uncles – It's All About Family

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.

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.

July 4th Memories

From early childhood in the 1960s until my early 20s, our 4th of July was spent at our relatives’ cottages at Pickerel Lake in Colchester, Connecticut. They were owned by my mother’s sister and her husband and my mother’s brother and his wife. They were all good friends and found this property and decided to put two homes on it with a common staircase from the road and a shared beach area.

It was about 45 minutes from our home in Wallingford and even though we went frequently throughout the summer, the 4th of July was a special party. It was a family reunion!

Besides the regular cast of characters there were people we saw on this day only. From Wallingford, my grandfather’s sister Aunt Mary Biega and his half-brother Walter Bonk and his wife Bea were there every year. I thought for the longest time that she was his mother! Walt and Bea had 3 daughters and they would be there with their families.

From the Fairfield area were the “Fairfield Posts”. Although they were all born Posluszny, a few of the brothers changed their last name to Post. The Polish “L” has the ~ through it so they just lopped off the rest of the letters! Joseph and Anna would be there along with their adult children and families.

There would always hard rolls from New York Bakery in Wallingford that we would stuff with my mother’s sausage and peppers with a piece of cheese on top. Clam chowder, hot dogs and hamburgers and delicious desserts. Every one brought something to share.

The adults would play cards at the picnic table, and there would be horseshoes or bocci going on in the middle of everything because there wasn’t much flat space!

Kids would be swimming out to the raft to hang out or to play “Toss People Off the Raft”. There were rowboats, and a canoe to take out and Uncle Mal was always willing to take people out in his sunfish. He’d have his moccasins on his feet and pipe in his mouth as we sailed around the lake. There were tubes to float around in – remember when they used to be actual car tire tubes? – and the fish loved to bite your butt as you floated around! Each cottage had a motorboat and if we were lucky, we’d get to go out in it and every luckier, got to waterski.

Kids in the life raft we brought, someone in a big tube, and people on the raft. Uncle Mal’s motorboat and the canoe in the foreground. Way in the back you can see the big rock that of course we called Plymouth Rock.

I don’t recall having fireworks there as it definitely wasn’t like it is now with fireworks from June 1st through the end of summer! The sun would set and we would pack our belongings and head on home. Sometimes we would catch town fireworks going off as we drove home.

The relatives moved to Florida in the 80s and held on to the cottages to stay at in the summer for a few years but eventually sold them. By then we were off to our own 4th of July parties.

My husband and I had a summer cottage at a nearby lake for 12 years and one time we took our kayaks over to Pickerel Lake to paddle the lake and see the houses again. It was a nice trip down memory lane. The lake felt so much smaller than I remember and the opposite side of the lake that was always home free, had homes at one end! It was nice to see them one last time.

White House – Aunt Judy and Uncle Mal’s. Blue House – Auntie Irene and Uncle Lou

Every 4th of July I think back to those family reunions and the fun we had swimming and spending time together. I’m grateful that although we may not be together on the 4th, we continue to celebrate holidays together with these same people as we’ve grown older and had families of our own.

A Valentine Gift in 1913

Wishing a Happy Birthday in Heaven to Louis J. Posluszny 1913-1983.

On February 14 in 1913, Julianna Ingram Posluszny gave birth to a second son – Louis Posluszny. At the time of his birth, they were living on Jefferson Street in Yonkers NY surrounded by other Posluszny families. When they made the move from New Britain to Wallingford in 1925 as I talked about in 121 Clifton Street, Louis was 12 years old.

He must have been bit by the same Outdoor/Farm/Garden bug as his mother, because the 1930 Federal Census lists him as an 18 year old boarder and general farm laborer for James and Mable Cook on what is listed as North Elm Street in Wallingford. A look at the town directory shows their farm on North Farms Road on the other side of Barnes Road in Wallingford. The 1933 Wallingford Town Directory lists him again as a farm hand but residing at 121 Clifton Street when he was 20 years old. It appears from this 1941 postcard after he was married that it was really something he loved.

On November 10, 1937 at Holy Trinity Church in Wallingford Louis married M. Irene Lefebvre (I have no record of what the M. stands for but it’s listed in the birth records). Lou left farming and went to work at the Wallingford Steel Company. They first lived at 132 East Street in Wallingford in 1939 and in 1940 lived at 24 East Street with Irene and their first child Judith. This 2-family home was originally owned by Caroline and Jon Bonk and when they died transferred to their son, Walter who was Konrad Posluszny’s half-brother.

He and Irene welcomed three more children – John (known as Jack), James and Loisanne to the family. They lived on the second floor at 604 Center Street with Irene’s parents, (Prime) Frank and Emily Lefebvre on the first floor. This house is currently occupied by Winterbourne Land Services, a land surveying and mapping company and is next door to Silver Pond apartments. I remember many happy family parties in the back yard that had a grape arbor and a stone fire place. I can picture the rooms upstairs clearly also!

Lou and Irene heading off on a cruise

Their children – Loisanne, Judy, Jack and Jim (front)

While his children were growing up, he and his brother in law Mal Bellafronto invested in property on Pickeral Lake in Colchester Connecticut. Lou and Irene were great friends with Judy (his younger sister by 4 years) and her husband Mal. They built cottages next door to each other with a large expanse of lake front for swimming and boating. The cottages were styled differently to accommodate different family sizes but they both were open and welcoming. Our family spent many Sunday afternoons there while growing up and were always given a week at one or the other cottage for a great family vacation.

Lou and my mother, Elizabeth, were brother and sister but just as there was a age gap between her and Tootsie, there was a 9 year gap between them and I don’t have any pictures or knowledge about their relationship. Their kids were my first cousins but Judy their first born was 21 when I was born and soon to be a mother of her own first child! My parents made a beautiful choice of godmothers for my sister and me – Irene was Gail’s and her daughter Judy was mine! Years later, when we needed her most, Judy at our side.

When Lou retired from the Steel Mill, he and Irene headed down to Florida to enjoy the warmth and sunshine and golf! They spend many happy years there living in the same area as Judy and Mal and welcomed their children and grandchildren on a regular basis. I don’t recall if they traveled up to Connecticut very often after that but when they did, I know we were happy to see them!

Lou and Irene

Lou, Irene and the grandkids

Lou passed away on August 21, 1983 from cancer. I remember it happened the day of my sister Janice’s wedding and because they didn’t want to upset her happy day, they didn’t call until after the reception was over.

When I think back to Uncle Lou now, I think of him as bear-like – sort of silly! – but he was sturdy and had very dark hair on his head and arms. I search his face in pictures for a resemblance to his parents and I see it.

Uncle Lou & Uncle Mal — Uncle Lou on left with his brother in law and good friend Mal Bellafronto

So Happy Birthday to you Uncle Lou! I hope you’re dancing up a storm in heaven with your beautiful Irene and sitting having a fine meal with your parents and siblings. Love you!

I know his children and grandchildren have many, many more memories of him than I could possibly have. Could you post them HERE in the comments so they will be in a place everyone stopping by can see them?