June 25th 2018. Back to Tom's paternal grandmother's side to meet more relatives.

On the way back to where we were on the 23rd, we stopped by a church where they attend.

 On an outside wall, there is a memorial of those that served in WWII.

 Almost there...another picture to help tell our story.  This particular road was a main route between 2 nations at war.  Not a good place to be in the middle.

 These next 2 pictures, are next to each other.  This first one we visited on the 23rd, and came back today.

This home, although not the original one, is on Tom's great grandfather's property.

 Great Grampy was a blacksmith, and his anvil is still on the property.

This home in between is where Tom's grandmother's sister lived for her remaining days. 

 These last 2 pics are some of Tom's 1st cousins once removed.

On this day, we did go to another cemetery to see where many relatives lay, but it is also an opportunity to record some from-to dates in search of more ancestors.  After 3 days of hugs from many people, we were still sleep deprived.

After 3 days of meeting people, all set up by our wonderful geneaologist Daniel, it was time to take a break.  He drove us back to Krakow where we said farewell to him and thanked him for great planning.  For the next part of the trip, we would be on our own.  Wait.....he was out interpreter too!

June 24, 2018 - A visit with paternal relatives

After a much needed several hours of sleep...and a hot breakfast, we headed back to near where we were yesterday.  This time the other set of relatives on Tom's paternal grandparents (Michal's) side.  To no real great surprise, the 2 locations were about 7 miles from each other.  We often had wondered if Michal and Julia had known each other before they came to America.  Evidence suggests that they did.  Today's location was more outside of town.  Although we had been only 3 of 4 doors down from the place where we visited another dozen or more relatives, we did manage to see where Tom's Grampy Mike had lived.  We even had a friendly greeting.

 We found that the soil was not the best quality for farming.  The home was often near the road and the farm fields ran for many yards away from the road.

We had a wonderful visit with family, some who had traveled well over 300 km to see us.
Part of the day was spent visiting a cemetery to see where they were laid to rest. Being able to visit a cemetery would be an easier time for a geneaologist  because accurate dates of birth are the best source for identifying a relative.  What is also nice is that many tombstones have a picture of the deceased engraved on it.

 After a tour of Tom's grandfather's property, we went back to learn more about family. 

Of course it was easy to learn about their families as there were at least 2 of them that spoke very good English.  You can see that Chatty Kathy got them going as everyone was paying attention.

At the end of the day we had met another dozen or more people who were happy to see more people from America...although they had met Dan and Mary last year.  It was another great day meeting people...and although we had never met each other before this day,  we could feel they were family

June 23rd 2018 - afternoon

After we left Zofia, we continued to Trzebuska where we were to meet relatives on our Paternal Grandmother's side of the family. As we turned the corner to go down the street, the lot where our Great Grandfather Maximillian lived was the first on the street.  The original house where he lived no longer exists but a new one replaced it in the 1950s.
The next house was where his daughter lived and the third house was the meeting place.  When we arrived, the relatives (family) were very welcoming and so happy to meet someone from America.  Although they did last year, when cousin Dan and Mary were there, for them it didn't seem to get old. It didn't take long for Daniel to get into action and make old and new connections, take pictures for us and also good notes.

Maria, Max's granddaughter has a lot to offer and very willing to share info. 

 Food, prepared the old fashioned way.

 More notes and pictures of pictures...

 and more food...

 and more stories...

and someone turns up the volume, and there was dancing and merriment.

It was a great day...however from around 8 am on Thursday, including naps on the plane, napping at the airport waiting for another plane because we missed the flight, and maybe about 5 hours on Friday night to Saturday am, and realizing it was really about 2 am Eastern daylight time (Sunday in the US)...we headed to Rzeszow for some sleep.

Poland, June 23rd, early in the morning.

Daniel showed up around, got a cup of Kawa into us and down the road we went.  BTW, we used Google translate often so now would be a good time for you to try it.
We headed east for the first of our planned meetings.  This trip was not intended to be a sight seeing trip but rather a meet and greet with Joan and Tom's relatives.  Because we had some time on our hands, we made a stop along the way to see a couple places where ancestors had been. This first stop was at a church where our Great Grandfather was baptized. Up until this time, the earliest relatives we knew about were born in the late 1800's.  This new connection now brought that date further back to the mid 1800's.  Daniel, being a geneaologist, and fluent in the Polish language, went to work.  A woman who came to the church right after us to do some volunteer work unlocked the doors for us and invited us in.  Dan inquired about whether she knew the family name and she indicated that she had heard the name but did not know anyone specifically, but there was someone with that name who was going to do some work on the church roof. 
We took some pictures, knocked on the pastors door with no answer and headed down the road.

The walls higher up that were covered with stucco were drawn on with what appeared to look like charcoal, but was paint.

We went to see a sign on the way with the name of a town where relatives had lived.

 By chance, Daniel stopped in a driveway and talked to 3 men shooting the breeze to inquire if they new of any people with the family name.  They did, but did not know where they lived.  Daniel found out where the town Mayor lived and we were there in less that 10 minutes.  Knocking on the door proved to be a plus as there was someone home. Mayor I..... was not native to the area however his  wife recognized name and knew of Michal.  She went to the phone book, made telephone contact with Zofia and she agreed to see us. The Mayor rode in the car with us to see her.

When we got there, much to her great surprise, there were 3 people standing on her doorstep from America. Tom's sister Joan was the hugger in the group and made the day for all that we met.

After what seemed like only a couple of hours....and many more names (23) to add to the family tree.

She was making decorations for Christmas trees and she gave us 4 of them.

It was a very pleasant experience meeting out first relatives living in Poland. 

Thanks to Daniel also as it was a surprise to him that he found a couple of our relatives

 

As the days went along, Grammie proved over and over that she remembered names much better than Joan and I did.

The day wasn't over yet so we will gather some more thoughts and continue with another blog segment later.

June 23, 2018 Poland information

Good morning all, Grammie took her first trip overseas to Poland with Tom and his sister Joan.  It was a trip that we had thought about several times over the last 5 years and finally in January we finally decided that next year we were only going to be another year older.
First, a little history

The country of Poland is 312,685 km sq.  Converting to sq miles (121,000) it would be nearest the size of New Mexico, our 5^th largest state.  It’s population  is about 38 million ranking it with our most populated state of California at 29.7 million. 

The geographic center of Poland is 52 degrees North and 20 degrees East. To make it easier to understand, take the middle of the state of Maine (Newport), and move it 500 miles to the North.  Sound bad right?  Actually this year their growing season is about 2-3 weeks ahead of us in the Newport area…except for our brother Dave.

Their time zone is 6 hours earlier than our Eastern time zone. Central European Summer Zone. (CEST)

We found the people to be very friendly but, we might add that we were their relatives from America.  They were very interested in our county as we were in theirs.  Their country is older than ours with many buildings still standing from centuries ago. Because Poland was a country in the middle of nations at war, it became a battlefield and wartime devastation was a reality.

In the last 10 years, they have worked on infrastructure, very apparent in their roads.  The highways were lined with tall fences, many 30 feet high, and many that included designs on them.

Many of the buildings especially older ones (churches) are typically 18-24 inches thick.

From Boston, we flew into Krakow through Frankfurt, GE.  We were supposed to get a connecting flight to Krakow to arrive by 2 pm but because of an employee who apparently doesn't like blue passports, we missed put flight and didn't get into Krakow until after midnight on the 23rd.

The altitude of Krakow is around 600 ft and it is right on the edge of the mountainous region of southern Poland.  
After a short nights sleep, only to awake, pack up and move on, we were picked up by our interpreter/geneaologist Daniel. We had heard good words from Cousin Dan and his wife Mary who had been over last year.  He was very reasonable, well prepared and was very welcomed by family as he saw many of them last year.

The soil is not the best suitable for growing conditions.  Our trip over the 10 days that we were in Poland included the cities of Krakow, Biadlony Radlowskie, Zblobice, Tarnow, Trzesbuska,  Rzeszow, Sokolow, Malopolskie, Razinow, Mazury, Warsaw,  Jarocin, and Bielin.  All were on the southern and western areas.

In 966, Duke Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty, a pagan and Poland's first recorded leader, converted to Christianity and this event is considered the birth of the Polish nation. The Slavic tribes that he united to form Poland consisted of around a million people.

 

The Partitions of Poland

In the late 1700s Poland's three powerful neighbors, Austria, Prussia and Russia coveted Poland. None wanted war with each other so they just decided to divide the now-weakened Poland in a series of agreements called the Three Partitions of Poland. These took place in 1772, 1793 and 1795, with the latter effectively erasing Poland from the map. Even at this dark time, however, the country‘s government managed to ratify a constitution called the Constitution of May 3^rd. It was the very first constitution in Europe and the second in the world after the U.S. constitution.

Poland in World War One

When World War One arrived, there were three occupying powers at war with each other and Poland became the main fighting ground. There was no Polish army, so Poles were forced into the Russian, German and Austrian armies and forced to fight against one another.

Poland Regains Independence

Shortly after the armistice with Germany in November 1918, Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic, however, the country was devastated by the war, and approximately one million Poles had died
The Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921) brought fighting again to Poland (but this time) the Polish army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 under Marshal Pilsudski. As a result Poland gained lands in western Belarus and Ukraine.
In 1926, a coup brought an authoritarian government into power, and a number of undesirable political parties followed. In an effort to prevent future regional wars Poland signs non-aggression pacts with Germany and the Soviet Union, that however would soon prove worthless.

Poland In World War Two

World War II was about to rear its ugly head, as on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded western Poland. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland and the country was now split into two war zones. These two invasions were later found to have been the result of a secret pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
In 1941 the Germans attacked the Soviet Union which proved to be a bad decision, however, over the next three years Nazi Germany controlled Poland and the worst for the long-suffering Polish people was yet to come.

 

 Many Poles were deported to labor camps and intellectuals were executed. Most of Poland's Jewish population, including many non-Jews, would die in Nazi death camps set up throughout Poland at Maidanek, Birkenau and Auschwitz. In a hard to read (fact-of-war) the Germans exterminated most of Poland's three million Jews, along with Jews from other occupied countries.

The Soviet Army also brought much suffering to the Polish people. In 1940 the Soviets executed over twenty thousand Polish prisoners of war, including officers, and buried them in a mass grave. During the war the Soviet Army also sent many Polish people to forced labor in Siberia.
1943 brought the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Jews in the ghetto bravely but fruitlessly fought back against the Nazi effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to concentration camps. In the end 13,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto within 24 hours, and the remaining 50,000 were shipped to the Treblinka concentration camp.
In 1944 the Warsaw Uprising broke out. Polish soldiers and citizens rose up to drive the Nazis out of Warsaw. The uprising lasted for 63 days, but it was brutally crushed and Warsaw razed to the ground. Over 10,000 soldiers and over 100,000 civilians perished, including children who had participated in the fighting. The Soviets, while they expressed their support for the Poles in this uprising against the Nazis, did not help them fight.
In 1944, Russia's Red Army was victorious over the Germans so Russia consequently set up a Communist-dominated government for Poland.
In 1945 World War II finally ended. Six million Poles had died in this war – this was 20 percent of the country’s entire pre-war population. But, again, this was not the end of Poland’s suffering. That same year, Russia, the United States, and Great Britain met at Yalta and handed Poland over to Soviet Union control and a Communist government. This was a crushing blow to the Polish people’s hopes for freedom after a devastating war.

Communist Rule in Poland

1947 to 1956 was an era of Stalinist oppression and terror in Poland. Former members of the Polish Army and citizens who expressed disapproval of the Communist government were arrested, interrogated, tortured and sent to gulags.
Repressed seemingly forever, in 1956 the Polish people attempted to gain their freedom from Russia. A reformed government was elected without Soviet approval, prisoners were freed from jails and some personal freedoms were reinstated.
This blatant defiance did not sit well in Russia, Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, paid a visit and Russian armies gathered on the Polish border.
The fight back against Communism continued, with large protests against the government by students and shipyard and other workers organized in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These protests were brutally crushed by the government. Churches became popular gathering places once again and Poland, slowly but surely, managed to rebuild its war-devastated industries.

In 1978, in a real morale builder for the country, Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, was elected Pope. Taking the name John Paul II, he was the first non-Italian pope in nearly 500 years and jubilation quickly spread across Poland. John Paul II visited Poland several times after he was elected. The Communist authorities wanted to ban his visits, fearing it would embolden the people to further protests. Each time, however, they would relent and allow his visit, as they feared even worse protests if he was banned from visiting. These visits caused the rebirth of hope in many Poles.
In 1980, the pot of discontent boiled; strikes and riots ensued as the economy had crumbled to its lowest point and the Polish people had yet to regain a decent standard of living. It began at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, where labor turmoil led to the formation of the independent trade union named "Solidarity," which over time became a significant political force.
In response to the growing strikes, in December of 1981 Martial Law was declared. Its goal was to crush Solidarity. At midnight members of the opposition were arrested and telephones ceased to function. Soldiers occupied the streets and curfews were introduced. Censorship of all correspondence was put into effect. Over ten thousand people were imprisoned before Martial Law ended in July 1983. 

Freedom In Poland

The dominance of the Communist Party was coming to an end, when in 1989, Poland's first free elections were held, and Lech Walesa, a brash union organizer and "Solidarity" candidate won the presidency in 1990. In the eyes of many, the "Solidarity" movement caused the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe.
The transfer from a socialist-style planned economy into a market economy proved somewhat difficult, and there were temporary slumps in social and economic standards. Regardless, Poland became the first post-communist country to reach real economic success.
In 1999, Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, and in 2003, Poles voted to join the European Union (EU) in a countrywide referendum. Poland became a full member of the EU in 2004.
Tragedy returned to Poland on April 10, 2010, when the country's President, Lech Kaczynski, along with 89 other high-ranking Polish officials died in a plane crash near Smolensk, Russia.

Poland Today

Today, this virtually indestructible country is beginning to shine on the world stage, and for travelers, Poland presents some of the most interesting historical sites and attractions in all of Europe.
From large modern cities to quaint little towns; from Gothic castles to Medieval villages, and from Baltic Sea beaches to the tree-covered mountains and resorts of the south, Poland is now ready to be explored.