Ah, the last day.  We’ve made it!  Congrats to all!

I may have been stuck on Y, but I’ve known from the very beginning what I wanted to do for Z.

Zarecze.

Because Zarecze is a mystery, and I’m hoping someone will be able to offer some clues.

Here’s what I know:

My grandfather, Josef Urynowicz, traveled to America on the Pretoria, which sailed from Hamburg, Germany and docked at New York Harbor on November 15, 1907.

Here’s his line from the ship’s manifest (the text version, since the handwritten original is almost unreadable):

0005. Urynowicz, Josef M 24y S Russia, Polish Zarecze, Russia

 

Reading from left to right, it tells us he’s #5 on the manifest list; it gives us his name and tells us he was male, he was 24 years old, he was single, he was from Russia but ethnically Polish, and he was born in Zarecze, Russia.

Problem #1:  Russia’s on there twice.  According to the manifest, he was from the Russian partition.

I have no problem with that except that it’s in direct conflict with what my mom and other family members have told me, which is that Grampa was from Krakow.  The problem is that Krakow wasn’t in the Russian partition—it’s in the southern part of the country, which was the Austrian partition.

Problem #2:  There’s no town called Zarecze anywhere in the Russian partition.  Nor is there one anywhere near Krakow.  It appears, in fact, that there’s no town called Zarecze anywhere at all.

However,  Google is happy to provide me with an alternative spelling.  It’s not Zarecze, according to Google.  It’s Zarzecze, with an extra Z (perfect for today, right?).  And as it turns out, there are lots of Zarzeczes, including one near Krakow and one near Vilnius (a major city in what was the Russian partition, now the capital of Lithuania).

So now I’m stuck.  What I’ve just given you is the sum total of all the information I have about my grandfather, so when it comes to tracking down my great-grandparents or any other relatives (none of whose names I know), I’m pretty much looking at a brick wall.  Was he from a town that no longer exists, or was it just spelled wrong?   And if it was actually Zarzecze, then which one?

And there’s nobody left to ask.  My mom, who passed away in 2010, was the last of her siblings.

Incidentally, my mom always told me my grandmother was from Krakow, too, but Grandma’s ship’s manifest says she also was from the Russian partition, specifically from Kaunas (Kowno), which is also in present-day Lithuania.  I don’t know any of her parents’ or siblings or other relatives’ names, either.

Any ideas?