Re: Bad Kowalski in Chicago
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In reply to:
Bad Kowalski in Chicago
Sandy 8/03/05
Sandy, if you're willing to be patient and do a little legwork, I think you do have enough to figure out what you're looking for...
If he served in Joliet, then his records with the Illinois Dept of Corrections are available to you. You would have to write to them and request his case number from Cook County (where he would have been prosecuted), as well as his date and place of birth. I'm assuming they were born in Poland from your post, so if that's the case, then they probably would have emigrated post-1905 (a key date with immigration records). It's possible that the IDOC records will give you the exact town, but it's more likely that his booking records in Chicago will have the more complete information. They are public files and you can file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a copy of his booking record and "any other information about his parentage, place of birth or details of his entrance into the United States (including date, place, and mode of transit)."
With his date of birth and any other details that you can find, you can go to the National Archives and Records Administration center on S. Pulaski and try to pull his immigration petition. If it's not on file, then you would have to write to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is now part of the Dept of Homeland Security, and request the Naturalization petitions for any/all of your ancestors who would have been naturalized.
Given how freakishly common the name Kowalski is, it will be really important to provide ICE with the greatest amount of detail possible.
Now, if they were the children of immigrants and were born in this country, then is it possible they had to register for the draft, either in 1917 for WWI or between 1942-58 for WWII or Korea? If so, then those records are also open for you to obtain (again, NARA on S. Pulaski can help you). They will tell you where the boys were born and info on their parents and next of kin.
Now the problem you might run into is that before 1930, birth certificates were optional in much of this country. If these guys were born before then, you'll have to try to find alternative records to trace them. Church records (baptismal certificates) (as long as they were Catholic or Lutheran) and Census records are the easiest to obtain. Other records that I've been able to use thru the years are school records, especially as the school pictures are now part of archives for many districts and that makes it nice to find out more about them and how they lived.
I hope some of this helps. If you need a hand, let me know and I'll try to do whatever I can to help you whittle thru this one step at a time.
Happy hunting...
More Replies:
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Re: Bad Kowalski in Chicago
Sandy 11/02/05
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Re: Bad Kowalski in Chicago
Janis Nearing 11/03/05
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Re: Bad Kowalski in Chicago