The Slawsky Page

A bit of the Slawsky family history

(What follows was written by my father, Richard E. Slawsky.)

Much of the Slawsky family history is hearsay. It is hard to separate fact from fiction, but I will try to tell the story.

A known fact is that Frank and Julia Slawsky emigrated from Poland in 1905, arriving at Ellis Island with their son Joseph. What is uncertain is the name. In Poland, all surnames mean something but Slawsky does not. The closest translation would be "of a fine place" but that would not be used in Poland.

The hearsay is that the name was much longer and the immigration officials at Ellis Island took the first and last syllables to create a "simpler" name. Obviously, too, Frank, Julian and Joseph were not their actual names. To confirm that point, my father, the first Slawsky born in the U.S., was actually named Mieczyslaw but later became known as Edward.

Also, the original "contracted" name could have been Slawski. Again, the hearsay is that the family originally settled on the lower East Side of New York City on Rutgers Avenue. It was predominantly a Jewish neighborhood and Jewish immigrants, mainly from the Ukraine, spelled their names ending in "sky" not "ski." Following the story, the teachers at the school Joe and my father attended supposedly changed the spelling to "sky" because the great majority of kids there used that version. And my grandparents, new to the U.S. and its customs, assumed that was how things were done and accepted it.

They immigrated in 1905 as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution originating in Russia. The Russian objective then was to get rid of the intelligentsia and since Frank and Julia were both schoolteachers they had to go. They came from a small village in Poland called Trampolin. Supposedly it was in the southeast corner of the country outside Lvov but I have never been able to find it on any historical maps of Poland.

It was a small village. I've been told the houses were numbered in the order they were built. So you could live at 20 Main Street and your neighbor could live at 100 Main Street.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Trampolin is that Uncle Joe, while driving a truck as a bootlegger during Prohibition, met a young lady in Montreal who came from the same village. They married and I knew her as Aunt Helen.

Hearsay, again, says there were 11 children in the Slawsky family, two of whom died during the major flu epidemic of 1918. I only know of eight. They were, in order of age:

Joe, Edward, Frank, Nellie, Michael, John, Mary and Alfred.

All, sadly, are no longer with us. Joe married Helen and had two sons; Joe Jr. and Eddy (known within the family as Junior and Sonny). My father married Jeannette Marie Vernon and, of course, they had my late sister Marilyn and me. The four of us were the pre-WWII kids with me the youngest.

Frank and Ethel had Robert and Donald. Nellie married Tom Hanratty but had no children. Michael married Jessie and had Gary and Cheryl. John, sadly, was lost in WWII. Mary married Jack, who ran a bar in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Again, they had no kids. Finally, Allie married Grace and had three kids.

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