Pajewski, which they pronounced as Payefskee. It was a name my grandmother and her Anne sister didn't want to talk about, something part of their past. In fact when I brought it up, my grandmother suggested that "that other name" was her father's adopted name. However, as I dug into it, I found that her father John, his brother Michael and Frank used the Pajewski name from when they arrived in the 1880s until around the 1920s when they started using Page. And the Pajewski name is on all their marriage records and baptismal records, including my grandmother's. In addition, I found that my g-grandmother's name before she married John Pajewski was Anna Gainowski. Going back another generation I found that John Pajewski's mother's maiden name was Elizabeth Drosdowski and Anna's Gainowski's mother's maiden name was Wogenvodka.

I also found that Veronica, the Pajewski brother's half-sister's maiden name was Rhode and that she and the boys had a common mother, Elizabeth Drosdowski. Thus Elizabeth Drosdowski married a Rhode and then Paul Pajewski after her first husband died.

I also found that Michael Pajewski came over with a Pastwa family and eventually married a Pastwa and Frank Pajewski married into the Abend family and Veronica Rhode married Martin Nicolai.

What nationality were these families with Polish and German sounding names? John Pajewski's parents, Paul Pajewski and Elizabeth Drosdowski appear to have Polish names as do Anna Gainowski's father, Joseph Gainowski. But while the name appears to be Polish, the family claimed they were from Germany, they spoke German, sought out German Catholic parishes in Chicago, and were proud of their Germany heritage. How can this be explained?

While I hoped for a simple explanation, the more I looked into this the more complicated it got. Here is what I found.

1. First, I found that John Pajewski and Anna Gainowski were from around Marienburg, which is about 30 miles southeast of Danzig area in West Prussia. Marienburg is now Malbork and Danzig is now Gdansk and both are located in Poland. In particular John Pajewski is believed to have been born in Melencz, now Miloradz; Anna is believed to have been born in Muntau, now Matowy Wielkie; and Anna's parents Joseph and Rosa Gainowski are believed to have been married in Gnojau, now Gnojewo. Melencz, Muntau, and Gnojewo are all in the District of Marienburg and all are within an approximate 5-mile circle.
2. Next I found that Prussia extended across all of Poland and well into what is now Russia. There was a great re-arrangement of the people living there after WWI and WWII, but what is of more interest to us is what happened before 1900.
3. At the time when our families lived there, there was no Poland, but there were of course Polish people living in Prussia. Thus the records of the people living there for the 1800s all indicated they lived in Germany, although that is not Germany now.
4. Next I found that Danzig, now Gdansk, has a long history of being invaded and controlled by outsiders. Danzig was Polish since 1466, but fell to the Russians in 1734. It then became a free city in 1772 but passed to the Prussians in 1793. It was made a free city by Napoleon from 1807-1814 but then reverted to Prussia. Thus in the 1800s, the area was controlled and administered by Germany and the predominant language and customs appear to be German.
5. With further reading I came to understand that Danzig was a place where peoples from all over the world came to live and do business. I'm not sure it was exactly like the concept of Brooklyn where successive waves of immigrants settled, but there appears to be an aspect to Danzig as a free city where people of many nationalities lived.
6. Then in my reading of the parish history of St. Boniface and St. Augustine, two German parishes the Pajewski's were part of in Chicago in the late nineteenth-century; I came across the term Kashubes, or German speaking Poles. These were parish immigrants from Prussian-dominated Poland.
7. Further researched indicated that many Kashubes were from an area about 30 miles south of Danzig, an area that the Pajewski and Gainowski families appear to be from.

So at this point, things are a little less confusing, but still quite confused. We have several families (Pajewski, Gainowski, and Drosdowski) with Polish sounding names but who spoke German and felt they were German culturally. In addition while they had Polish names and had adopted German culture, they were intermarrying with partners with German or Russian sounding names such as Wogenvodka, Rhode, Nicolai, Pastwa, and Abend. Given their presumed origins around Danzig, it is possible that they were Kashubes, or German speaking Poles, but this is not certain.

So in summary, the answer to the question, were they Germans or Poles is complicated. Culturally our family was Germany and as far as we know not one of them spoke Polish, felt a Polish affinity, or talked about their Polish culture. In fact, for them it was probably natural, since there was no Poland at the time. On the other hand, some of the family lines such as Pajewski, Gainowski, and Drosdowski were probably Slavic peoples native to the land and culture that was traditionally Poland. However, there appears to be much mingling of the peoples in Prussia (German, Polish, Russian, and numerous others), especially in the Danzig area, such that by blood our families appear to be a mixture of German and Polish, and possibly Russian before they immigrated to the United States.

An explanation for why these families with Polish sounding names culturally were German could be that by the time of their birth in the 1860s and 70s, the area had been Prussian for so long that the schools, the towns, and orientation were German and families that had been Polish had basically been assimilated. I am not certain of this but it is not so different from what happens to children of foreign-born parents in the United States. The kids just take on the identity of the United States, not the old country and generally witin a single generation.

With time we'll learn more about this fascinating chapter in our families history as we confirm their towns of birth and firm up the names and origins of their parents. But until then there is much to dwell on, as it appears that our ancestors were not simply German, but instead a combination of historic German and Polish peoples and probably others by both blood and culture.


Further Reading:

1. A Short Polish and Kashubian History by Vincent Paul Drewa, Vancouver, B. C.