Michael Wargoski & Wictoria Salomeja Tolpa Family History

Michael (AKA Jaja, or Dziadzia, for grandpa in Polish) is believed to have been born in Tryncza, Poland, 1882.  According to a World War II ration book No. 3, issued to him in 1943, Michael was listed as 61 years old, making his year of birth 1882.  This year is confirmed by his being reportedly 10 years younger than his wife Wictoria born in 1892.  Little is known of his early childhood years, except that his oldest daughter Amelia remembers his mentioning a brother who emigrated from Poland to the USA approx 1910, to live in Chicago.  It is believed that Jaja’s father was known as Peter, which was Jaja’s middle initial and likely his middle name. As a  youth, Jaja apparently had musical training due to his ability to play the violin beautifully with great skill and pleasure to the delight of audiences at marriages, birthdays, and party events.  Jaja loved the outdoors, and especially loved fishing, gardening, hiking, mushrooming, orchard husbandry, and collecting/growing flowers, which activities he pursued throughout his life.

Here is what oldest daughter Amelia writes of Jaja: “My father was very closed mouthed about his past, so it was difficult to pin things together.  He never did tell me the story, but he did tell Aunt Frannie.  When he worked in the military service, they placed him in the stables where the Lipizzan horses were kept, and he took care of them.”

Wictoria (AKA Bopcha, or Babcia, for grandma in Polish) was born in Tryncza, Poland on 04 July 1892.  She came from a family that was more wealthy than Jaja’s family.  Little is known of her youth, except that she was industrious to learn the skills of gardening, cooking, sewing, cleaning, and laundry.  Bopcha was meticulous in her housekeeping, which would indicate early childhood training in domestic skills during her youth.

The families of Bopcha and Jaja lived in the same town in Poland, and probably attended Catholic Church together also.  In the very early part of the 1900s, parentally arranged marriages were common.  And that is reportedly how Jaja and Bopcha became a wedded couple, during a church ceremony arranged by their parents in the year 1908.  Bopcha was 16 years old, and Jaja was 26 years old.  The exact marriage date is not known by Bopcha and Jaja’s two daughters, and possibly not known to either Jaja or Grandma either.  The marriage is believed to have been a strained relationship, with the new couple probably not being particularly close or familiar with each other, since there was apparently no courtship prior to the arranged marriage.  During the early years of the marriage, it is possible that the two never really lived together, but remained with their respective families.  There were no children during the first 10 years of their marriage.

Amelia, their oldest daughter, reports that Jaja’s family name of “Wargoski” was considered to be of noble heritage, while Bopcha’s family name of “Tolpa” was considered common.  The Tolpa Family was considered to be fairly wealthy in terms of ownership of land, while the Wargoski family was less wealthy.  So the marriage was convenient to both family lines, according to this tradeoff theme.

In the approximate year of 1907, Jaja decided to take a ship across the Atlantic Ocean to visit the United States at that time (age of 28 approx), with stated intentions of returning back to Poland.  However, he never returned within the next few years time.  So the Tolpa family sent Bopcha by ship to the United States in the approx year of 1912, with destination as the last address listed on Jaja’s letters home to Poland.  Bopcha spoke no English at all, so she simply had her name and destination pinned to her clothing.  The US port of entry is believed to be Ellis Island. 

Here is what oldest daughter Amelia writes:  “I don’t know much about my grandparents at all.  Both mom and dad came over as immigrants in the early 1900s from Poland.  Mother’s maiden name was Tolpa, Wictoria Sally Tolpa  T-O-L-P-A.  Her husband, my dad, was Michael Wargoski.  I think his middle initial was “P,” and I think it stood for Peter.  But it was difficult to pin Dad down anything about him, prior to the time that we knew him as our daddy.  The way it was told to me, Mother’s (Bopcha’s) parents were looking for a husband for their daughter, Wickcha, in Polish. And because Wickcha’s (Bopcha’s) family was a wealthy family land-wise, not with money, but with land, they wanted Wickcha to have a marriage name whose name ended in “ski,” because that is what was known as a sowitchanemia, a high society name.  And the marriage was arranged without mother ever getting to see her husband until at the church on her wedding day.  They were married, and then dad came to the United States, and worked to earn enough money to bring his wife to the United States.  Five years went by, and Wickcha did not get a summons from her husband to come to the United States to join him.  So my grandmother, Mrs. Tolpa, said to my Mother, “I’m not going to support you while you have a husband.”  So they took her to Dansk, which is the only seaport that Poland has, and they bought someone’s ticket, and sent Wickcha to the United States on someone else’s ticket.  So there is no record of her ever entering this country, as we later discovered, when we tried to get a passport for her.  And she came over, and she had a big sign on placed on the front of her body that read, “Send me to Holyoke, Massachusetts.”   So when people saw the sign, they put her on the right trains, and she found her way to Holyoke, and found her husband.  And so, that is the story.”

The couple lived at first in Holyoke Massachusetts, and then in Pawtucket, Connecticut with mailing address of Westerly, Rhode Island, which was across the river from Pawtucket.  Bopcha worked as a domestic housekeeper taking care of children in one of the wealthier homes on Watch Hill, which is a very exclusive beach area. 

Jaja worked in a florist shop and oldest daughter Amelia writes the following:  “In Westerly, Rhode Island, Jaja worked in the Monroe florist shop.  And I could smell him coming home, because any flowers they didn’t sell, the workers were allowed to bring home.  And he used to come home with pails of carnations.  And they were so fragrant.  And we could smell them and get so excited and meet him as he was coming home with these flowers.  I can remember my childhood and greeting dad with these pails of carnations which were just so gloriously scented.  Well, that was what dad did there.  He hurt his back.  He was moving an orange tree, and hurt his back.  And for the rest of his life, he had a back problem and did not work -- much. And Grandma was the one who was weaving (in the mills) and working and she brought the family up.  Mom and dad were not very compatible.  And, as I told you, they met at the alter [in an arranged marriage].  And there used to be frequent arguments between them where she called him lazy.”

Jaja and Bopcha had 3 children, oldest son Zygmund who was born in approx 1914 and died at age seven, and two daughters, Amelia Grace oldest born 26 March, 1920 and Francis born 2 years later. 

This is what oldest daughter Amelia writes about Zygmund:  “I mentioned having a brother Zygmund.  I never got to know him because he died of pneumonia a year after I was born [died in 1921, approx].  Jaja loved to go fishing, and of course Zygmund was the apple of Jaja’s eye.  So he took Zygmund fishing with him out into the Pawcatuck River, which is the dividing line between Connecticut and Rhode Island in Westerly.  And Zygmund became over-exposed to the cold weather, and contracted pneumonia and died.  When he was very ill, and I was a little girl, I used to come over and pull his hair as he was lying there ill.  And he would say (in Polish), ““Mother, mother, come take this parrot away because she is attacking me again.”” (Laughing).  That is a story that Grandma, my mother, always told me.”

Two habits that Jaja had that were troublesome in the spousal relationship between Jaja and Bopcha were smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and wine. 

Jaja would buy both tobacco and cigarette paper separately.  Then he would use a cigarette rolling device to make his own smokes, which saved him much money this way.  He would smoke everywhere he went, in his home, in the car, outdoors, and everywhere.  The tobacco habit eventually resulted in both his death and Bopcha’s death from cancer, even though Bopcha never smoked.  The coughing and wheezing from the effects of tobacco are memorable sounds of his tobacco habit.

Jaja also had his own vineyard that surrounded both the front and rear of the Wargoski home in West Warwick.  He would ferment the grapes to make his own wine.  The wine was kept in wooden kegs downstairs in the basement, which was dark and musty, and smelled strongly of wine.

Jaja was unable to perform physical labor due to his back injury suffered at the florist shop, as mentioned above.  But he would earn extra money playing his violin at weddings.  Amelia writes this about Jaja’s violin playing: “Oh, yes.  Jaja loved to play the violin.  And while Mother was in Poland, and he hadn’t called her back to come to the United States, he was over at all the Polish weddings, playing his violin and (supposedly) romancing all the girls around.  And he did play the violin beautifully, until around the time I was already teaching school [in the early 1940s], until the time he was using a power saw, downstairs in his workshop area in the basement.  And he cut off his fingers, so he no longer had the fingers to play the violin.  And I can remember as a girl dancing around the kitchen floor with my mother, doing the Polish polkas while Jaja was playing away on his violin.  In fact, I love the violin so much, it is still my favorite instrument.  And during the Depression days (of the 1930s), just before Grandma moved from Westerly to West Warwick, I was taking violin lessons.   But I was not a good student.  I thought that I could learn the violin by looking at it.  I didn’t want to practice.   When we moved to West Warwick, we didn’t have the money for my lessons.  So I never continued.  But I inherited that love from Jaja.”

Another thing that Jaja did to earn money was to use his skills at light carpentry work.  He maintained a good set of handicraft tools and would do light labor such as making picture frames, installation of cabinetry and shelving, and doing other light woodcraft projects.  He would also do gardening projects, to include grafting branches onto fruit trees to make one tree produce better fruit or different varieties of fruit.  Jaja would also sell his own distilled spirits that he manufactured himself with his own whiskey still and fermentation vats.  The amount of profit is unknown, and likely not very large, since this income served to finance his own personal consumption of tobacco and alcohol. 

Bopcha was the main wage earner in the family.  She worked at first as a domestic, and then later in the cloth spinning factories.   She did the long hours of factory work because it was a much better paying job.  Oldest daughter Amelia writes:  “And it [the factory] was right there in town where she could walk to work, while at Watch Hill [for her domestic work], she had to be transported.  And I think she lived there [at Watch Hill] in the summer and did domestic work.  And then in the winter, apparently found a job in the factories, where from then on she worked in the mills.”

In 1930, the Wargoski family moved from Westerly, RI to West Warwick, RI.  It was the beginning of the depression The weaving mill where Bopcha worked in Westerly closed down.  And so the family moved to West Warwick because there were still mills open there.