The next day Kasia experimented with a trap. She shared several photos from her childhood in Poland in a collage on Instagram to see if Katie would imitate her.
She didn’t have to wait long. Katie commented that “this activated some very deep memories buried in the recesses of my mind.” (Presumably memories unusually similar to Kasia’s own.) Sure enough, the next day Katie shared her own photo of the alleged house she grew up in in Poland. When Kasia messaged to ask where this was, she replied, “My (dad’s) grandparents’ house in Poland! Near Czernichów!” (Again, notice the contorted grammar: do the parentheses clarify it’s her dad’s grandfather, i.e. her great-grandfather? Or her grandfather on her dad’s side?)
The man looked around eighty, Katie about four or five. Sat in shade, he wore brown patent-leather dress shoes, a brown aran sweater, grey lounging trousers finishing at his lower-shins, under which he had pulled up a pair of socks in a smart, elderly American gentleman’s style. His face was definitely not a Polish one.
Katie’s reply of the specific town name was interesting. (I half wondered if she’d been listening to our conversation about us never being told which town she was from through a microphone in our air vent.) Why Czernichów? There were two of them. We know from her Instagram that Katie visited Kraków several years ago during a year abroad in Europe: traveling up from Italy, she probably travelled through Katowice to get to Kraków. Could she have passed through Czernichów back then and stayed there?
With more digging, the man in the photo was identifiable as her paternal grandfather through a photo in his obituary. He was not Polish, but he was married to a Mary, née Mary W——, whose Polish maiden name was the same surname Katie has lately been inserting before her own in her academic work, mirroring the structure of my wife’s name after marriage (with her Polish maiden name first; my British surname, the add-on, second). The obituary mentioned no other siblings of Katie’s, adopted or otherwise.
Following this name, the Polish side of the family tree was finally clear. Mary W——’s record in the April 1930 census lists her as eight years old and born in the US, though her own parents, John and Bertha W——, were born in Poland. Mary had other siblings: a Tadeusz (misspelled in the census “Tadeuor”), who went by Ted, and a Frank; a later census also revealed a younger sister Alice. John had been a shoemaker who owned his own shop; Frank’s obituary confirmed that he and Ted later took it over. While John spoke English, on the 1920 census Bertha didn’t.
Kasia went on to find Mary’s birth certificate, which revealed that Mary’s full name had actually been Marja Franciszka W——. John had actually been a Jan, while Bertha had been a Bronisława, née U——. Kasia was able to trace a ship manifest record from 1912, in which Bronisława U—— had first travelled to the USA from Antwerp, Belgium. Her person of contact was listed as her sister Barbara, five years her senior, who had left two years before her in 1910—the same year Bronisława’s future husband Jan also left Poland.
This was as far back as the American records went; but Kasia was able to locate Katie’s birth certificate—first name Katherine—where she was indeed born just a town over from the university her father worked at in the USA.
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