My Ancestors

One thing I use this blog for is to document some of our family history for my children and grandchildren, if I should pass without telling them these things. I recently posted this on Facebook to a fellow Pollack's page regarding why so many Many Polish immigrants went to Chicago. SInce I grew up in Detroit of 100% Polish stock, I wrote this:

My ancestors moved to Detroit, which also had a large Polish community, e.g., Hamtramck. When my father, born in Detroit in 1913, started school at age five, he was bilingual, neither of which was English (Polish and Ukrainian). They put him in second grade where the teacher spoke Polish. He ended up graduating from high school at fifteen, lettering in swimming. My mother was also Polish, born in Standish, MI, before her family moved to Detroit. Polish was spoken in my home when my parents didn't want their children to know what they were saying, lol. I grew up in the Polish National Catholic Church, created to say the catholic mass in Polish, and centered in Scranton, Pennsylvania. My mother was a great soprano, who sang in the church in Polish, both PNCC and mainline Catholic in Boyne Falls, MI, which yearly has a Polish Festival the first weekend of August.