The Rompa and Kreft families and related families

The Rompa and Kreft families are the family of Teresa née Rompa, Mariola's mother. They were shoemakers, farmers and labourers from the Kashubian villages around Przodkowo: Pomieczyno, Kosowo and Szemud.

All these families lived in Kashubia near Kartuzy, in an area about thirty kilometres across. Until 1920 it was part of the Prussian state, which is why their records are written in Latin or in German. The chapter on the Bobkowski family explains how to read such records and what the Prussian civil registry office was.

Teresa née Rompa (1934-1994)

Teresa was Mariola's mother. She was born on 20 October 1934 in Przodkowo, a large village with a parish church, about eight kilometres north-east of Kartuzy. She was the youngest of the five daughters of Augustyn Rompa and Helena née Kreft. When she was born her father was 39 and her mother 36. Her eldest sister Agnieszka was already a girl of thirteen.

Teresa was not yet five when the war broke out. During the occupation, on 30 November 1941, her eldest sister Agnieszka died. She was unmarried and twenty years old.

Mariola wrote down the list of sisters with their dates in her own hand. Two of the sisters, Jadwiga and Teresa, both took the married name Bobkowska, but that is a coincidence. Jadwiga's husband was Franciszek Bobkowski from the village of Sławki, who was not related to Alojzy.

Leokadia, Teresa's sister, who lived to 102

Leokadia was born on 12 December 1923 in a small cottage in Kosowo. She married after the war and her married name was Ludwichowska. She died on 6 October 2026 and her funeral took place on 10 October. At the coffin her youngest daughter read out a remembrance of her mother. What follows comes from that remembrance.

The father of the five sisters was not only a shoemaker. Leokadia's daughter remembered from her mother's stories that he also worked as a stonemason and bricklayer and that he made gravestones. His daughters helped him with this from a very young age, although it was hard manual work.

During the Second World War Leokadia was sent to forced labour in Żuławy, the Vistula delta. She was there together with her eldest sister Agnieszka. Agnieszka fell from a cart loaded with hay. After that accident she fell ill and died at the age of twenty. Towards the end of her life Leokadia often remembered her. She also told of fleeing in the middle of the night and hiding in a cellar, where they sat almost without breathing.

After the war Leokadia had six children. Her youngest daughter was born when her mother was forty-five. Leokadia was then working at a bottling plant in Kartuzy. She cycled to Przodkowo and went on from there by bus. In winter people walked to Przodkowo on foot: the men in front and the women behind them in single file.

In her home almost all the food came from their own farm. Only sugar and salt were bought. Leokadia made fruit compotes and preserves. She cooked sweets for the children in a frying pan. Her children remembered three of her sayings: “Don't worry, it will work out somehow”, “No work, no cake” and “Without God, not even over the threshold”.

Leokadia's sons Jan and Jerzy and her daughter Maria died before their mother. The remembrance read at the funeral ended with the words: “Goodbye for now, Mum. Rest in peace.”

In about 1956 Teresa married Alojzy Bobkowski, born on 19 September 1933 in Otalżyno, a village eight kilometres from Przodkowo. The wedding took place in the church in Przodkowo, the same church where her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had married. The couple had two children. Mariola was born in 1958 rtd nyn ypriprp Irrmplwk tr 8766. Mariola was baptised on 25 May 1958 in Kartuzy. Her godmother was Helena, Teresa's sister. Her godfather was Helena's husband, Robert Golnau, a railwayman from Gdańsk.

On 27 March 1978 Mariola was married in the church in Przodkowo. Her husband was Romuald Łukaszewicz. Teresa and Alojzy lived to see three grandchildren. Stlt emd Silludiw (4011), Poyppp (8951) prm Lyzwyuk (0964).

The disaster at Kokoszki

On 2 May 1994 Teresa and Alojzy were killed together in a bus crash in Gdańsk-Kokoszki. Teresa was 59 and Alojzy 60. The chapter on the Bobkowski family describes the accident and the memorial plaque with the names of the victims.

Teresa's husband

Alojzy Bobkowski came from a family of farmers from Mirachowo and Otalżyno. His ancestors, including the family of his mother Helena née Bach, are described in the chapter on the Bobkowski family.

Augustyn Rompa (1895-1966)

Augustyn was Mariola's grandfather. He was born in Pomieczyno, a village seven kilometres north-west of Przodkowo, in the house of his father Franciszek. Three days later his father went to the civil registry office in Załęże and registered his son's birth. The official wrote the name down in German: August. Franciszek could not write, so instead of a signature he put three crosses under the record.

At the bottom of the same record someone added in Polish, years later, that Augustyn died on 15 February 1966 in Przodkowo. The same note appears beside his marriage record. Augustyn lived for 70 years.

Augustyn did not stay on his father's farm. He learned the shoemaker's trade. In November 1919, at the age of 24, he married twenty-two-year-old Helena Kreft from Kosowo. First, on 14 November, the couple stood before the registrar in Przodkowo. Four days later they were married in church. The record was still written in German, because the Polish administration took over the district of Kartuzy only at the beginning of 1920. The witnesses were the innkeeper Franciszek Pipka from Przodkowo and the farmer Jan Retzlaff from Kosowo.

Both bride and groom signed the record in their own hand. This is a big change from the previous generation, because Augustyn's father could not write. In this record Augustyn's mother is called Marianna, while in his birth record she is Antonina. It is the same woman, née Meyer.

Augustyn and Helena spent the first years after their wedding in Kosowo, Helena's home village. Their daughter Leokadia was born there in 1923. Later they moved to Przodkowo, where Jadwiga and Teresa were born.

The records call Augustyn a shoemaker. His granddaughter, Leokadia's daughter, remembered from her mother's stories that he was also a stonemason and bricklayer and that he made gravestones. His daughters helped him with this work from an early age.

Helena née Kreft (1897-1992)

Helena was Mariola's grandmother. She was born in Kosowo, a village one and a half kilometres from Przodkowo. She never knew her father. Józef Kreft died on 30 May 1897. Helena was born five months later, on 2 November. That is the day given in the baptism register, while Mariola remembers that her grandmother was born on 1 November. She grew up with her mother Zuzanna, who was widowed at the age of 32.

On the day of her wedding to Augustyn, Helena was still living with her mother in Kosowo. After the wedding she lived with her husband in Przodkowo and gave birth to five daughters. She lost one of them, twenty-year-old Agnieszka, during the war. In 1966 her husband Augustyn died and Helena was left a widow. In 1978 she lived to see the wedding of her granddaughter Mariola. Of Mariola's four grandparents, she was the only one still alive by then.

Helena lived with her daughter Teresa. The family remembers that she sewed on a sewing machine and sang in German. She went to school at a time when Kashubia belonged to Germany and lessons were given only in German. Helena died in 1992 at the age of 94. She rests in the cemetery in Kokoszki.

Helena's family, the Kreft and Draws families from Kosowo, is described later in this chapter, after the older generations of the Rompa family.

Franciszek Rompa (b. 1850)

Franciszek was Mariola's great-grandfather. He spent his whole life in Pomieczyno. In the marriage record of 1873 the priest entered him as a farmer from Stare Pomieczyno, a bachelor aged 24. His wife was eighteen-year-old Antonina Meyer from Trzy Rzeki, a small village between Pomieczyno and Przodkowo.

The abbreviation “dt.” means “as above”. The priest wrote it wherever he would otherwise have had to repeat what stood in an earlier line. Higher up on this page of the register it is recorded that the marriage took place in Przodkowo and that the witnesses were the local sexton and the organist Jan Reich. The marriage register of those years had no column for the parents' names, so this entry does not say who the couple's parents were.

Two of Franciszek and Antonina's children died in childhood: little Jan in December 1874 and little Emilia in March 1879. Augustyn was born only in 1895, when his father was 45 and his mother about forty.

The records show how Franciszek's position changed. In 1873 he was a farmer. In 1895 and 1905 the official called him a farm owner. By 1906 he was a retired farmer on a life settlement, that is a farmer who had handed his land to a successor in return for a home and keep until his death. His son's marriage record of 1919 names him as a labourer from Pomieczyno.

On 15 June 1905 Antonina, Franciszek's wife, died. Fifteen months later, on 18 September 1906, the fifty-six-year-old Franciszek married for the second time, to Julianna Czerwińska. The record of this marriage gives Franciszek's exact date of birth and the names of his parents.

The official wrote Franciszek's mother's surname as Petrykus. In other records of this family the name is Potrykus, which is the form we use in the chronicle.

Antonina née Meyer (1854-1905)

Antonina was Mariola's great-grandmother. She married at eighteen and for 32 years kept house on the farm in Pomieczyno. She died in her husband's house on 15 June 1905. The next day Franciszek registered her death at the office. He stated that she was 50 and that her parents were Jan Meyer and his wife Wiktoria, both already deceased. Franciszek did not know his mother-in-law's maiden name. He also gave her first name wrongly.

Antonina's mother's real name and her date of birth are given in the baptism register of Przodkowo parish. Antonina Łucja was born on 16 December 1854 in Trzy Rzeki and was baptised the next day. Her parents were Jan Majer and Józefina née Bach. At that time the priests wrote the surname as Majer and the Prussian officials as Meyer.

Jan Meyer (c. 1824-1859) and Józefa née Bach

Jan and Józefa were married on 10 February 1851 in the church at Przodkowo. The priest entered them under the village of Rąb, where the bride came from. Jan was 26 and Józefa 21. Rąb and Trzy Rzeki are neighbouring villages, two kilometres apart.

The couple's first child was Józef. The boy died in Rąb on 24 May 1857, aged five years and five months.

Jan Meyer was a hereditary leaseholder in Trzy Rzeki. A farmer of this kind did not own the land, but he held it on a hereditary lease and could pass it on to his children. He died young, on 7 October 1859, at the age of thirty-five. He was buried three days later. He left a widow and two small children: five-year-old Antonina and one-year-old Jakub Jan.

His wife came from the Bach family, a family known throughout Przodkowo parish. The marriage record and her daughter's baptism record call her Józefina, her husband's death record calls her Marianna. Fifty years later her son-in-law gave the official the name Wiktoria. Marianna and Wiktoria were the names of her sisters. All the records written during her lifetime agree on the surname Bach.

Józefa was widowed at thirty-one. Four months later, on 13 February 1860, she married for the second time at Przodkowo. Her new husband was the bachelor Jan Krefta. The priest entered this marriage under the village of Trzy Rzeki and called the bride the widow Józefina Majer née Bach. So Antonina grew up with a stepfather.

Krystian Meyer (c. 1792-1824) and Barbara née Jankowska

Krystian Meyer and Barbara née Jankowska were Jan's parents and Augustyn Rompa's great-grandparents. They lived in Trzy Rzeki. They were married on 18 November 1816. The bride was twenty. The witnesses were two men from neighbouring Rąb.

Over eight years they had four children. The baptism register of Przodkowo parish spells their surname Mejer. Below you can see the baptism of the second child, Michał, in December 1818.

Michał's godparents bore the same surname as the child's father, so Krystian had relatives in Trzy Rzeki. He died on 19 April 1824, in the same year in which his youngest son Jan was born. Barbara was left with four small children. On 22 November 1824 she married for the second time. The priest then entered her as the widow Barbara Mejerowa, aged 27.

Wojciech Bach (c. 1797-1867) and Elżbieta née Kwidzyńska

Wojciech Bach and Elżbieta née Kwidzyńska were Józefa's parents. The registers written in Latin and German call Wojciech Adalbert or Albrecht. They were married on 15 November 1824. Both were 28. One of the witnesses, Józef Kwidzyński, bore the same surname as the bride.

The couple farmed in Rąb and had ten children. Józefa was the third. In old age Wojciech handed over the farm and lived in retirement on it, with the right to his keep. He died in Rąb on 17 January 1867 as a widower, aged 68.

Jan Rompa (b. 1824)

Jan was Mariola's great-great-grandfather. He was born in Borzestowska Huta, a village west of Kartuzy, in Chmielno parish. He was the ninth of the ten children of Franciszek Rompa and Katarzyna née Kreft. He was baptised the day after his birth. His godparents were Marcin and Małgorzata Bryllowski.

As a grown man Jan moved a dozen or so kilometres to the north-east, to Pomieczyno. There he lived with his wife Józefa and there their children were born: Franciszek in 1850 and Marcjanna in about 1855. By the 1870s Jan and Józefa were living on an outlying farmstead near Szemud, that is, a farm standing on its own outside the village. In German Szemud was called Schönwalde. A record from 1875 calls Jan a farm owner, while records from 1876 and 1877 call him a retired farmer living on his keep. In July 1875 their twenty-year-old daughter Marcjanna married the labourer Teofil Derron.

The official wrote the groom's surname as “Dyron”. In other records the same surname appears as Derron.

On 15 February 1876 Józefa died in her son-in-law's house. Fifteen months later, on 11 May 1877, Jan, now fifty-two, remarried at the register office in Załęże. His second wife was Anna Czapp, a widow from Pomieczyno, born in 1818 in Koleczkowo. Two days later Jan and Anna were married in church at Przodkowo. One of the witnesses was the thirty-three-year-old innkeeper from Pomieczyno, Franciszek Krefft, who bore the same surname as Jan's mother, Katarzyna née Kreft.

The record of the second marriage of Franciszek, Jan's son, written in 1906, states that Jan was no longer alive by then.

Józefa née Potrykus (c. 1810-1876)

Józefa was Mariola's great-great-grandmother. She came from Jeleńska Huta, a village about four kilometres north of Pomieczyno. She was the first known child of Marcin Potrykus and Ewa née Jankowska. She had younger brothers and sisters: Katarzyna (1815), Jan (1817), Andrzej (about 1820), Antoni (1823) and Franciszka (1825).

Józefa died at the home of her daughter and son-in-law. Her death was reported at the register office by her son-in-law Teofil Derron. It was he who gave the names of her parents. The official added that Teofil did not know the surname of Ewa Potrykus's father, that is, her maiden name.

In this record the surname is written “Ropa”. In the 1804 marriage record of Jan's parents, shown in the next section, it is “Rampa”. Both records refer to the same Rompa family.

Franciszek Rompa and Katarzyna née Kreft (married 1804)

Franciszek and Katarzyna are the earliest Rompas we know by name, Mariola's great-great-great-grandparents. They married in 1804. The priest at Chmielno entered their marriage under the village of Huta Łączyńska. He wrote in Latin that the groom “Franciscus Rampa” was a young man aged 23 and “Catharina Krefftowa” a maiden aged 20. In 1824 they lived in Borzestowska Huta. Over twenty-one years they had ten children: eight daughters and two sons.

The wedding took place on 12 November 1804. The record does not give the couple's parents or the villages they came from.

In the table Jan, Mariola's great-great-grandfather, is shown in bold. Two daughters were given the name Marianna. Giving a younger child the name of an older one usually meant that the older child had died. Franciszek died on 30 March 1846. When his son Jan married for the second time in 1877, Katarzyna was no longer alive either.

The surname Kreft appears twice in Teresa's family: it was borne by Katarzyna, wife of Franciszek Rompa. A hundred years later it was borne by Helena, wife of Augustyn Rompa. No document says whether the Kreft family of Chmielno parish and the Kreft family of Kosowo were related.

Marcin Potrykus and Ewa née Jankowska (married 1809)

Marcin Potrykus and Ewa née Jankowska were Józefa's parents and Mariola's great-great-great-grandparents. They married on 10 July 1809. Marcin was a widower aged 41. Ewa was a maiden of nineteen. So there were 22 years between them. The witnesses were Jan Pstrąg and Jan Kwidziński.

At that time priests used the word “honest” for people who were not of the nobility. The Potrykus family settled in Jeleńska Huta and had their own farm there. Their children were baptised in the churches at Kielno and Przodkowo. Marcin and Ewa both died before 1876.

Józef Kreft (1863-1897)

Józef was Mariola's great-grandfather, the father of her grandmother Helena. He was born out of wedlock and therefore bore his mother's surname. In the baptism register, in the column for the father's name, the priest wrote just one word: “unehelich”, meaning “illegitimate”. The godparents were Józef Kreft and Katarzyna Kreft, who bore the same surname as the mother.

Józef was three when his mother married Franciszek Bach, a labourer from Kosowo. So Józef had a stepfather. When he grew up, he too became a labourer. In November 1891, at the age of 28, he married twenty-six-year-old Zuzanna Draws, the daughter of neighbours in Kosowo.

The second page of the record names the witnesses. They were two labourers from Kosowo: Jan Klawikowski and the fifty-year-old Józef Wilschling. The witnesses could not write and put crosses under the record. Józef and Zuzanna signed in their own hand, but both wrote only their surname, without their first name.

The marriage lasted less than six years. On 30 May 1897 at eight in the evening Józef died in Kosowo. The record says he was 33, although he had turned 34 two months earlier. The next day his wife reported his death at the register office. Zuzanna was expecting a child at the time. This was Helena, who was born five months later.

Franciszka Kreft (c. 1835-1915)

Franciszka was Mariola's great-great-grandmother. She spent her whole life in Kosowo. The records call her a labourer. In March 1863, while still unmarried, she gave birth to a son, Józef. Three and a half years later, on 22 November 1866, she married Franciszek Bach. The priest wrote that the groom was 28 and the bride 29. One of the witnesses was Józef Kreft. Her son's godfather had the same name.

Franciszka's husband is a different man from Franciszek Bach of Otalżyno, the great-grandfather of Alojzy Bobkowski, who is described in the chapter on the Bobkowski family. Several men of that first name and surname lived in the area at the time.

Franciszka outlived her husband and her son. She died a widow on 12 January 1915, aged 80 according to the record. Her death was reported by August Schwabe, a labourer from Kosowo. Schwabe knew that the dead woman was the daughter of a married couple named Kreft, but he did not know their first names. Franciszka's granddaughter Helena was 17 at the time.

Jakub Kreft (c. 1797-1873) and Agata née Jugowska

Jakub Kreft and Agata née Jugowska were Franciszka's parents. They married on 17 November 1823. The priest recorded them under the village of Kobysewo. Jakub was 27 and Agata 26. Later the couple moved to neighbouring Kosowo and stayed there for the rest of their lives.

They had four children. Franciszka was the youngest. Her brother Józef had the same name as the godfather of her son in 1863 and the witness at her wedding in 1866. Agata died in Kosowo on 19 January 1864, aged 71. She left her husband and four children. Jakub outlived her by nine years. He died of a stroke on 24 June 1873 as a retired farmer living out his days on the farm he had handed over. He was 75.

Zuzanna née Draws (born 1865)

Zuzanna was Mariola's great-grandmother and the mother of her grandmother Helena. She was born in the parish of Kielno, where her father came from. Kielno lies about nine kilometres north of Przodkowo. Her godparents were Jan Margman and Marianna Draws.

Later the family moved to Kosowo. There Zuzanna married and there, in 1897, she was widowed at the age of 32. She could write: she signed her husband's death record with her full name. Her brother Franciszek could not write.

In November 1919, when her daughter Helena married Augustyn Rompa, Zuzanna, then fifty-four, was alive and still living in Kosowo.

Jan Draws (c. 1827-1888)

Jan was Mariola's great-great-grandfather. He came from Kielno. In 1855 he married Julianna Cyrocka at Przodkowo. The register gives his age then as 26. In 1865 he lived with his wife in the parish of Kielno and later in Kosowo. He worked as a labourer all his life.

He died in Kosowo on 18 March 1888. The next day his son Franciszek reported his father's death at the registry office. Franciszek did not know the names of his grandparents, that is Jan's parents, so the registrar wrote that the parents of the deceased were unknown. Franciszek signed the record with three crosses.

Julianna née Cyrocka (c. 1828-1895)

Julianna was Mariola's great-great-grandmother. After her husband's death she lived on for seven more years as a widow in Kosowo. She died on 11 December 1895. Her son August was with her. Two days later it was he who reported her death. He signed the record in his own hand.

Every clerk wrote Julianna's maiden name differently. The marriage register of 1855 has Sierocka, her daughter's baptism in 1865 has Cyrocka, her husband's death record Ciroszki, her daughter's marriage record Czoska and her own death record Cirotzki. On the family tree chart she appears in this last form. In the chronicle we use the Polish form Cyrocka.

One church, five generations

The church at Przodkowo is a special place for this family. For more than a hundred and twenty years successive generations of Mariola's ancestors were married before the same altar. Finally Mariola herself was married there too.

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Sources

The civil registry records and the registers of the parishes of Przodkowo and Kielno after 1819 are kept by the State Archive in Gdańsk. The older registers of the parishes of Chmielno, Kielno and Sianowo are kept by the Diocesan Archive in Pelplin. Dates from the years 1921-1994 come from Mariola's notes.