Fortunately Jacob's family suffered no ill fortune on their stay at
Ellis Island.
Approved for admittance to America, Jacob and his wife and son joined
the ranks of the three hundred and fifty thousand Polish immigrants who
came to the great cultural melting pot of America between the years of
1890 and 1920. (www.chapter18). Jacob traveled
from New York to Chicago Illinois by rail to meet with his sister and her
husband, Wally Watroba, to begin his new life. Nearly three fourths
of all the Polish immigrants to Illinois settled in Chicago in communities
mostly on the North side. Neighborhoods such as Avondale, Irving
and Belmont were on the north side and the south side towns included Pullman,
Calumet City, and Brighton. (www.Pullman). These communities
were easy to live in for the Polish. Work was easy to find in the
factories and Polish was one of the main languages spoken. These
communities had been established years before by homesick immigrants in
an attempt to recreate the a feeling of culture they had left behind.
(America). Jacob's family located in Pullman on Maryland Avenue in
a tenement building built to house Pullman factory workers. Three
generations of Dyrek's lived in this building which Jacob later purchased.
(Dyrek interview).
Jacob Dyrek and his wife Anna had two sons, Joe, who made the trip
with them, and John, who was born shortly after the journey. They
also had three daughters, Helen who was interviewed to get Jacob's story,
Florence, and Annie. Jacob's son, John, married and also had five
children who were raised in this Maryland street apartment building in
Pullman. Jacob died at the age of eighty-three. John died at
the age of sixty-two. Webmasters Note;
Every time I go back and see this old house, it is empty and it looks like it
was bombed out. Recently my cousin sent me and my brothers some pictures
of my grandmother who died shortly after moving to Pullman. The
interesting thing is that as soon as my older brother looked at the picture, he
yelled, "That's the woman that I saw in the basement." This refers to when
he was a kid, in the early fifties, when he would go into the basement, he would
see a ghost lady. My brother has never seen his grandmother because she
died before he was born. Until recently, he has never even seen a picture
of her. Did he see his grandmothers ghost? |
