Becoming American

David Laskin, author of the forthcoming The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War, writes on History News Network,

Why would an Italian peasant from Puglia who shunned the central government in Rome proudly tell his kids about the first time he voted for an American president? Why would a Jew who smuggled himself out of the Pale in a hay-cart in order to avoid military service under the Russian tsar enlist in the United States Army? Why the profusion of American flags hung outside Polish-American homes on U.S. national holidays? The answers have shades of difference for each group, but the common factor is opportunity: not only the obvious peacetime opportunities of paying jobs, social fluidity and basic human rights, but also the wartime opportunities provided by military service.

Read the whole thing. Something to think about when tracking these or other immigrants.

Fall features in the ISGSQ

"Woodcarvers and Furniture Designers: The Anderson Family of Chicago, Illinois," by Diane K. McClure.*

"Early Polish Immigrants Settled in Southern Illinois," by Joseph F. Martin.

"Shamgar Hewitt's Story -- Soldier, Privateer," by Raleigh Sutton.

"The Stevenson-Ives Library and Archives: A Genealogist's Treasure Trove in Central Illinois," by Julie Cahill Tarr.

* Footnoted.

The Polish Midwest

Sometimes hearing how people found stuff out is as interesting as the stuff they found out. At least when Julia M., graduate student and linguist, goes to Poland in search of the family truth instead of the legend and tells all in her Summer 2008 travel blog:

I grew up believing a legend about my Polish ancestors. The story was that my great grandparents (parents of my maternal grandmother) were both Polish orphans who met on the boat coming over to America. Only a bit of this is true. My uncle (well, my mom’s cousin) Craig La Clair’s research tells quite a different story . . .

She warns that the rest will be boring if you're not related, but when people say that (showing that they're self-aware) it's usually not true. Real bores don't know they are. I don't do any Polish research but I was fascinated by the process of even just finding the town from which her ancestors emigrated.

Across the ocean to Berrien County, Michigan

The internet can close the gap between continents, but leave you not knowing your neighbors. I live just minutes from Berrien County, Michigan (and yes, I have research plans there!), but until this morning I didn't know that "Juliane's granddaughter" blogs from there at Two Sides of the Ocean -- largely about her ancestral researches (surnames Schulte, Feucht, Wellhausen, Schluessler, Kijak, Rubis, Kolberg, and Kramp, from Germany, Pomerania and Poland), and sometimes also about meeting up with fellow bloggers on research trips. (You can catch up with Apple's Michigan adventures at her blog too.)

From the far north end of the Midwest

Thanks to Jessica's Genejournal for pointing to an elegant blog orchestrated by Ceil Wendt Jensen, CG, "The Polish Pioneers of Calumet, Michigan." Calumet was a mining town about halfway up the Keeweenaw Peninsula, which sticks out into Lake Superior on the north side of Michigan's Upper Peninsulra. The blog "explores the Polish community of Calumet, Houghton Co., Michigan. They were not the largest ethnic group -- but many Midwestern families trace their ancestry back to a miner in Calumet." I especially like the map showing some of their ancestral villages near Poznan.

No danger of sentimentalizing this place. A recent post transcribes the records for Andrzei Adamski, a "drill boy" born in 1875 and killed 17 Dec 1889 or 1890 by an "explosion of dynamite." The year 1889 appears on the gravestone and mine accident report; it's 1890 in the county death returns. Go figure.