Dorszewski FamilyWar stories grow apace. On September 12, 1918, two Polish druggists, Stefan and Wiktor Dorszewski, went to their draft boards in Philadelphia to register for military duty in the First World War. The older of the two, Stefan Dorszewski, who came from Magdeburg, Germany, in 1901, had a drug store in the heart of the Polish neighborhood in Port Richmond. Whether or not they were related, Wiktor Dorszewski was a well-known druggist in Frankford and general secretary of the Polish Beneficial Association. When he returned to his home at 2316 Orthodox Street, his wife, Anna (nee Slomkowski), whom he married June 11, 1911, asked him what happened at the police station where he went to register.
"Nothing," he said. "I heard that the Army and the Navy don't need druggists to prepare medicines."
Fortunately the war ended on November 11, 1918. Had the two Dorszewskis been called to war, it would have left the Polish population of Philadelphia, which stood at approximately 50,000 in 1920, with only three Polish druggists. Neither Stefan nor Wiktor Dorszewski stayed in Philadelphia very long. Stefan Marion Dorszewski, who was born June 11, 1881, in Germany, and arrived in the port of New York July 3, 1901, on board the 3747-ton steamship Albano, was missed in the censuses of Philadelphia. On October 28, 1942, his son, Alfred S. Dorszewski, who was born in 1905 at Philadelphia, joined the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, and nothing is known of his fate.
The same is true of Wiktor Dorszewski, although more is known about him. He was born September 18, 1883, in Rogalin, near Poznan, Poland, the son of Michael Dorszewski and Theodosia Wiznarowicz, and educated in German schools. He left his homeland on the Graf Waldersee and immediately after arrival in the United States on November 24, 1906, apparently became active in the Polish Beneficial Association, for he was soon elected general secretary of the new organization. In 1911, the year he married the daughter of a hotel owner in the Logan section of Philadelphia, he set out to improve his life and was graduated in 1912 from the Medico-Chirurgical College of Pharmacy in Philadelphia. In 1916, his alma mater stood in the way of a parkway between City Hall and Logan Circle and, without time to build something for 700 students, it consolidated with the University of Pennsylvania.
After leaving the Polish Beneficial Association, Wiktor Dorszewski served as vice president of Richmond Trust Company and became president of the bank in August of 1920. For whatever reason, he was not satisfied with his work in Philadelphia and moved in the 1920s with his wife and children to Chester, where he rented a house for thirty dollars a month, and probably died. His daughter, Wanda, graduated from Chester High School in 1932. After that the slate is blank. His wife, or widow, as the case might be was back in Philadelphia in 1952. The story of the Dorszewski family is therefore unfinished.
The family name is derived from dorsz, Polish word for cod fish. Dorszewski would then mean fisherman.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009); Ancestry.com; Hoffman, William F., Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings; Rymut, Kazimierz, Slownik nazwisk wspolczesnie w Polsce uzywanych (Directory of Surnames in Current Use in Poland; and Leonard, John William, Who's Who in Finance and Banking.