My maternal grandmother’s house was a sanctuary to me – a place of unconditional love. We visited my grandmother every Saturday when I was growing up, and she often cared for me and my siblings when we were sick, while our parents worked. I feel such a strong connection to the house that it almost feels like an ancestor.
To us, she was simply Grandmom S. My grandmother was born Helena Catharine Menet in 1911, according to her birth and baptismal certificates, but by the time she was our grandmother she was known as Harriet Schneidenwind. I wondered why, as the fourth child and middle daughter of Polish immigrants, she chose (or was given) the German name of Harriet (which I understood to be its origins). Her parents emigrated in the 1890s from Austrian-partitioned Poland (known as Galicia), whose residents mostly spoke German, so perhaps that explains the connection? However, my great-grandparents, Galician peasants who identified as Polish, spoke that language, and my grandmother, raised in a Polish-speaking home in America, spoke only Polish until the first grade of elementary school.
However! I discovered that Harriet is the English version of the French name Henriette, according to Wikipedia. And since the surname of my great-grandfather, Menet, is French in origin, that makes more sense! Menet is an uncommon surname in Poland, but there are a few Poles who have that last name. (I have yet to trace my Polish ancestry back to France, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to, since my Polish ancestors left few records, and those are mostly in Poland.)
Okay, enough on that tangent! Back to the house …
As of this year, 2025, my ancestors and their descendants have owned the house on South Fifth Street for 100 years. My great-grandfather, Hieronim (Henry) Menet, bought the house in 1925. My grandmother, who married Charles Schneidenwind in 1941, inherited the house from her father in 1945, and a Schneidenwind has lived in that house ever since, for the past 80 years.
Continue reading “The house of a hundred years”
Harriet and the Berky 