It is just a page or two from an old newspaper, neatly folded to make one item visible – a schedule for passenger ships sailing to Europe. Closer examination reveals the paper is brittle and the newsprint odd (a font most would not be accustomed to seeing). A banner touts the newspaper section name, “Steamships and Tours”.
To look at it, and the way it is folded, one might think the reader, contemplating a trip to Europe, had just put the newspaper down, perhaps to answer a knock at the door or tend to a steaming kettle on the stove. However, after glancing at the date at the top of the page one realizes the newspaper is from a time long past...November 9, 1924. How curious it is that a few pages taken from a newspaper from so long ago would be preserved in such a manner…looking as if the reader might be returning at any moment.
The newspaper belonged to my aunt. Before that it belonged to my grandmother. I know not why it was kept, but it was, and therefore I keep it now.
Since the newspaper is from my grandmother's time, I assume it was she whom in 1924 was thinking of a trip to Europe. By then she had lost her two sisters, and her father, each in a tragic manner; however, her mother Zofia (Sofia or Sophie in English) was alive and no doubt she would have wanted to visit her.
The trip was never made. Here, in the United States, my grandmother was a farmer’s wife living in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. She no doubt lived a busy life. Plans to sail across the ocean and travel by train to Poland were probably more easily dreamt of than carried out...especially when weeks turn into months, and months turn into years, in what seems like the blink of an eye.
Fifteen years later the European continent was immersed in a war brought on by a madman, one that began in, and tore apart, what is now Poland. It was there, for the second time in her lifetime, my great-grandmother found herself ensnared by a World War. Unfortunately, this one, would consume her life. Zofia died November 2, 1944 in Fabryczna; seven months before the end of the war and almost twenty years to the day the newspaper was printed.
That was then.
In the here and now it does not seem long ago that 2012 was just beginning. Yet here we are, with 2013 strolling up our walks and about to knock on our doors. At the start of this year I had just begun researching my family history, wanting to know more about the Polish roots of which I write and from which I came.
I knew then that my grandmother emigrated out of Poland on her eighteenth birthday and that her maiden name was Fasiecka. I knew almost nothing about the family she had left behind. I knew stories of course…those told openly…and those not. I also knew that my great grandmother’s name was Zofia and I had a phonetic-spelling of her maiden name. Other than that, my coffers were empty.
That was then.
Now, not only do I know the correct spelling of Zofia’s maiden name, which is Kisicka, I have it in her own handwriting (I’ve posted this image before…The Marriage of Stanislaus and Zofia). Shortly after the discovery of Zofia’s maiden name I remember thinking it impossible to know more, the names of her parents and her husband's parents for example. I was convinced that this was knowledge forever lost to time, and it made me sad that I never asked such questions when those whom would have known such things were alive.
That was then.
I now know more names than I ever thought possible. On my great grandmother’s side I have names going all the way back to my great, great, great, great, great grandparents...five greats. On my great grandfather’s side I have names going back three greats. The surnames on both sides are difficult to spell and even harder to pronounce; names such as Przybylska, Budzyńska, Kędzierczakowa, Augustyniak, and Nowicka…the latter probably the easiest to spell and pronounce, but possibly the most mysterious (Thomas Nowicki and Magdalena Nowika, a story for another time...and then there is my great-great grandmother Fransika Przybylska, a budding mystery also for another time).
An interesting note, as was the tradition in Poland back then, surnames ending with an “i” or “y” for the husband were changed to ending with an “a” for the wife.
The fact that my last name is Smith almost seems anticlimactic. My father's roots were quite different from my mother's, whose maiden name was Drozinski, my grandmother's married name. My grandmother married a first generation American whose parents (Joseph Drozinski and Apolonia Koselafska) immigrated to the United States from Danzig, Germany (modern day Gdansk, Poland).
That was then.
While there is still much I do not know, and most likely never will, my sights of late seem more fixed on the future than on the past…a natural transition I think for someone who has focused for so long on times gone by and places so far away. One can spend the rest of their life trying to decode the past and uncover its secrets; but there is a cost, one of precious days in the present, where life goes on, and we record with our words, deeds, and actions those histories that our descendants will someday speak of, and perhaps write about. I am not saying that my research has come to an end, but I am saying that my sight in the next year will be more forward looking than it has been as of late.
I think the late singer songwriter Dan Fogelberg said it (or should I say sang it) best…
and the sons become the fathers
and their daughters will be wives
as the torch is passed from hand to hand
and we struggle through our lives
though the generations wander
the lineage survives
and all of us from dust to dust
we all become forefathers by and by
To my family and friends…I hope your Hanukkah was a happy one, I hope your Christmas is a joyous one, and I wish for you a New Year that is happy, healthy and prosperous. Goodbye all, until next year.
