The Mystery of My Great Aunt Marta

After our daughter Evie died five years ago, we decided to have a “celebration” instead of a traditional funeral. Part of that celebration was to be a slideshow of moments from Evie’s life. So in mid-November 2018 I set myself to the bittersweet task of scrolling through iPhoto and dragging photos to a folder. I alternated between laughing and weeping. To the casual observer, I probably looked like a fucking lunatic.

But one photo from April 2014 jumped out at me:

Evie (a.k.a. The Daughter) standing in front of a brick rowhome on Kenilworth Street in South Philly, doing an unconscious imitation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

This is the rowhome where my great-grandparents and their children lived after they emigrated from Poland in 1902. I’d only found out about it recently, from a distant cousin who’d tracked the address down in census records. If there was such a thing as an ancestral Swierczynski family home, this was it.

As I stared at the photo, I was so desperate to be back in that moment with Evie, outside 106 Kenilworth. I wanted to tell my younger self to stop and realize how special that moment was. Overwhelmed, I closed iPhoto. I could only do this slideshow in shifts. Trying to do it all at once was way too much.

But for the rest of the day, something about that Kenilworth Street photo nagged at me. A piece of family history I had uncovered, but was now forgetting. I reactivated my Ancestry account and started looking through the tree I’d started more than four years ago. I found it fairly quickly—the thing that nagged at me. Four years ago, it had struck me as heartbreaking. Now, it flat-out wrecked me.

My great-grandfather Anthony Swierczynski had lost his second child, a daughter named Marta, who was 15 years old.

This happened exactly one hundred years before we lost Evie, who was also 15 years old when she died.

My Great Aunt Marta, along with her mother, my great-grandmother Maryanna, perished in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Which means that my daughter and great aunt were the same age when they died, one hundred years apart:

Marta Swierczynski: 1903 – 1918

Evie Swierczynski: 2003 - 2018

The morning of December 8 I woke up determined to pin down the exact dates that Maryanna and Marta Swierczynski died. I asked Evie for help. I didn’t want to make a habit of this—the last thing I wanted to do was bother her. (“Hey, Daughter, do you know where I put my keys?”) But in this case, I really needed her guidance.

Help me figure out how to find the death certificates for your great-great grandmom Maryanna and your great-great Aunt Marta, I asked.

And I swear, just minutes later, I had one of those blind moments of pure internet luck and found myself faced with a no-frills PDF list of death records in Pennsylvania for the year 1918. I scrolled through until I find my great-grandmother. Her surname—go figure—was mispelled:

Maryanna Swierczinskie; --155299; Phila; Sept. 30.

My great-grandmothers’ full life, including an arduous journey halfway around the world, would be reduced to a single typed line.

But there was no sign of her daughter Marta.

There was a “Martha Swiertz” who died on May 12, 1918 in Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania (up near Bloomsburg). But that couldn’t be her. Unless Great Aunt Marta died earlier in the year, in another part of the state.

I rechecked my great-grandmother’s listing to see what else I could use. There was the number: 155299. Using it, I was able to track down her death certificate using the browsing feature at Ancestry.com. After about forty minutes of literal doom-scrolling, I found a scan of her actual death certificate.

Maryanna Swierczynski died at 2 a.m. on September 30 from bronchial pneumonia due to influenza. She had been sick for five days. She was only 40 years old.

It made sense that Marta would have died around the same time. Perhaps she was caring for her ailing mother, then fell ill herself? I started to browse forward in time, then backwards. The names of the dead rolled by. So many names. None of the them are my Great Aunt.

I went back to the original no-frills PDF. Is it possible that Marta’s surname has also been mangled, but in a different way?

Yes. It was entirely possible:

Swerczinska, Martha; --151842; Phila; Oct. 5.

And using that number, I was able to find a scan of her death certificate, too.

My Great Aunt Marta died October 5, just five days after her mother passed—and a mere two days after her mother’s funeral. It is doubtful that she had been able to attend. (I have no way of knowing who was healthy enough to be graveside.) Three days later, Marta was laid to rest next to her mother in the same cemetery on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

Both my Great Aunt Marta and Evie died the same month, a century apart.

And I couldn’t believe something so tragic as losing a 15-year-old daughter could be forgotten within a generation or two. Why wasn’t this impossibly sad story passed down? One hundred years from now, will our descendants know nothing of Evie?

“It was generally women who nursed the ill,” Laura Spinney writes in Pale Rider, her history of the 1918 epidemic. “They were the ones who registered the sights and sounds of the sickroom, who laid out the dead and took in the orphans. They were the link between the personal and the collective.”

It would make sense that if the Swierczynski household fell ill, then it would be the two oldest women—my great-grandmother and great aunt—who would care for the sick. Perhaps this was why they didn’t survive.

But also, according to Spinney: “As far as we know, the immune system is just as robust in a fifteen-year-old as it is in a twenty-eight-year-old, yet in 1918, [though] fifteen-year-olds … got ill in large numbers, relatively few of them died.”

Great Aunt Marta was one of the few, then. I don’t know what she looks like, or what her voice sounded like, or what dreams she had. But I feel her, and remember her.

Elsewhere in the Swierczy-verse

• This version of the newsletter will always remain free, but I’m adding a paid tier that will include one or two bonus posts a month. What kind of bonus posts, you ask? Well, they’ll be portions of my current work in progress, Man Full of Trouble, which is part memoir, part true crime. (The piece above is a sample from my manuscript.) If I had to give a Trouble a log line, it’d be something like this: “Reeling from the death of his daughter, a mystery novelist investigates the rise and fall of the gangster who killed a family member 100 years ago.” I’m doing the paid tier thing to help fund my research, but also light a fire under my Polish ass to finally wrap up the manuscript I’ve been working on for more than five years now. If you’re able and have the interest, consider subscribing—I will thank each and every one of you in the finished book.

• We’re heading into the final week of our the Sixth Annual Team Evie Holiday Book Drive, benefitting the Literally Healing program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Huge thanks to everyone who has donated a book so far. If you’re able, and want to take advantage of some Cyber Monday deals or Giving Tuesday opportunities, you can find the foundation’s wish list (and other details) right here.

• My new novel, California Bear, will be in finer bookstores everywhere in a little over a month. Publishers Weekly gave it starred review, calling it “jaw-dropping… this is tour de force”! Nothing helps a novel succeed like strong pre-orders, so if you’re so-inclined, let your favorite bookstore or online retailer know you’d like a copy. In the next (free) edition of this newsletter, I’ll have more details about book events and where you’ll be able to find signed copies.

• Speaking of… signed and personalized copies of my short story collection Lush and other tales of Boozy Mayhem are still available at the Cimarron Street Books store, along with back issues of bare*bones. Just choose the “signed paperback” option in the drop-down variant menu, and let me know if you’d like it inscribed to you or someone you love—I fulfill these orders personally. (I’ve been throwing in nifty new Gleeful Mayhem stickers in every package.) And Lush is now available in a Kindle version, painstakingly reformatted by publisher/editor John Scoleri! Only $7.99, it will live on your phone or e-reader forever.

That’s all for now. Be kind to each other and consider taking a moment to explore the untold stories in your own family tree.

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WHO THE...? You’ve signed up for a newsletter from writer Duane Swierczynski, who has written a dozen novels, hundreds of comic books, a fistful of screenplays and audio dramas, and other violent entertainments. He works out of a tiny private-eye style office in Old Pasadena. Learn more at gleefulmayhem.com and linktr.ee/swierczy.