Kopankiewicz, MartinWhether his first name was Martin or Anthony, as the Rev. Francis Bolek referred to him in Who's Who in Polish America, is the question. According to two reliable sources - U.S. Census and Zgoda - it was Martin Kopankiewicz. This is then an effort to combine whatever notes exist under either name.
As the 1870 census of New York reported, Martin Kopankiewicz, a 31-year old shoemaker from Prussia, lived at 7 Orchard Street in New York's Ward 10 with his wife of the same age and country of birth and their son, Stanislaw, three years old, who was born in New York. It is not clear whether Kopankiewicz had his own shop or worked in a shoe factory because he lived in a neighborhood of Polish shoemakers. In a little bit of trivia, one of his neighbors, who lived in Margaret Clyde's boarding house, would not give his last name, to the census taker. He was a 35-year-old night watchman named Valentine. The census taker never found him at home and picked up what he reported from his landlady.
Kopankiewicz was one of the leaders of the Poles who settled in New York after the Uprising of 1863 in Poland. Beginning in the 1830s the Polish colony in New York had a long history of starting Polish organizations and periodicals, but they failed for lack of support. The most prominent organization in the 1870s was "Nowojorskie Zjednoczenie Polakow w Ameryce" (The New York Alliance of Poles in America). Whether or not he started it, Kopankiewicz was its president in 1872 when it sent $50 to help the Polish victims of the Chicago fire in 1871.
Kopankiewicz made efforts to establish the first Polish parish in New York. In his time, when Polish priests passed through New York, he begged them to say Mass for the fervent Polish settlers in and around the largest city in the country. Further details of his leadership in the Polish parish are scarce. One of the best historians of the period, Father Waclaw Kruszka, who devoted many pages to the trials and tribulations of St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr, Catholic Church, including the pastors, German interlopers, and disagreements with John Cardinal McCIoskey, who was promoted to New York in 1864, did not provide any details of Kopankiewicz's role in these affairs. No doubt that the leader of the New York Poles worshipped at St. Francis of Assisi, the church of the German Franciscan Fathers on 31 st Street, just west of Sixth Avenue, as did other Polish immigrants from the time of their arrival in the United States until Father Wojciech Mielcusny, who was appointed pastor of the Polish parish in 1874, moved the holy services from St. Francis to an Irish church on Cannon Street.
Little is known of the two Polish priests, Teofil Poszpisilik and Eugene Dzikowicz, who did most of God's work in the Franciscan church at 135 West 31st Street. After one of their services, the Poles held a meeting in the basement of St. Francis of Assisi Church and formed the Society of St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr. The group began to raise funds to build its own church. When Father Mielcusny arrived, they had only $300 in the bank, as he wrote to Gazeta Polska Katolicka on June 15, 1875.
Because many of the worshippers didn't like Father Mielcusny, with whom they had many fights, especially after he moved his pulpit to an Irish church, they quit Kopankiewicz's organization. As a result, Father Mielcusny was forced to leave the Irish church and celebrate Mass in other churches. His support dwindled. One wonders why Kopankiewicz couldn't heal the breach between his erstwhile followers, or dissidents, and Mielcusny. Nevertheless, the priest found a property on Henry Street, where be built a wooden church, and invited the Polish community of New York to the first Mass on December 18, 1875. Evidently Cardinal McCIoskey did not want the Polish people in his archdiocese to have their own church. When Count Peter Wodzicki, who belonged to St. Stanislaus parish, tried to change his mind, Cardinal McCIoskey said: "A pig shanty is sufficient for the Poles as a church."
The quarrels continued, The people who lived around the Polish church - and obviously didn't go there to pray - objected to the dances the parish held in order to pay the bills. One night the New York police, many of whom were Irish immigrants, arrested the dancers for "immoral behavior." After that the priest that Kopankiewicz apparently supported left New York in the waning days of 1876 and the following year the property was in the hands of creditors. The Polish church was closed.
Ironically, in the second effort to open another house of worship, Kopankiewicz found in 1882 that the pastor of St. Stanislaus would not support Zgoda, the first organ of the Polish National Alliance. Kopankiewicz was the business manager of the newspaper and reported on April 29, 1882, that 628 of the 1140 persons who received the paper still owed him for their subscriptions. One of the causes for the deficit was, as Zgoda's editor wrote in Polish, "the pulpit of St. Stanislaus Church was in continued opposition to the newly organized Polish National Alliance and its fledgling organ - Zgoda - in spite of the fact that not a single word had been printed against the Polish Roman Catholic Church or any of its priests." Kopankiewicz condemned the lack of support in New York for the six-month-old Zgoda and died soon afterward.
Presumably he was buried in a cemetery on Long Island that lists burials by date and not by name. The exact date of his death has not yet been rooted out.
New York marriage records and the 1900 census of San Francisco, California, albeit without the Polish suffix, list persons of the same name. For example, Andrew Kopankiew, as it is written in 1900, who came from the German partition of Poland in 1860, was of the same occupation as Martin Kopankiewicz and about the same age. In 1900, his wife, Magdalen, nearly half his age, whom he married in 1872, the same year as she emigrated from Poland, and he lived on Divisadero Street, San Francisco, with one child, Vera, who was born in California in January 1889. The census taker wrote that they raised two of eleven children. It could be that either or both Annie and Ladislaw Kopankiewicz, who were married in New York 1889 and 1895, respectively, were the children of the two San Franciscans.
Whatever happened to them, two-thirds of San Francisco went up in flames after a terrible earthquake and shocks struck it in 1906. At least 3,000 persons then died. No more is known of this Kopankiewicz family.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)