Personal day

Last Wednesday was a really nice day for me. 

I took a personal day off work and drove to Aiken, SC (about two hours west of Florence) to have lunch with my aunt Linda. Aunt Linda is my dad's older sister, and his only living sibling. 

I really didn't have much contact with my dad's family growing up. My mother hated and resented them her whole life and made sure no one could have relationships with them. It was all very toxic and awful, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Anyway, now that my dad is dead, and my mother and I have cut ties, I've reached out to my aunt once or twice and she seemed genuinely happy to hear from me. Back in the summer I'd found some information about my Polish great grandparents online that I wanted to share with her, so we started planning to meet. It turned out that she has all sorts of family history documents, one of which is the ship manifest from 1906 when my great grandfather, Pawel Czmiel, came to Ellis Island at the age of 17. She made me copies of everything: the ship manifest, naturalization applications, family baptism records, my grandfather's WWII military documents, and on and on. It was wonderful! We met up at a restaurant with outdoor seating (the weather was nice) and sat and talked for over four hours. My aunt was so kind to me, and so welcoming, and I look forward to building a relationship with her going forward. It's nice to feel like I still have some family left in this world, and learning more about my dad's relatives means a lot to me.

Father's Day, and an anniversary

Tomorrow is Father's Day, and the day after, June 19th, would have been my paternal grandparents' 69th wedding anniversary. I promised you all some more family photos, and what could be better than vintage wedding pictures? Grandma gave me copies of all of these to keep forever.

June 19, 1948

  

The bride and groom with the maid of honor, grandma's cousin Clara, and the best man, grandpa's brother Johnny.

You guys.....wasn't my grandmother beautiful? And her dress...!!! Just lovely.

I also got a copy of their wedding announcement that ran in the newspaper. Back in those days, they spared no detail when describing a wedding in the society columns. Here are a few excerpts I thought you might find interesting:

Miss Margaret Martin Weds Mr. Czmiel in Rites at St. Louis Catholic Church, Dillon

In an impressive service on Saturday morning, June 19, at the St. Louis Catholic church in Dillon, SC, Miss Margaret Martin became the bride of Joseph Stanley Czmiel of Chicago. Rev Lawrence Sheedy of the Dillon church assisted by Rev. Maurice Shean of Rock Hill officiated........

......The lovely little chapel was decorated with tall floor baskets of white dahlias and gladioli. Sprays of ivy entwined the altar rail, where burning candles were placed..........

....The lovely young brunette bride, given in marriage by her father, was beautifully gowned in white slipper satin, with sweetheart neckline and long fitted sleeves ending in points at the wrist. Her full skirt, attached to a fitted bodice, ended in a wide cathedral train. She wore a fingertip veil of bridal illusion edged in rose point lace and caught to a halo of tiny beads. The bride carried a white prayer book topped by a white purple-throated orchid, and showered with satin ribbons.....

The bride had as her only attendant her cousin, Miss Clara Lou Hardwick of Aynor. She wore a blue taffeta dress fashioned with sweetheart neckline, fitted bodice and full skirt, and carried a colonial bouquet of yellow rosebuds encircled by Shasta daisies. She wore matching taffeta mitts and, on her head, a bandeau of roses and daisies.

Mrs. Martin, mother of the bride, wore Eleanor blue crepe with softly draped hipline and self embroidery, and on her shoulder, a corsage of pink roses.

Mrs. Czmiel, mother of the bridegroom, was gowned in beige. She also wore a corsage of pink rosebuds.

Immediately afater the ceremony the bride's parents entertained with a wedding breakfast at their home on Marion street, which was made attractive with numerous arrangements of white gladioli, dahlias, and snapdragons. The bride's table, centered by a triple tiered wedding cake tipped by a miniature bride and groom, was especially lovely, decorated with gardenias tied with maline and white satin ribbons......

.....During the afternoon, the bride changed her wedding gown for a dressmaker suit of white gabardine with which she wore black accessories and the orchid from her prayer book. Following a brief wedding trip the young couple will be at home in Chicago.

There was plenty more I left out, like who provided the nuptial music and the pieces they played ("Oh, Perfect Love" by Gurney and "Ave Maria" by Shubert, as well as the traditional marches), the usher/groomsmen names and where they lived, and who greeted guests, worked the bridal register, presided over the dining room and "assisted with hospitalities" at the reception. There was also a bit about my grandmother being a recent graduate of Winthrop University, and my grandfather being a veteran of WW2 and serving in Europe.

Clearly, wedding announcements were a big deal back in those days!


A year later, on June 12, 1949, my grandparents' first child was born, my uncle Paul.

A perfect picture for Father's Day: my grandpa with his first-born son.

Grandma was a pretty young mother. And look at the telephone in the background!

Grandma sewed all the fancy lining and ribbons on this bassinet.

My great-grandmother, Emma Martin, visiting Chicago when my uncle Paul was born. She's on the left, and my other great-grandmother, Angeline Pierog, is on the right. Can anyone guess what kind of car they're posing beside?

My grandfather's sister, Ann Czmiel, and his brother, Johnny Czmiel, with their new nephew.

I hope you've enjoyed these old family photos! I had so much fun looking through them and picking out ones to share here!

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there! Go show your family some love, especially the older generations if you're still lucky enough to have them in your life. I feel very fortunate to still have grandma around at her grand old age of almost 90 years old.

Family photos

I'm home from a quick visit with grandma last night.  We spent some time poring through old family photos and I brought a few home. Here's one I especially wanted to show you all.





My grandfather, Joseph S. Czmiel, in WWII. He was in the US Air Corps and served in  the 466th Bombardment group in Europe. Wasn't he a dapper looking man?!

Ancestor stories

Last week I went to visit my grandmother. She is elderly (mid eighties) and lives alone in a town about 2 hours away. Grandma is my last living grandparent, and unfortunately we didn't have much of a relationship when I was growing up. She never got along very well with my mom (her daughter in law) so there was a rift there that made it difficult for me to be close to her. That's all in the past, now.

For over a year now, grandma has been making a sincere effort to have a relationship with me. She had been asking me to come and see her for months, so I finally did.  I was afraid it might be awkward after all these years, but I'm glad to say it wasn't. We had a great visit, and I discovered we have a lot in common, too. We're both avid readers, and I discovered some of my favorite books and magazines on her bookshelves. We have similar habits, and when we went out to eat with her daughter (my dad's sister) we all chose mostly the same foods. Grandma and I both love to garden, and to keep track of bird species spotted at our backyard feeders, and the list goes on. It was very interesting to see how much I have in common with a grandmother I don't know all that well.

I also got to hear great stories about our family. When grandma was a teenager, she met my grandfather while he was on leave from the air force and visiting Myrtle Beach, SC. He was the son of Polish immigrants living in Chicago, Illinois, and was fighting in WWII. (He was also incredibly handsome in the photos we have of him from his war years!) After grandma finished college (it was unusual for a woman in the 1940s to get a college education, but she was from a well-to-do farming family) she converted to Catholicism, married my grandfather, and moved with him to Chicago. Her in-laws spoke no English, and it must have been a real adjustment for her, coming from rural South Carolina to live in a large city with grandpa and his family. They proceeded to have three kids, one of which was my dad, before moving back to South Carolina in the 1950's.

I wanted to know more about my Polish great-grandmother, Angeline Czmiel. She came over from Poland around 1905 as a teenager, and met her husband (also the son of recent immigrants) after arriving in New York. She told a story about her trip across the Atlantic that has come down through the years to me. Apparently, while they were in mid journey, a woman on the boat fell overboard and drowned. My great grandmother saw it happen. The poor woman had been wearing a scarf around her neck and it floated to the surface in the spot where she went under. The teenaged Angeline watched the floating scarf get smaller and smaller as the ship sailed on. She said that that  image stayed with her forever, and she told the story of it often enough that it's now part of family lore.

Grandma said that Angeline was always kind to her. Although she spoke no English, her children would translate for her and grandma picked up a little Polish in the years they lived near grandpa's family. Angeline was a very, very devout Catholic. According to grandma, every Sunday morning the entire family had to go to mass, then to the cemetery to visit the family graves and pray. She had had two babies die early in her marriage when the family had lived in Pennsylvania, and she scrimped and saved to have the bodies moved to Chicago. She got a job in a factory during the war to send money home to relatives in Poland who were hungry, but also spent a lot of that hard earned money to buy a beautiful monument for the family graves. They are all buried in Resurrection cemetery in Chicago, and one day I hope to be able to visit the graves and leave some flowers.

Since we were on the subject of family stories, grandma surprised me with a thick folder of papers with a family history compiled about her side of the family, the Martins. I was shocked to see that someone had done a ton of research, and compiled a detailed history of the Martin family that goes back 11 generations! The very last ancestor documented (where our record begins) was a man named Jean Michaux born on the Ile de Re, France, about 1608. He worked in salt mining and later moved to London, where his daughter was married in Canterbury Cathedral in 1659. Her married name was Catherine Rembert, and she and her husband moved to what is now Georgetown, SC, where she died in the early 1700's. Apparently they were very well to do; several of her descendants had listings of their property as well as birth and death dates, and most of them had hundreds and hundreds of acres of land. By the time my grandmother was born, her family still had several large farms, even though the land kept getting divided up as the generations marched on. I never knew we had a French connection in the family, nor that we had detailed records going back so far.

So it was a very interesting visit, and I'm happy to say that I'll be going back soon. I'm truly fortunate to have a living grandparent at my age who can tell me all these stories, and that I have so much in common with!