Hypothetical cousin from America - genealogy and Poles

One day you meet an overweight, old American with a poor grasp of the Polish language who is visiting your area. He seems simple-minded enough that even if he turns out to be an ax murderer, he is probably not very good at it. Through his okropny po Polsku you eventually conclude that he is trying to discover if you may be a family relative. He somehow relates to you that his grandfather came to America around 1915. This means that the nearest common relative will probably be your great grandparents. He does know the names going back even a generation or two before them so it is possible to compare notes.

1) Do you know the names of your great grandparents so you can compare notes? How about pra pra dziadek i babcia? Is your family genealogy something you even care about?

2) Do you even know that you might have relatives in America? In other words, is there any "family lore" or even some records like old letters that relate how great uncle Stanley went to America?

3) Or do you simply sic the dog on him and take a video of the dog chasing him to put on YouTube?

@Paulwiz

WTF?????

Ok. Pretty weird. Maybe very weird. Aiming for humor but missed. The fat old American is me. But if you ignore the story and look at the questions you'll see what I'd like to know. My last name is very common in Poland. So if I visit the area where I expect to find family, in general, can I expect people to know about their family tree back 3 or 4 generations? (I suspect most people in US would know very little about great grandparents.) And in general should I expect a Polish family to know that they may even have a distant relative in the US if the relative that emigrated left Poland in the early 1900's? Or is this whole topic not even interesting to them and will quickly bore them?

If it is too weird then just ignore it and it will go away. Sorry.

Depends on the people, some will know a lot, some will know some, some will know very little.

Not weird at all, a humorous treatment of a question which is oft asked in various forms. The best person to answer your genealogy related questions on this forum is Kaprys. She is Polish and is interested in the subject, seems well informed about it. To answer your queries, based on my own observations of Polish people:

1) Many people won't know the names of great grandparents, certainly they won't know all four sets of them. Think about it. In England where records have been kept for hundreds of years and the information is available if you seek it, surprisingly few people know the names of their great grandparents. Now consider Poland and its history, inadequate written records, partitions, wars etc. However as Ironside says, it varies, you may be lucky.

As to whether people care about their family history in Poland, it's probably much less important to them than it is to a Polish-American. I think it's a growing area of interest among younger people though.

2) People might know that they had a relative who emigrated but they won't actively think about the fact that they have distant cousins in the States.

Some people won't like what I have to say now, but it's something I've observed. I've known a few people who've traced their Polish relations and found that the relations were friendly enough at first but that very soon they began asking for money. I knew an Irish man around your age, whose grandfather was Polish. He traced his Polish family and they were friendly and welcoming but his daughter said that after a while, he was receiving regular requests for money from various distant cousins. Mind you this was about fifteen years ago and perhaps with the new prosperity that will have changed.

On the whole, Polish people are not big on sentiment. They are practical, down to earth people and survival is their number one consideration. Their touchy feely, lovey dovey side is reserved for young children and dogs.

Before I got interested in geneaology I knew names of only my great granparents (except for one great grandmother as my father didn't remember it. He was born when she was in her seventies and lived miles away from where his parents originally came from. Later it turned out both of his grandmas were Zofia).

I doubt my brother or cousins even know that.
Distance and the age gap make a lot of difference. In the past people would have children for 20-25 years after the marriage. One of my great great grandfathers was born over 200 years ago. My great grandfather was born when his mother was 47 and his father was in his 60s.

My great grandparents came from three different regions of Poland. And actually from different towns and villages in each of these regions.
People moved more than we imagine. Some moved abroad and overseas after all.
Some stayed.
There might be some distant relatives in the places your ancestors were born in but it's hard to say whether they're interested in geneaology and know all their ancestors' children and cousins.

I personally just looked up my my direct ancestors. I don't even remember all of my granparents' siblings.

Thanks Milo and Ironside. And special thanks to Atch and kaprys. Yet again you answered my questions oerfectl

(Somehow posted before I meant to.)
A wall can spring up when people move to a new country. My grandparents spoke Polish in their home. So my Dad's generation learned to speak Polish as well. When it came time to go to school they were taught to speak, read and write English. But they could not read and write Polish. So even if one of my Dad's siblings wanted to write to the family in Poland it was not easy. And the wall is even more effective for the next generation (me) and does a good job of keeping the family separated.

Except ...
My aunt (Dad's sister) was a nun. She worked in a hospital and developed an amazing skill with languages. Polish was one of several languages she taught herself. She made contact with the family in Poland. I have a couple of the letters and I think there may be more records in a box that my cousin found. We believe she may have visited Poland as well but we're not sure.

In short, I have found a way around the wall. I am trying to figure out what to do now that I can see to the other side. Do I look for family or do I just visit and take pictures of churches and graveyards? Or both? If the typical Polish person, who has lived in the same area for many generations, has a good grasp of their family genealogy then it would be nice to (try to) communicate with them. But I don't want to impose on them either. Much to consider.

Thanks again Atch and kaprys. Remarkable that you could discern what I needed in light of the lousy way I asked the question.

And cats.

I'm not Polish but to be honest most Europeans barely think about America at all in their daily life. Outside of movies, POTUS latest updates, we barely give any thought on the US and half of the most popular English speaking artists here are actually British or Canadian (1D, Bieber for ex. a few years ago). So I think most Poles don't speak a lot about distant relatives in the US. Somehow Americans are more eager to keep the connection alive.

Thanks for the input Jack. I can't explain why Americans seem to be interested in genealogy (even though I'm one of them). But I have observed that the hobby seems to be most popular among older Americans. The young people who show an interest mainly want to use the DNA tests but usually don't want to pore through ancient census records. I looked at the web pages for some Polish genealogy clubs. Sometimes they show pictures of the members and they look to be a bit younger. But these are obviously generalizations and might be inccurate.

It is unfortunate that TV and movies are seen as significant. I don't watch TV. I shudder to think that an extraterrestrial alien civilization may be forming an opinion about earth based on TV signals that have escaped into space.

I would be too if I were American. Trying to find out my real roots which could originate anywhere in the world sounds like fun. With homogenous societies like the Polish it is different. A Pole knows he or she is Polish and that`s enough.

So many amateur genealogists here have hidden agendas. They won't admit it, but they are looking for "royal ancestors". And there is the eternal search for "family crests". There are scoundrels here who will sell you your family crest. And, big surprise, the crest usually has something on it to commemorate the "service to the king". Kind of weird IMO. I don't even know what a family crest is. I bet my great grandfather didn't either. And the highest status he probably reached was when the mud built up on his shoes. And I still feel blessed to learn about him.

@Paulwiz

I don't think that is true.
Search the Polish elite sites.
I think people may be looking for successful,influential, artistic or whatever ancestors.
But coats of arms?
Nah, not many.....

Yeah, I was probably too judgemental. Anyone even remotely serious about genealogy probably has more objective motives.

What is a Polish elite site? I need to see if there is any nobility in my ancestry and the name implies maybe I could do it there.

But seriously, what is a Polish elite site? Never heard that term.

A name doesn't tell much. If you're of the nobility it should be in the records.

There used to be so some time ago. Now it has become totally different.

Back in the 1970s, I think people were still genuinely proud if their ancestors were coming of gentry people, but these days such a feeling has vanished almost completely. This is because people have realised the nation today is a true mixture of different social classes. There have been a lot of articles in the press on it recently and one cover headline in the "Polityka" weekly of August 2018 summed it up very nicely by asking: "Ile chłopa, ile Pana w Polaku?" (How much of a peasant and how much of a gentleman in a Pole?].

All hereditary titles in Poland had been swept away by the Constitution of 1921. Then the nobilty had been deprived of their land and possesions by the communist regime which came to Poland in 1945. The final result is that Polish nobility has pratically vanished from the earth. In the 1990s there had been a little revival of this subject when it became popular on TV for a short span of time, so we could see impoverished aristocrats coming out of the closet and showing themselves as creatures living like ordinary people in blocks of flats in Warsaw or elewhere and telling us about their harsh life in the times of the People's Republic: "my father asked my mother regularly why I couldn't speak French yet". Absolutely hilarious, so to speak!

The "search for crests" has evolved these days into the "search for roots" as people in Poland are genuinely interested in their family's past irrespectively of who they were and what they did for a living. Times have changed.

Palwiz, Humor not lost on me I thought it was funny!! Lol

I think what is extremely important for Americans is to first totally exhaust all available American records sources. Immigration records usually pin-down the exact village where their ancestor came from, but not always, and you must be positive you have the correct person and record of immigration!!! Too many ppl no matter the foreign country they are delving into do not have enough information to make that quantum leap into say, Polish Church records. All available records must be examined and thoroughly used to make sure they are going to be looking in the correct place, in the foreign country. Poland, Germany, whatever. It's not enough to start looking in Warsaw or Stuttgart lol.

Just to re-inforce my point, I and many others in America have German ancestors who came here in the 1700's. For very many of them (most) we and previous generations of researchers were never able to "cross the seas" and find anything in Europe. The ship / immigration records in those days were very poor if you can even locate them. Likewise, American records in the 1700's and much of the 1800's were not good either. Much depends on the State. The New England records are excellent and many times one can trace back to the early 1600's. Sometimes to The Mayflower. But then to trace into "Merry Old England" is usually not possible. The English port records of ships are lost or whatever except for a few years. Even then there usually is not enough to go on. Computers / the internet has CONFOUNDED many ppl's pedigrees also. A case of technology causing much trouble because if you do not understand proper research methods, all this data will not help you. One point I want to make is, POLISH RECORDS ARE QUITE GOOD-very good! And I believe with all this digitizing and making available online etc., Poland is the best country in the world regarding genealogy!! In my great grandfather's village church I read a while back how the parish priest hid a book of church records in the ceiling when the Nazis came through. I believe this man lost his life too, but he preserved those records. They turned up only in the last ten years or so during renovations. These were of course the missing records many of us myself included, needed for our family research

I think we are already seeing it, and it will only increase...Polish citizens will naturally want to find out about their family histories. Remember, during the whole Communist period, anything like this was discouraged. Not allowed. Yet the records (not all no country is perfect) survive. Same in Russia. The Soviet Union absolutely did not allow such things, but they did archive-away records. Today, some Polish genealogy issues can be researched in these Russian records. They kept Nobility (Szlachta ) records for example, from Polish families, in Russia (for the Russian controlled partition)