Daniel Grosso

My family is predominately Italian on my father’s side and Polish on my mother’s side. For this project I chose to focus on the Polish side of my heritage. One specific person that I found very interesting was my great-grandfather: Karol Tyminski.

Karol Tyminski was born in the Polish town of Bialystok in 1894. His hometown was very close to the Polish-Russian border, and was always a constant target of border disputes between the nations. At the age of fourteen the Russians invaded Karol’s town, and forced all of the young men to join the Russian military. Although only fourteen, Karol was included in this group of young men, and was going to join the Russian army against his will.

            In order to avoid recruitment, Karol and his family fled from their eastern Polish town, and into Germany. Here they bought boat tickets, and in 1912 Karol and the rest of his family headed over the Atlantic Ocean and to the United States.

            Once Karol arrived in the United States, he took up residency in a Polish portion of Port Chester, New York. He had to work very hard in his first few years in the United States. He moved out to Pennsylvania on his own, and worked for a few years in the coalmines there.

            One day, disaster struck in one of Karol’s mines, it clasped while he and many other workers were still mining inside. Karol was rescued from the mine, however, with only a few minor injuries. After this incident Karol decided that working in the mines was too dangerous and not worth his low wages, so Karol decided to explore opportunities in the railroad industry. After only a few months, on the rails Karol once again decided that the job was too dangerous for his liking and he then moved to Glenville, Connecticut to pursue his own business.

            Once in Glenville he met a woman named Bronislawa Lichota. She was also a Polish immigrant, and they shared many interests. In 1916 they were married in a small town in New Jersey.

            After the wedding they returned to Glenville, Connecticut where Karol’s business began to take shape and become successful. He opened a grocery store in this town, and it was so successful that he opened another one in the Greenwich, Connecticut area.

            After this success Karol and his wife began raising a family. They had four boys and two girls. For his children Karol was very concerned about assimilation. Karol created a set of rules for his household, and his stores. All of his family members needed to speak English and not Polish when engaging in normal conversation. He didn’t want his children to carry a Polish accent, and therefore he felt it necessary for them to learn English at a very early age.

            School was also very important to Karol. He always made sure that his children were doing well in school, and they were punished if they had to stay after class, or if their grades were falling. He was a unique father though, he didn’t believe in physical punishment. Instead he would make his children kneel on the hardest surface of the house, and stare at the wall quietly for hours. His children later agreed with him that this form of punishment was much worse than any other.

            Karol spent a lot of his free time working with his hands. He was a great landscaper, blacksmith, and painter. One time he even worked on the house of New York Yankees’ owner, Jacob Rupperts’s mother-in-law.

Karol was a very successful immigrant in the United States. He was generally accepted in all of his communities in which he lived. He was a great businessman as well as a great man with his hands. He had a wife and six children, all of which he instilled his same moral values and work ethic. Karol was a great man and found a lot of happiness and success in America.

The red dot in the upper right of Poland shows about where Bialystok is.