Repinski Family Tree History
Repinski-Dulak/Dulek Line
My Kashubian Ancestors
My First Polish Settlers of North America
"A Long Line of Kashubian Immigrant Ancestors"
About a month ago I received a message from my cousin Shelby Repinski Ellison who just happened to be traveling abroad for work and she messaged me from Poland...the "Mother Land" of my dad's family.
To say I was a little jealous of her at this moment is just a bit of an understatement....
She asked if I knew of any of the areas where some of our family ancestors may have come from.
I have quite the list and I am sure that after sending numerous 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and more Great Grandparents and the places that they came from in Poland....she was probably saying "Oh why did I ask??" (inject big grin).
Some day I hope to make it to Poland and visit all of the places I have discovered in my research. I haven't talked to her since her return but I do hope that she got the opportunity to explore a bit.
As I was going through some of the family tree branches on my Repinski/Dulek side to find these towns for her, I decided to do a little more in depth research into one of the areas that quite a few of my ancestors came from.
I already knew from previous research that most of my dad's ancestry from his mother's Osowski side of the family and her mother's Kiedrowski side of the family all came from an area of Northwest Poland called "Kashubian Pomerania".
A distant cousin, Arthur Newkirk, who lives in North Carolina has helped me with this line by finding and adding some of my ancestors to my family tree on Geni.com which is where I have a tree connected to the "World Tree". The more ones line is filled in on the World Tree, the better one is able to connect to other relations through out the world and throughout history.
The more I dug into my family lines, the more I realised just how intimately KASHUBIA and POMERANIA are connected to my dad's family lines from both his father, Clarence Repinski and his mother Evelyn Dulek Repinski starting in the late 1800s and establishing the bedrock of our family as we know it today.
As one write up in an article on the first settlers says very well:
The hopes and dreams of these immigrants began to be realized as they moved into the 1880’s.
Their simple log homes became part of larger and more comfortable white frame houses. Their children moved to their own farms or to the city for work or to set up a business.
Seven more Polish Catholic parishes were organized.
Even though the "chain migration” from the Kaszuby region had begun to subside by the mid-1880’s, immigrants from the Austrian and Russian partitions of Poland began to find their way to Portage County - usually after a short stay in Chicago or Milwaukee while deciding where to locate.
Perhaps they were drawn to this area by the large, successful Polish community with its Polish Catholic Churches which had its beginning almost 150 years ago.
Some of those immigrants to North America and in particular the ones that settled in Portage County Wisconsin that are my ancestors have the following surnames: Repinski, Dulek, Osowski, Riemer, Kowalski, Cyzewski, Kosobucki, Mrocki, Zblewski, Kiedrowski, Kynter, Polzcynski, Janta, Wosocki,
Come learn about Kashubia and Pomerania and those Kashubian Poles who emigrated away from their homeland to make new lives for themselves...a very large part of the ancestry of my Repinski/ Dulek family history...
