GUZEWICZ, FRANK (March 15, 1869 -- )Coal miner. Frank Guzewicz, who came in 1886 from Suwalki in the northeastern corner of Poland, near the Lithuanian border, to mine hard coal in Scranton, Pennsylvania, didn't realize how much he lost when someone tucked the letter "i" between the "z" and "e" of his last name. It was superfluous. Worse of all, whenever someone would look for his petition for naturalization (No. 7234, Vol 28, Quarter sessions Court, Lackawanna County, Pa., Sept. 14, 1911), it wouldn't appear in the new spelling of his last name. It would be Guzewicz.
According to the 2000 U. S. census, there were 163 persons named Guzewicz and 105 Guziewicz compared to 438 and 292, respectively, in Poland. William F. Hoffman, editor of Rodziny, official organ of the Polish Genealogical Society of America, said the name is derived from guz, which means bump in Polish. So far as is known, no one who owns the name has renamed himself Bumper as the Scranton family has changed it to Guziewicz.
Neither Guzewicz nor Guziewicz is as popular as the body is with the -owski suffix. For example, from the 15th century it became more and more popular than -ewicz or -iewicz and by the beginning of this century there were 3,659 Guzowski names, 33 less than Guzek, in Poland. Without the suffix, there were 4522 Guz names in Poland.
There's no place like Scranton, with its annual city directories and public records, to research the Guzewicz family. Frank Guzewicz, who boarded the Polaria, a 2074-ton German steamship, in Hamburg, Germany, was probably the first Guzewicz in the United States. He arrived in New York on October 18, 1886, and settled in Scranton when the first Polish church was less than a year old. He had seven children with his wife, Felicya, whom he married in 1898, when she arrived from Poland at the age of 21, and unfortunately the history of the family is still unwritten.
So far, I know that Frank Anthony, who was born June 98, 1900, was a mule driver in a coal mine, and died in August 1950.
Anthony was born June 8, 1902;
Helen, Jan. 9, 1907, a weaver in a silk mill;
Peter, Sept. 7, 1908, a roller in a record mill;
Casper, May 13, 1911, helper in a restaurant;
John, August 3, 1914, baker's helper;
and Magadalena, May 17, 1916.Changing their last name as they did took the starch of spending more time in research.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2011) [email protected]