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Mamma Never Told Me She Was an “-owski”

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

My brother, who lives in Montana, doesn’t have a telephone. But, every once in a while (I’m using the term “a while” very loosely here) he’ll show up unannounced at my doorstep. When I’m lucky, I’m actually home when he shows up, and get to spend some time with the rascal before he drives another thousand miles down the road.

It was a frosty April in Chicago, and this time I actually had some advanced warning that my brother was on the way. Unlike other warm-blooded mammals, my brother doesn’t need heat to survive. So, at the top of his list of travel itineraries was a trip to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, where the bitter early spring cold ensured that all the attractions would be closed. It was a long drive, but we wound up where we aimed, at the copper mining archives at Michigan Tech in Houghton, Michigan.

Some people find that their life calling is juggling knives and eating fire for a living; others seek control of money and power. At the archive, we encountered a man who was meant to be a reference librarian. I asked him for the employment record of my great grandfather, but he came back with two records.

The first record was my great grandfather Ignacy. The record confirmed a fact that I’d only recently discovered- he was born in Poland. This made me 1/8 Polish.

The second record was a man named Josef Kmieciak. I had never heard of Josef Kmieciak, which is my excuse for not being able to pronounce the name. But it turns out, he also worked in the mines, was Ignacy’s father-in-law, and also was born in Poland. So I was up to 1/4 Polish! Before the summer began, I didn’t even know I had a drop of Polish blood in me.

There would be more surprising leads like this, and I soon found that I could easily spend entire days mining through archival references and internet databases looking for another clue in the story. By now, I’m up to 1/2 Polish; all six immigrants on my mother’s side came from the partitioned land that was the once and future Poland. The research became overwhelming in scope, so I learned to focus. This is just the story of Ignacy.

My uncle, from the Texas branch of my family, was happy to share his stories about Ignacy. Turns out, Ignacy’s job in the mines was to light the dynamite. This was a good way to make money fast, and it was also a good way to die. Fortunately, he “chose” the former, or else this story could never have been written.