Twentieth Century Poland

What happened after my ancestors left Poland, part 4: Bilwinowo.

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I’d never heard of Bilwinowo, Poland, until a few months ago. This tiny village has provided the most significant piece in the scattered genealogical puzzle pieces my father and his mother left behind.

Growing up in a quiet suburb sixteen miles west of downtown Cleveland, my childhood was idyllic. One of my favorite places was my Grandma Hill’s backyard. I adored her apple tree. It was the only tree I was able to climb.

(Me, age four or five, in my grandmother’s backyard. Apple tree in background.)

Look at that kid. Why would that little girl want to know about the ramshackle Polish village where her great-grandfather was born? The thing is, I was very curious about family history. Even then. I liked hearing my Grandpa Malloy reminisce about my mother’s Irish ancestors. Grandma Hill had to have some of her own. More than once I’d heard her speak fondly of her dad, always ending with his most famous quote. “I’m the wealthiest man in the world! I’ve invested my future in seven different banks – my children!” If one of her grandchildren pushed for more information, she described him like a Disney character. He was a prince, humble and wise, from an aristocratic family somewhere in Europe. He loved to read to his children, and he valued education. He was a respected businessman in Berea, Ohio. No, he wasn’t Polish. Maybe Russian. Maybe German. Maybe Hungarian. But that’s not important. According to Grandma, we were 100 % American.

Grandma Hill’s parents:

Pelagia Szweda and Jan Dziedzikowski, 1892. The paper in her hand is their marriage license. This is the type of photo Polish immigrants sent back home to announce a marriage.

My grandmother, Harriet Doskey Hill, was the primary author of the fairy tale otherwise known as my childhood. Dated 1927, my father’s birth certificate was its first sentence: Myron John Hill, born, son of Joseph F. Hill and Harriet Doskey Hill. They’d been married ten years, without a child of their own. His birth provides the earliest example of them using their chosen Anglicized name on a legal document. In the records of St. Ignatius Church, their 1917 marriage is recorded under the names Jadwiga Doski and Jozef Gorzynski. Joe was a widower then, with a son named Frank. After they married, Hattie and Joe and Frank lived in the Gorzynski family house in Cleveland’s Warsawa neighborhood. My father’s birth was probably the reason for leaving the family behind. Jadwiga and Jozef re-created themselves as the All-American Hill family. Even Frank became a Hill before he ran away to join a carnival.

During the depression, Hattie and Joe signed loan papers for the unfinished shell of a foreclosed house in a rural Cleveland west-side village called Fairview. They succeeded in paying it off in six months. Buying this house provided them with a place to raise Myron HIll as a pure, unhyphenated American.

My grandmother’s penchant for changing names even extended to the dead. My father’s name, Myron, gestured towards the Polish tradition of naming a first-born son after his paternal grandfather. To secure her side of the story, she had it etched in stone: on my great-grandfather’s gravestone, his name is Myron Gorzynski. Judging by the age of the stone and the carving, it was placed there in the mid-1950’s, after grandpa’s sister Helen filled the plot. Gorzynskis had been dying since 1910, and I’m guessing an earlier, more honest, stone marked the spot. Great-Grandpa’s baptized name was Marian.

You’ll note grandpa’s sister Helen’s surname is Doskey. My grandfather’s sister Helen married grandma’s brother Clem. For the first few years of their respective marriages, they all lived together in the Gorzynski house, along with the matriarch, Frances (Franciszka) Gorzynski. Helen had a girl named Delma a few years before Hattie had Myron. Ultimately, both couples struck out on their own, leaving great-grandma Franciszka alone in a three family triplex. Censuses tell me she was illiterate and didn’t speak English.

When I first saw this grave, I wondered if the stone was upside down. Or was the tree purposefully planted on top of the coffins? If so, did a Gorzynski plant it? Why? One thing’s for certain, once you’ve found the Gorzynski grave at Calvary Cemetery, you’ll always know where it is.

I suspect there was a feud between Hattie Hill and Helen Gorzynski-Doskey, and perhaps it was over the idea of changing a dead man’s given name. As the one who died last, my grandmother won. Taking control over the headstone, she altered details to her liking. Remarkably, she didn’t change the Gorzynksi surname. I like to think my grandfather refused to let her go that far in erasing his family’s memory.

My grandmother’s preserved receipts for “debts fulfilled” reveal a story of cemeteries. She paid for many headstones and their engravings, including her own. Except for the Gorzynski stone, they’re all located in the Doskey family plot in Holy Cross, Cleveland’s west side Catholic cemetery. Grandma even paid to exhume her father’s remains from the Polish section at Calvary and move him fourteen miles to his new resting place. The last time I visited Holy Cross, I couldn’t find any of them. I recognized names on some of the better-maintained graves in what I thought was their section, but the earth had all but consumed unattended grave-markers. I dug out a few, but found other names. I uncovered as many as I could until I lost heart. After all, I’d only stopped for a moment or two to visit my parents’ grave, before heading back to my home in Buffalo. I hadn’t any proper tools for unearthing headstones. Maybe another time. A warmer day. Luckily, I’ve seen the Doskey monuments before. The largest one memorializes John and Pauline Doskey, grandmas’s parents; the second largest is Harriet herself, beside her husband, Joseph Hill. Her younger brother Frank and his wife Irene are there too. Her sisters, Irene and Charlotte, lie nearby, as does brother Clarence, eternally estranged from his wife.

One night, only a year or two before she died, Grandma and I were alone together, drinking tea and talking. Again, I asked about my family’s Polish heritage. This time, she gave in. Sitting close beside me, she took my hand, and told a story about her father. He was the son of a Polish aristocratic family who lived on a forest estate in an area that was occupied by Russia. Their fortune was invested in lumber. One day, her dad was given a load of wood to deliver to the harbor and told to get a good price, take the money, and build a future in America. Here’s a modified version of this story from a letter my grandmother sent to my father’s cousin, Jack. He made sure I had a copy before he died. Here’s the important page:

Lucky Jack. He got the names she withheld from me. Suwałki. Dziedzikowski. But Jack was a historian by training, and a Doskey. She probably figured he deserved to know. I was a Hill, with an Irish mother. (My grandmother opposed her son’s marriage to a girl with my mother’s working-class Irish upbringing.)

When I gave the information from Jack’s letter to genealogist Iwona Dakiniewicz, her first reply was that Dziedzikowski was a ridiculous name. It was the kind of name peasants made up in America, so folks would think they’re aristocracy. She thought his name was really Dziedziach. Channeling my grandmother’s stubbornness, I told her I only wanted Dziedikowski records. She sent me a few.

Several years have passed since that research, and I’ve given in. Iwona was right. My great-grandfather’s name was really Dziedziach. In 2020, a DNA 3rd cousin who shared Doskey cousins with me appeared on Ancestry. His surname was Jessick. When I wrote to him, he told me his grandfather changed the family name from Dziedziach. Oh, how I admire this distant cousin’s style! The sound of “Jessick” is very close to the the Polish pronunciation of Dziedziach. With this varification, I turned to the Polish genealogy database Geneteka, and found the births of both my great-grandfather Jan and his brother, Stanislaus, who immigrated with him. In America, they both used the name Dziedzikowski and the pseudonym Doski or Doskey. When he died, great-grandpa’s name was given as John Doskey, and his father’s name given as Peter. Here’s the citation I found at Geneteka:

So, it would appear part of Jan Dziedzikowksi’s tale was true. His father’s name was Peter – Peter Dziedziach, and his mother had a name, too. Cesaria Mackiewicz. In the screen shot above,”Vesicle” indicates the Parish he was baptised in; Bilwinowo, the town of his birth. Through this database, I’ve traced two further generations back, discovering more ancestral names, both Polish and Lithuanian: Gieryk, Zdanowicz, and Sustkowki; Domalewski and Wyszenki. I traced each family back into the days of the Commonwealth. All lived in and around Bilwinowo. Notably, Bilwinowo is near Suwałki, as my grandmother said. Researching the greater Suwalki area during World War II, I watched the film “Legacy of Jedwabne” which documented those who remained in that village after the 1941 pogrom there. An interview near the end stopped me cold. It was with a man who, with his brother, cleaned up the remains of his incinerated Jewish neighbors. His surname was Dziedziech.

Bilwinowo is 132 km north-east of Jedwabne. Google Translate helped me read a Polish language wikipedia entry that calls my great-grandpa’s birthplace “The royal village of the Grodno economy.” This “royal village” designation harkens back to the Commonwealth days, when Bilwinowo was “within the Grodno district of the Trakai Voivodeship ”  “A characteristic feature of the Grodno district was the predominance of royal property over noble property, with a negligible share of clerical property. Within the Grodno district there were staroties: Filipów, Przewalski, Przerośl, Wasilków and smaller royal estates.” Bilwinowo was one of them. During the Polish Partition, as Russia tightened its control over the area, former Polish aristocrats or royals who lingered risked deportation, or worse. Geneteka tells me my 2X great-grandpa Peter died two years after his sons left for America. A year after his death, widowed Cesaria remarried Leonard Tylenda, and had a daughter. I’ve found some records in northern Michigan that suggest they came to America.

North-east of Suwalki, Bilwinowo is located in a borderland region known as the Suwałki Gap . Some consider this to be the most dangerous place on earth right now. “Stretching about 100 kilometers along the Lithuanian-Polish frontier, between Belarus in the east and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the west, Western military planners warn the area would likely be one of the Russian president’s first targets were he ever to choose to escalate the war in Ukraine into a kinetic confrontation with NATO.” (Politico). Some think the third world war could ignite in the Suwalki Gap.

So, I don’t plan to visit there anytime soon. Luckily, the internet has informed me a little about Bilwinowo. From above, it looks like this:

Walking down that road, a visitor there would come across the crosses. It appears that Bilwinowo is famous for the crosses people have erected there, memorializing what stood, long ago.

This photo is taken from a Polish blog page titled “Bilwinowo“, which features many photos of the memorial crosses erected there. Again, I used Google Translate to read the account of these monuments. Here’s what it said:

Another cross is located in the center of the village, next to the recently built chapel commemorating 220 years of the existence of the village of Bilwinowo. There is an inscription on it:

“Less of us in your care – a souvenir of the village of Bilwinowo.”

This is where May services are held. Almost the entire village gathers and at 7 p.m. a litany to Our Lady of Loreto is recited, and later songs are sung in honor of Mary.

This cross was made a long, long time ago and, like other crosses, it was initially made of wood, and in July 1986 it was made of gravel.

So, my great-grandfather’s tale of noble ancestry have some truth to it. However, evidence of his family’s fortune in the homeland has been destroyed by one hundred and fifty years of occupation and war.

Still, people live there. Not many. Stalwart types, I imagine. Survivors. Former royalty or nobility?

My Great Grandpa Jan Dziedziach/Dziedzikowski/Doskey, was a survivor, too. He operated a successful grocery store in Berea, Ohio for over a decade and raised and educated seven children. When he died, he owned his own home on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio. His was a Polish-American immigrant success story, largely due to his chameleon nature. Dziedziach, Dziedzikowski, Doski, Doskey. He assumed whatever shape the circumstances required of him, and from him my grandmother learned her dissembling ways. Harriet Hill was a force to be reckoned with: confident and well-spoken, she attracted admirers, well into her eighties. I’m forever grateful for the role model she provided; I am the continuation of her American success story. I honor her every day of my life. But how American was Hattie, really? Everyone, even her grandchildren, noticed that slight accent she couldn’t disguise, and how dark her olive-colored skin became if she went outside on hot, sunny days without a parasol.

Hattie Doskey, formerly Jadwiga Dziedzikowska, approximately 1916, aka “Grandma Hill”

What Happened After My Ancestors Left Poland, Part 3: Bryńsk

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Thanks to Iwona Dakiniewicz’s 2017-2018 research in Poland and my own subsequent research on the Polish database geneteka.com, I can say my paternal grandfather Joe Górzyński’s family lived in and around the village of Bryńsk in Działdowo County, Warmia Masuria from approximately 1790 until 1910 or so. Maybe longer. His parents lived in two of Bryńsk’s colonies – Czarny Bryńsk and Ostrowy Bryńsk – before they immigrated to the United States in 1881. Were their families originally from this area? Maybe. The name Górzyński may be derived from the nearby town of Gorzńo. But they may have migrated here, by choice or force, from another part of Poland. A distant Ancestry DNA match told me that his Górzyńskis were from an area closer to Warsaw, on the Vistula River. The two families – likely cousins – immigrated to the Americas at roughly the same time. Our DNA tells us we have a common ancestor who lived sometime during the 18th century.

(View of Czarny Bryńsk from Ostrowy. I took this film in 2018, when my husband Phil and I toured our home villages with genealogist Iwona Dakiniewicz.)

Another American with links to Bryńsk, Kent Kolberstein, has a blog called Visit to Bryńsk that documents his visit to Bryńsk. His blog provides this Google translation of a description of Bryńsk’s history:

“Outline of the history of the village of Brynsk”

“First recorded in the sources, our Brynska name was “Brennitia” and comes from the year 1229. In 1410 the Teutonic Order used the name “Borausee”. Brynska areas were settled after the partition of Poland by arriving German colonists to Lidzbarka and its surroundings. The first houses were built along the channel of the river Brynicy. In time, expansive sustainable forestry led to the formation of large clearings, no locals whom they settled workers. Conducted at the beginning of the nineteenth century colonization of Prussia led to the creation of five large settlements of a common member Brynska ie. Brynska Krolewski (Royal), Brynska Szlachecki (knighthood), Brynska Kolonia (Colonie), Brynska Czarny (Black) and Brynska Fialka (no polish translation but it means “violet” in Russian). No area of sediment rapidly, operated brickyards, distillers, mill with a windmill and sawmills and inns. Brynska Szlachecki (knighthood)was at that time an important center industrial-commercial. Today in the area are preserved foundations of the tavern, a brickyard, and a kiln lime and tar. Currently, the village Brynski captivate the beauty and its rich history.”

Born in Bryńsk, my 2X great grandfather was baptised Johann Górzyński at the Catholic church in Górzno. The eighth child of Franciszek and Jadwiga (Renska)’s eleven, and the sixth son, I’d wager Johann couldn’t count on inheriting much of the family fortune. He became an itinerant carpenter. In 1854, he married his first wife, my great great-grandmother Julianna Falkowska. They had two boys, Jan and Marian (my great-grandfather), before Julianna died. A widower at 29, Johann remarried Ewa Lampert and returned to his traveling profession, producing thirteen more children in various villages throughout Masuria while, apparently, his two eldest sons remained in Bryńsk and Czarny Bryńsk. Johann died, around 1891, possibly in Mroczno. In 1895, Ewa and her children moved to Chicago. My great-grandfather’s half siblings had many children, some of whom are also trying to rediscover the Górzyński story. On first encountering the current generations of Johann and Ewa’s kin, I felt a bit like an interloper. Most of them knew their shared ancestors were a great-great grandma named Ewa Górzyński and her husband Johann aka Jan. They didn’t know Ewa was a second wife, and Johann had two elder children from another wife. Our DNA helped verify this. I’m especially grateful to my Górzyński third cousins Joanne and Paul, who corresponded with me about our DNA relationship. Together, we’re mapping out the story of the Górzyńskis in America.

My great-grandmother was Franciszka Gołembiewska, born up the hill from Czarny Bryńsk, in Ostrowy (also known as Ostrowy-Bryńsk). She was the eldest daughter of Thomas Gołembiewski and Anna Prusak. In her initial research in 2017, Iwona found several significant Gołembiewski records, including five of Franciszka’s sibling’s births and marriages, with husbands’ birth places, parents’ names and significant dates.

The fates of the Górzyński and Gołembiewski families summarize several of the choices made by Poles living under occupation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Wikipedia article “History of Poles in the United States” says that” Between 1870 and 1914, more than 3.6 million people departed from Polish territories (of whom 2.6 million arrived in the U.S.)” According to my Ancestry and 23&Me DNA matches, several Górzyńskis, Gołembiewskis, Prusaks, and Falkowskis ended up in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania; Buffalo and Rochester, New York; Chicago, Cleveland, Wisconsin, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. I have a few 4th cousins in England and Canada.

While the Górzyńskis scattered throughout the English speaking world, only two of the Gołembiewskis followed them. Others remained in Europe. One great-aunt, Josephine, married Franz Amenda in 1890. Recently, I discovered another tree on Ancestry that named Josephine Golembiewska and Franz Amenda as great-grandparents. This tree featured a photo of their daughter, Honorata. This name alone captured my attention: my grandfather’s eldest sister was an Honorata, too. And I thought I detected a resemblance between Honorata Amenda and my great-grandmother. I reached out to the researcher, and after a few exchanges, we both agreed we’re third cousins. The Amendas moved to Essen, Germany, probably before the first world war.

A few of the Gołembiewskis stayed in Poland. 2X great grandpa Thomas died in Ostrowy in 1895. My great aunt Julianna Gołembiewska married Johan Bartnizki in Bryńsk on November 22, 1903. A year later, her mother (my 2X great grandmother) Anna Prusak, died in Ostrowy. Julianna’s husband Johan died of old age or heart attack in 1944 in Dzialdowo. She died three years later, also in Dzialdowo.

The city of Dzialdowo is thirty three kilometers from Bryńsk. Its Germans name is Soldau. Early in World War II, the Nazis built a concentration camp there.

Flashback: It’s 2018, I’m standing knee deep in Lake Piaceszno, thirty kilometers west of Dzialdowo. A pristine lake with a stunning beach, it once provided the setting for a Prussian hotel. An odd place to be born. But according to my great-grandfather Marian’s baptismal record, he took his first breath by that lake. So in 2018, I ignored Iwona’s warning that there’s nothing much in Piaceszno and insisted it be one of the stops on our ancestral tour.

It was a sunny late spring day. We’d been driving around for hours. We pulled into a parking lot and looked around. Across the road from Lake Piaceszno were fields; behind the lake, forest. Mid-afternoon sun glinted on the rippling water. It was hot, and we’d been driving for a few hours. Without a second thought, Iwona dove in, totally clad. I wanted to join her, but, conscientious middle-aged American traveler that I am, I was wearing pants with a money belt underneath them. All I could do was roll up my pants’ legs and wade in. After a brisk little swim, Iwona joined me in the shallows, and we walked together to the beach.

“I couldn’t control myself,” she said. “This lake is perfect.” I agreed. I was smitten by the beauty of the land the Górzyńskis had left behind. As if reading my mind, Iwona said: “You know, your family didn’t want to leave here. They had no choice but to go. You have no one left here.”

It took a few years for me to understand what she was telling me.

This past summer, I read about some mass graves discovered near Działdowo. 17.5 tons of human ash were found. Officials estimated that least 8,000 were interred there. The BBC says “The bodies are thought to have been dug up and burned in a Nazi operation to hide traces of their murders. The Nazis murdered Jews, political opponents and members of the Polish elite at Soldau.”

An early report said these ashes included the remains of residents of the surrounding villages. I recently found additional evidence to confirm that, on a Facebook page I follow called Przystanek Górzno (roughly translated “Bus stop Górzno.”) On September 1, 2023, their commemoration of the Nazi invasion of Poland was the text of a monument erected in the middle of the Bryńsk square. Though FB’s translation was far from perfect, the meaning was clear. It seared into my heart. It described September 1, 1939 as a pleasant late summer day. No one in Bryńsk knew what was happening in other parts of Poland. A German soldier or two appeared, for what seemed a routine inspection. No one suspected. But the next day, German troops appeared and rounded everyone up, led them into the woods, and executed them. A few escaped and hid in the basement of an old schoolhouse.

Yet, great-aunt Julianna and her husband survived the war. They were both 70 years old when they died, apparently of natural causes, in the city of Soldau. Johann’s profession on his 1944 death certificate was listed as “laborer.”

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Today, Czarny Bryńsk houses the headquarters of the Gorzńo-Lidbark Landscape Park. A few houses. Farms. Lots of fields. Woods. Rivers. Lakes. Driving there, the roads weren’t good. Iwona feared for her tires. Finally, we came upon a sign, and I demanded that we stop. Regretably, I didn’t take a photo of the sign. This image was posted on August 18, 2023 at Przystanek Gorzńo:

“That building,” Iwona said, pointing to the wooden cottage. “Dates from the time your family was here.”

I examined it as closely as I could.

On that trip, we also visited Krakow, Warsaw, Toruń, and Gdańsk, as well as my husband’s grandfather’s birthplace of Turza Wielka. (Only twenty-six kilometers from Piascezno.) Once back home, I obsessed over these photos, especially those of that old wood cottage in Czarny Bryńsk. My Górzyńkis were carpenters, after all. Perhaps they helped build this relic. Finally, I painted a watercolor of it.

On the Gorzńo Facebook page, this house gets featured often. It’s obviously a landmark for those who know the area. People tell stories about, the most common being that it was a schoolhouse, a long time ago. Does it have a basement? I don’t know.

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What Happened After My Ancestors Left Poland, Part 2: Sadki

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Jakup and Aniela Szweda are my Grandma Hill’s grandparents. They were the first of my Polish ancestors to arrive in New York harbor, on April 18, 1870, aboard a ship called the D. H. Watjen. I’m not sure how long it took them to get to Berea, Ohio, where these graves are located in St. Adelbert’s Cemetery. When we asked why our family settled in Berea, my father used to say that “Berea” meant “This is where the wagon wheel fell off.” I thought he was kidding. Seven years ago, I was contacted by an Ancestry DNA match – I’ll call her L – who knew a lot about this branch of the family. L told me that the Szwedas were part of a larger group that ended up in Wisconsin. (The name Szweda shows up several times in a list of Kashubians who settled in Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin.) Only a few stayed in Ohio. Why? Perhaps my father wasn’t kidding, and Berea was where the wheel fell off. In the early 1870’s this rural community fifteen miles southwest of Cleveland offered a lot to immigrants looking for work and a new home. According to the 1911 installment on the United States Immigration Commission’s Immigrants in Industries part 24 Recent Immigrants in Agriculture (available in Google Books), “there is a large Polish population, both in the town of Berea and on small farms in the immediate vicinity, as a greater part of the employees in the stone quarry . . . are of that race. . . A large number of the Poles either own small farms of from 1 to 10 acres, with a house, and work in the quarries, or rent small tracts of improved land.” The report concludes “Because of the opportunities for outside employment and because most of the {land} purchasers have bought only small tracts, for which they could soon pay, the immigrants at Berea have suffered few of the pioneer hardships frequently experienced by immigrants in purely rural locations.” So, my grandmother’s migrant ancestors’ story had a happy ending, if they could avoid getting crushed in the sandstone mines.

The standing woman below is Aniela, with her mother, Mary Januszik Skorcz, who also rests in the Berea cemetery.

“L” told me to check the Poznan Project database for their home in Poland. And sure enough, I found Jakup (Jacobus) and Angela 1865 marriage in the Catholic Parish in Sadki.

Through the Poznan Project, I could confirm the origin of several other Berea residents, including many of Jakub and Aniela’s siblings and cousins. If not from Sadki, they came from nearby villages. Did every resident of this corner of Poland migrate to Wisconsin or Ohio or where ever in America their particular cart lost its wheel? I don’t know. I imagine a stubborn few remained. The elders and their caregivers. Hopefully, they had all died off or moved away by 1939.

Thirty-eight kilometers west of Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, Sadki currently has 2,000 inhabitants. Wikipedia tells me this region has been part of Poland since the tenth century, when it was a royal village. Prussia occupied this area throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The Versailles Treaty returned it to Poland in 1919, but that only lasted until September of 1939. According to Wikipedia, “During the German occupation of Poland (World War II), the local forest was the site of executions of 86 Poles from Sadki and other nearby villages, perpetrated by the S.S. and Selbstschutz in October and November of 1939 as part of the Intelligentzaktion.”

May they rest in peace.

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Other than this Wikipedia image of St. Adalbert church there, I’ve found very few photos of Sadki.

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Notably, the church built in the 1870’s by the new Polish residents of Berea, Ohio was also called St. Adalbert’s. This postcard image from the church’s centennial anniversary book may have been sent to relatives back in the Old Country.

As with all of the churches built by Polish immigrants who settled in the United States, Berea’s St. Adalbert’s interior was lavish, as can be seen below. (The annotation says this is the interior of the “first” St. Adalbert Church. When, in the early 1930’s, it was determined that the steeple and the foundation of the original building needed extensive, expensive repairs, the Polish community in Berea opted to build a new church instead.)

As the last annotation on the right says, Berea’s St. Adalbert’s first baptism was celebrated on December 8, 1873. The child was the first American-born child of Aniela and Jakub Szweda. That girl, Pelagja, married a Polish immigrant named Jan Dziedzikowski and had seven children. My grandmother, who was baptised Jadwiga Dziedzikowska, was their eldest.

Pelagia (later known as Pauline) playing with her eldest child, my grandmother, Jadwiga (Hattie). Approximately 1917.