Drapiewski, Leo Frank
(Dec. 18, 1884 -- Sept. 4, 1949)
UndertakerBorn and raised with dead bodies in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, where his father, Anthony, was an undertaker since 1881. The family name is hardly consistent in public records. Twice, in 1918 and 1942, he registered for the military draft under the same name. His father's name is spelled the same way in a history of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and it is the same in Poland. When the Drapiewski family came from Poland, it was broke and unable to buy train tickets to Trevorton, Pennsylvania, where their relatives were huddled in a Polish colony, which was started in 1852. The Drapiewskis then walked from Castle Garden, New York, where they got off the boat, to the fledgling mining hamlet of Trevorton, several miles from Shamokin, in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania.
As the country grew, the father, Martin Drapiewski, moved to Mount Carmel, eight miles from Shamokin, and sons went in different directions, Anthony to Nanticoke, in another coal field of Pennsylvania, Stanley to the soft coal fields of Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania, and Matthew, who changed his last name to Dropeski, settled in the so-called thumb section of Michigan, where the first families drained the swamplands, planted crops, raised pigs, among other animals , and in 1858 organized the first congregation of Polish Catholics in Michigan. The first Polish undertaker in Nanticoke, who had worked in the coal mines of Northumberland County and various factories in Pittsburgh and Chicago, had coal dust in his veins. He went back to work in a hard coal mine at Nanticoke, four miles from Wilkes Barre, and attended night school. After an accident in a mine shaft, he learned shoe repairing and opened a shop in Nanticoke, where Poles were the largest ethnic group, and he married early in 1883 Kazimiera Szoptanski, who came from Poland when she was a young child. Until 1881, the only undertaker in Nanticoke, where mining accidents happened everyday, buried more Polish miners than any other nationality. He wanted to sell his business and urged Anthony Drapiewski to buy it. In time Leo, who was three years old when his father converted the shoe shop into a funeral parlor in Nanticoke, became the first son of the family to go into the business with him. Although Vincent became a dentist, Edmund a druggist, and Albin Drapiewski a medical doctor, the sons, nine in all, took part in funerals in one way or other. When Leo died, his mother continued to run the business, as is typical of undertakers in the United States, and she was in her 80s when I talked to her and learned the history of A. Drapiewski and Sons - Undertakers. She was 104 years old when she died in January 1972. She outlived thirteen children.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)