The Łukaszewicz family

This is the family of Romuald's father, the paternal line from which the surname comes. The documents allow it to be traced through seven generations, from Andrzej and Łucja of the village of Śnieciemięta, who lived in the 18th century, to Antoni, who brought the family to Poland in 1958. For almost two hundred years they were peasants of the Vilnius region, first serfs of the Stracza estate, then farmers in the zaścianeki of Żukiszki and the village of Ockowicze.

The chapter tells the family's story from the youngest to the oldest. It first describes Antoni, Romuald's father, then Antoni's father Jan, then his grandfather Stefan and great-grandfather Jakub. After that it goes back further still, to times from which no registers have survived.

Antoni Łukaszewicz (1925-1962)

Antoni was born on 1 August 1925 in Ockowicze. It is a village near the small town of Komaje, in the former Święciany district, today on the Belarusian side of the border. He was the fourth of Jan and Zofia's five children. He was baptised in the church at Komaje, because Ockowicze belonged to that parish. He was about three years old when his father left for lands across the ocean and never came back. He was brought up by his mother, who was left alone with five children on a small farm.

This single document confirms three generations at once: Antoni, his father Jan and both his grandfathers, Stefan Łukaszewicz and Antoni Gaul. The family grave in Iława bears a different date of birth for Antoni, 25 August 1925. The true date, 1 August, is given in the birth record.

Deportation and return

We know about Antoni's youth from the account of his daughter Iwsudi, who heard it from her mother Alina and her grandmother Zofia. At the end of the war, in 1944-1945, when Soviet rule returned to the Vilnius region, Antoni was about nineteen and liable to be called up into the Soviet army. He did not want to go and hid in the forests. Once he came home to sleep in a bed for a single night. Someone informed on him. Two armed men from the local Soviet auxiliary militia, known as "striebki", came into the cottage. Antoni hid under the bed. They asked his mother where her son was. When they began to reload their rifles, his nerve broke and he came out. They beat him with flails in the barn and took him away.

The family said he was deported to Siberia. He was away from home for about a year. He walked back from exile. On the way he was found barely alive in a gateway and taken to hospital. When he finally reached home his mother did not recognise him, he was so emaciated. Zofia saved her son by feeding him in very small portions. Many boys who came back in such a state at that time died because they threw themselves on food straight away.

From exile Antoni brought back a song, which he sang for the rest of his life. He played no instrument, but he had a beautiful voice. His daughter Iwsudi remembered the words and sang them in August 2026. W adu kdyte wwn ssdti er rtmdpo urwwrk.

• There where the Polish soil is stained with blood, there is my homeland and my very own home. There where my thoughts fly off far into the wide world, there is my homeland of my young years.
• Every day I see you in the golden morning mist, as you stood before the cottage and bade me farewell. Your rosy lips were tenderly smiling.
• My heart weeps with pain and yearns for you. And I must live here and love you from afar.
• So let us not lose heart, let us not bow our heads. The storm will pass and Poland will return again.

Marriage and children

On 7 February 1949 Antoni married eighteen-year-old Alina Markowicz from the zaścianek of Obkorty near Podbrodzie. The marriage was registered at the office in Podbrodzie. The young couple settled in Kocielniki, a village in the parish of Sorokpol, whose church stands in Powiewiórka. Rlewos, Sukwrkptw mwt Mkdtomu were born there. Between the middle of 1954 and the end of 1955 the family moved to Guże, a village on the river Mera two and a half kilometres from Kocielniki, right beside a military training ground. Romuald ykk Sdrikut were born in Guże. All the children were baptised in the church at Powiewiórka.

The children's baptism certificates and Antoni and Alina's wedding portrait are in the chapter on the Markowicz family.

The road to Poland

In 1955-1959 Poles from the Vilnius region could leave for Poland for the last time. According to family tradition, what made the family decide to go was a fire at the new house of Alina's parents in Obkorty. Alina dealt with all the documents. Antoni did not want to go round the Soviet offices and told his wife only this: “when you've sorted the papers, we'll go”. His daughter Iwsudi supposes that after what he had been through in his youth he was simply afraid of officialdom.

Alina's parents, Dominik and Leokadia, left first, in October 1958. Antoni, Alina and the five children set off soon after them, in November. The youngest, Ruzednk, aae rln droi rwl and Romuald not quite three. They went first to the reception centre for repatriatesi in Zielona Góra. From there Antoni travelled round the country with his brother Stefan, looking for work and a home. He found a post as forest ranger under the forester Kosiński of Chmielówka and a renovated former German house in the settlement of Sąpy near Iława. The family got off the train at Samborowo and their belongings were taken to Sąpy by lorry. Antoni brought with him a Junak motorcycle with a sidecar.

2 December 1962

On Sunday 2 December 1962, around midday, Antoni left home on his bicycle. Alina later wrote in her application to the court that he was going about his duties as a forest ranger in the Chmielówka forest district. His daughter Iwsudi remembers that he was to arrange with carters in Wielowieś to bring in wood for the winter. He did not come home. A few days later a carter brought back his bicycle, which had been found on the road by the cemetery in Wielowieś, in what was then the Morąg district. Fresh snow had fallen, then came a thaw and the tracks disappeared. Ketskp, srs pis zymson tw eda oase, remembers a militiaman brushing the matter aside with the words: “he drank, he drinks, he'll turn up”.

The inquiry was conducted by the District Prosecutor's Office in Morąg under number DS 848/62. Alina wrote in her application that the circumstances pointed to murder. The inquiry was discontinued. Antoni's body was never found. The family ruled out suicide. Antoni was thirty-seven years old.

For Alina this meant not only grief but also poverty. With no body there was no death record. Without a death record Alina was not entitled to a widow's pension. She was left alone with five children. Only on 1 March 1973, more than ten years after he disappeared, did she apply to the court to have her husband declared dead. As witnesses she named Stanisław Kuczyński and Aleksander Cieplicki of Urowo and Wacław Antkowiak of Sąpy. The District Court in Iława issued its decision on 23 August 1973. On that basis the civil registry office in Iława drew up death record number 18 of 1973.

In this copy the official entered “Oskowice” as the place of birth. It is a misspelling of the name Ockowicze.

Antoni has no grave of his own. His name is carved on the family grave in Iława, where Alina and her parents are buried.

Alina née Markowicz (1930-2014)

Antoni's wife was born on 4 March 1930 in Obkorty, the daughter of Dominik Markowicz and Leokadia née Cybulski. She died on 12 January 2014 in Samborowo. Her life, her parents and her more distant ancestors are described in the chapter on the Markowicz family.

Jan Łukaszewicz (b. 1893)

Jan was the youngest of the seven children of Stefan and Rozalia recorded in the registers. He was born in Żukiszki, a small zaścianek in the parish of Sorokpol, where his father and all his brothers and sisters were also born. He was baptised two weeks later in the church at Powiewiórka.

The godfather, Antoni Paszuk, bore the same surname as Jan's great-great-grandmother, Magdalena née Paszuk, of whom we write below.

The priest made the note about the marriage in 1919 in the margin of the old parish record. Thanks to it we know that Jan of Żukiszki is the same man who married Zofia Gaul. After the wedding the young couple settled in Ockowicze in the parish of Komaje, in Zofia's home area. There Antoni was born in 1925 and Stanisława in 1927.

Across the ocean

Around 1928 Jan left for South America to earn a living. At home there was great poverty: a small cottage and five children, the youngest of whom was one year old. Thousands of people from the Vilnius region were leaving at that time for Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, hoping to earn money and bring their families over or come back with savings.

Jan sent his wife money only once. After that nothing more was ever heard of him. No one in the family ever learned whether he died, was killed or started his life afresh. His granddaughter Iwsudi recalls that Uruguay or Paraguay was mentioned. The name Montevideo recurs in the family's notes. It is the capital of Uruguay. That single money transfer was most probably sent from there.

Zofia née Gaul (1894-1968)

Jan's wife was born on 1 September 1894 in the village of Kruki in the parish of Komaje, the daughter of Antoni Gaul and Urszula née Błaszkiewicz. After her husband left, she brought up their five children in Ockowicze on her own. After the war she found herself in Poland. She died on 15 October 1968 in Mirsk in Lower Silesia. Her life and her ancestors are described in the chapter on the Gaul family.

Jan's brothers and sisters

Stefan and Rozalia had seven children recorded in the registers of the parish of Sorokpol. All of them were born in Żukiszki. Two sons died in childhood of croupi, a choking inflammation of the larynx.

The eldest of the children, Stefan, was named after his father. His death record survives in the register of the parish of Sorokpol.

Zofia Kalesnick, the sister in America

Jan's elder sister Zofia was born on 28 April 1889. Her godparents were Konstanty Łukaszewicz and Miss Marianna Łukaszewicz, most probably the child's uncle and aunt, that is, her father's brother and sister. In Russia the registers were kept according to the old calendar, which was then twelve days behind. By the calendar we use today, Zofia was born on 10 May. This is the birthday she later gave in America.

On 17 June 1914, a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War, Zofia sailed from Hamburg to New York on the great steamship Imperator. She travelled in the cheapest class, third class. The passenger list recorded her as unmarried, a servant and a Russian subject, with her place of residence given as „Bockewicze”, that is Bucewicze, the village next to Ockowicze. She said she was twenty, although she was twenty-five.

She settled in Portland, Maine. There, on 23 October 1915, she married Michał Kalesnick, a twenty-six-year-old newcomer from the Polish lands under the Russian partition. The wedding was conducted by Father John Sciokalski in the Polish church. In the marriage record Zofia gave her parents' names: Stephen Lukaszewicz and Rosalia Witkiewicz. Thanks to this we know for certain that Sophie Kalesnick of Portland is our Zofia from Żukiszki.

The 1920 census noted that Zofia did not speak English and that her mother tongue was Polish. In 1940 the family lived at 58 Clark Street in Portland. Zofia kept house and belonged to the women's societies of St Louis's church. Michał died in 1952. Zofia died suddenly at home on 30 January 1959. She was buried on 2 February in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery in South Portland. The local newspaper wrote that she left two daughters, two sons and eighteen grandchildren. So descendants of Stefan and Rozalia still live in the United States today. They are distant cousins of Romuald.

The gravestone gives 1892 as Zofia's year of birth. The register of the parish of Sorokpol, in which her baptism was recorded, gives the year 1889, however.

Zofia's family kept the birth certificate of her son, issued on 17 September 1923 in Augusta, the capital of Maine. The boy was born on 25 June 1923 in Portland and was given the Polish name Władysław, which the clerk wrote down as Wadslav. The year of birth shows that this was the same son who was later called Archie. The clerk typed the mother's maiden name as „Tuk…senticz”. That is how the name Łukaszewicz looked to him: he took the letter Ł for a T.

Stefan Łukaszewicz (b. 1855)

Stefan was the third son of Jakub and Tekla. He was born in Żukiszki and spent nearly forty years in that same zaścianek. Żukiszki lies in the former district of Święciany, today on the border between Lithuania and Belarus.

In August 1880 Stefan was a witness at the wedding of his elder brother Kazimierz, who married Aniela Kulesza from the village of Ockowicze in the church at Komaje. This is the first trace of the family's link with Ockowicze, where a generation later Stefan's son Jan lived.

A year later, on 18 October 1881, Stefan married Rozalia Witkiewicz. The marriage record gives his age as 25, although according to his baptism record he was already 26. The record names the parents of both bride and groom, together with the mothers' maiden names. A single document thus links four families: the Łukaszewicz, Czepułkowski, Witkiewicz and Misiun families.

The witness Józef was most probably the groom's eldest brother. For the next twelve years Stefan and Rozalia farmed in Żukiszki, where their seven children were born. In the parish censusi of March 1909 Stefan and Rozalia are no longer in Żukiszki. So between 1893 and 1909 the family moved out of the parish. Their grandchildren were born in Ockowicze near Komaje.

Rozalia née Witkiewicz (b. 1857)

Stefan's wife was born on 10 July 1857 in the village of Zułów, beside the estate where Józef Piłsudski was born ten years later. She was the daughter of Kazimierz Witkiewicz and Anna née Misiun. Rozalia and her ancestors have their own chapter in this chronicle, on the Witkiewicz family.

Jakub Łukaszewicz (1816-1876)

Jakub was the younger son of Jan and Katarzyna. He was born in July 1816 and was baptised three days later by Father Kazimierz Godlewski.

Wincenty Czepułkowski had also been godfather to Jakub's elder brother. Thirty-two years later he became Jakub's father-in-law, as told in the chapter on the Czepułkowski family.

As a child Jakub moved with his parents from one settlement to another. The revision list of August 1834 recorded him, aged seventeen, in the zaścianek of Żukiszki. Jakub lived in Żukiszki for the rest of his life. In the parish census of 20 March 1843 he is twenty-seven years old and lives in one house with his parents and with the family of his elder brother Franciszek.

On 21 November 1848 Jakub married Tekla Czepułkowska from the zaścianek of Zabieliszki. The wedding took place in the church at Kiemieliszki, in the bride's parish.

The priest wrote down the groom's age as 28, although according to his baptism record Jakub was already 32. At that time ages in marriage records were given by guesswork. The witnesses Kazimierz Witkiewicz and Adam Czepułkowski bore the names of Tekla's brother-in-law and brother. The father of Rozalia, Stefan's future wife, was also called Kazimierz Witkiewicz, but he was a different man.

The revision list of October 1850 shows the young couple in Żukiszki. It recorded Jakub, his wife Tekla and their one-year-old son Józef. Beside Tekla's name it was noted that she was the daughter of Wincenty. Under the same roof lived Jakub's brother Franciszek with his wife Marcjanna and their children. All of Jakub and Tekla's children grew up in Żukiszki.

The revision list gives 1842 as the year of Jan's death, although the parish priest still recorded him among the living in March 1843. Jan therefore died after March 1843 and before October 1850.

The eldest son, Józef, married on 12 September 1876 in the church at Sorokpol. The witness was Franciszek Łukaszewicz.

Jakub died of a fever on 1 November 1876 in Żukiszki, not quite two months after his eldest son's wedding. He left his wife Tekla, six sons and two daughters. The youngest, Marianna, was then two years old and Stefan was twenty-one. Three days later Father Woliński buried Jakub in the parish cemetery.

The record says Jakub was 62. According to his baptism record he was 60, because priests wrote down the age of the dead only approximately.

Tekla née Czepułkowska (1830-1888)

Jakub's wife was born on 12 October 1830 in the zaścianek of Zabieliszki in the parish of Kiemieliszki, the daughter of Wincenty Czepułkowski and Marianna née Kaczanowska. She was widowed in 1876 and outlived her husband by twelve years. She died on 2 June 1888 in Żukiszki. Her death record, her life and her ancestors are shown in the chapter on the Czepułkowski family.

Jan Łukaszewicz (b. c. 1791) and Katarzyna née Wojciechowicz

Jan and Katarzyna lived at a time when a peasant belonged to the estate and could not leave it without the landowner's consent. Their lord was the owner of the Stracza estate, in 1834 Władysław Paszkiewicz. Stracza lies in the former parish of Świr, today in Belarus. The estate included more than twenty villages and zaścianki, among them Śnieciemięta, Żukojnie and Żukiszki near Sorokpol, a dozen or so kilometres from Żukojnie.

Every dozen or so years Russian officials listed all the serfs of every estate, house by house, with their father's name and their age. Thanks to these revision lists we can follow Jan's path. In 1795 he is a four-year-old boy in his father's house in Śnieciemięta. In 1811 he is twenty and still lives with his father. In August 1816 the revision list records him in his father's house already with a family of his own: Jan aged 25, his wife Katarzyna aged 23 and their two-year-old son Franciszek.

The sons of Jan and Katarzyna were born in the parish of Sorokpol. Józef Franciszek was born on 9 March 1814 and Jakub on 22 July 1816 in Żukiszki. Three years later the family was living in the village of Żukojnie, Katarzyna's home village. There, on 26 March 1819, a daughter, Barbara Teresa, was born. She was baptised on 30 March in the church at Świranki. Her godparents were Jakub Wojciechowicz and Miss Krystyna Wojciechowicz, who bore the mother's family name.

At that time priests used the word “labouring” to mean peasants.

The move to Żukiszki

Between 1819 and 1834 the family of Wawrzyniec Wojciechowicz, Jan's father-in-law, settled in the zaścianek of Żukiszki, which belonged to the same Stracza estate. Jan, Katarzyna and their sons lived there in one house with the Wojciechowicz family. In the neighbouring house in Żukiszki lived another family named Łukaszewicz: Jan, son of Marek, with his sons. The documents do not say whether they were related to ours. The revision list of 16 August 1834 shows both houses.

The revision list of 1834 is the most important document in the history of this family. In a single line it names Jan as the son of Kazimierz and the son-in-law of Wawrzyniec Wojciechowicz. Below him it lists his sons Franciszek and Jakub. On the facing page, kept for the women, is Katarzyna, Jan's wife, aged 41. Below her is Marcjanna, Franciszek's wife, aged 21. In the column for the previous list Jan is 25 and his son Franciszek is 2. Exactly the same ages were recorded for both of them in 1816 in the house of Kazimierz in the village of Śnieciemięta. Thanks to this match we know that Jan of Żukiszki is the son of Kazimierz of Śnieciemięta and that he came from there.

The parish census of 1843

On 20 March 1843 the parish priest of Sorokpol made a list of all his parishioners. In Żukiszki he recorded the house of Franciszek, where his parents and his brother Jakub also lived.

The parish priest gave Jan's age as 62 and Katarzyna's as 63. That is ten years more than the four official revision lists show, in which Jan's age rises steadily from 4 in 1795 to 43 in 1834. In those days older people were often given a guessed age that was too high.

The parish census of 1843 is the last document that names Jan and Katarzyna as living. The revision list of October 1850 already records Jan as dead. Katarzyna does not appear in it at all. By then the farm in Żukiszki was run by their sons, Franciszek and Jakub.

The Wojciechowicz family

Katarzyna, Jan's wife, came from the Wojciechowicz family of the village of Żukojnie. Żukojnie lies in the former parish of Świranki, today in the Astravets district of Belarus. The village belonged to the same Stracza estate as Śnieciemięta. The Wojciechowicz family, like the Łukaszewicz family, were peasants bound to labour service.

Szymon Wojciechowicz and Teresa

The revision list of 1795 recorded in Żukojnie the house of Szymon Wojciechowicz, son of Szymon. The head of the household was 60 years old and his wife Teresa was 50. With them lived their sons Wawrzyniec (25, already married), Michał (18) and Ignacy (13), as well as their daughters Teresa (16), Rozalia (10) and Marianna (5). There was also a three-year-old grandson, Jan, son of Wawrzyniec.

The next revision list, of 1811, tells what became of this family. Little Jan died in 1798. In the same year sixteen-year-old Ignacy ran away from the estate. Michał died in 1802. Old Szymon died on 13 January 1805. His wife Teresa died less than three months later, on 7 April. Wawrzyniec remained on the farm.

Wawrzyniec Wojciechowicz and Teresa née Krzesonik

Wawrzyniec was Katarzyna's father and Jan's father-in-law. He spent most of his life working the lord's land in Żukojnie. In 1816 the revision list recorded him there with his wife Teresa and his daughter Ewa, whose age it gave as ten. His elder daughter Katarzyna was already married by then and lived with her husband. Wawrzyniec died in 1828. The revision list of 1834 records his family already in Żukiszki, with his son-in-law Jan as head of the household.

The maiden name of Wawrzyniec's wife is given in the baptism entry of their younger daughter Ewa from September 1803.

The Krzesonik family

All we know about Teresa's family is what this single entry tells us: that her maiden name was Krzesonik. Wawrzyniec's wife is called Teresa in every record from 1795 to 1816, so we take it that Teresa née Krzesonik was the mother of both daughters, Katarzyna and Ewa.

Kazimierz Łukaszewicz (b. c. 1759) and Magdalena née Paszuk

Kazimierz was born in Śnieciemięta and spent the first half of his life there. It is a large village in the parish of Niestaniszki, four and a half kilometres from the church, now called Sięcinięta, in the Smarhon district of Belarus. In 1795 it had 23 houses. In as many as 12 of them lived families named Łukaszewicz. Before the estate passed to the Paszkiewicz family, the village belonged to Leokadia Mikoszyna, wife of the Lithuanian wojskii, who in 1780 had her own manor chapel at Stracza. Earlier still, in February 1763, Stracza was owned by Szymon Jacynicz. Leon Jacynicz held the estate from him on leasei. We know of both men from a statement of claimi in which the neighbouring manor of Dubrowlany accused the leaseholder of imprisoning and severely beating one of its serfs.

The revision list of 1795 recorded the house of Kazimierz as number 23. The head of the household, son of Andrzej, was 36. His wife Magdalena was 30. At that time they had three sons: Wawrzyniec (14), Jan (4) and Stanisław (2). Kazimierz's mother, the eighty-year-old Łucja, lived with them.

We know Magdalena's maiden name from the baptism record of her daughter Helena from April 1798.

Magdalena came from the Paszuk family, peasants of the neighbouring Dubrowlany estate. A separate part of this chapter, entitled “The Paszuk family”, tells of her family.

Around 1805 Kazimierz moved with his family from Śnieciemięta to Żukojnie, a village of the same estate where the Wojciechowicz family lived. The official revision lists of 1811 and 1816 still recorded his family in the village of Śnieciemięta, but in the registers of the parish of Świranki the family appears in Żukojnie.

The year 1812 was a terrible one for these parts. Napoleon's army marched through the Vilnius region that year. In that one year 182 people died in the parish of Niestaniszki, whereas in other years between 35 and 100 died. In Śnieciemięta alone eleven people named Łukaszewicz died.

Magdalena died after 1805. Kazimierz married a second time, to Ewa Łoś from the village of Łosie. The wedding took place on 10 August around 1813. The witnesses were Józef Łukaszewicz, Bartłomiej Tumkiewicz and Maciej Łukaszewicz. In August 1816 the revision list names everyone living in the house. They were Kazimierz, aged 57, his wife Ewa, aged 27, his son Jan with his wife Katarzyna and two-year-old Franciszek, his son Wincenty, aged 17, his daughter Anna, aged 13, as well as three grandchildren: Marianna, Helena and Tomasz, son of the late Wawrzyniec. Beside his son Stanisław it was noted that in 1814 he had gone as a recruit, meaning that he had been taken into the army. Service in the Tsar's army then lasted twenty-five years and few came back from it.

By 1834 Kazimierz's family was living apart, in three settlements of the Stracza estate. Jan lived in Żukiszki, his grandson Tomasz in Śnieciemięta. The seventy-five-year-old Kazimierz lived in Żukojnie, together with his son-in-law.

The revision list of 1850 states that Kazimierz died in 1837. He thus lived to nearly eighty. His widow Ewa went on living in Żukojnie with Franciszek Klukowski and his wife Maria, Kazimierz's daughter.

The Paszuk family

Magdalena, Kazimierz's first wife and Jan's mother, came from the Paszuk family. The godfather of her daughter Helena in 1798 was Adam Paszuk, probably a close relative.

The Paszuk family were peasants of the neighbouring Dubrowlany estate, which bordered on Stracza. The oldest record of them dates from 27 August 1685. An inventory of the estate then lists, near the Dubrowlany manor, a farmer named Stefan Paszuk with three sons: Krzysiek, Hryszko and Mikuć. He paid the manor three kopa of groszy in rent each year.

Eighty years later the Paszuk family were living in several villages of this estate. In April 1766 an envoy of Prince Sanguszko, then the owner of Dubrowlany, wrote down the peasants' complaints against the leaseholder, who for three years had made them work more than he was allowed to demand. Five Paszuks appear in these complaints: Jakub in the village of Podzborze, Józef in Zawidzienięta, Kazimierz in Chocitki, Michał in one of the zaścianki and a farmer recorded only as “Pasuk by the manor”. Józef complained that he had had to carry a barrel of vodka to Poszumień for the leaseholder and then cart glass there as well, while the manor's cattle grazed his meadow, which would have given him two cartloads of hay. Jakub counted ten journeys with a cart beyond his duty. Michał counted eleven.

In 1777 Jakub Paszuk was already living in the village of Krzywonosy and Maciej Paszuk in the village of Łyłojcie. The Paszuk family still lived in these two villages of the parish of Niestaniszki when Magdalena was Kazimierz's wife. The estate inventories name only the heads of households, without wives or daughters, so the names of Magdalena's parents are not in them.

The revision list of 1795 recorded in Krzywonosy the family of Jakub Paszuk, son of Krzysztof. Jakub was then 60 and lived with his wife Marianna and their fourteen-year-old son Adam. It is possible that Jakub and Marianna were Magdalena's parents.

Andrzej Łukaszewicz and Łucja

Andrzej is the earliest ancestor in the male line whom we know by name. He himself does not appear in any document. We know of him because Russian officials recorded every man together with his father's name. His son is recorded in the revision lists of 1795, 1811, 1816 and 1834 as Kazimierz, son of Andrzej. By 1795 Andrzej was no longer alive.

His wife Łucja was eighty years old in 1795 and lived with her son. She was therefore born about 1715, in the reign of King Augustus II the Strong. She is the oldest person in this whole line about whom we know anything for certain. After the family moved to Żukojnie, the register of the parish of Świranki recorded in 1805 the death of Łucja Łukaszewicz of Żukojnie, whose age the priest gave as a hundred years. This was probably Kazimierz's mother.

The registers of the church at Niestaniszki from before 1797 do not survive. That is why what can be read about the Łukaszewicz family in the documents ends with Andrzej and Łucja.

Peasants of the Stracza estate

In no record from 1798 to 1893 does the Łukaszewicz family bear a noble title. Wherever a priest or an official wrote down which estate of society they belonged to, he called them peasants. Priests writing in Latin used the word “laboriosi”, in Polish “pracowici” (labouring) and in Russian “krestyane”, meaning peasants.

Until 1861 they were peasants bound to labour service. They worked the landowner's land and could not leave the estate without his permission. The landowner could move them from village to village. He also chose the recruits for the army. After serfdom was abolished in 1861, Jakub and his sons farmed in Żukiszki as free peasants.

Traces in the area

A list of Polish graves in Lithuania, kept in the collections of the Vilnius Archive, records a gravestone in the cemetery at Powiewiórka inscribed Kajetan Łukaszewicz with the years 1839-1915. This was most likely Kajetan from Żukiszki, son of Ignacy from the other Łukaszewicz family, which lived in the neighbouring house and is mentioned above. Kajetan's death record gives January 1915 and an age of 73. That points to a birth year of about 1842, three years later than the one carved on the stone. The same list of graves names, without dates, three other graves of the Łukaszewicz family, in which Adam, Franciszek and Michał are buried. Those were exactly the names of Kajetan's brothers.

In December 1919 two soldiers of the 5th Legions Infantry Regiment died of illness in Powiewiórka: Michał Nowak (7 December) and Stanisław Mistygać (26 December). In the same weeks, from November 1919 to January 1920, more than twenty soldiers died in nearby Nowe Święciany. This is recorded in the “List of losses of the Polish army. Killed and died in the wars of 1918-1920”, published in Warsaw in 1934. Powiewiórka is the same place in whose church Stefan, Rozalia and their son Jan were baptised.

In July 1579 King Stefan Batory gathered his army near Świr before the campaign against Polotsk. Świr lies a dozen or so kilometres from Śnieciemięta and Żukojnie, the villages the Łukaszewicz family came from.

Sources