cabinets. His father was talented with wood and I think he was the only son who took after him. I’m glad he was able to continue the business, and was able to get such a good job to use his talents when he decided to close up. He was able to enjoy his retirement before his heart made other plans for him and he went to assisted living where he had another 9 or so years making friends, and probably running into former customers of the store.

He took care of business and had a great career in the painting, wallpaper, and framing business.

Preserving Family History

The Week 19 topic for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is: PRESERVE. Today I’ll share my story.

I don’t know where my enthusiasm for researching and writing about family history came from. I do remember on our move from California to Connecticut, we stopped in Oklahoma to visit my husband’s family. His Great-Aunt Mildred Galloway had all the family census sheets and we had copies made to take with us. Maybe that’s what made me think about my family but a few years passed before I started anything.

I love finding the names and places, and I love having my DNA results to see the matches, but more than that, I love discovering the stories.

In the early days of my research, there was very little online, but I am fortunate to live in the same town that my parents’ families moved to in the mid-1920s. It was easy back then to visit the Town Clerk’s office for records. Over the years, I’ve received amazing photos and stories from my cousin Joan and her siblings and I’ve reached out with a little success for stories from my maternal cousins. It was through my cousin Judy’s files (and DNA) that led me to my half-Aunt Joanne.

I think most importantly for me is that my sisters and I grew up with only my grandmother alive and that was only until we were 7 and 9. My maternal grandfather died in 1944. My paternal grandparents died in 1927 and 1935! For our kids, my mother died before any of them were born. Now we have another generation in the family, these stories can get passed down to and through them.

*Gram with her 3 youngest grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren Christmas 1966*

The Effects of War

The topic for Week 17 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is WAR.

Over the life of this blog, I’ve talked about family members who have been in World War I like my paternal grandfather Charles Jakiela, and my Uncle Walt in World War II.

*paternal grandfather Charles Jakiela abt. 1923*

My grandmother’s brother Bronislaw Liro went BACK to Poland only a year or two before World War I broke out and managed to escape from Siberia!

My biological maternal grandfather, Jacob Engram, was in World War I as a member of the 49th Infantry out of New York. My lifelong maternal grandfather, Konrad Posluszny, didn’t serve in the war but he had four young children at home when the First World War broke out.

There was the aftermath of World War II as described by my grandfather’s brother Antoni in his letter to my dad and his siblings in the United States. “Even Helenka’s photo on a pony bothered them hanging on a wall.”

My mother’s brother, Connie, and her brother-in-law Mal both served in World War II. Connie was a cook in a San Antonio training camp. I have no records of him anywhere on the Fold3 website but in the videos from conversations with Aunt Judy, she said he was a cook and they had to pack up the kitchen when the fighting got close. The possibility of Connie going overseas was the family’s explanation when his father Konrad committed suicide in late December of 1944.

My husband’s dad Harold, uncle Ronald, and his step-dad Paul were all in the Korean War. Harold was a cook and Paul was in the motor pool in Korea. Ronald was in a tank during his time in Korea and it was a time that had a lifelong effect on him.

My dad, John, enjoyed his time overseas. He enlisted in February of 1943 in the Army/Air Force and headed overseas to Suffolk England. He talked very fondly of his time there at an airfield base and I think it was because he could leave home. He was living with his oldest brother, Steve, Steve’s wife, their two young sons, and John’s sister, Helen. I know he was grateful that he had a home, but I think it was a little crowded! He recalled to my sisters and me that when it was time to board the train to head off, parents and sons were crying. His only thought was, “This is an adventure!”. He volunteered for hatchman duty on the transport ship to England because it gave him privacy. At Great Ashfield Airforce Base near Stowmarket England, the location of the 385th Bombardment Group of the USAAF, he was a Corporal of the MPs on the base. He was back in the United States by September of 1945.

*John Jakiela, Corporal Army Air Force Word War II*

He had a picture of his squadron framed and hanging in his basement work area. We loved to take it from its spot and listen to his stories of the men in the picture.

He kept his address book of local friends and their war addresses along with the addresses of people he met while in the service. I have it now and like to flip through it to look at the various names.

He had a few Suffolk locals listed in there. One is Joyce Filby of Finningham England, who I think was his girlfriend while he was there. Another is the Hammond Family of Wetherden. I have a letter they wrote in November of 1947. Although the war was over for two years, they were still having difficulty getting food and were being strictly rationed for bread and potatoes. “Things are getting worse instead of better.” That sounds similar to Great Uncle Antoni’s letter from Poland in January of 1947!

Although some of the men had difficulties once they came back to the United States and their families, I’m grateful they all came back.

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!