Andrew Jendrzejewski Michal

The Free Peasant

Born 12 years before the January Insurrection of 1863, Jakob witnessed as a young man the sweeping changes that took place in his homeland. At his birth, his father Piotr was listed as a gospodarz rolnik, a farmer, who like in the previous generations, lived a feudal existance by farming his little subsistence lot on some noble’s farm in Nowa Wies. Still a young boy, he saw his father change from a feudal serf to an emancipated peasant, free to feel the economic hurt of his poverty and a newly experienced state of social and national consciousness with great mistrust of Russian oppression and tension for countrymen who called for liberty and others who simply wished to stay the course of their familiar past.

Jakob worked harder than ever to make ends meet. Russian domination dangled false opportunity after false opportunity in its overtures to the peasant. The Tsar even forbode the use of the Polish language on vital records or in schools or anything official. Bishops could not preside over their dioceses. All this did not seem to matter to the peasant. Like his father, Jakob was used to living as part of the land, regardless of whomever ruled.

Marriages and children

Jakob was already 37 when he married Maryanna Pawlek. Before that age, he no doubt had been hard at work farming with no means to think about marriage. Maryanna apparently died soon afterwards, age 30, apparently bearing one child, Wincenty. In 1887, Jakob married Rozalia Glusniewska, daughter of Jan Glusniewski and Malgorzata Plaskiewicz. The only known children of Jakob and Rosalia are Konstancia (born 1887 and Walenty (1893 - 1964) (my direct line). Jakob died sometime between 1893 the most recent record available so far from the LDS and 1914, which only states Rosalia as a living parent surviving.

A family legend states that Jakob sent Walenty to Pittsburgh to help him avoid the Russian draft as tensions built before WWI. If that legend is true, then it is possible that Jakub died or was killed just before or at the beginning of WWI. He would have been about forty. Walenty's 1913 ship manifest mentioned that his father paid for his ticket. This still needs to be confirmed.

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How to contact me:

Andrew Jendrzejewski
Ajend2@me.com