Next Steps
Dear relatives,
the www.kokolus.com project has reached my time limits and as far as I know, I have drained all the public sources of information. If you want to know more about your ancestors you simply HAVE T O help me, i.e. I need you to give me all the information you have.
The family tree in the Czech Republic and Slovakia is today very elaborate.
On the other hand, the genealogy in Poland after 1900 and the lineages in Ukraine and Russia are almost unknown. These family trees in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia cannot be completed without a devoted work of a local person. Will we finally find someone?
Regrettably, the situation is very similar in case of the genealogical tree in the USA and Canada. The Immigrant table is the cornerstone of the Kokolus history in the US and Canada. All the Kokolus family members who immigrated to the USA through Ellis Island, Baltimore or Philadelphia are, according to my information, listed in this table are. Some of them are also mentioned in the census-papers of the US Census in 1910, 1920 or 1930. Searching in these databases have mostly been extremely difficult, since the names were, during the process of digitalization of the hand-written ship’s Passenger lists, often distorted, e.g. Kockolos, Kokrelus, Kokolers, Kokol.s, Kokotus, etc.
Those of you who are descendants of one of the brothers Prokop, Stefan or Silvester Kokolus are lucky – your ancestors are known! - they are listed in the Immigrant Table under abbreviations IM-13, IM-14 and IM-34.
But what about other Kokolus dependency in the US and Canada? Please, acknowledge yourselves with the fact that Immigrant Table, built-up according to the ship’s Passenger lists, is your ONLY connection with the entire family tree from Zawadka! Nevertheless, this table suffers from two types of imperfection:
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in some cases, it is not possible to identify the immigrant, i.e. include him in a particular descendant tree
from Zawadka ZW-1 to ZW-6. There are several reasons for this, such as:
- in the Passenger lists only the age of the immigrant is stated, not the entire date of birth, which means that the actual birth date could diverge up to 2 years,
- minors often claimed to be older in order to be allowed to work in the US,
- it cannot be checked whether a particular immigrant settled down in the US or whether he or she came back to Europe,
- often it is not stated who were the immigrant’s relatives already settled in the US, neither his closest family, such as father, brothers, etc.
- it is almost certain that there has been more Kokolus immigrants to the US than listed in the Immigrant Table. Who are these people and what happened with them? For illustration, I was not able to find Passenger lists of some Kokolus family members, who were later stated in the US Census, neither have I found their ancestors from Zawadka.
Help to complete this interesting mosaic! If you have any information about your great-grandfather or great-grandmother Kokolus who came to the US, please send me an email to info@kokolus.com. Indicate especially the names of his/her brothers or father, when and by which ship did he/she came, when did he/she die or sail back to Europe, who was his wife/her husband, when and where were they wedded, etc. Do not hesitate, even a tiny piece of information can be important!
In any case, the same system can be applied as in the case of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia: with your kind help, I am able to complete the Immigrant table and tack on the ancestors of each immigrant as late as to 1700. Nevertheless, to map all the descendants’ stories in the US/Canada is beyond my time potential. There is a chance that much of this demanding work has already been done by late Tom McAvinia. However, after his death I cannot get in touch with his relatives and thus get access to the date he gathered. Is there anyone who knows about his work and would like to join me in this quest?
Therefore, despite the fact that a lot of material of various registers and archives in Poland and Slovakia, as well as data from diverse genealogical databases, have been processed, there are still some blanks in the Kokolus Story. What is necessary to clear them out in particular countries?: