Week 37: Prosperity #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Jozef Ernst Ciupka, my husband Martin's great grandfather, was born in Gliwice, Poland, in 1855 and married his wife Joanna Kozlowska sometime in the early 1880s. Although we have names and dates for both sets of their parents, we do not know their parents' stories, so this blog will only deal with what we know about Jozef and Joanna.

The young couple settled in Joanna's birthplace, Nieszawa, north of Warsaw, and brought up nine children there, the youngest, Janina, being Martin's grandmother.

Ciupka family around 1904-1905

They were very successful in business and became one of Nieszawa's most prominent families. We do not know how and when they acquired their wealth, but we do know that earlier generations must have been important in their communities too, as there is a street named after the family in Gliwice. The Ciupka family and Martin's direct line go back at least eight generations in Gliwice, back into the 1600s.

Jozef and Joanna's businesses included grain mills, importing and exporting grain to Russia, the manufacture of agricultural carts, a brick factory, ownership of land and property, and breeding elite horses for wealthy Europeans, including the Russian Czars.

Ruins of the brick factory outside Haczow

Around 1908-1910, they moved from Nieszawa to just outside the village of Haczow in south-east Poland, where they reestablished several of the businesses. We do not have evidence, but there is a family story that they made this move to get away from the harsh German oppression in northern Poland. The businesses survived WW1 and seemed to have remained successful up to and after the deaths of both Jozef and Joanna in the early 1930s. However, all of their businesses and all their prosperity was destroyed by WW2 and the subsequent Communist rule which nationalized almost all private industry.

Although many were displaced from Poland, all their descendants seem to have had successful lives, although perhaps not as prosperous as Jozef and Joanna.

Jozef Ciupka and his wife Joanna Kozlowska, Martin's great grandparents.

Comments

Week 50: You wouldn't believe it! #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

I have already written about my 3 x great uncle, James McAra, who was sentenced to deportation at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1811. His crime had been to attack his brother, my 3 x great grandfather, Alexander, with an iron bar during an argument, with Alexander being badly hurt and dying a few days later. James was an iron worker by trade in Scotland and continued this trade in the small town of Sorell in Tasmania. We cannot know much about the life he led in Sorell, but he is mentioned in a variety of documents. For example we know he was given a Free Pardon by the Governor of Tasmania and New South Wales in 1836. He also acquired some land in 1839, which, in his Will, he left to daughters of a friend. We know his affection for 'drink', which had led to the fatal fight back in Scotland, never left him as 'excessive drinking' was given as cause of death on his death certificate. However his tombstone bears witness to the fact he was well-liked and a 'good and h

2024 Week 14: Favourite recipe #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

So, despite the heading, I'm not going to write about a favourite recipe that an ancestor has passed down to me, simply because there isn't one. What or rather whom I'm going to write about is my mum, Helen Anderson, who absolutely loved baking. And it is this love of baking that has been passed on to me. My mum. My mum was always baking. Like most children, I got allowed to 'lick the spoon' and taste the raw cake mixture. I got to learn to how to make crispie cakes. I watched how to make pancakes and enjoyed getting the first ones off the pan. I took in helpful baking hints like 'half fat to flour' for pastry or ' 4 4 4 plus 2' for the measurements of flour, sugar, butter and eggs needed for a sponge cake or little butterfly cakes. She had learned how to bake from her mother, as many women in her generation had done. There was always something 'in the tin' should a friend or neighbour pop in for a cup of tea. But she didn't just bake f

2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot

Roots, shoots and stories

Search This Blog