(McHalsky) Michalski, John & Josephine (2x great grands)

As promised, I will make every effort to keep living family members from appearing on this blog without their explicit consent.  I have also removed the other side of the family off this graphic, for the sake of trying to keep it simple. 

Michalski, John & Josephine (2x Great Grandparents)

As I mentioned on Andrew's page, there is some confusion about who is actually his mother. I'm going with Josephine, officially, for the time being, until I'm able to locate information about Pauline.

John and Josephine were born and married in Germany.  Because they were already married when they came to the U.S., it seems that she would have been Andrew's mother. She is living with the family on census records here when Andrew is a young boy as well. Could it just have been a clerical error that Pauline was listed on some of Andrew's documents? I suppose, but because Pauline shows up on more than one document, it seems there might be more to it then that. Their last names are intrestingly similar...Provock and Paraviack. Is it possible the two women were sisters? Perhaps Pauline did die in childbirth and Josephine kept Andrew as her own? I'm not sure how I would go about finding this out, or confirming beyond the shadow of a doubt that Josephine is Andrew's mom.

But this stumbling block kind of puts a damper on going back any further along this family line until I figure out what's going on. Should I be following Josephine's family or Pauline's? Which is the bloodline?

In any event, they came to the U.S. in 1881 (Andrew was born in Wisconsin in 1897). It would appear they were part of a later wave of immigrants.  This group were finding it was now less expensive to immigrate to the U.S. and the political and economic conditions in Germany that caused earlier immigrants to leave (going all the way back to the 1820s) continued unabated. Many of these later immigrants were from Prussia.

An interesting tidbit for me is that they both listed themselves as unable to read, write, or speak English on the 1900 census, but they owned a farm.  John listed himself as a teamster on that census and not knowing anything about the teamsters, perhaps they were instrumental in getting John the mortgage for the farm. They may also be the ones credited for helping the two of them learn English, as they were listed on the 1910 census has reading and writing English and that English is their "native Tongue".  I suppose that's plenty of time to learn.  And they would have had to denounce their German citizenship (I believe) so I suppose they would put that English is their native language.

I think I have a better photo somewhere (I have a box full of loose photos and several photo albums). I'll update this pic if I find another one.

I have yet to find their immigration papers to confirm their arrival, nor can I find obits for either one. Marriage and birth documents would be in Germany.  I've not come across these documents on Ancestry.

Documents: census records, likely photos