GALESKI, LOUIS (Jan. 14, 1829 -- August 11, 1891)Military officer. The aliases of Captain Louis Galeski were glued to different periods of his life. Not many know that Galecki was the family name. Galeski was reaped in the United States. It's like a wart. Wherever you go in Poland, you will not find a Galeski name. Galewski, yes; Galeski, no. In 2002, there were more than 5,000 Galecki names with no and distinguishing marks through, over and under the letters. The name is still doing well. William F. Hoffman, an expert on Polish names, found two origins for Galecki -- (1) knob or ball and (2) jackdaw.
Whatever you think of it, the unfolding of Ludwig Galecki is extremely unique. He was born in the town of Ostrow, surrounded by peat bogs 35 km. from Lublin, where Jewish and Polish families were about the same size, and he was regaled in his younger years with stories of military heroes. He was educated in the military school at Vienna in Austria and then served in the Austrian army. Early in 1848, immediately upon hearing of riots in Budapest, Hungary, he followed in the footsteps of two Polish generals, Bem and Wysocki, and joined the Hungarian insurgents who wanted to overthrow the Habsburgs. Thousands of Polish, Austrian and Italian volunteers supported Lajos Kossuth in the struggle for Hungarian independence. Franz Joseph called in Russian troops to defeat Kossuth's forces. Galecki wound up in England.
Little is known of his arrival in New York in 1849 from Liverpool, England, and his line of work. He said he was a clerk on January 24, 1853, when an army officer recruited him in New York for Company D of the First United States Dragoons. At that time, the army officer, as Americans have a habit of doing, changed his name to Lewis Galeski and sent him to Fort Leavenworth. The same person probably placed an advertisement for recruits in a New York newspaper and signed up more dragoon recruits. By the time the ice in the West was melted, Fort Leavenworth had more than 90 much needed recruits ready to send to the 1st Dragoons in California. Only Galeski didn't go. Apparently he had a dispute with the people in the Quartermaster Department over 300 horses in their hands. Instead of giving each recruit a horse to ride across the western half of the United States, the stable hands tied strings of horses, three or four in each set, to supply wagons. The column, under the command of Lt. Col. E. J. Steptoe, left Fort Leavenworth without Private Galeski. It took the recruits 92 days to march 1,216 miles to Salt Lake City where the column was divided. Surreptitiously, Galeski returned to New York and assumed another name.
He soon found himself embroiled in illegal recruiting volunteers for the Crimean War. On April 28, 1855, Louis Celagi, as Galeski was listed, became a lieutenant under Colonel Jozef Smolinski in a secret organization, first in Boston and then in Quebec, and forwarded hundreds of volunteers enlisted in the United States to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He outwitted U. S. authorities until President Franklin Pierce caught the British minister to the United States doling out money to Smolinski and his accomplices for recruiting soldiers in the United States and expelled a number of them for breaking U. S. neutrality laws.
Celage's name would still be peppered in the records of the U. S. Marine Corps. On May 12, 1856, when Brevet Lieutenant Colonel W. Dulany had a detachment of Marines in Boston, Celage joined it and was promoted to the rank of sergeant on May 23, 1856; reduced to private, March 19, 1857; and was discharged on April 10, 1857.
During his second enlistment in the Marine Corps, which began at Brooklyn, New York, on April 15, 1857, he sailed on the USS Decatur, a large warship of 560 tons and manned by a crew of 150 officers and sailors, to evacuate U. S. citizens from Nicaragua. The troublemaker in that country was William Walker, an American filibuster, who conquered Nicaragua on July 12, 1856, and was ousted the following year. Private Celage remained with the detachment of Marines on board the Decatur until the end of 1859. One month later he was dishonorably discharged at Boston.
It was probably inevitable that Pelagia Tyssowski, whom Galeski met in the first days of the Civil War, would change his life. She arrived in the nation's capital in 1850 when she was a young Polish immigrant. Her father, John Tyssowski, who started the Krakow Uprising in 1846 but didn't finish it, was first a French teacher in Washington and then a cartographer. He died in 1857. The first and second generation of the Tyssowski family were pillars of St. Mary's Church of the Mother of God, the first Roman Catholic Church in the nation's capital. The church, which stood at 5th and H sts., N. W., was only four years old when the Polish family joined the congregation. The first pastor, Rev. Mathias Alig, who was born in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, married Pelagia Tyssowski to Captain Galetzki, as he spelled the groom's name, on October 15, 1861.
The new bridegroom didn't get along with his commanding officer and resigned as captain of Co. A., 4th New York Mounted Riflemen, on November 9, 1861. After a two-year hiatus, he enrolled in Co. H., 58th N. Y. Infantry, October 20, 1863, and was discharged January 10, 1865.
After the war, Galeski was a clerk in the office of the Quartermaster General and died on August 11, 1891. The date on his headstone, however, is August 3, 1891. The family, which lived at 1200 S Street, N. W., in the nation's capital, buried their dead in more than two cemeteries. When his first child died in 1863, Captain Galeski bought a family lot in Glenwood Cemetery, where he eventually buried three children, and he probably expected to be buried there. But he's not. His remains lie in Lot 139 at Arlington National Cemetery with his wife, Pelagia, who died April 16, 1900, and their daughter, Alexandra Louise, who died September 17, 1935. Seven years after his death, Pelagia Galeski and her brother, Thaddeus Tyssowski, entertained Henryk Sienkiewicz, the first Polish writer to gain international recognition, in Washington, D. C., for several weeks. The daughter was a teacher and a school principal a long time.
From: Edward Pinkowski - e-mail: [email protected] - (2011)
Galecki (Galeski), Louis
Captain in the Union Army. Joined the 4th Cavalry of New York as captain, Aug. 15, 1861. Later was transferred to the 58th Infantry of New York, Nov. 15, 1861. Honorably discharged Jan. 10, 1865. Deceased.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943