Time is relentlessly taking our family elders from us and we must
preserve and record our family information for future generations.
The Allies agreed, at the end of WWII, to let the Soviet Union annex
the eastern portion of Galicia from Poland into the Ukraine.
Lwow, a historic Polish capital city, now is in Ukraine. Luckily,
our ancestral home towns lie pretty far west of Lwow, in the brand new
Polish provinces of Malopolska (Little Poland) and Podkarpackie
(SubCarpathia).
While other related Bieniaszes emigrated to North America as early as
circa 1870, our direct ancestors came here at the very beginning of the
20th Century. This is their story. And ours as well.
For years, the spelling of our family surname has been a source of
controversy within our family. Let's put it to rest right now.
Stanislaw Bieniarz was indeed born to parents Franciszek & Jozefa
Bieniasz and christened Stanislaw Bieniasz, There is no doubt
that he is descended from a long Bieniasz line. Why the controversy?
The misspelling started with an arrogant German emigration official at
Hamburg-America Line in Hamburg. He insisted on changing the spelling of the
surname from Bieniasz to Bieniarz for both Stanislaw and Michalina in
March 1905. (I have found that this happened to as many as half of the
other Bieniasz emigrants. However, when Stanislaw Bieniasz first immigrated to America in 1901, his name remained intact and unchanged.) Thus, the misspelling at Hamburg continued on U.S.
immigration records at Ellis Island NY.
Stanislaw Bieniarz apparently accepted and used the "new" spelling on
various records throughout his life, including records at St. Stanislaus
Kostka Church and on his gravestone. His children were christened with
the surname Bieniarz.
Some of his sons - Joseph, George, and Daniel - continued using Bieniarz. Others
reverted to Bieniasz.
In these pages, I use Bieniarz only because that is the way Stanislaw
is identified on many American records. Future family researchers will
find it difficult, at best, to uncover very much information about
Stanislaw using the surname Bieniasz.
Adding to the confusion, Catholic clergy back in medieval Poland were
sometimes known to record the same individual's name with different variant
spellings at different times in the same individual's life. This is
because some peasant folks were illiterate and the spellings sounded the same. Bieniarz, Bieniasz and Bienias' (with an
accent over the "s") sound nearly the same to the untrained ear.
Bieniarz is pronounced B'YEN-yarsh, while the other two are pronounced
B'YEN-yosh.
Had our Bieniasz/Bieniarz family originated in England, this controversy might be
between Benson, Bensson and Bensen.
However, because our ancestral parish at Straszecin maintained an elementary school for centuries and was also the site of a college for a time, literacy was not a problem and our Bieniasz surname was consistently recorded accurately in the parish ledgers.
Editor's note: I have heard our family name pronounced B'YAIN-yosh
instead of B'YEN-yosh. I'm not about to start a controversy over it.
In any event, medieval Polish historian Jan Dlugosz made several mentions of the surname in his works and always as "Bieniasz").
What's New!
Visltors to and folks living in Poland often contribute new photos of our ancestral villages and parishes. The newest stuff is located at the SPUSCIZNA Polish Heritage Research Group website. Over 140 old Catholic parishes in SE Poland have been catalogued. Click here:
