The Pchełka Family

On the last day of November 1910, a twenty-one-year-old woman from a sand-road village in Austrian Galicia stepped off the steamship Friedrich der Grosse at Ellis Island. The inspector wrote her onto the first line of the page: Aniela Pchelka, married, of Kłyżów, going to husband Andrzej. She had crossed alone. Behind her, in the parish ground of Pysznica, she left two small graves - both of them daughters, both of them named Katarzyna. Ahead of her was a man she had not seen in twenty months, a cold-water flat in New Jersey, and the whole of the rest of the family's American story.

Everything on this page runs backward and forward from that morning. Backward through the parish books of Pysznica - which survived a church fire, two world wars, and an occupying army - to log houses on the edge of the Sandomierz Forest in the 1810s. Forward through Garfield and Bayonne to Jan and Władysława - Grandpa John and Grandma Pat - and on through their five children to the seventh generation: down to Adrian Pelka, the newest of the line, born the very day this page first went out to the family, in August 2026. Seven generations, and still counting.

What is documented and what is family belief are marked throughout, and sorted honestly at the end.

II · The village

Kłyżów, on the sand at the edge of the forest, within a walk of the edge of the map.

Fourteen farms, a tavern and a mill - and after three hundred years, still a place you had to leave.

A digression: the parish, and how it worked

Kłyżów had no church of its own from 1604 until 1974. Every baptism, wedding and funeral meant the same journey: about five kilometres north to the parish church of Pysznica - an hour on foot, thirty-five minutes by horse cart, along the forest edge. The parish had been erected by royal charter in 1569; the church the family knew was its third wooden church, built 1784. Every family sacrament in this story happened inside that timber building - and it burned to the ground, with its bell tower, in the fighting of 1914. The registers survived because they were kept in the brick rectory across the road. The cream-colored stone church that stands today (1924–31) is one the emigrants never saw.

IV · The crossing

Bremen to New York: six Pchełkas in March 1909, and one alone in November 1910.

Andrzej did not emigrate alone. On 23 March 1909, six Pchełkas from the one village of Kłyżów walked off the SS Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm at Ellis Island together - Andrzej at line 26 of the manifest, nineteen-year-old Agnieszka one line below him, Franciszek four lines down, with Józef, Adam and Amela on the same page. A whole strip of the village moved at once. His ship was practically new - nine months past her maiden voyage. Three years later she would be one of the liners in the vicinity the night the Titanic went down.

He left a wife and a six-month-old daughter. That November, the baby died with her father an ocean away. Aniela buried her second child, waited out a year, and boarded the Friedrich der Grosse at Bremen - the same route, the same shipping line. She landed at Ellis Island on 30 November 1910: St. Andrew's Day - her husband Andrzej's name day. Whether she planned it or the calendar simply smiled, she reached him on the feast of his name. Every family crossing, 1909 to 1912, was Norddeutscher Lloyd out of Bremen, on ships named for the Hohenzollern court: Polish peasants from Austrian Galicia riding the German Kaiser's namesake liners to America. The trains that started those journeys ran from Nisko station - opened 1900, steel younger than their marriage.

They left towards a letter - his, from New Jersey, with a prepaid ticket folded inside.

Not every emigration held. Cousin Wincenty and his wife Klara sailed from Kłyżów in November 1910 - eight days before Aniela - tried America, and were back in the village by 1913, where two more of their children were born. Emigration ran in both directions, a fact that will matter again in the mysteries.

VI · Those who stayed

The wars came to the exact fields the family left - twice.

Four years after Aniela's ship left Bremen, the war arrived at the riverbank she had left. In the autumn of 1914 the Battle of Rudnik was fought thirteen kilometres from Kłyżów; when it was over, tens of thousands of soldiers of both empires lay buried in the squares of one small San river town, and the wooden church of Pysznica - the church of the family's every sacrament - had burned with its bell tower. The front passed over the parish twice within eight months. Trenches from that war are still visible in the ground around Kłyżów.

The second war was worse. On 18 October 1939, Adolf Eichmann stood on the platform of Nisko station - three and a half kilometres from Kłyżów - and delivered a "welcome speech" to a thousand Jews deported from Vienna: the first organized Nazi deportation of Jews anywhere on earth began within sight of the family's fields. On 10 July 1943 the Germans pacified Zarzecze, the next village over, deporting a hundred men to the camps - the village still keeps the anniversary as the "Sunday of Tears." And on 14 June 1944, twenty-two kilometres away at Porytowe Wzgórze, some three thousand partisans held off thirty thousand Germans in the largest partisan battle ever fought on Polish soil, then broke out through the ring after dark. Men of the family's own gmina fought in it.

The family missed the wars by four years - and the village wrote them into its soil.

Mysteries & family lore

What we believe, what we suspect, and what would settle each question.

1. The grave in Pysznica Open

In Sector A of the Pysznica cemetery stands a small tended grave with a steel plaque: "Ś✝P Aniela Pchełka … Prosi o Modlitwę", she asks for a prayer. Born 1889, the same year as our Aniela, dead 4 July 1959. Who lies under it is a real question with three honest answers. It may be a same-named kinswoman of the village cluster; the cemetery holds several Aniela Pchełkas, and the plaque's birth date (28 July) sits five weeks off from our Aniela's (18 June). It may be our Aniela herself; the birth year matches exactly, and a date carved on a replacement plaque decades later is easily wrong by weeks. Or it may be a memorial raised in the home parish for the emigrant who died across the ocean, a thing Polish families did for those they could not bury. Set against it is the American record: the burial listings of Saint Peter's Greek Catholic Cemetery in Garfield, the very cemetery family memory named, carry Andrew Pelka, 1878–1941 and Nellie Pelka, 1889–1967, husband and wife, with children including Violet and Bruno. Those listings point to New Jersey, but they hold year-only dates and no photographs, so neither side of the ocean is proven yet. What decides it: the parish's 4 July 1959 death act in Pysznica, which names the deceased's parents or husband; a photograph of the Garfield stones; and Nellie's 1967 New Jersey death certificate. Whoever she was, someone still brings the Pysznica grave flowers.

2. Mazur or Maziarz Resolved

Her birth act of 18 June 1889 (house 106) settles it: father Jan Maziarz, mother Katarzyna née Mazur. Both family spellings were true all along - the papers kept her father's name, the Wall of Honor kept her mother's. The act even names her four grandparents, among them another Katarzyna Surowaniec: the same few village families, braided on both sides of the tree. One consequence follows for the tended "Jan Mazur 1860–1934" grave in Sector D: probably not her father's, since her mother died a widow in 1926, before this Jan died - but the village's habit of swapping Mazur and Maziarz between records means it is not closed, and he may in any case be her mother's family.

3. Where Andrzej is buried Found

Saint Peter's Greek Catholic Cemetery, Garfield - per the memorial index: Andrew Pelka, 1878–1941, beside Nellie. The family memory of "a Greek Catholic cemetery in Garfield" was precisely right, down to the parish. His death in 1941 also re-dates Aniela's widowhood: she raised the youngest children alone through the war years. What remains is a visit with a camera, since no photograph of the stones exists yet, and the 1941 death certificate, which would give the exact date and cause.

4. The vindication of "PHETKA" Documented

Family lore held various theories about the "real" name - Pełka, Pałka. The truth outran all of them: the name was Pchełka, of Kłyżów, and Grandma Pat's phonetic spelling was nearly perfect all along. Lesson, recorded for the next researcher: trust the first generation's ear.

5. Corrected beliefs Retired

"They married around 1919 in New Jersey" - refuted; they married 1 March 1905 in Pysznica, and Aniela arrived in 1910 already five years a wife. "The records burned in 1914" - the church burned; the books survived. "Aniela was from Wólka Tanewska" - she was from Kłyżów. Each correction came from a primary record, and each retired theory is preserved in the research files, because knowing where the road forked is part of the map.

6. Lore still standing Lore

That Andrzej worked the Garfield wool mills (overwhelmingly likely; unproven until a census or directory line says so). That the 1950 Garfield Pelka cohort are all Jan's brothers (the clustering says yes; birth certificates would say for certain). That the family sent money home (the Dąbrówka church near Kłyżów raised its bell tower in the 1920s on parish emigrants' dollars - whether any were Pchełka dollars, no record yet says).