Chasing our Family Heritage: More of the Story from Curt Wolf of the Relatives from Rogozno

Dear Family, In my last letter, I told you about a barista I randomly met in Poland who told me about a better genealogist who could help me. What I didn’t say is that this was pretty miracolous because he just so happened to be the region’s most knowledgeable about the village where our great grandmother Paulina Eifler Niedzwiedzki’s came from. Further, this same genealogist named Przemek, connected me to Andrzej Eifler who is the family historian with the largest family tree for the Eifler family in Poland. With these too gentleman as my sources and my own research, I will share with you some of the things I learned about our Busha’s Eifler family heritage. Busha’s family of Origin: The first thing I discovered was that Pauline (b.1891) and Anna Eifler Swierzawski (b1897), who were the only ones to come to America from the Eifler family, were half-sisters born to the same father Adam but not the same mother. Adam Eifler was born in 1848 and died in 1916. This is 4 years after Pauline came to America. He was a shoemaker or cobbler by trade as was his father Jan and his brother. This did not mean he didn’t take on other jobs, but is what we know for sure based on records. We also knew he had 5 wives- 3 who died in childbirth, one who left him, and one that survived him. Back then, when a wife lay dying, she often could point to a women she trusted in the room and say, “You take care of my children”…and that was the next wife of the husband. It was also the case that men could have children up to their 70s with these new wives. Adam’s last child was born when he was 63 so he had children spanning nearly 40 years! Before he had Pauline with wife #3, Maryanna Bazelewna aka Pakocik, his first wife, Rozalia Nowosad, had 4 children die in a row before age 3 and she died with the fourth who was miscarried. His second wife of less than one year, also named Rozalia, died from the birth of their first child. Busha would not have been around to experience these deaths from Adams first two wives, but she would have known of 3 siblings deaths from her mother and her step-mother Elizabeth who raised her. One of the sibling’s death caused the complications of her biological mother’s death when she was 4 years old. With all of these wives, Adam had 6 children that lived into adulthood- two being Pauline’s full siblings. They were her older brothers named Lukasz and Konstantin. I hope to meet their descendants someday. This frequency of death in the old world among children and wives was fairly common, but Adam experienced this more than the average person. It certainly must have grieved him tremendously. I cannot fathom losing this many wives and children as a husband and a father. I could only imagine that the deaths were hard on Busha too. The last thing I will say about Pauline’s mother Marianna, and the wives of Adam’s direct line of forefathers, is that most of them were Polish going back to the time they came from Germany. Because of this, the amount of German blood Pauline brought to her children with Josef N. was certainly not 50%, but likely something in the neighborhood of 17%. (This is an estimate.) Adam’s land: Busha’s father Adam was considered a “burgher”. This term means that he likely lived in a town and was anything from lower middle class to middle class. There were only 3 social strata back then which were peasant, burgher, and nobleman. Given what I learned, I would put Busha’s family of origin in the lower middle to middle class given the land they owned and his business as a shoemaker. . . but more research has to be done to confirm this. According to Uncle Frank, Pauline and Josef Niedzwiedz had about 6 acres of land in the Tomaszow area before they moved to America. It was not clear if this land came from the Niedzwiedzki side or Eifler side. But I saw the land that Adam’s family owned. It is near the center of Tomaszow with government buildings including a school on top of it. I do not know how Adam’s family of origin obtained this land because they were leasing land in the village of Roguzno from the time their ancestors came in 1784. I have video of the beautiful pastoral rolling hills you see as you approach Roguzno 4 hours outside of Warsaw.