stevejarz
20 Oct 2017
Language / Busha and JaJa [140]
I find this thread very interesting as I was always under the impression these terms were "real Polish". I'm a 3rd generation American of extremely varied ancestry. My paternal grandfather's family came from farms not far west of Gdansk. My paternal grandmother's father was from Lithuania, and her mother was from somewhere around the Poland/Lithuanian border.
Family lore has it that great-grandfather had an obviously Lithuanian name and was told on the boat coming over that he should change it to sound Polish, because Americans thought Poles to be harder workers than Lithuanians. He did so by ending it in -ski instead of -kus, but a big problem with that was he could barely speak Polish. Great-grandmother's maiden name was Romanovsky, and said that their farm may have straddled the border, because some years the Lithuanian tax collector came, but in others, the Polish tax collector showed up. She spoke Polish but not Lithuanian, and met my great-grandfather in Pittsburgh before coming to Calumet City, Illinois about 1900 when Cal City was almost entirely Polish immigrants.
That being said...in our family, they were Buscia and Dziadzia, and never anything but that. That's what my father, born in 1929, was told to call them for his entire life, and as far as I know, all of my friends of Polish ancestry here referred to either their grandparents or great-grandparents as Buscia and Dziadzia. My grandmother was very anxious for the arrival of our son, her first great-grandchild, so she could be finally called Buscia too.
I find this thread very interesting as I was always under the impression these terms were "real Polish". I'm a 3rd generation American of extremely varied ancestry. My paternal grandfather's family came from farms not far west of Gdansk. My paternal grandmother's father was from Lithuania, and her mother was from somewhere around the Poland/Lithuanian border.
Family lore has it that great-grandfather had an obviously Lithuanian name and was told on the boat coming over that he should change it to sound Polish, because Americans thought Poles to be harder workers than Lithuanians. He did so by ending it in -ski instead of -kus, but a big problem with that was he could barely speak Polish. Great-grandmother's maiden name was Romanovsky, and said that their farm may have straddled the border, because some years the Lithuanian tax collector came, but in others, the Polish tax collector showed up. She spoke Polish but not Lithuanian, and met my great-grandfather in Pittsburgh before coming to Calumet City, Illinois about 1900 when Cal City was almost entirely Polish immigrants.
That being said...in our family, they were Buscia and Dziadzia, and never anything but that. That's what my father, born in 1929, was told to call them for his entire life, and as far as I know, all of my friends of Polish ancestry here referred to either their grandparents or great-grandparents as Buscia and Dziadzia. My grandmother was very anxious for the arrival of our son, her first great-grandchild, so she could be finally called Buscia too.