Polish Americans Unearth Family History
February 21, 2008
(From left to right) Cynthia Piech, Yadwiga Cyparska and Roger Bober examine documents from Bober's research.
On the third Saturday of every month Polish Americans are getting together to talk about dead people. The Polish Museum of America, on the near West Side, houses drop-in workshops called Genealogy Saturdays. Like most immigrants, Poles left a country torn apart by war and economic strife. Now, as new generations settle in, they want to explore the branches of their family trees.
If you ask Roger Bober who he is, he might launch into this…
BOBER: Roger Bober, my father is Paul Bober and his father was Albert Bober, Albert's wife was Mary Kanapczyk and her father was Ferdinand Kanapczyk.
He began doing genealogy casually, about nine years ago, using the Internet.
BOBER: I put the family tree up in 1999 and got my first email response from somebody who saw it in June of 2007.
That email opened the floodgates. Instead of just a family tree, Bober came all the way from Michigan to the Polish Museum of America with a briefcase. It's filled with birth certificates, marriage records and obituaries. But he still has a few mystery people.
BOBER: I mean I've got all these theories, I mean, one is did she die, or is my grandmother's mother Jewish and therefore could not come to the country because Jews were not allowed to leave Krakow…
As Bober speculates what could have happened almost a century ago, Yadwiga Cyparska listens.
BOBER and CYPARSKA: Do you read polish?... Yes, I teach polish.…I went to a Polish-English translation and I tried to make sense of some of these words...so it's a member of this association…
Cyparska reads through and helps him understand some of the document. And while the tip didn't validate any of his theories, it did help Bober get over some brickwalls. Genealogy volunteer Art Lamberti says the "brickwall" is a common problem.
LAMBERTI: For instance your family could come from a particular town in Europe and you go there and then you find out that the town hall burned down years ago and that's it, that's all the records there were.
In 30 years of genealogy research he's traced his family back to the 12th century. Perhaps the biggest brickwalls today are the direct links that seem to fade as immigrants establish stronger roots in the U-S. But among these Polish Americans, the opposite seems to be true. Cynthia Piech grew up in Polish Chicago, Back of the Yards and says only recently has genealogy become so popular.
PIECH: That's a relatively new thing, most people doing their genealogy now don't speak a word of polish, most are second, third, fourth generation Americans.
Piech's been helping Larry Slabosz. He also grew up in Back of the Yards, but now lives in Valparaiso, Indiana. He came in with not much more than some names scribbled in a notebook.
PIECH & SLABOSZ: Now you had the name of a town, give me an idea of what you think it might be spelled like, just take a stab at it… O-R-T-A-K-A or it was R-O-K-O-W Oratka... OK let me try that, Oratka
Besides Internet resources like Ancestry.com or even Google, other factors have opened up genealogy to the masses. The Mormons have begun to digitize their extensive collection of civil and church records. For Poles, historical changes have also played a role. Piech says before Communism fell, Polish immigrants couldn't contact the towns they came from. And nobody really wanted to.
PIECH: Poland was closed, we weren't able to look at records there, we weren't able to contact our families there, we were busy here in America just getting our economic legs underneath us.
Piech says Polish immigrants now have more time and money, and a new perspective on digging into their family's past. She says it no longer matters whether they come from royalty or peasant stock. For this generation it seems the end goal is not to fill in the names on a piece of paper. It's to fill in the stories of their family history and have a more complete answer to the question of who they are.
For Chicago Public Radio, I'm Lisa Matuska.
If you ask Roger Bober who he is, he might launch into this…
BOBER: Roger Bober, my father is Paul Bober and his father was Albert Bober, Albert's wife was Mary Kanapczyk and her father was Ferdinand Kanapczyk.
He began doing genealogy casually, about nine years ago, using the Internet.
BOBER: I put the family tree up in 1999 and got my first email response from somebody who saw it in June of 2007.
That email opened the floodgates. Instead of just a family tree, Bober came all the way from Michigan to the Polish Museum of America with a briefcase. It's filled with birth certificates, marriage records and obituaries. But he still has a few mystery people.
BOBER: I mean I've got all these theories, I mean, one is did she die, or is my grandmother's mother Jewish and therefore could not come to the country because Jews were not allowed to leave Krakow…
As Bober speculates what could have happened almost a century ago, Yadwiga Cyparska listens.
BOBER and CYPARSKA: Do you read polish?... Yes, I teach polish.…I went to a Polish-English translation and I tried to make sense of some of these words...so it's a member of this association…
Cyparska reads through and helps him understand some of the document. And while the tip didn't validate any of his theories, it did help Bober get over some brickwalls. Genealogy volunteer Art Lamberti says the "brickwall" is a common problem.
LAMBERTI: For instance your family could come from a particular town in Europe and you go there and then you find out that the town hall burned down years ago and that's it, that's all the records there were.
In 30 years of genealogy research he's traced his family back to the 12th century. Perhaps the biggest brickwalls today are the direct links that seem to fade as immigrants establish stronger roots in the U-S. But among these Polish Americans, the opposite seems to be true. Cynthia Piech grew up in Polish Chicago, Back of the Yards and says only recently has genealogy become so popular.
PIECH: That's a relatively new thing, most people doing their genealogy now don't speak a word of polish, most are second, third, fourth generation Americans.
Piech's been helping Larry Slabosz. He also grew up in Back of the Yards, but now lives in Valparaiso, Indiana. He came in with not much more than some names scribbled in a notebook.
PIECH & SLABOSZ: Now you had the name of a town, give me an idea of what you think it might be spelled like, just take a stab at it… O-R-T-A-K-A or it was R-O-K-O-W Oratka... OK let me try that, Oratka
Besides Internet resources like Ancestry.com or even Google, other factors have opened up genealogy to the masses. The Mormons have begun to digitize their extensive collection of civil and church records. For Poles, historical changes have also played a role. Piech says before Communism fell, Polish immigrants couldn't contact the towns they came from. And nobody really wanted to.
PIECH: Poland was closed, we weren't able to look at records there, we weren't able to contact our families there, we were busy here in America just getting our economic legs underneath us.
Piech says Polish immigrants now have more time and money, and a new perspective on digging into their family's past. She says it no longer matters whether they come from royalty or peasant stock. For this generation it seems the end goal is not to fill in the names on a piece of paper. It's to fill in the stories of their family history and have a more complete answer to the question of who they are.
For Chicago Public Radio, I'm Lisa Matuska.
