After visiting the Dudzik house we check into a very nice Agro House right there in Mecina. We discover word has gotten out into the village (population 3,000) that visitors from the USA are in town.
We race over to the historian’s home of Ludwika Dudzik and she is able to find our grandmother’s house and her husband, Stanisław will actually take us there. We drive down a small and twisting road to the home of Elisabeth Krzak Kielbasa and her family. How Elisabeth is related: grandma’s brother Stanislaus’s granddaughter.
The family is very welcoming and Elisabeth is so excited and just so darn cute! They do not speak English so our wonderful interpreter Paweł has to work overtime keeping up with all the conversation that is happening all at once. We are invited into their home for tea/coffee and cake and soon an older woman walks in. This woman is our grandma’s niece (Stanislaus’s daughter) Casimira. WOW! Someone who knew grandma. She is so welcoming and excited to talk to us too. Casimira remembers our grandma’s visit to Mecina in the 1960s. Casimira told us that grandma and grandpa knew each other very well before leaving the village and that a group of them traveled together to America.
They took us over to house 222 which is located right next to Elisabeth’s home. No one is living in there now. It has been renovated since our grandma lived there (she left Mecina in 1912) by her brother Stanislaus, he died in 1987. The home is extremely small. I can see why grandma left! It is so much smaller then our grandpa’s home. We enter the front door and told the area where we stood is where animals were kept, we turn right and this is the living area. I am led to believe this area is where they slept, ate and cooked. Very, very small.