The Nowacki Line
General History
When I first delved into genealogy, I knew very little about the Nowacki line. My great grandmother was Felixa Nowacki and she married into my Ryckowski line. I have her on census records, but I haven't even located her passenger ship record. My main lead was with her obituary that mentioned a number of brothers and her sisters married names. This obituary did not even mention Felixa's sisters first names. After running into dead ends with Felixa's sisters, it took me a few years and researching this line again that I made a substantial breakthrough. In the obituary that was published, both last names of Felixa's sister's married names were misspelled. This is a valuable lesson to remember. Let's call it lesson number one.
Lesson number two I learned when I wanted to locate family records in Europe. Felixa's death certificate listed Posen, Poland as her birth place. For a genealogist, one should realize that this is still vague. Poznan, Poland is a city, but also a governing province for Poland. Felixa's church marriage records in Chicago gave a smaller village name in Poland, but it looked badly misspelled. This situation often happens when the person speaking has a heavy foreign accent. Then spelling is written down with an American phonetic spelling and deciphering the proper native spelling is difficult. If you run into this situation, do what I did. Track down documents of the siblings that also would have this same village name. After I had three similar documents with variations of the same village names, two of them nearly matched. Felixa's record, due to very poor handwriting, was misread. I figured out the village.
Lesson number three I learned while trying to locate one of Felixa's sisters, Valentina. After hitting on the correct married surname and finding census records in Milwaukee, I searched briefly for her Wisconsin marriage record. This was a dead end. The it hit me! The family apparently started in Chicago, then certain parts moved to Milwaukee and Kenosha. Going back to the same church parish in Chicago, I located Valentina's marriage record and even another brother's marriage record, who later moved to Kenosha, then Chicago again, and finally settling his family in Hammond, Indiana.
Summing up the Nowacki line general history, I researched the surname Nowacki and found out that 90% of that surname comes from the Poznan area in Poland. My Nowacki lineage comes from the village of Swarzedz, located six miles east of Poznan. This village is unique in that it was mainly made up of skilled craftsmen and not of the normal noble families and peasants.
Current Research Projects
Nowacki research has been completed in Swarzedz parish. See my Polish Roots section on this website. According to parish records, my Nowacki line moved to a town west of Poznan sometime around 1869-1870. That may be a little difficult to complete, as there are many possible towns involved.(07-1-07)
