Indexing Pakość-wieś: WWI Deaths in One Rural Community
In my family tree, some of the hardest blanks to fill in have been death dates, particularly as the years get closer to the mid-twentieth century and online access to records ends. On some branches, I have large families with many children, but no hits for any later marriages or descendants of those children. What happened to them? Did they move far from home? Change their last names? Die at an early age? It's frustrating - without a death date, it leaves the possibility open that some distant DNA match might be a descendant of one of these families, so I’m always searching. Recently, I learned the fates of two of those children, Jan and Jósef Wiśniewski, through indexing death records for Pakość-wieś, a rural standesamt (urząd stanu cywilnego or USC) in Mogilno County in the German partition of Poland where many of my ancestors lived.
For this project, I chose to index all of the deaths in this standesamt from 1900 to 1919, the year easy online access ends. This date range covers the years when many of my immigrant ancestors' close relatives - parents, aunts and uncles, and siblings - would likely have died. It also happens to cover the entirety of World War I. In 1914-1918 Pakość-wieś included the villages (landgemeinden) of Radlowo, Schlabau, Schepanowo, Szczepankowo, and Wielowies/Wielitz, and the estates (gutsbezirke) of Georgenburg, Jankowo, L[o]uisenau, Leuten, and Moelno, as well as some other tiny outlying inhabited spots. From the information compiled online on two sites, Meyers Gazetter and Kartenmeister, I estimate the total population of the area around the time of World War I was about 3200 people.
I’ve indexed death records before, and the first thing you notice is the babies - so many babies and small children died before their first birthday or soon after. In the 10 years prior to WWI, this small community had 1724 births but lost 404 of these infants before they turned 2 - almost a quarter of all babies born. Some years were worse - much worse - than others. But those who survived to adulthood tended to live fairly long lives, and a few reached their 80s or even older before succumbing in their old age. That’s what makes the other deaths so heartbreaking. Between 1914 and 1918, this rural area lost 90 adult men in the prime of their lives. It was ‘only’ 3 percent of the total population, but it was closer to 15 percent of the adult men. Enough that every family would have been affected personally in some way by the loss of a son, a brother, a husband, or a father.
Of the 90 deaths of soldiers recorded in 1914-1918 in this one standesamt, most were single young men with an average age of 22 (60), but a third (30) were married and older, averaging 33 years old. My Wiśniewski distant cousins lost two sons - 21 year old Jan in December 1914, and younger brother Józef, only 18 years old, in June 1918. And of course, death records only show those whose wounds were fatal. Soldiers who returned home injured physically or mentally, but alive, are invisible in these records.
Jan, the eldest son of Kazimierz and Bronsisława (Kopczyńska) Wiśniewski of the village of Wielowieś, died early in the war on the Eastern front less than 100 miles (160km) from home, in or just after the Battle of Łódź. His death record says he died in Złaków Borowy, and mentions a field hospital in Lowicz, both locations just south of the Vistula/Wisła where heavy fighting took place. The enemy forces of Russia would have included ethnic Poles as well, including possible relatives, as the border between the German and Russian partitions was only about 35 miles south of Wielowieś and some family branches had migrated across that invisible line in the years prior to WWI.
The younger Wiśniewski brother, Józef, was 15 years old when the family received the news of Jan’s death. I am sure the Wisniewski’s prayed the war would end long before Józef was old enough to to be called up, but the fighting dragged on. In June 1918, Józef was killed on the Western front in France, far away from home,during one of the last German offensives of the war, the Noyon-Montdidier Offensive. His death record notes he was last seen alive on June 9th, the day the offensive began, and that he was found dead in a ditch near Rollot, Somme, France. He was 18 ½ years old.
By late 1917, the United States of America had joined the war, and my great-great uncles Florian and Joseph Goscinski had enlisted. Both Goscinski sons, born and raised in Michigan, were the children of Polish immigrants from the same small towns where the Wiśniewski sons grew up. Their mother, my great great grandmother Antonina (Nowak) Goscinski, was born in Szczepanowo within this same standesamt. They could have faced their cousins across the battlefield, fighting on opposite sides of the Great War, without any way to recognize each other as cousins. War is cruel. Sadly, I have now filled in two more blanks in my family tree.
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