The Branch that Time Forgot

AKA - Finding the family no one wants to talk about...

Mar 13, 2025

I never knew my great-grandparents.

This may not sound surprising, especially when you gauge how long ago they lived by using "great" as a measure of time. When we hear "great-grandparent," and quickly translate it to "a person who lived long, long ago."

It makes sense that I would not have met someone who lived “long, long ago,” but what was always confusing were all the people no one spoke of.

Whether you are interested in Family History or not – there are always family STORIES! Stories we hear at annual holiday celebrations. Stories that turn up at funerals and weddings. Stories that creep out of a relatives cavernous memories as the age.

Enjoy them or not, they exist. The generations of ancestors have left family fables and myths we’ve heard one time or another. And even if we never trip down a rabbit hole to learn the stories origin or truth, because of these stories, most of us have a general idea as to who SOME of our ancestor are.

Take my family for instance. Here are some of the stories I’ve heard multiple times in my life:

On my mother's side, she and my grandmother enthralled me with tales of my great grandmother, Dominica Tomaro. How Dominica was born in a little village in Italy named Bojano, where the San Bartolomeo Cathedral was built (and rebuilt) long before she was born and still stands today.

A family favorite that always got a laugh was when, during the Great Depression, my Great Grandma Dominica was arrested for making moonshine. The part always shared was, after the judge sentenced her to a night in prison for her illegal activity, he said, “And what do you have to say for yourself!"

With a houseful of children at home, my great grandmother replied, "At least I'll get a good night's rest!"

Then there were stories about Dominica's husband, my great-grandfather Giovanni Priola. Unlike the warmth I felt in the tomes about Domenica, his stories were short and abrupt.

"Who was my great-grandfather?”

"A louse," my grandma would say until the day she died. "He was a drunk and a louse."

While his stories weren't happy or magical, they sill existed.

My mother also spoke of her father often, a man I never met. He passed away long before I was born, but she shared moments that explained who he was and how he loved her and my grandma.

She would also speak of his mom, her namesake.

Nicolena Miracco.

While the spelling is slightly different, my mother's Nicolina with an "i” instead of an "e" the spelling differences never made their relationship less special or the stories less intriguing. You see, Nicolena Miracco had a secret—one that disrupted the idea that my mom's side of the family was 100% Italian.

While it is true Nicolena grew up in the small town of Santa Sofia d'eprio, Italy, she wasn't actually born there. Her birthplace was somewhere (I have yet to figure this out) in Albania—a fact DNA supports.

Great-grandma Nicolena only shared this secret with two of her grandchildren—one of whom was my mom—who then shared it with me.

My great-grandfather, Luca Maimone, was a laborer who taught himself English and worked in the sewers in Cleveland, Ohio, in the early 1900s. My mother spoke of him too.

Then, on my father's side, my dad taught me about how his paternal grandfather rescued wood from his first home in America (after it was torn down) and turned it into wooden bowls for his children—so each of them had a piece of that history. I also knew that great-grandfather Frantisek Stary and his wife Mary Zacek met, married, and began their family in South Moravia (the current-day Czech Republic) before moving to Cleveland, Ohio.

Yet, with all the memories shared over the years there was always one part of the family we never heard about—my father’s mother’s family.

Honestly, to this day, it can be summed up in one word—crickets.

I would like to say I spent part of my childhood asking all the right questions to fill the empty branch of my family tree. That I pestered my grandmother to tell me something — anything — about her family before she died, but I didn't. Like so many others out there, I didn't allow my brain to slip into a world where I thought to ask, "Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about the family who came before you," until it was too late.

Around 2010, after having my own child, I finally began to wondered about all the stories I learned growing up, and all the ones that no one ever mention.

By then, my maternal grandfather, the one I had never met, had been gone for 44 years.

My maternal grandmother was gone for 12.

My paternal grandfather passed three years earlier, and my maternal grandmother was gone for two.

But I still wanted to know more.

Where where we from?

Who were “my” people?

Where was our old country??

Who were my great-grandparents and why would no one talk about them!

My parents couldn't fill in the gaps, so I decided I would go out and learn what I could on my own with what little information I had.

What was that information? They were passing comments, like this one from my father:

"Your grandfather's brother asked a girl he liked on a date, and she said, 'I’ll only say yes if you bring a fella for my sister.' So, he brought his little brother (my grandfather), and she brought her sister (my grandmother). That's how your grandparents met."

And this one from my paternal grandmother:

"My aunt lived behind that pharmacy. Sometimes, we would walk over there, and she would give us cookies."

This is how my story begins. The story of how I am learning the names of my ancestors, the ones I never knew existed.

It’s the story of my family on the branch that time forgot, and it starts in on a boat:

With a name like S.S. Kroonland, my first thought was the passengers and crew must have sang a lot. I’m only joking. The truth was the word “kroon” was taken from the Dutch language — meaning “crown.” It was combined with “land” to loosely translate to — “Crown Land” or a land of royalty.

The name makes better sense when you see in first class interior. Like the smoking lounge intended to make the eleven day trek from Antwerp, Belgium to Ellis Island, New York City, New York, USA tolerable.

First Class Smoking Room on the S.S. Kroonland

It’s very well possible that Ernest H. Holter, a predominate jeweler from Oberlin, Ohio, visited the lounged. It would have been a safe haven during the passage, a place to relax and interact with other first class passengers. I’m sure, while he met new men or possibly reconnected with the passengers he already knew, his English wife, Elisabeth Holter, probably relaxed on the first class desk. Making the most of the fresh sea air as they traveled back to Ohio.

But, while my ancestor due have ties to Northeast Ohio, Cleveland to be more precise, the Holter’s are not them. They are a name I plucked off the first class passengers on page one of the S.S. Kroonland’s passenger list.

To find my relative you would have to keep paging through, past the first and second classes, who would have been check in on board the SS Kroonland when they arrived in the United States, until you have found yourself waist deep in steerage.

Steerage was less “smoking lounge” and more, sardine can. Though, I will say, the SS. Kroonland did offer a Steerage balcony — something that wasn’t common for most passenger vessels.

By Alfred Stieglitz - Taken in 1907 on the *Kaiser Wilhelm II* The middle-class passengers on the upper deck are looking down on steerage passengers below.

Steerage is what most of the world thinks of when they hear the words “Ellis Island” or “Trans-Atlantic Voyage.” It is the image burned into our head by films like, The Godfather II:

But it's also what we think of because, in general, most of our relatives didn't arrive in first or second class. They were the sardines separated into rooms in the ship's bowels (family, women traveling alone, or family). While the Kroonland did offer a space to get fresh air during travel, I'm still certain when they finally disembarked to line up like cattle outside of Ellis Island — the cool 45-degree temperatures probably felt like the cool breeze of hope they longed for.

It was November 18, 1908 when the ship docked at Ellis Island. A New York Times front page headlines boasted, “Kaiser Surrendered, Germany Rejoices” — conflict the passengers most likely knew about when they boarded in Antwerp nearly two weeks before. But there was also talk of news they probably never heard of — like the seizure of a ruby ring sent from Duke of Abruzzi to one Miss Katherine Elkins. It was, high drama, but not the kind of drama that would have interested the greenhorns from Europe.

Among the many people queuing up to go over the myriad questions asked of them:

What is your name?

What is your occupation?

Where are you heading to?

All before they were physically examined to be very sure no one was infected with tuberculosis, diphtheria, or something even worse — was my great-grandmother — Anna Kurek.

Right now, I wish I could insert an image of her, but there isn't one. All I know is what her passenger list tells me:

Anna Kurek, a 17-year-old Polish girl from Austria who could read and write, and was heading to Cleveland, Ohio to meet her brother-in-law (Stanislas Moskal). In Cleveland, she would be a servant. She was traveling with a four year old companion, Pawel Kurek, who was possibly her cousin.

She was 4'11" tall (tiny), and both she and Pawel had $6 in their possession—each. While Anna was heading to find her sister and brother-in-law, Pawel was heading to find his father, Peter Kurek — in Lakewood, Ohio.1

While some of the steerage passengers left Ellis Island that day, heading to their final destinations, and others were put back aboard the SS Kroonland for not clearing the entrance exam into the United States, for whatever reason, Anna and Pawel were detained at Ellis Island for three days and ordered to attend a Special Inquiry.

But we can get back to that next time.

The Branch that Time Forgot

AKA - Finding the family no one wants to talk about...

Discussion about this post