News From the Slarks

I've been in contact with Sidney ("Jimmy") and Katherine ("Kitty") Slark, my great aunt and uncle, Chute's sister and brother-in-law.  They live in Manchester, New Hampshire and have for most of their lives since WWII.  The letter I just received had some fantastic information in it, including answers to several of my questions.  The whole thing is available here, but I'll go through it piece by piece below (you can see my original letter here).

Jimmy mentions Kitty's mother's sister Anne - that's Zose's (aka Sophie) sister, who I have recorded as Annie (with an 'i') Raulinitis.  I wrote about here once here.  I could only find limited information about her.  I had been told by Ellen Rolwich that Annie had gone to California, but the only records I could find said that she had actually gone to Scarsdale, NY on the S.S. California.  Now it seems that Ellen was right!  Not only did Annie travel on the S.S. California, she did spend some time in California.

It appears that Kitty filled in the family's name, but I'm unsure if she means that their name was literally "Kohler Plumbing" or that they're actually the Kohlers of Kohler Plumbing.  That would certainly make them wealthy enough to have employed Annie as a maid!  Knowing the family's name should make it easier to track them down in the census records.

I do hope they are able to find the photo album that is mentioned!  It would be incredible to see the old photos.

This tree shows Zose (Chute and Kitty's mother, my great-grandmother) and Annie.  Peter is their brother and the patriarch of Rolwich branch that lives here in Scotland.

What he says here is very interesting.  He says that Kitty's mother (Zose or "Sophie") was called "Jessie Rolwich" (not to be confused with Jessie Doyle Rolwich, who was married to Peter).  I had suspected this was possible previously, but didn't have enough to confirm it.  What it means is that little John Raulinaitis was my great-uncle, the illegitimate son of my great-grandmother.  There's clearly an interesting story there, but as he died in infancy, it will probably never be known in full.

It probably sounds odd that they "believe" that Jessie was here name, but bear in mind that names were rather fluid when crossing between different languages - my grandmother is Marija, but usually goes by Mary, sometimes Marie, and who of course I refer to as Chute, which is short for Machute, which is Lithuanian for "grandma".  Heck, Rolwich is a corrupted version of Raulinitis, which is a misspelling of Raulinaitis.  It'll be a nightmare for the next family historian to come along.

The other really interesting thing was that Zose (I'll continue to call her by that) had contact with Peter when they were in Germany!  I didn't realize that Peter had been in the War - should be able to find some military records.  This would have been when Kazimiras Sr., Zose, and Kitty were in the displaced persons camp after the War in the British Zone of Germany.  Maybe he was even in the same battalion as Jimmy, who was an Englishman enlisted in a Scottish regiment.  That's where he first met Kitty.

Sydney "Jimmy" Slark
Black Watch Regiment 1942-1944

Here he says that Annie Raulintis (the one who worked for the Kohlers) had the married name Annie Graham.  I looked back at my messages with Jane Ives (a descendant of Margaret Raulinitis), and she had also said that she believed her married name was Graham, but that she never had children.

Jane had also told me that Annie Raulinitis Graham had taken in her niece, Annie Flanagan, when she was 12.  She also told me that Annie Flanagan became a nun and still lives in New York.  From Jimmy's letter, it appears that they still have contact!  He says he believes she has three sisters.  That's true (Mary, Margaret, and Rose) but she's also got a brother, Joseph.  As far as I know, they all still live here in Scotland, but I haven't had contact with anybody other than Ives sub-group.

I was mistaken when I originally asked if Annie Raulinitis had been a nun.  I knew Annie Flanagan is, but I thought they both were.

I had also asked about the Kisielius brothers - that is, the brothers of my great-grandfather.  Jimmy previously told me there had been 5, but he wasn't certain of all their names.  I have yet to get around to tracking down the Wilkes-Barre group, but I will eventually.

He refers to Kitty's brother "Charlie", which is the Anglicized version of Kazimiras (in this case, Kazimiras Jr.).  I knew he was born in Glasgow because I found his birth record.  And I knew he was in the Lithuanian military because Chute had shown me a photo and told stories about his abduction.

His account of what happened to him differs from what Chute told me.  He says it was the Nazis that took him during World War Two, but Chute was quite clear about it having been the Soviets.  From my understanding of the history, it seems more plausible that it was the Soviets and that he was deported to Siberia before the Nazis even arrived in Lithuania.

We're jumping around in the timeline a little bit.  Now he's talking about how the family ended up back in Lithuania from Scotland, which was towards the end of World War One.  I didn't tell him in my letter anything about my theories, but what he says really confirms it.  He's vague on the details and gets the date wrong (not "early 1900", actually 1917, the tail end of WWI), but we have to bear in mind that he's relaying a story from Kitty that would have been told to her when she was just a girl 70-odd years ago.

He says the ships took the men to Siberia.  From what I've read, they landed in Archangel, around the north of Scandinavia in Russia.  By then WWI had ended and the Bolshevik Revolution had begun.  Some of the Scottish-Lithuanians remained in that port with the British convoy that had brought them there, and some left to join the revolution.  Those that stayed were eventually allowed to return to Britain.  Those that left were not able to "prove loyalty" and were not allowed back in (some had actively fought in the Red Army!).  I believe Kazimiras Sr. was one of the ones who was denied return.  Whether or not he was involved in the revolution, I couldn't know, but I do know that there was radical elements in Scottish-Lithuanian mining community who would have sympathized with the Bolsheviks, and I can only wonder if when Kitty says the men didn't want to fight against their "Brothers", she's remembering a mis-translation, and they actually didn't want to fight against their comrades!  At the time, they couldn't have known what the Soviets would become and what they would do to the Lithuanians, but later, once Stalin's reign of terror began, it would have become something that Kazimiras would never have spoken of again.

He's explaining, as he had previously, that the Kisielius brothers worked in the Scottish coal mines and saved their money to bring their sister Marijona over from Lithuania.  I did some searching and found that there are living descendants of Marijona here in Scotland today, but I haven't been successful in making contact (despite sending a couple letters already).

Just recently, I started looking again for a way to contact Anele "Helen" Tracy, but I hadn't gotten very far.  I don't know how current the address that he provides is, but I'll give it a try.  Hopefully I'll finally make contact!

He's explaining Kitty's recollection of the family's escape from Lithuania as the Soviets were returning at the end of World War II.  Kazimiras Jr had been abducted years earlier (before the Nazis arrived), so there's no doubt they would have been fearful of what would come.  Such was the case for many Lithuanians, especially because many of them had aided the Nazis (treating them as liberators) when they pushed the Soviets out in 1941.

It's also so refreshing to hear somebody refer to a school janitor as "a good job".  Something we lack today is respect for people who do real work, preferring instead to revere the investment class as "job creators" - absolutely disgusting.  It was also quite touching that they were trying to bring their "family cow" along.  I'm sure it was primarily because the cow was their one object of material wealth, but it just feels like they were looking after a pet.

Their escape to Germany is what eventually led to Kitty meeting Jimmy, Chute meeting Tevuk (Vacys Matulis), and their emigration to the United States.  He mentions Chute's first husband, who I know died of a stroke in Germany (buried in Munich - ***photo pending***).  He was called Vytautas Apenavicius, and I believe his family settled in Chicago.  Chute and Tevuk remained in contact with them and even visited them on occasion.  Someday I'll try to make contact myself.

Chute had told me that her parents were buried in Vilkaviskis, but I was always confused because she had also talked about living in Kaunas.  Now I know that both are true.