Someone Else's Aunt Anna

Perhaps it is owing to the commonness of the given name Anna that so many people can say they have an Aunt Anna. I do. My Polish cousin's father obviously did, for even though Anna Gramlewicz Jablonski was far removed from her family in Poland, she regularly sent letters back home and kept up on the family news.

It was thanks to a genealogy forum almost ten years ago that I discovered yet another person who could call this same Anna her Aunt Anna. Unlike my Polish cousin, this woman was descended from the little brother of Vincent Jablonski, Anna's husband. Anna was actually her mother's aunt; her mother grew up in the same apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, in which Anna had lived after Vincent died in 1943.

I got the first note from this Jablonski relative after she had seen my forum post on what was then genealogy.com. Of course, I was ecstatic to connect with someone who said Anna Gramlewicz was her own mother's Aunt Anna. Although the forum concept is so helpful, it was not often that a legitimate response materialized from one of my forays on these online sites.

Because this woman's mother grew up in the same housing complex as her cousins—the children of Vincent and Anna Jablonski—she likely was quite close to those relatives. Subsequent emails came well stocked with details on Anna's children and grandchildren. There was even a little bit on the great-grandchildren of one branch in Anna's tree. She provided me with current addresses of those who were still living, so I had up to date locations of where Anna's descendants had settled, as recently as seven years ago.

This other researcher, as it turns out, had also begun putting her records in a family tree online at Ancestry.com, so I've been able to see details as she adds them. And most recently, she mentioned considering doing DNA testing, although because we do not descend from the same common ancestor, it wouldn't reveal any helpful information for Anna's side of the family.

She even shared an old photograph of her side of the Jablonski family, which I loved seeing, even though it didn't include any members of my side of the family. It was still fun seeing how handsome Vincent was, and wondering if that was where his daughter Irene got her own classic facial features that were so photogenic in her engagement announcement, back in 1940.

With every little bit of detail added by these fellow researchers who found me online, the story of our immigrant ancestors grows clearer. I'm certainly thankful for everyone who has been willing to share their part of the family saga.

There was one more member of this Gramlewicz family who didn't share that immigrant part of the story: Anna's baby brother Hieronym. Born somewhere in Poland after his parents decided to leave New York City for good in 1912, his was the part of the family story which eventually provided the connection with my Polish cousin whose initial email to me in 2005 got this whole research project started in the first place.

Above: Undated photograph of the Jablonski family. Standing in the top row, from left to right, are Sigmond, Vincent (Anna's future husband), their mother, Marianne, and Mae; seated in the front row are Bertha, Viola, their father Alexander, Stephen and Lottie. Photograph courtesy Beth Galyon from the family's private collection; used by permission.

The Only Family in the Entire Country

If Anna Gramlewicz became the only one in her entire family opting to remain in the United States, what became of her after her family left in 1912? After all, even though her sister Helen returned from Poland in 1920, insisting that she was going to stay here in the land of her birth, I found nary a sign showing that she followed through on that intention. The only one of the Gramlewicz family I could find, year after year, in census records, newspaper reports and city directories, was Anna.

Anna, like many girls of that era, was married at a fairly young age—nineteen. Her fiance was the twenty three year old son of Polish immigrants Alexander and Mary Jablonski. Like my own paternal grandfather, Vincent Jablonski was a machinist at a print shop in New York City, from the time he married Anna in 1916 up until the point of his early death in 1943.

Vincent and Anna had two children. The oldest they named Irene Martha. She was followed by a son who, depending on which record you believe, was named Henry or Zenon. Lest you presume that Zenon was Henry's middle name, it was more likely one named after his father—Vincent—for in his burial records (as in his military records), he was listed as Henry V. Jablonski.

I know very little about Henry, other than that, as had his dad, he died relatively young—at age fifty six in 1975. Thanks to an announcement of their engagement in the Long Island City Star Journal in 1943, I learned that Staff Sergeant Henry V. Jablonski was to become the husband of his high school sweetheart, Harriet Pardon. However, considering this was still in the midst of war years, I have no idea when—or even if—the wedding took place, and whether the couple ever had any children.

Society pages being the favored realm of the fairer sex, it was no surprise that Henry's sister merited a larger spread in the society page than he had enjoyed. Irene's wedding announcement in the Long Island Daily Press may have been modest, but a becoming photograph accompanied her engagement announcement in the Daily Press on October 3, 1940.

Irene's intended was Benjamin McLarty, of which very little was mentioned in the society reports—other than that his mother was Mrs. August Reisdorf. Since the wedding occurred October 12, 1940—far past the date for the 1940 enumeration—I'll have to await the release of the 1950 census before I can tell anything of the newlywed McLarty's family. The only thing I know beyond that, I gleaned from Irene McLarty's obituary in 1999, which mentioned one lone daughter, Veronica, and two grandchildren. Apparently, just as had befallen her own father and brother, Irene's husband had also died young—at age forty nine in 1961—so it was a very little family left to her, indeed.

Such was all that I could find on Anna Gramlewicz's legacy here in the States. After the death of her husband, her son-in-law, and then her son, Anna herself passed away in New York City in 1976. With her passing likely ended those letters sent across the ocean to her family who had returned to Poland.

It doesn't, however, end the story of our quest, for there are several more questions burning in my mind about the Gramlewicz story. Uppermost in my mind, of course, is to find out where, exactly, it was that the family returned to when they returned to Poland in 1912. Along with that answer, of course, comes many more details which, in their own turn, engender more questions. But before we can turn our attention to those, there is one more detail that I need to discuss about Anna, herself: the fact that she, too, had returned from Poland to America.

Above: The Brooklyn Bridge, circa 1895, as captured by amateur photographer Edgar S. Thomson; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Not a Moment Too Soon

Finding that mention of the marriage of Helen Gramlewicz' sister Anna in her passenger records was a serendipitous discovery. I'm not sure I would have figured out what Anna's married name might have been, had I not stumbled upon that handwritten note added to Helen's records.

Still, discovering Anna's married name—Jablonski—wasn't enough to find any documentation of the marriage. True, I could, with the tip off of the name, find their entries in subsequent federal and state census enumerations, allowing me to discover the names of the next generation of Gramlewicz descendants in the United States. With the newfound knowledge that Anna's firstborn daughter, whom she named Irene Martha, arrived in 1917, it was a safe bet to assume Anna and Vincent Jablonski were married around 1916. But as to the wedding, itself, there wasn't much documentation to be found.

I tried, of course, to find any record online. The search for any Jablonski marriage records at FamilySearch via the New York, New York, Marriage Index spanning 1866 through 1937 yielded absolutely nothing. Of course, there was, theoretically, the possibility that young Anna and her beau had slipped away to be married outside the five boroughs comprising New York City. But who was there to elope from? Her parents and siblings had all left for Poland in 1912. The only family members remaining in the country were her aging uncle and aunt, with whom she shared their Brooklyn apartment.

There was another way around this search dilemma, of course: public notices published in local newspapers. While the Brooklyn Daily Eagle yielded nothing, it was the Old Fulton New York Post Cards website that came to my rescue.

Sort of.

You see, while I was able to find a mention of a marriage license issued to Vincent and Anna in the Brooklyn Standard Union, the unfortunate fact was that the genealogical patron saint behind that quirky website had somehow scanned that very page in such a way as to cut off the heading, which essentially meant that the issue's date was scrubbed from the digitized image. All I can go by is the search result entry which indicated—at least—that it was an edition published in 1916.

However, this is not the time to bemoan such a research quandary. There is a way out of this dilemma—if, that is, I am willing to wait a while. For not a moment too soon, we—at least, those of us who are researching our New York City roots—have been snatched from the fate of having to expend the time and money to head to the lower reaches of Manhattan and the city's archives there and personally crank through the microfilms in hopes of finding that very date.

On the same day I was pondering how I was going to resolve the absence of the marriage date I'm seeking, an email arrived in my inbox, trumpeting the news: "WE WON!" Apparently, the New York City Marriage Index—in this case, a later segment than the one I'm currently seeking—will just now become "free and open data." However, in the same email, the group making it so—Reclaim the Records—explained that the Index for the years 1908-1929 has now been digitized, thanks to the help of FamilySearch.org, and uploaded to the activist group's site at Internet Archive, where they can all be accessed freely.

Well, make that a little too freely. The data is there, all right. But you have to go find the specific names you are seeking. A little too daunting a task for me.

It occurred to me that, rather than hunting through the digitized file for the 1916 marriages in Brooklyn, New York, as found in the Internet Archive file, since FamilySearch was the one doing the grunt work, perhaps they got the benefit of also keeping a copy of the file.

True, they did show a file with a similar name on their own website. But remember, putting the file through its paces with a search for both Vincent Jablonski and Anna Gramlewicz yielded me nothing.

According to the Reclaim the Records email, they are working with others to get "some kind of standalone searchable version of that CSV data thrown together online" in the near future. My choice at this point: either wade through the data in hopes of finding Vincent and Anna, wait for those "genealogy nerds" to create the search mechanism, or try to hack through it all, myself.

Maybe I'll just opt for wandering around the data, myself. What gets poked and still doesn't explode can't hurt me.

Above: From the Brooklyn, New York, Standard Union in an undated 1916 edition: "Marriage Licenses...Vincent Jablonski, 23, of 149 Grand street, and Anna Gramlewicz, 19, of 137 North Ninth street."

"Always"

The assumption, in the case of most immigrants, is that they make their incredible journey to a new homeland with the intention of never again leaving. It is, after all, a hazardous enterprise to have crossed an ocean in search of a suitable place to call home, especially in previous centuries.

When Annie Gramlewicz's parents came to the United States in the 1890s, they knew exactly what it was like to take the cheapest passage possible for the long journey from Europe. One could presume that was a trip people seldom wished to repeat.

Annie and her siblings, having been born in New York City, knew nothing of the sacrifices their parents made to come to America. But they also knew nothing of what Mecislaus and Josefa remembered of the homeland they had left behind.

Apparently, the call of those memories overcame the lure of any opportunities the Gramlewicz elders might have enjoyed in their new life in New York. There was a reason why I couldn't find any trace of the Gramlewicz family in census records after 1910—and why their one daughter Annie had had to find a home with a relative by the time of the 1915 state census: the family had decided to return to Poland.

Until I received confirmation from my Polish cousin, whom I met online years ago, that the Gramlewicz family had returned to Poland, I didn't really know what had happened. Only when passenger lists started showing up in online databases was I able to piece together the story. Even then, the document I'm sharing today was a more recent discovery. Thankfully, it confirms the story, owing in great deal to the handwriting added to the image—which never, incidentally, would have shown up if the record was offered only as a transcription.

It was the journey of Annie's older sister Helen in December, 1920, which provided the most complete snapshot of the family's odyssey. Arriving in the port of New York on December 13 of that year, the S. S. Zeeland, sailing from Antwerp, had brought Helen back to the city of her birth.

The passenger list was full of questions that had to be answered, thus providing us, nearly one hundred years later, with a glimpse of Helen's plans, once she disembarked at the end of her voyage. We learn that Helen Gramlewicz reported her age, at that time, as twenty four, and that she was a single woman. She declared her occupation to be bank clerk. In addition to being able to read and write Polish, she could also do so in both German and English. Despite having been born in New York, Helen considered Poland to be the country to which she owed her allegiance, but intended that her future permanent address would be in New York City.

It was at this point on the passenger list that we are provided with the information pertinent to the question of what became of Helen's parents. She listed her last residence address to be in the city of Zerkow, Poland, and specifically indicated that that was where her parents resided at the time.

The second page of the passenger list provided more confirmation of Helen's story. She explained that she had been born in New York City and—this is the important, handwritten note that would have been omitted from any transcription—that her family had left New York in November of 1912.

Of course, there were more mundane—yet interesting—details on the form. We learn that Helen was five feet, three inches tall, with a fair complexion and blue eyes. Everything from the condition of her physical and mental health to her personal opinions about anarchy and polygamy were questioned as part of the routine screening on the second page of that form.

Interestingly, though she had left New York for Poland with her family in 1912, the passenger questionnaire revealed that Helen's purpose in coming to the United States was to never return to Poland, but this time, to "become a citizen of the United States." As to the question, "Length of time alien intends to remain in the United States," Helen declared, "always."

The one thing that proved the most pertinent to my search, though, was the detail of just where Helen planned to proceed, once cleared from questioning at the port of entry. According to the typed entry on the form, her next stop was going to be 1730 Stefan Street, Brooklyn—home of her brother in law.

Thankfully, someone had written in yet another note providing me, through that shared image, with the lead for what had happened to Helen's sister Anna. Next to the typed "brother in law" was scrawled the note, "and sister, Anna Jablonski."

Above: Sunset Over the Sea, 1887 oil on panel by American landscape painter, George Inness; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.