Pins and Needles: Family Secrets and Liberty Cabbage

"No one knows what our name used to be," Max had mentioned many years ago. "My great-grandfather changed it and wouldn't tell anyone what it used to be. My dad doesn't know, nobody does. We think it might have been Polish."

We met up for lunch last week and I told him about the research I had been doing on my own family. He reminded me of his family history and said his family had been doing genetic tests to discover where they were from, which had been cool. I latched onto the mystery.

"I bet I can find out for you," I said, getting excited. "What's the name of someone in that line?"

"My grandpa Donald?"

"Is he still alive?"

"Yeah. Super old."

"Do you know the name of anybody who's dead?" Records get released once you're dead, so that's important.

"My great grandfather. He's the one who changed the name. He died a couple days after I was born, and 'Henry' is after him."

"Where did he live?"

"Chicago area, they're all still out there."

So with name, vague date, and vague place in hand, I began my search.

My first stop was findagrave.com, which I love. It's awesome when there are pictures of the headstones, and you can search within the cemetery for people with the same name. Lots of people edit to add family history on there, and I've even been in touch with someone who put up some old family photos to see if she had more. But I digress.

I entered the name, year, and state of Illinois. Just one result, and it looked right.

Henry J Quinn and Helen D Quinn, in Skokie, Illinois. He had died the year Max was born, which was right. No more info than that, though.

So I went to Google. "Henry J Quinn," "1982" yielded something promising on the first page, an obituary archived by the local library.

Very helpful! This confirmed that Henry J Quinn, with wife Helen who died in 1977, was the father of Donald, Max's grandpa. I was on the right track.

Next up in the search came a result from the Social Security Death Index. These become available when someone is registered as dead by Social Security. The Social Security applications apparently have a ton of details beyond this, but you need to pay to see them. But now I had a birth date!

It was time to go to the census with the information I had so far. Maybe Henry lived with his parents or they lived with him after he changed his name.

The United States census is taken every decade, and searchable from 1790 to 1940. Except for 1890, which was burned up in a building fire. The "72-year rule" means that 1940 is the most recent available, so 1950 won't come out publicly till 2022. Most of it is even scanned in!

To search the census, I went to familysearch.org. This free website was established by the Mormons for their genealogical work, and has expanded beyond just Mormon ancestry. I have an account to search with, and use it to post photos into my family tree and share stories, which Mormons are super into.

A search of the census for Henry J Quinn, wife Helen, in Cook County, quickly yielded the 1940 entry, which looked right:

All the correct siblings were there. This data filled in that Henry was a janitor in an apartment building at the time and was born in Illinois. He listed his annual salary as $2400. I learned that Helen's maiden name was Schmitt or Schuett (the computer thought Schmitt), since her father was living with them and listed in the house.

I also looked up their address, "2337 Howard Ave, Chicago" and it's in the right area, Evanston, and is still apartments. One recently came up for rent and probably hasn't changed much since they lived there:

Next I tried the 1930 census with the same search terms:

That worked too. At that time Henry was a janitor as well, and the family lived half a mile away at 2046 Estes Ave, another apartment building. This one doesn't seem to have changed much either.

But wait! The supplemental questions yielded that while Henry was born in Illinois, he reported that both parents were born in Germany. Helen answered the same way.

It was starting to look like Henry's ancestry was German.

I tried the 1920 census next. No sign of the Henry Quinn family. Donald was born in the early 1920s, so I wasn't sure if Henry and Helen were married yet in 1920. I searched for Helen Schuett or Schmitt, since I now knew her maiden name and year of birth.

Sure enough, there was Helen in her father's household, 17 years old at the time. They lived in this little house in Evanston, which was built in 1884 according to Zillow:

There are multiple other families named Schuett on the same page of the census, many born in Germany, so the street was probably heavily German-American and everyone knew each other. Helen lived with her father Fred, mother Mary, sister Marie, Marie's husband Charles, and Charles and Marie's daughter Dorothy.

I was hoping that there would be a Henry of the right age living on the street too - maybe that was how they met - but no luck. Henry's name was hiding well.

Just for fun, I searched for possibilities that crossed my mind if they were German. Henry Konigin? Henry Konig? Henry Cohen or Kuhn? No luck.

Next I went back to the obituary, to see if I could figure out anything through Henry's siblings. First I tried August, but searches for August Quinn didn't turn up anything that seemed right. Most of them were Swedish, with families with very Swedish names. Most likely, August had not changed his last name as his brother Henry had.

So I tried Marie Christian, searching familysearch.org for Marie Christian, born within a decade of Henry, and living in Illinois. Hmm, this seemed promising - a death certificate.

She was born around the right time, in the right place, and the name was right, but I didn't know her children's names (if she was widowed, Robert must have been a son to fill out the death certificate for her).

BUT, August Kwidzinski was certainly promising! If August was Henry and Marie's brother, he could very well have been named for their father, and August isn't exactly a common name. And Kwidzinski! It was just close enough to Quinn that I started getting very excited.

But I had to confirm that I had the right Marie Rose (Kwidzinski) Christian. If I could find some record of her living with her family in 1910 or 1920, and siblings named August and Henry, I'd be home free.

But no such luck. There was no Kwidzinski family with the right names on the 1910 or 1920 census. Bummer.

So I searched for Marie Kwidzinski and her birthdate, and found a birth record from their church:

It matched perfectly - even if it was Latinized in the Catholic Church ledger. 'Mariannam Rosaliam' matched Marie Rose, the birthdate of 02 November 1908 was perfect, parents Augusto and Marianna Kwidzinski matched the death certificate, and someone had even noted her marriage to a John Raymond Christian in the margin. Cool!

But was this Henry's family? Marie Christian matched, but what if this Marie Christian wasn't his sister after all?

So I narrowed my search to just the Illinois Catholic Church records, and searched for August Kwidzinski. More birth records began to pop up for parents August Kwidzinski and Marianna Lakowka.

Joannem Georgium, a boy, born 1895.

Bernardum, a boy, born 1897.

Luciam Ottiliam, a girl, born 1898.

Henricum, a boy, born 1901. In fact, born 13 May 1901.

His brother Augustus, born 1903.

That was it! Henry Kwidzinski, born 1901. By 1922, when his first son was born, he was known as Henry Quinn.

But why? A criminal record? A life left behind? Just to Americanize a tough-to-spell word?

I ran a Google search for "German-American name change 1910s" or something like it, and got my answer pretty quickly.

World War I, of course.

Apparently over 900,000 German-Americans "disappeared" between the pre-war and post-war censuses. They had changed their names, denied their heritage.

And here was why, taken from local newspapers in 1918:

Robert Prager, a German immigrant, was lynched by a mob of coal miners in Collinsville, Illinois, in 1918. His death no doubt terrified the German-American communities in Chicago, and may have influenced Henry to change his name.

I had my answer.

In wrapping up, I combed through a few more records looking for more. I searched the Ellis Island passenger lists, but there was no promising match for the Kwidzinski immigration. One thing I did find was that August Kwidzinski and his wife Mary Lakowka had variously listed themselves as German, European, and Polish on documents. One listed place of birth as "Danzig" for both, a city on the Polish-German border which established independence in the treaty of Versailles in 1918 and is now called Gdansk. They had been married in 1894 in Chicago.

August's father was also named August Kwidzinski, and his mother named Anna Groth. Mary's parents were August Lakowka and Susanna Kowalewski. Interestingly, August Lakowka and August Kwidzinski had lived at the same address - 1879 Poe St - at the times of their deaths. The community was no doubt very close knit.

I linked all the data I'd found, and created a family tree on familysearch.org. Almost exactly 100 years later, the secret is out.