If You Know the Story Behind This Picture, You Know It. If You Don’t…

 

I saw this picture of a Pennsylvanian relative on Ancestry. One reason that I saved it was to colorize it, etc. Another reason, and a more-compelling reason: no immigration of this man to Pennsylvania, no Pennsylvania staples as you might know them. If you’ve ever heard of a brand called “Bobby T’s” and another one called “Chokola Beverage Company”, you’re now putting a face to their names. Why? The man known as “Felix Czarniecki” took incredible risks immigrating from Russia-occupied Poland (and if you know even an inkling of the real story—which I did not until I began doing serious digging into my family history—you will appreciate why he took those risks. His brother Julian was my paternal grandfather’s paternal grandfather, and Julian would join Felix in 1904—with Julian’s son Tony joining him in 1908). 

Felix’s daughter Lillie (originally Nellie**) would go on to marry John Trudnak—and he sadly did not get to walk her down the aisle, as he passed away in 1928 (just under six years after Julian, his younger brother, passed away in a coal-mining accident). He did, as far as I know, get to walk his daughter Katherine down the aisle—and she became the bride of the widower Simon Chokola (and Simon had three more children by her—and how they kept it together when one of those children died in infancy, I will never know). 

The apparent story by itself would be perhaps compelling—if you even knew that Felix existed and immigrated to Pennsylvania (which I originally did not— and I certainly had no idea that Tony in fact came over here when he was a child to join his father and his uncle, whom were already over here). If you knew even an inkling of the actual story, you would be amazed at the truly-all-American account of a man whose descendants include the original “Bobby T” and many of the Chokolas today. By the way, I’ve never seen a picture of his brother and his in-law sister whom are my ancestors—let alone pictures of  Felix’s and Julian‘s parents. The estrangement (one of the risks) got so bad, that we would throw away pictures that a family friend brought back once we were done passing them around (My granduncle Tony, of blessed memory, told me this.). Felix also named two of his daughters “Katherine“—Katherine and Jennifer Catherine (later Joan)—for his mother, as if she were already dead (We are mixed Ashkenazi and Sefardi Jewish on that side, although he used Ashkenazi naming custom in those instances— and as I said, the estrangement got bad. For starters, his mother was forcibly baptized when she herself was five years old — and she did not appreciate that her sons chose to generally hide their Jewish heritage.)

(**Her mother, Josephine “Veronica” Czarnecki née Supronowicz, apparently had Jewish heritage from the Jewish Diaspora in Ukraine, and used “Nellie“ for Nechama. Lillie’s in-law sister Mary Trudnak subsequently was my paternal grandfather’s mother, by the way. Unfortunately, Felix never got to see Mary become his in-law niece, either, as Mary and Tony married in 1934.).