In The Polish Town

My first trip overseas was to Poland and I'd move there except my house is Polish already, with a flowering meadow across the lane, etc. Finding Sylvia Plath's grandmother's Polish home address I Google-Mapped it. Ernestine Kottke Plath died in an Oregon mental hospital in 1919 but her childhood home still stands: 12, Strozewo (a village).

I saw the address in Ernestine Plath's Oregon State Hospital record.

Just six miles away is a Plath landmark town, under German rule spelled "Budsin," today in Polish spelled "Budzyn," population 2,000. It's Plath's grandfather's hometown. Sylvia called it a "manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia." Theodor Plath married local girl Ernestine in 1882 and settled there. I think Ernestine gave birth to Otto in Grabowo because she had relatives there, but Otto grew up in Budsin, and tired of maps I wanted to see the place.

"Strolling" through the older part of Budsin I saw where the Plaths might have raised their children, not quite to their adulthood. The year Otto was born the German Empire's increasingly menacing army started cleansing the empire of Russians, Poles, and Jews. Masses of ethnic Germans like the Plaths were already leaving for the U.S., partly to escape conscription. Otto was 15 when he went to the U.S. His father, and then his mother and five siblings, ages 4 to 13, left Prussia the following year, 1901.

Traditional Polish houses are stone covered in paintable stucco. I learned Gmin means local government, and this is Budzyn's City Hall at the center of town.

Poles put flowers wherever they feel like it. It's a celebratory thing.

For the address of the Plath house in Budsin I'd need church or civil records not readily accessible. But I like Poland for itself and felt at home there. My mother's parents were Polish immigrants. They died when I was very small but I remember the Polishness of their house and ours. I hope you too grew up amid abundant cabbage-rose decor.

Sylvia Plath's Black Relatives: More

The Nicholsons rented 116R North New Jersey Ave., Atlantic City, in 1915. The storefront and rear extension are additions; more typical houses c. 1910 sit to its right and left. [1]

Their marriage lasted 20 years -- from the wedding in Boston in 1906 to sometime after 1925, when the husband, a waiter, was last listed in the Atlantic City directory. In 1928 the wife was still using his surname, "Nicholson" -- in various papers rendered as "Nichols," "Nicholason," and "Nicholas." Husband Christopher J. Nicholson also gave his birth year as 1881, 1882, and 1883, making his later years yet harder to trace.

Something led Nicholson to leave his wife, nee Anna Greenwood, on her own in Atlantic City -- where their four children had died in 1918, of influenza, all four names carved on a single gravestone. Perhaps he sought a better job or a marital separation. Anna remained in Atlantic City, working as a domestic.

Anna was Sylvia Plath's blood relative, the Viennese great-aunt who had married a black American. I have learned that more than any other U.S. city, fin de siecle Boston saw unskilled white immigrant females like Anna marry African-American men employed in skilled occupations. For young women from Europe not yet seized by the very American horror at "miscegenation" (word coined in 1863) it was a step up.

Christopher Nicholson's 1942 draft registration card -- the next obtainable document -- shows him in New York City, working downtown and lodging in Harlem. Anna, under her maiden name, had remarried in New York in 1932, to a white British ironworker formerly employed in Atlantic City. They'd moved to England.

U.S. federal census takers missed Nicholson in both 1930 and 1940. Nicholson filed for Social Security benefits on 23 August 1948, giving what is probably his real birthday: 21 August 1883. [2] The 1950 federal census shows him retired, at the same address as in 1942; his marital status is "separated." I found no divorce in New York legal records, only a civil suit Nicholson filed in the Bronx, in 1953, against one Dominick DeLillo, the nature of which I don't know.

Nicholson's death record still eludes me.* Nicholson's niece Aurelia Plath never mentioned any Nicholsons in letters or papers we have access to.

It weighed on me that I had told Anna's story and not Christopher's. Now I have told all I know.

[1] This is the only Nicholson family address still standing. The 1915 New Jersey census shows a racially integrated neighborhood.

[2] Nicholson's 1918 draft registration card gives his birthday as 4 July 1881. It was common for men to claim to the draft board that they were older. Otto Plath's brother did the same.

*Update, July 2024: The New York City death record says Nicholson died in Manhattan on 26 October 1956. He was buried on 31 October in Rosehill-Rosedale Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey. The cemetery confirmed that his grave has no marker.

Sylvia Plath Had Black Cousins

Uncle Christopher J. Nicholson checked "Negro" on his draft card, 1918. (Click image to enlarge.)

Sylvia Plath had African-American second cousins who were first cousins to her mother Aurelia Schober Plath. Using public records and genealogical tools, I drilled down into Sylvia's Austrian-born maternal relatives the Greenwoods and Schobers, and discovered:

Sylvia's great-aunt -- her grandmother's sister Anna Johanna Greenwood, from Vienna -- in Boston in 1906 married African-American waiter Christopher Nicholson.

Interracial marriages were legal in Massachusetts, but rare. Sylvia Plath's writings, and what we have of her mother's writings, never mention an Aunt Anna or Annie. I had thought that odd because Aurelia Plath and her mother so much valued contact and visits with relatives. Sylvia's future grandmother with her sister Annie as teenagers left Vienna in 1904 and together crossed the Atlantic to Boston, where they moved in with their brother. Both girls soon married professional waiters. Annie married Christopher J. Nicholson, born in Boston of parents from North Carolina.

In 1907 the Nicholsons moved to Philadelphia, where in November Christopher Jr. was born. The state of Pennsylvania registered the baby as "mulatto." Their daughter Deborah's birth certificate says "1/2 black, 1/2 white."

The federal census for 1910 shows the Nicholsons living in a South Philadelphia boarding house, its head and tenants all designated black except for Nicholson, 28, his wife, 26, and their son and daughter, all designated white. In 1911 the family moved to New Jersey. Its 1915 state census says Nicholson and the children are black.

Nicholson worked steadily as a waiter at Atlantic City's Royal Palace Hotel. In September 1918 he registered for the draft as Christopher Jessee Nicholson, checkmarking the category "Negro," and on the back of the card, the categories "Slender" and "Tall."

The couple had another son, Melvin, and a daughter, Martha. Seeking what happened to them led me to this horrifying photo:

The Nicholson children, ages 11, 8, 5, and 3, all died in October 1918, probably of influenza, and are buried in Atlantic City Cemetery, Pleasantville, New Jersey.

Their parents survived. Nicholson lost his waiter job in 1919 and Atlantic City directories show him employed as a laborer through 1923. Then he is a waiter again, but after 1925 I found no further records in Atlantic City. Anna Nicholson surfaces, alone, in the 1928 directory, working as a domestic. In 1932, as Anna Greenwood she married British-born Joseph Campbell in New York City. The couple moved to England in 1939. The story of their later life is posted here.

Sylvia's Plath's mother Aurelia Schober was 12 when her four cousins died. Did she know about them? Could anyone keep secret such a family tragedy? I think Aurelia, who lived with her mother for 40 years, probably knew. Did Sylvia know that she had African-American relatives? Probably not. But we do.

The Nicholson family should be added to Sylvia Plath's family tree.

Draft registration card: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-8BRR-L4C?i=3882&cc=1968530&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AKZJ7-ZNJ  Headstone: Findagrave.com. "England as of 1939": In January 2024 I researched Anna's later life and the story is posted here.

Sylvia Plath's Hungarian Roots

Sylvia Plath's DNA test results would break the Internet, but we can know right now that on her mother's side Sylvia was part Hungarian. Her maternal great-great grandfather Franziskus Paier or Pajer, pronounced "pyre," was born in Pest in 1822. In Austria he Germanized his name to Franz Bayer ("byer").

Sylvia grew up with her maternal grandmother, "Grammy," whose mother Barbara was Franz Bayer's daughter. Sylvia noted in her diary for 1945 that "Great-Grammy died," so she knew of Barbara, but mentioned her again only in the line "Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother / Reach hag hands to haul me in" ("All the Dead Dears"). Sylvia's chief interest in things Hungarian was a brief acquaintance with a young man named Attila, written up in her journal as exotically attractive.

In case you cannot view the family tree pictured below (click to enlarge), it centers on Franz Bayer, the Hungarian ancestor. Franz's parents were Georg Pajer and Elisabeth Buzar of Pest, Hungary.

Parish records show that Franz's paternal and maternal grandparents were married and baptized children in Pest, so Franz was at least of the third generation. Franz married Vienna-born Josepha Magdalena Schmidt on March 5, 1848, in Vienna. Eight days later a violent revolution erupted exactly there.

Click to enlarge. Tree from FamilySearch.org, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Their daughter Barbara Josefa Bayer, Sylvia's great-grandmother, was 12 and her sister Anna Amalia 7 when they were orphaned in 1866. So it is true that Sylvia's great-grandmother was an orphan, as Plath family lore said. Because the name Barbara Bayer was not changed, Barbara probably was sent to a relative or an orphanage.

None of this was unusual. Men went where there were jobs, changed their names to help assimilate. Life expectancy in Austria was 40, so Vienna had thousands of orphans.

Regarding Sylvia Plath's maternal ancestry, all births, weddings and burials from the 1700s into the 1900s were Roman Catholic, and all births were to married couples. Like the elusive "Native American ancestor" that families in the Americas like to claim, the lone Jew or "gypsy ancestress" in European families is mostly a figment, conjured when it is advantageous to do so, and I think Plath in her poem "Daddy" was doing that.

Barbara Bayer at 18 married Matthias Grunwald in Vienna. Between 1902 and 1908 Matthias and Barbara and their seven grown children all left Vienna for the U.S. and changed the family name to Greenwood.

Through their father, Sylvia and her brother were more Polish than they were Hungarian, and above all their heritage was German and Austrian. Pressured in school to become "all-American," neither Sylvia nor her mother Aurelia mentioned in writing their slender Hungarian root.

Another Suicide in Sylvia Plath's Family

Sylvia's maternal grandmother, "Grammy" Greenwood Schober (b. 1887) had six siblings. All left Vienna, Austria, for the United States. Grammy's brothers Joseph Greenwood (b. 1876) and Otto Greenwood (b. 1877) moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and worked as waiters in hotels. In 1951 Otto Greenwood hanged himself. He was 74, married, and 15 years retired from his waiter job. The Missouri death certificate says "Suffocation by hanging in his house Dec. 28 1951 about 12 noon."

Otto Greenwood was Aurelia Plath's uncle and Sylvia Plath's great-uncle. There is no reference to him or his death in any known Plath documents. He had a wife, Angela, and two grown children. Like Aurelia Plath's waiter father Frank Schober, Otto Greenwood belonged to the International Geneva Association for hospitality workers. [1] Greenwood was cremated on Dec. 31, 1951.

The Gregg shorthand character preceding the coded designation "974X" under "How did injury occur?" says "respiration."

[1] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 December 1951, p. 13.