John Nyznyk: My Grandfather, an Enigma, The Story Ends

My grandfather, John Nyznyk has been the subject of my blog for the past two weeks. Researching his life has unearthed a lot of information about his life, but not everything that I was trying to find.
This week I will finish the story, but I do not have an satisfactory end to it.

Last week I finished my post with the 1930 United States Census.  John was 52 years old,  living at 533 East 6th Street in New York City, working as an upholsterer in the furniture industry.  He was living alone, and stated that he was a widower. He now was a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Michalina Nyznyk Immigrates to the United States.

Manifest from the SS Kosciuszko.  Michalina Nyznyk is listed on the first line.

Michalina Nyznyk, my father's half sister, arrived at Ellis Island, in New York on April 27, 1931.   She joined her father, John, in Belleville, New Jersey.  He was living at 52 Columbia Ave in Belleville.  Michalina was 20 years old, with brown hair, fair skin and grey eyes.  She was 5'4" tall and in  good health .  She left her brother Paul, her closest relative in Poland, who like Michalina was born  and raised in Pomorainy,  and now lived in Niszczuki, Zborov, Poland.  She obtained her passport in Warsaw on March 23, 1931, and left from Gdynia, Poland, on the SS Kosciuszko on April 15.  She came to the United States as a permanent resident. According to the ship's manifest, her occupation was farmer and she could read and write. From the records that I have, she had never met her father, since he left Pomorainy before she was born.

Second page of the SS Kosciuszko, showing Michalina's home information and her fathers address in New Jersey.

I have found no other information about her at all.  She was not listed in the 1940 Census, or in any existing  Belleville, N.J. directories.  I have found neither marriage nor death records for her.  As far as I know, she came to the United States and vanished.

John Nyznyk: The 1940 United States Census.

John Nyznyk was 58 years old and living alone in New York on April 8, 1940, the day the Census taker came to gather information. He lived at 205 East 4th Street in New York, a few blocks from his residence in 1930 and was paying $13 a month in rent. He was listed as single and was born in Austria and attended school for 5 years.  According the the Census, he lived at the same address in 1935, which is interesting, because four years earlier, in 1931, he was living in Belleville, N. J. with his daughter Michalina.
John had been unemployed for 50 weeks, and had worked only 12 weeks in 1939. However, he said he had a source of income, which was $240 per year or $20 a month.  When he last worked, he was a laborer in construction, unusual for a 58 year old man. He had previously worked as an upholsterer, never as a laborer.  He was still looking for work and did not do any public emergency work.  
This is the last record that I have about John Nyznyk.  I have searched again and again and have consistently found nothing.  I think that he died in the 1950's, but this information came from my parents, and they heard it from other relatives.

1940 United States Census.  John Nyznyk is on line 15.

Conclusions?

I will continue to search for information about John and Michalina.  From the 1920, 1930 and 1940 Censuses, I found a lot of information about my grandfather.  I am also fortunate that his applications for US citizenship were available on line.  I am also glad that my father had a detailed marriage license for his parents.  His birth certificate was also detailed and provided me with a lot of information about his parents.
I would like to find out more about Michalina.  I wonder if she married and stayed in the US?  I wonder if she decided to return to her brother and family in Poland? There are many records of in coming ships to the US, but I have found no sources/manifests about outgoing ships. Perhaps a reader of this blog may remember a grandmother, great-grandmother or aunt by the name of Michalina.  If you do, please let me know.

A Big Breakthough in the Monkovski Family Tree.

Genealogy research can be very tedious.  A lot of time is spent going through lists of people who lived long ago, trying to find your ancestor. The search can be complicated by inaccurate records, unfamiliar spellings of names, and a lot of dead ends.

This week I had none of those problems.  I put aside writing about the Monkovski family, thinking that the information I had was all there was available at this time.  Well, I was wrong.  Jose Gutstein of the Szczuczyn Web site, came through again. 

Jose has been helping an Israeli family with their family tree, and he discovered that that family had the same picture of the Chiam Pesach Monkovski family I had (without the crack down the middle.)  He supplied me with information identifying some of the people in the picture.  I heard from family stories that some Monkovski relatives immigrated to Israel, but that was all I knew.

My picture of Chiam Pesach Monkovski's family with the crack.

The Israeli Family's picture of the Monkovskis

It turns out that one of Chiam Pesach’s sons, Yoseph, did immigrate to Israel, but first immigrated to Cuba in 1929.   Two of his daughters are still living in the Tel Aviv area. Then I found out that some members of the Monkovski family immigrated to Argentina, and about 10 years ago, visited the Israeli branch.

Now there is another mystery.  The family in Israel has this family picture, and nobody has any idea who they were.  One of my husband's cousins sent me this postcard that was in some of her father’s things.  Is she the girl with the white beads in the back row?  Perhaps the message on the back, written in Yiddish will provide the answer.

 

Is the girl in the center of the top row in the picture to the right?

This picture belongs to the  family in Israel.  Nobody knows who they are.

 

Message on the back of the picture above. Wasosz, 1929.  To my sister, from Abraham.

So, don’t give up.  Occasionally those lists can get results, but it helps to know someone who has the resources to trace family roots in Europe.  I found Jose searching the net for information about Szczuczyn.   I e-mailed him and eventually found more than I ever expected.  Sometimes researching the places you ancestors lived can give you results you never expected.

Wasosz Poland: Ancestral Village of the Monkowski-Markin Family

Monument to Jews killed by the Nazis in Szczuczyn, in Jewish Waldheim Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois.  My husband's grandparents and several other relatives were members of this organization.  Abraham and Rose Krause (my husband's maternal grandparents) are buried near this monument.

My husband's maternal grandmother's family, the Monkovskis,  came from a small town in Northeast Poland called Stuchin, or Szczuczyn in Polish.  After doing some research and obtaining famiily records from Jose Gutstein, of Szczuczyn.com  I found that they actually came from the small village of Wasosz, which is about 3.5 miles south of Stuchin.  When they immigrated to Chicago, they formed a landsmanshaftn, a group of people who came from the area around Stuchin, called the Stuchiner Social Society.  One of the things that they did was to buy a section in Jewish Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, where they could be buried with people from their home villages.  They also raised money for a monument in remembrance of the Jews of Stuchin who were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Map of Northeastern Poland, showing the town of Wasosz.  It is located northeast of Warsaw,  3.5 miles SE of  Szczuczyn, and 45 miles NW of Bialystok, and was the home of many Monkovski ancestors. Today, it has a population of 1600.

Stuchin was established in May of 1436 by the Polish Prince Wladyslaw.  It became part of Russia as as result of the partitions of Poland during the rule of the Russian Tsarina, Catherine the Great. In 1897, Stuchin had a population of about 5000 and a Jewish population of about 3,336, about 66% of the total.  After World War II, the Jewish population of Stuchin was zero. Most of the Jews in the Stuchin area were tradesmen or merchants. The most common trades were shoe making and tailoring.  Members of the extended Monkowski family included tailors, shoemakers and glaziers. Others worked as laborers.

Farms in the

area of Wasosz, Poland

Typical street in Razilow, a town neighboring Wasosz and Stuchin. I included this picture, since I couldn't find any pictures of places of the town of Wasosz.

I Say Shtutchin, You Say Szczuczyn......

Map of Poland, 1907, Szczuczyn is near Lomza

Szczuczyn is the red dot on this map of Poland

  









Szczuczyn, Poland was the home of the Monkovskis, the family of my husbands maternal grandparents.  It is an old market town, first mentioned in the fifteenth century.  In 1900, the population was about 3000, and 58% were Jews, most of them were traders and craftsmen.  An independent Jewish community was established in 1820 with a synagogue and Bet Midrash (House  of Study). The Jewish community of Szczcuzyn was destroyed in the Holocaust.  Many of the former residents have written memoirs of their town and its vibrant culture. 

Most of the Monkovski family left Szczcuzyn at the beginning of the twentieth century, emigrating to the United States and Israel, those who remained perished in the Holocaust.
I am including information about life in Szczuczyn from the memoirs of the former residents,  written after World War II, since the Monkovski's who lived there are no longer with us.

"Not far from the then German border lies the shtetl, Shtutsin [Szczuczyn]....  Jews there were engaged mainly in commerce and trade.  All businesses were Jewish. Only a few were of Christian proprietorship.  Two days in a week were market days: Tuesdays and Fridays.  The peasants came to these fairs with their products...and sold them to the Jews.  With the money they received, the peasants would buy from the Jews: clothes, drink and the like.  Life went on in this manner until Hitler came to power.  Anti-Semitism grew stronger and commerce was taken out of Jewish hands....Before anti-Semitism infested the shtetl, Jews had felt like their own masters....Everything had been open to the Jews: City hall, government institutions and all other offices." (Yeshiah Skubelski, from The Destruction of the Community of Szczuczyn, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1954)

Market Days in a Polish Shtetl

Itzhak Wertman writes in his memoir, From the Inferno, Back to Life, about his home in Szczuczyn in the 1920's.  "Economically, we weren't very rich, but also not poor.  We lived in a rented house next to the shop.  It had two rooms and a kitchen, and the bathroom was in the yard.  The living conditions in those days demanded a lot of work: we used to draw the bath water...from a well in the yard.  A Gentile woman brought our drinking water from the river....  We heated the house with a porcelain stove, which stood between the two rooms, and a lit a fire in it using wood and peat (and later by coal). The was a stove for cooking in the kitchen that we also lit with wood and peat.
As children, we used to play different games: we made balls from various rags and played with them or with a hoop that we rolled on the ground with a wire.  In the winter, when we studied at night, we used to make lanterns for ourselves.  (From the Inferno Back to Life pp. 3-19)

Wertman describes how his family celebrated the Sabbath:  "We always received the Sabbath with special preparations:  my mother cleaned the house for the Sabbath, made challot [Sabbath bread] and cakes every Thursday night, and on Friday took them to the bakery to bake them.  She also used to bring the cholent [a meat stew] that she made to the bakery.  On Sabbath morning, like all the other Jews in the city, we took the cholent home for our Sabbath meal.
Shortly before the entrance of the Sabbath, the Synagogue's dayan walked between the shops in the city and announced that it was time to close the shops for the approaching Sabbath.  All the city's Jews--men, women and children-gathered in the synagogue for the Sabbath prayer. [After the services, the family returned home for a festive meal] After the meal, every Friday night and also on the Sabbath, we wore our best clothes and went for a stroll in the city's main street." (pp. 3-19)

Scczuzyn, Poland

Chiam Monkovski's family, dressed in their best clothes, ready to celebrate the Sabbath in Szczuczyn. Chiam Monkovski was my husband's great Uncle.