Spotlight: Mary Stompar

 Mary Stompar is my great-great grandmother. I am documenting her here (not exhaustive) because I don't know much about her ancestry beyond her parent's names.

The earliest documentation I have for her is a 1905 New York Passenger list. It is very challenging to read, but here is a doctored version I made to facilitate interpretation:

Some details I see:

• M.... Piorek, 36 yrs, female, married, wife (?), can read and write
• Under "Nationality" you have to go a few names up to find that answer. There are two hands that wrote in that box, the first might say "Austria" with the second writing overtop it, maybe saying "Galicia". It is very hard to read so this may be wrong.
  
• Under "Race or People" it says Polish
• "Last Residence" is pretty hard to read, but I think it probably says "Swierczow", a town in Poland I have previously identified as their place of origin based on Ellis Island digitized records. That information can be seen here: http://jksfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-pioreks-probably-came-from_99.html
• They were on their way to Bridgeport, Connecticut
• Also listed with her are children Johana, Andra, and Sofhie. These are how Ancestry.com indexers spelled it, so I'm just following their spelling. We know from later records that she had children Martin (died in 1904, previous to this), John, Anna, Michael, Sophie, and Anthony.

Her last residence was in Swierczow, which I've previously identified as a small village outside of Kolbuszowa, Poland.

This location falls squarly inside of a the sub-region that Ancestry.com has identified part of my DNA as originating from:

Very little is known about Mary's parents. A few years ago I wrote to the Connecticut State Department and requested her death certificate which yielded her parents name. The informant was her son Anthony. Their names were Michael Stompor and Anna Jakubiec.

I personally love that her mother's name is Anna. That name has remained in the family ever since. Mary and her husband Peter Piorek named one of their daughter Anna (my great-grandmother). Anna then married Stefan Ramik (my great-grandfather, whose mother's name was also Anna) and they had a daughter named Anna (my grandmother's sister). My grandmother named my mother "Lee Ann", she named my sister "Breanna", and finally my own daughter's middle name is "Ann".

And that's about all I know. One additional detail is that in an interview with my mother's Aunt Ann several years ago (she recently passed away) we were told that Mary Stompar had a brother named Anthony Stompar who ended up in Chicago.

Through Ancestry DNA I have discovered a distant relations on my mother's side named "Richard Stomper", and another named "G.S." whose account is managed by a "Leslie Stompor". I hope to someday make contact with them and see what I might learn.