History until WW1/WW2
The accessible source information about the KOKOLUS kin in Zawadka before the WW1 has been arranged into Descendant trees – altogether there is more than 250 people with a surname KOKOLUS in the complete list. The interconnection between the heads of these trees is not precisely known – the duty to keep the birth records was only established in the Austria-Hungary during the reign of the empress Maria Theresa (1740-1780).
I hope that some members of the Kokolus family living in Poland will now help me with completing the picture (I am from the Czech Republic).
Regarding the family history in Zawadka, two important factors influenced the future development of the kinship family:
- the misery and poverty which made a lot of the family members left Galicia and moved out to present-day Czechoslovakia, Ukraine or Russia. A lot of them immigrated to the USA for work, mostly to a cement mill in Pensylvania. Some of them settled down and started a family there, e.g. in hamlets such as Omrod, Egypt, Ironton, Shamokin, Allentown, Cementon, Whitehall, Macungie, Ballietsvile, etc. in Pensylvania, Mingo Junction in Ohio, etc. The data I have gained from the American immigration databases in the ports of Ellis Island, Baltimore, or Philadelphia are shown in the Immigrant Table (it was very work-intensive because some names were distorted by the immigration clerks and during the digitalization process of hand-written Passenger lists). According to a population census in the US (US Census 1910, 1920, 1930), it is evident that some immigrants resided in the USA and started families there. The most known are the KOKOLUS brothers Stefan (married Anna Drabik – they bought a farm in Ballietsville, PA in 1920), Sylvester (married Katherine Sukana), and Prokip (married Anna Esther Rajtarowska), partly due to a genealogical work of the Rajtarowski, Rubasky, and Kosenash family. In the Immigrants table there are still some obscurities – see the part Next Steps. Some of the family members also changed their surname while living in the US, e.g. to Koke or to Kalus.
- The Wisla Operation, during which (precisely in 1947) a vast majority of the population of this area was forcibly resettled to the north-west Poland.