Monday, July 3, 2000
I got some very nice mail today: the National Archives of Canada answered my query from May about Grandma’s immigration record with a copy of the passenger list page that lists her. There’s some good stuff in there. She’s listed as Josepha Zurbyk, single female, age 18, born in Liczkowce, Poland, a citizen of Poland of Polish race (that’s incorrect, but it’s probably because she was more literate in Polish than in Ukrainian thanks to the despicable policies of the Polish government in forcing Ukrainian children to go to school in Polish for most of the time). She could read Polish, and paid for her passage herself. She had worked as a domestic in her own country, and planned to continue working as a domestic in Canada (I guess she didn’t realize she’d be picking potatoes). Her destination is listed as her uncle, Zurbyk Wawro (backwards), of Elphinstone, Manitoba. Her nearest relative in the old country is listed as her brother-in-law, Mr. Antoni Kaczmar, of Liczkowce, Poland. That would have been the "nasty Polack", in Grandma’s indelicate phrase, that her sister Katherine had married. She was neither mentally nor physically defective, nor was she tubercular. She carried passport number 313, issued in Kopyczynce, Poland, on May 30, 1930, and had $10, which was probably the minimum amount of money you could have and still be allowed to enter Canada.
The ship, as noted before, was the Antonia, departing Liverpool, England, on June 20th, 1930, arriving in Quebec City on June 28th. There’s a note scrawled on the paper that implies that she originally left from Danzig (later Gdansk, Poland) on June 12, 1930, but I can’t make out the name of the ship. Most of the other people on the same page have the same notation.
The record came as two 11x17-inch photocopies, so I’ve had to do a little reconstruction in the scans, since my scanner doesn’t scan pages that are that large.
Josepha Zurbyk, Immigration Record/Passenger List
Posted at 7:36:07 PM
