The Branch That Time Forgot
the curveball
I sat down to write a post about Joseph Neuman, the man who most likely paid to have my great grandmother travel from the Old World to the New in 1908. He was an interesting man, a Jewish married Saloon owner in Cleveland. Neither the house he lived in when my great grandmother worked for him nor the bar he owned still stand. Progress is to blame.
The location of his home is now part of the Cleveland Clinic Medical Campus, and the bar he owned was knocked down and paved over to make way for a new street.
Then, I thought of sitting down and writing about my great Aunt Tekla. How she arrived before Anna. How she married Stanislaw Moskal and they lived in an area known as Birdtown. At least, that’s what we called it when I was a kid. The small community was originally built to house the employees of the National Carbon Company. Each street named after a different species of bird, like Robin, Plover, Lark, Thrush, and Quail. I know the history of this miniature neighborhood, because I grew up down the block from Birdtown. I thought it would make a fascinating read. My family. Streets with bird names.
But then, my uncle died.
Aryn is a dedicated genealogist and researcher passionate about uncovering family history and social history. She helps people connect with their heritage and explore historical narratives that shape their identities. Aryn also assists clients in using their research to craft engaging nonfiction and historical stories about their ancestors and other figures. To learn more about this Substack and my love of history, family history, and genealogy — head here! To learn more about the From Research To Novel webinar and Substack — head here.
A lot of times
working on family history makes you feel like you are a detective–because you are. You siphon through documents, newspaper clippings, and sometimes family heirlooms, photographs, diaries and more. You sit, for hours, reading, deciphering, and learning about the people who came before you with a detached sense of wonder and a hope not to let bias get in the way of the truth of who they were.
But all of that changes when you actually knew the ancestor in flesh and bone.
When you stood in a room with them.
When you have your own personally grown memories, research becomes more difficult. All the good, bad, and all those other memories that live in a gray area can complicate things. Maybe not so much the grey ones… You know the ones that don’t really fire up the dopamine center of your brain. They sit stagnate in between the bigger moments, like, being that time you were at a church bizarre and your relative was also there shopping or when their annual holiday card arrived. Grey moments are the ones that are not life altering events, but they exist anyway, stitching together the larger more seismic beats.
When you work on your family tree and the name you are researching is a person you share physical space with and breathed the same air as, the detective work morphs into something else. It becomes laced with memories and sentiment that can trigger warm and fuzzy memories, resentment, or maybe a sense of detachment.
All of those emotions make the research process harrowing at best. Which is why I will not go into details specifically about my Uncle’s life. It would be better, smarter, to take time to process rather than speaking from a place so new.
Because when a death is this fresh, it almost makes it feel impossible to speak from any place besides the passing. So, instead, I’ll go back to speaking about Anna.
This is a part of Anna’s story I didn’t intend to get to, at least, not for a while.
My uncle was the first grandson to my Great Grandmother Anna Kurek,
mothered by her youngest daughter, Mary. He was the first grandchild of all the Kozikowski children.
Before my Uncle, there was my grandmother. She was born 14 March 1920 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time, the family lived at 1038 Holmden Avenue.
These days, where the house once stood is nothing but a patch of empty grass.
But according to the 1920 US Federal Census, the house was large enough to hold three kids, a pregnant Anna and her husband, Adam Kozikowski. Gauging from the sizes of the houses still standing, all built around 1900 with 4 bedrooms and two baths–most likely one full bath and a toilet and a shower in the basement designed for factory workers to use when they arrived home. (This way, they didn’t dirty the house) — the Kozikowski home was probably similar. It would have been a turn of the century Victorian style home with coal fed furnaces and a yard. All within walking distance of a steel mill, specifically, Corrigan-McKinney steel Co, for Adam, and so many others, to work at.
In 1920, Anna and Adam had a mortgage—it was their home, and in January 1920 when the Federal Census was taken, Anna was pregnant for a fifth time. She must have been showing, which is common at seven months with your fifth child. This child was Mary, my grandmother. She was one of four who would live to adulthood, and, of course, she was also the baby.
Between 1920, going from living in a home with a mortgage and a baby on the way, to ten years later in 1930, something went wrong. The early growth period of the steel boom was more than likely the catalyst for them to purchase the house found in the 1920’s Census. Just as the onset of the Great Depression was most likely the reason they’re found renting a different house in 1930. Regardless, by 1930, the family left their mortgaged home and moved to a new house down the street at 1095 Holmden Avenue.
Like the house listed in the 1920 Census at 1038, the structure at 1095 is long gone. All that is left is a thicket of trees and overgrown weeds all owned by the City of Cleveland.
This would also be Anna’s last home. She died two weeks after my grandmother's eleventh birthday in 1931–a year after the census was taken.
She died 9 years before my uncle came to exist in the city she traveled so far to get to. He, and all his brothers, including my father, would never know her.
Born in 1940, my uncle was the oldest of four boys.
At the time of his birth, the world was at war, but the US was still fighting hard not to get involved. Citizens were rising up and demonstrating to make sure they would not join the Allies in the fight against Fascism and Nazis in Europe and Asia. With neutrality acts put into place and even some polls saying as much as 94% of the population didn’t want to be involved, America remained neutral.
Everyone still remembered the toll of World War I, and they didn’t want to do it again.
It was late August—a hot time in Cleveland, when the humidity is so thick it makes you feel like you forgot to run your clothes through the dryer before you put them on. My grandmother can be found nowhere near Holmden Avenue. By 19 April 1940, when the 1940 Census was taken, she was living on the west side, specifically on W. 54th street with her husband – Stanley Stary (pronounced Starry) and her new family: Frank and Mary Stary, her mother and father-in-law, and their children Louis, George, and Vlasta.
This is the schism that launched the Branch that Time Forgot. My grandmother and grandfather’s union marked the moment when everything changed and the history of the Kurek Family Line (and the Kozikowski for that matter) was no longer spoken about.
It would be decades before I learned the name Kurek–somewhere around 2010. Roughly, 70 years after the union of my grandparents and the birth of my uncle. Also, two years after my grandmother died.
The seventy years of silence was cracked when my cousin, who has been working on the Stary family history since the mid-1990s mentioned the name Kurek. Then, for me personally, it was cracked again when she told me that Anna Kurek lay in an unmarked grave in Brooklyn Heights Cemetery. (A grave that is still unmarked because I cannot afford the $3k price tag to purchase her a headstone.)
After that was when my father learned her name, because I shared it with him.
He had never heard it before.
No one spoke of Anna.
I began my digging, which has been fraught with brick walls, lost documents, bad penmanship, and of course, silence. No one was supposed to ask about “before” the birth of my Uncle. This means a lot of my early research was done in the shadows. I found the ship manifest with Anna’s name on it, which I presented to my father, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. So I reached out to the cemetery, in the hope I would find something more there. I did. I learned that John Kozikowski, my Grandmother’s oldest brother, was buried next to my Great Grandmother – also in an unmarked grave.
From there, other little tidbits began to tumble out.
First, I have never (to this day) been able to find a marriage record for my great grandparents. I’ve been to the archives. I’ve called every church in the area. I’ve held a seance with a ouija board. Nothing.
Second, when my great grandfather remarried, I found MYRIAD documents about him and about his second wife. A woman who had four different husbands and married my great grandfather before the end of the year my great-grandmother died in.
Third, after Anna died, and then, when John the following year, the remaining Kozikowski children scattered.
I grew up around the Stary family in the post-Anna world, and if I’m going to be very honest – all of the cloak and dagger added to the interest and grew my intrigue.
With the passing of my uncle,
the family story has turned another corner and I find myself beginning the reexamining process, where I look through all the documents I have, hoping to learn something new. While I still plan on talking about Joe Neuman, the man in 1910 who was my great grandmother’s boss and a person who fled Russia during the porgoms in the late 1800s, and I still plan to talk about Tekla and how the elusive address on Anna’s ship manifest turned out to be an apartment building. One that housed many Kureks when they first arrived from Poland. I need to know more about Anna. I need to know where she came from in Poland, and who she left behind.
But, for now, I need time to sit and process all those feelings I mentioned above. Then, I can plot out where to go next, as I continue my search into the Branch that Time Forgot.
Don’t forget to give this post a live and a restack!
Miss the first two installments? Check them out below:
The Branch that Time Forgot
When you spend hours researching other people's family histories, you begin to wonder, "Why have I not found interesting stories in my family tree? "The simple answer is that you're not spending enough time on your own research. Hence, you don't know as much about your family as you do your clients'.
As always, I write my family history in the hope of helping you write your own. Family Research is a process that takes time. So, have patience, take breaks, and follow this substack for stories about my own family history, other historical figures I find interesting, learn how I do my research, and other basic Genealogy 101 posts. Follow From Research to Novel to learn more about how to use Genealogical Research to write your creative nonfiction and historical fiction novel.
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