Mending Estrangement: Rebuilding the Missing Branch of My Family Tree

2025-10-222025-12-11 / mlouisehill / Leave a comment

Of all the inheritances one might lose, family histories are the most valuable. Money, jewelry, and furniture take second place to the stories our ancestors hoped would get passed down from one generation to the next.

My mom’s Lewy Body Dementia was in full blossom when we moved her to memory care in 2019, right before COVID cast us all into isolation. The facility was only blocks away from the home Mom and her second husband bought in 1982. Every inch of that house and garden was designed and decorated by her. Only a few of her precious items moved with her to the room where she died. Everything else was up for grabs.

Like many mothers, mine had a highly refined sixth sense. She could read your mind. She saw through her children’s deceptions so easily. At an early age, I decided my best strategy was to always tell the truth. It wasn’t surprising, then, that Mom knew the day her house sold, though no one told her. She was inconsolable on the day its contents were “secretly” liquidated. Each of her five children collected what we could pack into our cars before all the rest was taken away in a truck to parts unknown. Mom’s beloved octagon table, her selection of paintings and mirrors, her quilting fabrics, her piano, her organ, and her porch swing became anonymous finds in some second-hand store. That’s how family histories are lost, by the way. The keeper of the history dies or the last survivor of a generation gets sick during plague. Or there’s a fire. Or a war. Often, the next generation chooses to disengage from their immediate family. Memorabilia gets cast aside, its stories forgotten.

The current popularity of Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots signals a collective nostalgia for boxes left behind in some attic, somewhere, sometime during the 1990’s. Many of my fellow family historians have become pretty adept at fleshing out complex family histories. Some of us can trace American identity to the first wave of Western Europeans who broached this nation’s shores. I can do that on my maternal grandmother’s side, where I qualify to be a Daughter of the American Revolution six times over . . . and counting. On my father’s side, I trace my American identity to a migrant worker and his wife. Members of the Polish Peasant Diaspora, they were not welcome in America. We know the derogatory terms they encountered. Sometime during the 1970’s, mainstream America agreed not to use them anymore. DNA tells me my father was 100% Polish. His parents wouldn’t admit this while they were alive. I don’t blame them. They wanted to rise above the embarrassing stereotype attached to being Polish and pave the way for my generation to enjoy the American Dream. So our grandparents assimilated. Changed names. Changed locations. Some changed locations so many times, it’s as if they never stopped migrating. I’ve found death certificates for my relatives in cities all over the United States. Addresses confirm they never left the working class. They lived in company towns, industrial workers’ quarters, and densely populated ethnic urban neighborhoods. Many of them died young. Renal failure, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, and diabetes are among the most common causes of death.

Rebuilding a family tree becomes very difficult when ancestors relocated often, and were prone to changing their name. But not impossible. In my case, DNA results only confirmed suspicions. DNA doesn’t get you very far if you don’t have the proper surname. I have countless DNA matches on my father’s side that are only that: DNA matches. Their names are like Hill: Smith, Martin, Jessica, Rose. A generation or two back, an ancestor assumed an alias and began creating legal documents to support their revision of the family’s past. Little did they know that their grandchildren would have access to FamilySearch and Ancestry.com. There’s always a crack in the wall of documents created by ambitious migrants trying to rewrite their family’s history. For me, it was a pair of wedding documents.

My mother told me when I was eleven that my name wasn’t really Hill. She had written down a name she found in an obituary, but it was wrong. In my thirties, I became very tired of the blandness of “Hill.” I decided to find my true surname. I knew my father’s parents changed it. So, I wrote a letter to the pastor at the church where my grandmother told me she and grandpa wed, requesting a copy of his marriage registry on October 10, 1917. The pastor wrote back. He sent me this:

When they married, my grandparents were using variations on their Polish names. Twenty years later, I discovered on Family Search that”Doski” was first used by my grandmother’s family on the 1900 census. “Gozinski” is a misspelling. The proper spelling of my grandparents childhood surnames appeared on another wedding registry. The two witnesses to my grandparents’ nuptials were Grandpa’s sister Helen and Grandma’s brother, Clarence (aka Clemens) A few years later, Helen and Clem married.

On the day I walked into my mother’s vacant house to collect the things I wanted, I felt a bit like a stranger. She raised Mary Louise Hill (aka Mary Lou aka Louie aka Babe) in a void. I took after my father. Not knowing my father’s family, she didn’t recognize their traits in me. She didn’t know how to guide me.

I took mom’s sewing machine and a few pretty ribbons from collection. I took an antique mirror and some ceramic bowls from my maternal grandfather’s ancestral farm in Pennsylvania. And I took all of the old photo albums and memorabilia. Boxes of them, from all sides of the family. On visits home, I spent time sorting them out. I knew what was in those boxes, but I left them in Mom’s basement so other family members could have access to them. In the end, no one wanted them. I took them.

My mother took meticulous care of her own family’s photos, and they’re all marked well. (The display in the first photo above are hers.) Not so with my father’s family. It’s not that they didn’t take photos. Photography was one of Grandma Hill’s hobbies. She had multiple cameras, and she carried one of them almost everywhere she went. She took great care to organize her photos into albums. The problem is, she didn’t label anything. These were albums created for her own enjoyment.

Over time, I’ve learned to identify many faces in my father’s family. The anchor photo is always my grandmother. Hattie. She had very distinctive facial features, so it wasn’t difficult to identify younger versions of her.

_{This is one of the rare instances where she put her name on a photo.}

That nose and those eyes helped me identify photos from every stage in her life.

According to censuses and other public records for Berea, Ohio at the turn of the twentieth century, the woman I knew as Hattie Hill was called Jadwiga Dziedziekowski as a girl. A photo of her church’s choir in the centennial anniversary book confirmed that name and its spelling. This photo also informed me that my Aunt Charlotte was originally named Leokadia.

Migration – whether it’s from city to suburb, state to state, or country to country – is a sure fire way to become estranged from one’s past. Many families in Poland know they had relatives who left during their nineteenth century Partition. They have no idea where they ended up. I wrote a blog entry about the Dziedziekowskis several months ago which caught the attention of a Polish family historian with a mother who wanted to know what happened to her disappeared ancestors. The researcher recognized my tale as that of a long-lost relative. After exchanging photos, we decided we were distant cousins. When she finally admitted her father came from Poland, my grandmother told me I was the great-grandchild of Polish aristocrats. My new cousin informed me that was a lie: great-grandpa was from a hard working Christian peasant family called Dziedziach. His story had been passed down in her mother’s family: he and his brother Stanislaus had disappeared after their father died. When their mother remarried, they took off, never to be heard from again.

Though I lived in Buffalo and Mom lived in Cleveland, I visited her as often as I could. We were close. She often confided in me. One day, while she was still living at home, she asked me to get a particular sweater from one of the drawers. She was in the early stages of her dementia already, and nothing was where she thought it was. While looking for her sweater, I found this:

My mother was upset when I handed her both the sweater and this photo. She demanded I return the photo to where I found it. She knew it was the branch of the family I was most obsessed with. She’d written the name “Hill” on the back. And I could easily recognize my young grandfather. You see, even though I never met the man, I knew from photos that my grandfather had pretty distinctive features, too. Here’s a page from Grandma’s album that features she and Joe when they were courting. Grandma’s sweetheart is none other than the little boy leaning against his mother’s knee in the family photo.

The Górzyński family photo tickles me. Grandpa Joe and his family laugh with me across time. My great-grandfather Marian – Oh my! I can imagine him winking. I estimate his photo was taken between 1895 and 1901, when no one smiled for photos. Anyone who did was considered a little inappropriate. On showing this to my seven-year-old nephew, he labeled it”the silly family.”

The silly family. The ancestors no one wanted to talk about. Were they silly? Were they embarrassing? Were they in the mafia? Or did they simply refuse to assimilate? My grandfather’s parents were migrants for a long time. They moved several times before they owned their own home. They always lived in the Polish enclave. Creating America’s Polonia was a process: villages reunited in working class areas near America’s mines, factories, and stockyards. At the turn of the twentieth century in Cleveland, Warszawa, the Polish neighborhood my family settled in, “was, in essence, a Polish town situated in the corporate limits of Cleveland” (Polish Americans and Their Communities in Cleveland, by John J. Grabowski, Judith Zielinski-Zak, Alice Boberg, and Ralph Wroblewski.) That community flourished as long as it could remain isolated. President McKinley’s assassination was the first of several events that forced the assimilation of Polonia into the urban Cleveland landscape.

Great-Grandpa Marian (often called Frank) died in 1914. Franciszka stayed in the Warszawa house her husband built for her until she died. That house – a double with a livable attic – is still standing. In 1920, the house was functioning as my great-grandparents had intended: Great-Grandma lived there with Walter and his family, and Joe and his family, plus Helen and John, both still single. After Walter died and his wife and daughters moved out, Helen married Clem, and their family moved in. My grandparents moved out when my father was born. Helen and Clem stayed on with great-grandma for a few more years before finding their own suburban home. During the 1930’s Grandchildren moved into the family home, but they didn’t last long. By 1939, when Franciszka died, she had tenants. The final census she appears on – 1930 – lists her as illiterate, her language, Polish. At the time of her death, her eldest living son – and possibly the child who was in line to inherit the house – was my grandfather. By then, Joe and Hattie lived in the suburbs. It appears Joe washed his hands of the family situation completely. Franciszka’s death certificate and the documents marking the sale of the house were signed by Grandpa’s youngest brother Eddie, who still lived nearby. It’s amazing this photo remained in our possession. Although mom kept us hidden from us, I credit her with keeping it. She valued family history, even when it was a little embarrassing.

Embarrassing by whose standards, though? My research suggests otherwise. To their family back in Poland, they were a success story. Until they lost touch. This photo was taken to send to someone. Chances are, copies of it went to Poland, where everyone knew the beginning of this family’s story.

Marian Gorzynski was orphaned at age three when his mother died and his father moved away and remarried. When Marian married, he lived in Czarny Bryńsk, Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivoideship, Poland and had a respected trade: he was a wheelwright. Franciszka Golembiewska was the eldest daughter of an esteemed family in nearby Bryńsk-Ostrowy (shown on maps as Ostrowy), Warmian-Mazurian Voivoideship, Poland. These villages were among several satellite settlements of the nearby settlement called Bryńsk. (Marian’s father was born there.) Franciszka’s father Thomas bequeathed a slice of his land to his community, where he erected a wooden cross for travelers to pray before leaving town. When that cross was destroyed, the village erected another. I’m very grateful to a contact I made through the Facebook page Orędowdnik Wielkiego Lasu who has shared this story as well as photos of the current cross marking the former Gołembiewski land.

The Gorzynskis’ first stop in America was Glen Lyon, Pennsylvania where, in 1881, the wheelwright became a laborer for the Susquehanna Coal Company. The family photo suggests that Marian was tall. It’s an attribute he passed on. The men (and some of the women) in immediate family range in height from 6’0 to 6’7″. If Marian was anything over six foot tall, he probably found it challenging to work under ground.

_{from: Growing Up In Coal Country by Susan Campbell Bartoletti}

Given his experience in carpentry, I imagine him as one of the men tasked with timbering tunnels.

Meanwhile, above ground, Great-Grandma Franciszka had babies. The miners were paid in scrip that could only be spent at company stores. There was never enough to feed a family, and it was the women’s job to figure out how to make it last.

_{From Images of America: The Anthracite Coal Region’s Slavic Community by Brian Arden}

Franciszka was the first of Thomas Gołembiewski’s daughters to leave home. She arrived in Castle Garden September 25, 1883, accompanied by an eleven month old daughter (Honorata). In July 1884, the couple’s eldest son Ladislas was born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. Later called Walter, he’s the boy standing between his parents in the family photo. My grandfather, Jozef, was born across the river from Nanticoke, in Plymouth, Pennsylvania on November 1, 1888. A daughter named Tekla was born in Pennsylvania in 1887. In 1890, their son John was born in Buffalo, followed by Helena, born in Buffalo in 1892. Their next son, Alfons, was born in Cleveland in 1894, and their final child, Ildefons (Edward), was also born in Cleveland in 1897. Looking at the photo, I calculate my grandfather is between six and eight. If that is so, then the baby is Alfons, the little girl in front, Helena.

Somewhere along the line, these folks earned a reputation that my father and his mother didn’t want to pass on. My siblings and I heard rumors about rum-running and organized crime. And one of grandpa’s migrant kin supposedly knew Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin. I have researched that particular rumor in depth and come up with circumstantial evidence. The Górzyńskis lived five blocks away from the Czolgosz family. Leon worked at the same rolling mill each of the Górzyński men worked at one point or another. Leon’s father ran a bar not far from the rolling mills. Given my family’s love of drink, I’m sure my great-grandfather, my grandfather and his brothers visited it once or twice. Any association may have been passing. Does that deserve estrangement? If so, then every man who enjoyed a good drink and worked in the rolling mills was implicated.

I’m a member of Polish Genealogical Societies in both Cleveland and Buffalo, and I’ve met several Poles with ancestors who knew Leon Czolgosz or his family. Most retained their Polish name and identity. Not even Leon Czolgosz’s father took an alias. Marian and Franciszka didn’t change their names, either. But their children did. Shortly before World War I, America’s cities developed Americanization programs that targeted these immigrants’ children of immigrants. Recognizing their potential as soldiers and workers, these programs taught American culture. Cities with large immigrant communities continued those programs into the 1920’s. My grandfather may have resisted participating for a while, but my grandmother was ambitious. She went to business school, and she’d already changed her name once. She was the force behind their assimilation. After they changed their name, they left Warsawa behind. In 1932 they bought a home in Fairview Park, a semi-rural village on the west side of Cleveland. Then four years old, my father grew up there. If his Polish grandmother wanted to see her newest grandson, she needed to find someone who owned a car. Fairview Park probably seemed like another country to her.

My family history research has focused on restoring my migrant ancestors’ dignity, and their past. This blog does that. My novel The Double-Souled Son strives to do that, too, while also acknowledging these folks were probably far from perfect. The first part of the book recreates the Poland they left behind: a traditional village in its third generation of Prussian occupation where it’s getting harder to keep their Polish language and culture alive. Essentially, they were traumatized before they ever left home, and the conditions they encountered in America only made it worse. In the second part of the book, the characters remedy their alienation by recreating their village life in urban Polish enclaves. There, ancestors’ traditions were passed on to their children. How they came to America was integral to their identity.

The novel is fiction. The “real” story is slightly different. This photo represents a high point in my family’s journey towards building an American home. The “true” story I’ve cobbled together about it deserves to be told:

Based on my timeline, the Gorzynskis were living in Cleveland when they visited Pannebecker Photography, a well known shop in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. Why did the family return to Pennsylvania?

In 1939, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of St. Adalbert’s Roman Catholic Church in Glen Lyon, the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader published an article listing the names of the miners who founded that church, in 1889. On the fifth line from the bottom I found the name Marian Gorzynski.

_{found in Newspapers.com 5 February 2021.}

Marian arrived in 1881. St. Adalbert’s cornerstone was laid 20 November 1889. Between 1881 and 1889, Glen Lyon’s Polish mine workers had to travel to Nanticoke’s St. Stanislaus if they wanted to attend a Catholic mass delivered in their own language. St. Adalbert Parish’s first service was held in a basement in 1889. The original church building was dedicated in 1891. My Gorzysnki family photo wasn’t taken then, though. Given my grandfather’s age in the photo, I’m imagining Marian and his family returned for a service inside the new church when they could finally afford to travel with all those children.

_{found at the Nanticoke Historical Society.}

The family in my photo is far from silly. They’re happy. Perhaps for the first time since arriving in America, they’re proud. They’ve moved on to jobs that pay in United States currency, and they’ve saved enough of it to return to their first American home, and the church they helped build. This photo was a big expense for them. I’ll bet Franciszka made a new dress for it, and they surely had several copies made, one for each of their children, one for their own home, and one for Franciszka’s parents, who were still alive, living, in their home near the cross in Ostrowy.

_{The current St. Adalbert’s in Glen Lyon, now known as Holy Spirit Church, and slated to close soon. My photo, taken May 2024.}

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

2023-11-27 / mlouisehill / Leave a comment

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.”

✟

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.

✟

What Happened After My Ancestors left Poland, Part I

2023-10-242025-07-28 / mlouisehill / Leave a comment

It was inevitable.

As an obsessive family historian and researcher, I knew someday I would have to seriously approach the question of what happened to my Polish ancestors who stayed in the homeland.

For over a decade, I’ve been restoring the severed Slavic branch of my family tree: Grandpa Hill’s family. We considered them our black-sheep. Some of my siblings thought it best to honor our grandmother’s stated desire to never speak of them, but I resisted. I couldn’t help it. When I looked in the mirror, I could see them looking back at me. I needed to know why we became estranged. They must have done something truly awful. But what awfulness could justify keeping children from knowing their grandfather’s story? We learn from our parents’ and grandparents’ mistakes, after all. Their hard-earned lessons are our inheritance. Repressing past stories silences important lessons.

For years, I thought my Anglo name was randomly chosen. I was in my fifties when I finally learned that my surname – Hill – is a translation of the “gora” in Gorzynski. Anyone in the 1920’s rustbelt Polish-American community would have recognized the code. My father and his mother chose not to pass it on to me when I was born in a Cleveland suburb, in 1958. Family Search and Ancestry led me to my correct surname, and my great-grandparents’ story. I’ve since traced their American journey backwards to their arrival at Castle Garden. Then, with the help of Iwona Dakiniewicz, a genealogist I met through the Polish Genealogy Society of America, I located all my family’s offshoots in Poland. Where once I barely knew grandparents, now I know at least three generations.

My father’s pedigree represents three different Polish cultural regions. Dad’s paternal grandfather was a Górzyński who was baptized in Górzno in Brodnica County, Kuyavian Pomeranian Voivodeship. Great-grandpa’s father and grandfather were baptized in nearby Bryńsk. Górzno public records document the 1859 birth of my great-grandmother, Franciszka Gólembiewska, in nearby Ostrowy. Her parents were married in Górzno, too. Her mother’s family, the Pruszaks, appears to go back several generations in this area. So far, I can’t say that for her father. Perhaps he was itinerant, as my great-great grandfather Górzyński was.

Elevation of the Holy Cross Church, Górzno, Poland. Photo taken by me June 19, 2018.

My grandmother’s father came from the Suwałki Region. He immigrated in 1881. Grandma’s mother was the first American-born child of immigrants from Pomerania. I’ve yet to visit these areas, but my husband and I were able visit the Górzyński homeland in 2018. With Iwona’s help, we saw some of what’s left in the villages of Bryńsk, Czarny Bryńsk, and Ostrowy. The lands around them are a landscape park now.

A view from our cabin at Hotel Dworek Wapionka, Górzno, Poland. My photo, taken June 19, 2018.

Taken at Pałac Myślęta Hotel, My photo, taken June 18, 2018. (This is not in the Górzno-Lidzbark Landscape Park; it’s forty minutes away from there, in Uzdowo.)

I fell in love with the landscapes of my homeland. To honor my ancestors’ lost memory, I wrote a novel in which I imagined rural Poland, one hundred and fifty years ago. This was a time when Poland didn’t exist, having been partitioned during the 1790s by its neighbors, Prussia, Russia and Austria. In West Prussia, where my family lived, Polish language, history and culture were prohibited. What was the breaking point that caused them to finally decide to leave this beautiful homeland? The Górzyński migration took them first to the Susquehanna Coal Company mines of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. After ten years there, they moved to Buffalo, New York; a decade later, they resettled in Cleveland. My great-grandfather died in a house he co-owned with his sons. A nice ending to a tumultuous journey. Their story really isn’t remarkable, though; it’s the story of thousands of Poles who migrated to industrial America. Proud, hard workers, they didn’t always assimilate well. In fact, some planned on returning home. Some did. Americans, for the most part, weren’t kind to Poles. In 1901, when a “Polack” shot President McKinley at the Pan American Exhibition, anyone Slavic became even more marginalized. That infamous event ends the book. I’ve been marketing it under to titles: The Double-Souled Son and The Polish Assassin. I’m hoping a publisher or agent will help me decide which is better.

I’m three generations away from the Górzyński family’s migration – enough time to forget any Polish patriotism my family ever felt. I have no known relatives in Poland, though Polish records indicate some of them stayed. Did they survive? They were rural folk. In each of my ancestral home regions, villages were destroyed, if not by the Germans, by the Russians. What I’ve learned about my family’s villages keeps me up nights. One early morning, while sipping warm milk and honey, I remembered a similar autumn night, forty years ago. I was drinking tea with my grandmother, and I asked her if we still had family in Poland. Slapping her hands over her ears, as if I’d screamed at her, she shook her head. “It’s too horrible to tell.” After that, she clammed up.

I had a blissful childhood, thanks to her. I remained naive about the world’s evils well into adulthood, thanks to her. I don’t blame her for her choices, but I’m glad I now know what she kept from us. Because it’s happening again. The current Russo-Ukraine war harkens back to what happened in Poland, not so long ago. If we think of ourselves as our families, ancestors and all, we’ve all been forced to migrate before, and given our current climate crisis, it’s likely to happen again.

This is the first in a series of photo essays about the events in my Eastern European home regions after my great-grandparents left. I like to engage in a lot of other art forms while I’m working on a novel. Watercolors were significant to my process writing The Double Souled Son. These blog entries are process writings for a new novel. Tentatively titled American Limbo, the next Górzyński novel imagines my Polish-American grandparents’ coming of age in jazz age and depression-era Cleveland, Ohio. Based on what little my grandmother told me, the news from abroad during those years contributed to her decision to opt for total assimilation.

Each entry will briefly describe the family that left that given area, when they left, and what happened in those villages after they left. To sweeten the bitterness of forthcoming content, I’ll stick to facts alone, while including photos and paintings of my ancestral landscapes as they are today. I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful place.

A field in Czarny Bryńsk, Poland. Taken by me, June 18, 2018.

Process Paintings, Continued

2023-06-042023-12-04 / mlouisehill / 2 Comments

A recent collection of the process paintings that have helped me imagine the world of my the novel,The Double Souled Son. (This book has also been marketed as The Polish Assassin.) It begins in a Prussian occupied Polish village, in 1861. Earlier paintings can be found at “Process Paintings” in 2021.

Unless otherwise marked, these paintings are based on photographs taken at the Museum of Folks Architecture, Olsztynek, Warmia and Masuria, Poland.

Interiors

The protagonist becomes a wheelwright:

Gypsy Cart At Standstill. (based on a 1984 image from Jerzy Ficowski’s The Gypsy In Poland: History and Customs.

Exteriors

(The following painting is based on a photo taken on the grounds of the Myśleta Pałac Spa and Hotel in Uzdowo, Poland.)

In 2022, I found this cottage in Czarny Bryńsk, Poland advertised on Air B&B, and I screen-shot a photo of it. Over half of The Polish Assassin (formerly titled The Double Souled Son) takes place in a cottage in Czarny Bryńs. I imagined it to look like this one. (I found this listing several years after I created my setting.) Maybe I’ll get to stay here some day. Maybe not. It’s not on Air B&B anymore. So I guess I’ll have to settle for painting it.

Gus, my resident art critic

Doubly Cursed: Process Paintings

2021-06-202021-06-21 / mlouisehill / 3 Comments

I’m working on what I hope will be final drafts of my novel. The book is called Doubly Cursed. I’m working on a concise summary, since I’m preparing to pitch it at the end of next week. Once I’ve concocted one, I’ll include it.

The first half of the book is set in late 19th Century Poland. The area I’m focusing on was in West Prussia then. The village is Czarny Bryńsk, which is the last place my Górzyński ancestors lived before they immigrated.

The main characters? The Górzyńskis, of course. Absolutely fictionalized. Mythologized, even.

The Górzyńskis were woodsmen, and carpenters. In order to access an intimate know of woodworking and building in Poland, I did paintings. All of these paintings are based on photos that I took during my 2018 visit to Poland. One is based on a building still standing in Czarny Bryńsk. The others are buildings from the region and the period, now located at the Museum of Folk Architecture, Olsztynek, Warmia and Masuria, Poland, Europe.