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Found a vintage pic at my Moms house


Dirtyhip

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My mother was the youngest of nine children - all but one now passed away, and now that I'm 67 a lot of my 80+ year-old cousins write me and send me old family pics, some around 100 years-old, and other items: saying their kids aren't interested and I am essentially the family historian and they want them to be passed down the generations.  Not only am I getting interesting photos, I get official pieces of paper that answer some questions.

My mother's father was a Polish immigrant who apparently escaped Poland as a "terrorist" -a fighter for Polish independence in the early 1900's, and told his family little about his background.

One scrap of paper was one of my Polish Grandfather's first American Work Permits.  Some in the family had argued he was from Krakow and others Warsaw.  The work permit lists him as a Russian Subject. When he came to America around 1906, Krakow was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Warsaw was under Russia.  Argument solved!

Another was his 2018 Luzerne County, PA registration form where, by then, he had become an American citizen.  His name had been Anglicized to "Griscavage" - which is what his descendants through his male children and grandchildren use today (if you want a great deal on travel, contact my cousin-by-marriage Jessica Griscavage at McCabe World Travel in McLean, (northern) VA).

But, very exciting to me, on that registration form Grandpa had spelled out, in his own hand, his original Polish name: Joseph Gryskiewicz (Poland uses our Roman, not Russian-style Cyrillic letters).  With that, I was able to research and determine the spelling, with the ending "ewicz," was a rural last name assigned in the 1600's (cities spelled it differently: owicz, ovicz, or evicz, when last names were assigned in the 1500's, "ski" arriving later) and that "Gryski" is a nickname form of the Polish version of "Gregory" - all the rest of the last-name meaning either "son of" or "servant of." The nickname form of Gregory indicates it's almost surely "son of" - a boss's name would be formalized with the official version of Gregory: Grzegorz. I also located the region in Poland, Suwalki County, where the largest concentration of people named Gryskiewicz live today - more than twice any other region. There had been some other family rumors that the family name may have had a Lithuanian root. Check the location of Suwalki on the map below and that makes sense! Note that from around 1300 thru the 1600's, the Polish-Lithuanian Empire with it's new capital at Warsaw ruled 1/3 of Europe, and there must have been a lot of migration both ways. So, with that one piece of paper I figured out that my first Polish ancestor who used a last-name lived on a farm in the 1600's that was most likely owned by his father, Gregory, and most likely near Suwalki Poland. Due to WW2 destruction by the Germans or Russians, all that information has been historically lost otherwise.

5a4a9c14e230c_SuwalkiPoland.JPG.ea5bc295b3b7618ab47321ce14fbb6a0.JPG

We had also heard that my grandfather's Polish father owned a brickyard in Warsaw.  My grandfather spoke several languages and was probably involved in commerce in some way, but that's been a dead-end so far.

 

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13 minutes ago, Dirtyhip said:

So much this.   Riding momo made me faster.  Going fast feels comfortable.  

I owned that truck too.  I used to be the cool chic.

I loved those trucks.  I had a 4 runner about that same year for a while.  Dope ride.

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