Page 1 When I asked my father where his father came from originally, I thought it was an easy to answer question. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened had he given me some names and dates, shown me some old family photos, and told me a bit about my grandfather's family. Would I have been satisfied and stopped asking questions? Would I ever have started family research at all, had I known how much time and effort I would have to invest into finding an answer to my question? Well, it's pointless worrying about it, because my father's answer was a simple "I don't know". I'm sure many descendants of immigrants to the United States have asked their parents the same question and got the same answer. At that time I couldn't understand how it was possible for my father to know nothing about his father's heritage. How could that be? Had they never talked about it in the family? "The adults talked about these things amongst themselves when we were kids", my father said, "but not with us". He didn't recall his father ever speaking about his family or home country when he was around, and, like many of us, he never asked about it while he still had the chance. Now, after many years of family research and learning more about the life of Polish immigrants and their descendants in the United States, I know that it wasn't unusual for the first generation of immigrants not to talk about their life in the 'old country' and for their children not to know where their parents came from. The majority of Polish immigrants to America at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century were peasants or descendants of peasants from the overpopulated south who had lived in rural poverty and for whom emigration was the only opportunity to escape a future of poverty and deprivation. However, they had to work very hard to earn their daily bread. Due to often low education levels and unfamiliarity of the language, most of them were recruited for hard-labor, low-paid, dirty, and often dangerous jobs in industry, construction, or coal mining, and had to invest all their energy in their jobs and in meeting the basic needs of their families. The conditions my father was brought up in during the years of the Great Depression in the 1920s and 1930s are unimaginable to us who, for the most part, never had to worry about where the next meal would come from, if we had decent clothes to go to school in, if we could afford to see a doctor and get the health care we needed, or if the rent would be paid on time. My father experienced his father's struggles to support his wife and 10 children working as a roofer in Chicago and his father's death from falling off a scaffold to the pavement below while working on a building. Like his father, he worked hard and invested all his energy in creating a better life for himself and his children than he had it when he grew up. Both generations, the immigrant generation as well as the first generation born in the United States, were too busy dealing with the present, with getting ahead economically and socially, to worry about the past.
Take a look into the past ...
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