From Family Lore to Family Fact
From Family Lore
to Family Fact
By Rev. John Midura
For many of us as children, we often sat amazed at some of the stories that were freely offered around the dinner table by our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Stories that have been handed down from one generation to the next. Of course, none of them could be fully corroborated except for the respect that was explicitly shown to the previous generation. After all, who in their right mind would dare to challenge the memory of a well respected elder.
One amazing statement of lore in my family that stood out among the others was that we were part Jewish. That prospective fact didn’t seem so far fetched as it was known that prior to WWII, almost one third of the Polish population was Jewish or partly Jewish. And we can reasonably infer that some interbreeding did occur.
My grandmother and four of her siblings emigrated to America from Poland during the first decade of the 20th century. After establishing themselves with good fortune, two of them decided on a return visit to Poland, just a few years before 1939, to visit their parents and other siblings. My great aunt Julia, in addition to visiting her family also procured the assistance of another family member who was also a Monsignor in the Catholic church, to investigate our family tree, During those years and centuries prior, all vital records were kept by the local parishes. Upon her return home she informed our family of the Jewish connection but failed to provide copies of any documentation. In those days, there were no modern mechanisms like photocopying, email, personal computers or fax.
Although I can’t imagine this to be true for all Europeans, unless one is seeking a royal connection, most people in Poland don’t really care about heritage and ancestry. The whole practice of genealogy is quite an American phenomenon. The majority of us in the Americas are not native to this land. We came from somewhere else and generally, remain very inquisitive about our ancestral roots.
For me, and I’m sure for many other Americans, the initial step in our quest began with a membership with Ancestry.com. Not only did this webpage provide a gateway into the past, but provided an opportunity for direct DNA analysis. Needless to say, I readily provided a sample of my saliva for DNA analysis. After waiting for a few weeks the initial results were in. I was almost 95 per cent eastern European, mainly from the same geographical area, and 5 per cent Eastern European Jew! My great aunt Julia was absolutely right!
Of course, as with any self-respecting sleuth, a little information now requires even more information. I needed to know just who in my ancestry contributed to my Jewish heritage. I found that help I needed with another cousin of mine here in western Massachusetts. We were trying to piece together our exact relationship. We knew the answers lay within the records in Poland, specifically through the catholic parish in Pstragowa, our family’s ancestral town.
We thought our search had reached an end, thinking the only way to seek those records was to actually fly to Poland. However, we soon discovered a website called geneteka. It provided copies of church records based on the modern names of counties within Poland. I knew that Pstragowa was within the southern county called Podkarpcie, meaning beneath the Carpathians. Clicking on that country then allowed me to drill down into the town of Pstragowa and the records it provided spanning several hundreds of years. Having some understanding of Polish and Latin, I spent a few days tracing my family back through births or baptisms, marriages, and deaths to finally find the marriage record of my grandmother’s grandfather. The church record clearly made note of the woman he married as being Jewish but who also converted to Catholicism for the marriage to take place. And there was my answer. I think the other person who appreciated this find was my mother. She had always wanted verifiable proof of our Polish/Jewish connection and was very pleased and proud of this new found fact.
I sincerely hope that someone else can learn from my own experience. Although this took some time, in the end the truth finally revealed itself. My next venture is to solve the family’s connection with Adams, MA. I suspect there to be some intrigue afoot as I reach a few stumbling blocks, but that’s another story for another day.
Happy journeys into your ancestral past.
Rev. John Midura