I have 26 first cousins.
Three were born in the U.S., and the other 23 in Poland, 12 of whom immigrated
to the U.S. in their youth. Of the 11
who never left Poland, six have passed away. Thanks to email, Facebook, and
Skype, I have been able to keep in touch regularly in recent years with the five remaining. I first met them all on a family trip to
Poland when we were teenagers, and now we've all either surpassed or are quickly approaching our 70th year.
I decided last year that it was time to go back to Poland to see them in the flesh again.
I started planning my trip way back in April, and originally considered the idea of going alone. Since my mission was simply to ensconce myself in my parents’ village of Jednorozec (population 2,000) and see family, I didn't want to subject John to a week of just sitting by and listening to me speaking Polish with relatives. He's already had to put up with more than 40 years of just that at Lesinski gatherings in Connecticut (thanks for your patience, dear!).
Still, although I’m fluent in the language, the idea of being in a foreign country with a rented car was a little intimidating. So, I was happy when my niece Joanna agreed to come with me – a copilot who understands and speaks Polish as well.
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| Our home for the week... |
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| ....the back yard - old barns and my rental car |
We arrived on August 7. For our week’s accommodations, we stayed in a house on property that has been in the family for over 100 years. The site originally contained the three-room cottage built after the end of WW I by my great-grandfather Wojciech. It was the home of my grandparents, then my parents and --- significant for Joanna – the place where her mother (my late sister Ann) was born.
After my parents came to this country in the late 1940’s, the house was passed on to my father's sister Hedwig and her husband. Eventually, their eldest son - my cousin Zbyszek (now living in the U.S.) inherited the property and replaced the aging cottage with a two story house. The first floor has permanent renters, and - lucky for us - the second floor bedrooms and bath are reserved for visits from extended family. Basic, but comfortable, private, and conveniently located in town.
Joanna & me, near the iconic Jednorozec (unicorn) statue in the center of the village. My cousin Christine & her husband Peter can be seen on the balcony of their home in the background.
As can be imagined, it proved to be a very busy but fulfilling week. My cousin Christine is the only one still living in the village, but other cousins were within a couple of hours' drive, and came to visit to catch up on our lives and share some family history and lore.
I last visited in 2004 with my father; reuniting after all these years was kind of like reading a novel, where characters appear briefly and fade into the background, reappearing years or decades later with expanded families and back stories to fill in.
In between family time, Joanna and I visited some larger nearby cities, driving through the flat rural countryside and recognizing town names from my parents' stories over the years.
One such destination was the city of Przasnysz (population 17,000) - an easy 12 mile drive for us, but a journey of several hours by horse and wagon for my father when he used to accompany my grandfather there on market days in the 1930's. The 15th-century city had been pretty much leveled during the first World War. The entire region saw extended heavy fighting between Germany and Russia in 1914-1915 (Jednorozec in fact is the site of a German cemetery from those battles, where over 1,000 soldiers are laid to rest).
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| Former market square in Przsasnysz; now the site of a history museum. |
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| Przasnysz: monument on the site of the execution of Polish partisans during WWII |
German soldier's cemetery from the First World War: 1,000 + buried here.
Another trip took us to an outdoor museum in the town of Kadzidlo, a small Sturbridge Village-like reconstruction of what a typical "Kurpie" (pronounced Coor-pyeh; our region of Poland) settlement would have looked like, and featuring the region's folk art.
Back in Jednorozec, we made multiple trips to the town cemetery, as my visiting cousins all wanted to pay their respects to the generations before us. My four grandparents are all buried just a few feet from each other, giving me the distinct and somewhat comforting feeling that I was standing at my personal ground zero. As an amateur genealogist, the cemetery was of special interest to me, but disappointingly, the graves of ancestors buried prior to 100 years or so ago are long lost due to the wars that hit so close to home.
With my cousin Karol (Carl) Lesinski at our grandparents' grave
I'll spare you all the other details and the 250+ pictures from my journey, but I'll just say that I would repeat it in a heartbeat. My niece Joanna returned home to her three siblings and encouraged them to take the trip as well, so I'm thinking that I may have a future as a tour guide for the rest of them. I'm grateful for the social media that allows me to keep up the connections with family so far away, but I know that there are more trips to come.
