In the summer of 1893, a fourteen-year-old boy named Joseph Jankowski stepped off a ship and into the cotton country of Austin County, Texas. Nine years later, Vincent Gorka crossed from Bremen in steerage with eight dollars in his pocket. Their families had left the same corner of partitioned Poland — the villages around Poznań — for the same few square miles of Texas blackland, where Polish was spoken at St. Stanislaus in Chappell Hill and the sausage was made the old way.
In 1940, in Houston, Joseph's son Maximillian married Vincent's daughter Agnes, and the two stories became one family — ours. This archive collects what the records and the relatives remember: the ship manifests and homestead censuses, the headstones and wedding licenses, a grandmother's 1966 letter to the newspaper, and the house on Gay Street that rode away on a truck when the freeway came.
The Tree
Sixty-plus relatives across five generations and three surnames — every documented person clickable, with the original records attached.
The Timeline
From a village birth in 1843 to today — 29 chapters with the documents inline. And a place for you to add what you remember.
Gallery & Records
The complete 2019 Gorka book, newspaper clippings, certificates, censuses, and headstones — the primary sources, full size.