Connecting with Ursula on the ancestral plane

Some ancestors call out to me more than others. Of course, if I could time travel back to their eras, I would want to meet every single one of them. But there are some I would want to spend a particularly long time with.

To me, the "ancestral plane" is something like a very big party. The guests include family members I knew in this lifetime (my Babcia, my Dad, my aunts and uncles), relatives that I never knew but heard about through them (my great-grandfather Antoni Ruscik, my Dad's youngest sister, Annie), and many, many ancestors whom I've become aware of through family research. Helpfully, those people are all wearing "Hello, my name is ..." badges so I can finally put a face to a name as we introduce ourselves.

But there are a few individuals who need no introduction. We make eye contact across that crowded room, and there is an instant sense of recognition, an affinity of souls. We have always known each other, somehow, across time and space. I yearn to talk with them, to learn more about their lives than I can ever glean from genealogical research.

Who, what, when, where, why, and how

In a family like mine, there is precious little information recorded about any one person's life. In Europe, the sources are for the most part limited to brief entries in church registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, and in occasional church or civil censuses. In the United States, for our 1890s-1914 immigrants, there is little beyond the standard official records (passenger lists, military registrations, citizenship papers, and such).

From their arrival in this country through the 1920s, at least, there is almost no documentation or description of their lives. Most of our immigrants were young, in their late teens and twenties; most were single. All were looking for work, trying to get a foothold in a country where they could not speak or read the language (at least, not much). What they did, who they did it with, where and when they did it, and why—I wonder about this endlessly.

I have found almost nothing about any of my Polish immigrant ancestors in the English-language newspapers of the cities they lived in. And I have spent many, many hours reading through microfilmed copies of the old dailies published in Worcester, Boston, Pawtucket, Lowell, Springfield, etc.

In search of wedding news

So I didn't have very high hopes for finding anything when a fourth cousin and I recently spent the day in Maynard, Massachusetts, a town where our shared Bogdan-Przyjemski family lived in the early twentieth century. What I really, really wanted was to find some newspaper mention of the September 26, 1915, marriage of Urszula Przyjemski to Jozef Szlachciuk. In July 2012, I wrote about Urszula's marriage in "Discovering Julian Prokopowicz's Bogdan family in America," which features the group portrait made for the wedding.

Had that portrait not been inscribed on the back, had it not come down to me, I most likely never would have known about my grandfather Julian's relatives in Maynard. Urszula's wedding was the key that unlocked a room full of family history. Would newspaper coverage of the event perhaps unlock more? I really hoped so.

The Maynard weeklies

In 1915, two weekly newspapers served Maynard (population then about 6,500) and environs: the Maynard News and the Maynard Enterprise. The Maynard Public Library has both on microfilm; the reference librarian noted that some issues were missing (a situation not uncommon with century-old newspapers).

We started our search that day with the Maynard Enterprise; unfortunately, the issue that would have been published in the week following the wedding was not on the microfilm. We checked the subsequent issue, but weren't surprised to find no mention there.

As we scanned the pages—those good old-fashioned broad pages with nine columns of tiny type—we could not help noticing the almost complete lack of any coverage related to Maynard's Polish population. Even the English-speaking Irish Catholics of St. Bridget's Parish got little attention. Among the town's diverse ethnic groups, only the Finns seemed to merit a few inches of print.

An electric sign, a whist party, a wedding

We moved on to the Maynard News, whose content mirrored that of the Enterprise. The News was published on Fridays, so we zeroed in on the October 1, 1915, edition, printed just five days after Urszula's Sunday wedding. Eight pages, small font, much of the newsprint faded long before it was reproduced on microfilm.

Typical of the era, the News consolidated most of its local coverage under town headings: "Maynard," "Sudbury," "Acton." A sentence reporting someone's weekend trip to Boston might be followed by a death notice, which might in turn be followed by an announcement of a concert or a runaway dog.

By the time we reached page eight, our hopes were dim. But there at the bottom of page eight, in a "Maynard" potpourri that told of a "new electric sign" in town, a meeting of the Knights of Kaleva, a family's houseguests from Vermont, and a whist party at the Masonic Hall, there it was: a two-sentence announcement of Urszula's wedding.

"There was a wedding on Thompson street, Sunday, when Rev. Francis Jablonski joined in wedlock Miss Ursula Pryjenski and Joseph Szlacheink. The usual festivities followed," the newspaper reported.

Some information, some questions

Twenty-five words, no more. Surnames misspelled, no surprise. The announcement didn't say much, yet it spoke volumes.

We might have hoped for some mention of other members of the wedding party, if there were any besides the two witnesses (one being my grandfather, Julian Prokopowicz). Or perhaps a description of the bride's gown (once upon a time, many newspaper inches were lavished upon detailed descriptions of veils and lace and trains and beads and fabrics).

What did it tell us? I was surprised to learn that the wedding took place at the family home rather than at church, which would have been St. Bridget's, since St. Casimir's Polish Catholic church was still a decade away from being built in town. I would guess it was a noon or afternoon wedding, since Rev. Jablonski would have been busy with Mass on that Sunday morning.

What "usual festivities" followed the wedding? I can imagine lots of food, lots of music, lots of guests. For Kazimierz and Elena Bogdan Przyjemski, the marriage of their first-born child, their 17-year-old daughter (18, according to the town record), would certainly have been cause for celebration. And Sunday would have been the one day of the week when friends and family living in Rhode Island and elsewhere in Massachusetts might have been able to travel to Maynard to share in the joyous occasion.

Who did the reporting?

Perhaps most significantly, the write-up told us that, despite the dearth of news space devoted to Maynard's Polish immigrants, this event made it into print. How did that happen? Who took the initiative to report the event? We'll never know.

I'm intrigued by the different possibilities raised by the spelling, wording, and details in the announcement. If the family reported the wedding, surely the bride's and groom's surnames would have been spelled correctly, at least at the outset. It's not inconceivable that the errors might have been made at the newspaper, either in copying the information, or typing it, or typesetting. If a reporter assigned to town hall dutifully recorded all the marriages for the week, it might have become a tidbit in the community news column that way. That's quite possible.

But here's how I imagine it: Ursula took the initiative to go to the newspaper office, perhaps with the marriage certificate in hand as documentation. After all, she had come to this country in early childhood; she would have been educated in Maynard schools, probably equally fluent in English and Polish by the time she was a teen-ager, and comfortable in her community. She may well have been more fluent in English than Joseph, who, though a few years older than her, had immigrated more recently. Or maybe the newlyweds went to the newspaper office together, if they were able to squeeze in time before or after their jobs at the American Woolen Company mill.

Why did it matter?

Why would it have been important to share their news in an English-language publication that perhaps few of Maynard's Polish immigrants might have read? Well, people generally like to share happy news. (Facebook is full of it, announcements and photos and thumbs-up "likes.")

Beyond that, maybe Ursula and Joseph wanted to create a more public record of their marriage than the listing in Maynard's 1915 annual town report would have afforded them.

Or maybe Ursula sensed somehow that she wouldn't have many opportunities ahead to let the world know she was here. In fact, her time was limited. She would live long enough to give birth to her only child in 1916, when her name would appear as "Celia" in the town records. When her husband, by then known as "Joe," registered for the World War I draft in 1917, she would be referred to only as "wife."

When Ursula died suddenly at the height of the influenza epidemic in October 1918, just nine days after her third wedding anniversary and a few months after her 20th birthday, there would be no obituary; newspapers could not keep pace with the volume of deaths that fall. When she was buried in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, her gravestone identified her as "Celia Scluck."

Feeling her presence

What if Joseph and Ursula had not moved to Rhode Island in that final year? What if they had stayed in Maynard? Would she have escaped the flu? Would she and Joseph have had other happy events to announce in the Maynard News in decades to come?

I wonder about that.

I felt Ursula's presence so strongly during that day in Maynard. Not only did my cousin and I find the wedding announcement, we found the house on Thompson Street where Joseph and Ursula were married in 1915. Sitting in the car, parked in the pouring rain, we spent some time talking about the Przyjemski family's years there, wondering about their lives, imagining "the usual festivities" that must have filled the house and yard on that September afternoon so long ago.

We have a lot to talk about with Ursula on the ancestral plane.

Discovering Julian Prokopowicz’s Bogdan family in America

Almost everything I thought I knew about my paternal grandfather’s early years in the United States was wrong. And I am happy that I was wrong.

I knew that Julian Prokopowicz, age 19, planned to stay with the Linga family, his friends from Kiwance village in Radun parish, when he immigrated to America and reached his destination of Worcester, Massachusetts. The April 1914 passenger list for the SS Koln showed him traveling from Bremen, Germany, to Boston alone. His parents and siblings remained in Russian Poland, and he never did see them again. I was right about that much.

What I recently learned, however, is that members of his mother’s family had immigrated more than a decade earlier and had apparently maintained communication for all those years. I discovered this through Massachusetts records that have been digitized and made available online at the FamilySearch website. A single record in a Massachusetts vital records database (“Massachusetts Marriages, 1841-1915”) provided a single detail that gave me a whole new look at my grandfather’s first year here.

This new information unlocked the secrets held in a set of three related wedding-day portraits that I received in 1998, one of several dozen photos left behind, ignored and unwanted, in a small black suitcase after my grandmother, Anna Blaszko Prokopowicz, died in 1976. My grandfather, Julian, died much earlier, in 1951.

The large wedding portrait (shown below) is typical of its era: a seated bride and groom flanked by a group of nine beautifully attired but solemn-faced persons who shared in the occasion. A smaller photo shows the bride and groom standing alone. Inscribed in pencil on the back is this note in Polish: “Pamiontka szlubu Pan Jozef Orszula Szlachciuk”—that is, “A remembrance of the wedding of Mr. Jozef [and] Urszula Szlachciuk.” A third photo shows three young men standing together: one unidentified at left (holding a lit cigarette in his white-gloved hand!), Jozef Szlachciuk, and my grandfather, Julian.

The only person recognizable to me in the photos was my grandfather, looking very young at age 20. The Szlachciuk name meant nothing to me; I guessed the groom was a friend—likely a close friend—of Julian’s. The photos were made at the studio of Geo. T. Elson of Maynard, Massachusetts; his name is engraved on the tan and brown cardboard mats on which the photos are mounted.

About five years ago, in browsing through this collection of old photos, I tried to find some information about Jozef Szlachciuk. He appears with a wife and children in the 1930 U.S. Census for Rhode Island. I thought idly that someday when I had time, I would try to locate one of the Szlachciuk descendants and offer them the photos. (In fact, I have four other small postcard-type photos featuring Jozef and Urszula.) I assumed that the Szlachciuks were not related to me. And then I put the photos back in storage.

What a digitized record revealed

A few weeks ago, I came across the Szlachciuk wedding pictures and decided to research the surname again. So much more genealogical information is online now than there was five years ago! I entered the surname on FamilySearch, and was happy to get a result, though the name was indexed as Joseph Szlachcink. (Polish surnames are misspelled and misindexed more often than not in U.S. records, often so grossly incorrect as to be unrecognizable. A handwritten “u” misinterpreted as “n” wasn’t too far off, all things considered.) The digitized image was a page detailing “Marriages registered in the town of Maynard for the Year Nineteen Hundred and fifteen” (p. 631 in the Massachusetts state volume).

“Marriage No. 76” records the September 26, 1915, wedding of Joseph Szlachciuk, 23, and Ursula Przyjemska, 18. It was the first marriage for each of them; they were both residents of Maynard, both born in Poland. His occupation was “Laborer” and hers, “Mill Op.” (that is, “operator”). Joseph’s parents are listed as Stanislaw and Mary Krasz[e]wski Szlachciuk. Ursula’s parents are identified as Casimir and Ellen Bohdan Przyjemski. The priest who performed the ceremony was Reverend Francis Jablonski of Maynard. The date of record was September 27, 1915.

One detail in that record stopped me in my tracks: Ursula’s mother was Ellen Bohdan. (This is a surname that is variously spelled Bogdan, Bohdan, and Bahdan in Polish and Russian records.) Julian’s mother was Anna Bogdan, or Bohdan. I had found the 1870 baptismal record of Elena Bohdan in the Radun parish microfilms that I use for research at my local Family History Center. Elena Bohdan was born in Odwierniki, the same village that Julian claimed as his birthplace on his World War I draft registration card in 1917.

It seemed more than coincidence that the bride’s mother was a Bogdan from Odwierniki, a village of only six houses in that era. According to the somewhat earlier 1852 Radun parish census, two of those six houses in Odwierniki were inhabited by Bogdan families, one headed by Mateusz, the other by his brother, Jan (or Iwan, in the Russian-language records). Elena and Anna Bogdan were almost certainly either sisters or first cousins.

It may be some time before I know for sure what their relationship was, because there are gaps in the Radun parish baptismal records available on microfilm. The records for 1872 and 1874-1877 have not been filmed, and it is likely that Anna Bogdan was born in one of those years. (I will probably have to hire a researcher to find her baptismal record or request a search for it in either the Vilnius or Grodno archives.)

So Julian Prokopowicz appears in the Szlachciuk-Przyjemski wedding photos not because he was a friend of the groom, but because he was a cousin of the bride. If Elena and Anna were sisters, then Julian and Urszula were first cousins; if the two women were first cousins, then Julian and Urszula were second cousins. Either way, they were cousins.

Not just a guest at the wedding

Intrigued by the details provided in the town of Maynard’s civil record of the marriage, I wanted to know more: who were the witnesses? That information, along with the bride’s and groom’s villages of origin, would have been recorded at St. Casimir Church, where the wedding ceremony was performed. Established in 1912 to serve Maynard’s sizable Polish Roman Catholic immigrant community, St. Casimir Parish closed in 1997; its records are now held by St. Bridget Parish in that town. I contacted the parish office, and learned that the witnesses were Julian Prokopowicz and Jozef Fabrycki.

This news was quite exciting! Why was Julian chosen to serve as a witness? He had been in the United States for only 17 months when the wedding took place. He would not have seen his cousin Urszula’s family for at least 11 years before they reconnected in Massachusetts. Elena Bogdan Przyjemska and her daughters Urszula and Anna had left Russian Poland in 1903, when Julian was 8 years old and Urszula about 6; Elena’s husband, Kazimierz, had emigrated in 1902. Certainly, in more than a decade in Maynard, the Przyjemski family would have had ample time to establish relationships with other men suitable to serve as a witness to Urszula’s marriage. (In fact, I have discovered that they had other male relatives living in Massachusetts and nearby Rhode Island at this time.)

It is, of course, speculation on my part, but I would like to believe that the relationship between Julian and the Bogdan-Przyjemski family was so close that they chose to recognize him with this honor. So he was not alone in America, as I had assumed all these years; he did have family here, and knowing that makes me happy to have been wrong. The question now is, were Elena and Anna sisters, or cousins? Anna’s baptismal record would clarify their relationship.

I wish I could time-travel back to Odwierniki: Would I see a copy of that 1915 wedding photo on display in the home of my great-grandparents, Kazimierz and Anna Bogdan Prokopowicz? Would I see Anna’s face light up when she looked at it? Would she take comfort in knowing that her son Julian, some 4,200 miles away, had Elena (his “Ciocia Helena”) watching over him in his new American life? I’d like to think so.

Photo caption

Jozef Szlachciuk and Urszula Przyjemska were married September 26, 1915, at St. Casimir Church in Maynard, Massachusetts. This group portrait was made at the Geo. T. Elson Studio in Maynard. Seated at far left is, I believe, Anna Przyjemska, about 12 years old, the younger sister of the bride; an unidentified woman; the groom, Jozef Szlachciuk, age 23; the bride, Urszula Przyjemska, age 18; and marriage witness Jozef Fabrycki. Standing at far left is my paternal grandfather, Julian Prokopowicz, age 20, the bride’s cousin and another witness to the marriage. The others are unidentified.