Forum | PolishOrigins :: View topic - Need Help Deciphering Ancestor's Town Name

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Sophia
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Joined: 05 Oct 2014
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Posted: 4 Days ago at 4:47 am Post subject:

Very interesting!

Nice work that you are doing here. I am still thinking about the Zurawicz to Fisher idea.

Let me just add two little things. One is, yes, they had two sets of twins. As you already pointed out, Praxeda and Walenty show up in the church record together and they have two sets of godparents. Here is the link for Paul and Peter:
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-64V3-MKM?view=index&personArk=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AQVMN-G1F1&action=view&cc=1452409&lang=en&groupId=M9SQ-HQQ

Note for Leokadia (middle name Marcyanna) that her birth was in 1900:
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DHQF-LP?view=index&personArk=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AQ2YM-XBKS&action=view&cc=1452409&lang=en&groupId=M9SQ-W5P
You have her on your list as being born in 1898.

I notice that this family attended several different churches. I had at first assumed they were only going to St. Stanislaus Kostka but it seems not. I see them at St. Salomea and at Holy Trinity. From the birth register, it shows that with Teodor in 1904 they were living on Cleaver Street but the year before with Antoni's birth they were on Dickson Street. Have you tried looking at Chicago city directories to follow them over time and see if you can spot the transition year from Zurawicz to Fisher?

Sophia

Sophia
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Posted: 4 Days ago at 5:16 am Post subject:

A bit more about St. Stanislaus Kostka records. You see the list of them here:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/koha:411138
And you will notice that some years have been indexed, and other years have not. With the orphan idea in mind, I decided to take a look at the non-indexed years for the death records, specifically the 1895-1902 group of deaths and then in the 1874-1895 group of death records I looked at years from 1892 onward since that is when the Cieslak and Zurawicz families arrived. I found nothing for your family. There was a Cieslak family, father's name Andrzej and mother's name Honorata, who had some children who died (Sylwester in 1895 and Weronika in 1900). A Cecylja Cieslak died, age 11, daughter of Walenty Cieslak and Konstancja Pawlak. There is no reason to think they are connected to you. However, now that we know not all years of the church books were indexed, you may want to see if the same was true for the other churches that the Cieslak family may have attended, to try to substantiate the orphan hypothesis.

Sophia

P.S. Having now had sufficient coffee, I should clarify what I said earlier. It is not that the years 1874-1895 and 1895-1902 are not indexed for St. Stan's, but to see the indices you have to open the microfilms and look at them there. Death records for subsequent years 1902-1911 and 1911-1915 were indexed by Family Search, so you can use the Family Search search function to find people in those years. You cannot do that for the 1874-1895 and 1895-1902 records.

Sophia
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Posted: 4 Days ago at 1:38 pm Post subject:

Hi again,
I want to add that I found the section on the cause of death on Anthony Fisher's death certificate to be far more detailed than usual. It took me a little while to decipher it. All quite interesting.
I am not sure what to make of Warsaw being given as the place of birth. Often, for Polish immigrants, this part of the death certificate just says Poland and does not give a town or city.
Sophia

Trish
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Joined: 23 Sep 2020
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Posted: Yesterday at 9:27 am Post subject:

Hi Everyone!

There is a tree on family search for the Zurawicz/Fisher family. They are listed under Fisher. The tree should be corrected with the correct surname of Zurawicz and Cieslak with adding the notation the family changed their name to Fisher. Also, I would contact the people who posted the information on this tree. They may be related and have more insight on the family.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/details/G4FY-2FF

I also found this interesting for the Cieslak family. I'm wondering if this "Joe" is really Jozef Cieslak, brother of Ksawera. It's something to think about and put in a folder of possibilities.

Name Joe Cieslak
Birth Date abt 1872
Death Date 3 Feb 1943
Death Place Blairsville, Williamson, Illinois
Death Age 71
Gender Male
Father Name Stanley Cieslak
Spouse Name Agnes Cieslak
FHL Film Number 1983448

Regards,
Trish

Sophia
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Posted: 12 hours ago at 7:31 am Post subject:

I agree with Trish that it would be helpful to contact the people who were putting together that Fisher/Cieslak tree. It is not obvious from the source documents why they made the connection between the two surnames so the hope is, as Trish suggested, that they have family stories about the name change.

I will add one more detail. As far as census records go, the family already used the name Fisher in 1910. However, I looked in the PGSA website which lets you search Jubilee books from churches and it shows the family still using the Zurawicz name in 1917:

https://pgsa.org/results/?pgsa_search=other_search&surname=Zurawicz&first_name&type=match-first&records=jubileeother

I do not think it was so unusual for people who changed their names to use both for a while, so I am not especially bothered by this, but it is interesting to see it.

Sophia

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