Person Sheet

A photo of Katarzyna Delenta’s birth certificate, reissued in 1952, is below. It says:

Katherine Delenta

REPUBLIC OF POLAND
Province RZESZOW
District NISKO
The Civil Law Office KAMIEN
No. 113/1890 [113 refers to the line item in the registry]

EXTRACT FROM BIRTH CERTIFICATE

I attest that KATARZYNA DALENTA
daughter of ANDRZEJ DALETA and HONORATA nee LACH
of parents DALENTA(s) was born in KAMIEN
the third of November (3.11)
the year of one thousand EIGHT HUNDRED NINETY, 3.11.1890
KAMIEN, 2 APRIL, 1952

In addidtion, a photocopy of her birth registery is below (line 113, top left), showing her parents’ names.

The family name was also spelled Dalenta (the name on her immigration ship’s manifest list) and Dalanta, but Katherine came to adopt her older brother Joseph’s spelling of Delenta, as did her brother Luke.

The Koln

Katarzyna, who came to take the name Katherine in the U.S., left Poland at age 18 with a friend aboard the Koln on Feb. 4, 1909, sailing from Bremen, Germany, and arriving at Ellis Island on Feb. 12 (although one document had it Feb. 19), 1909 — her brother, Joseph, made the same journey on Feb. 10. She was probably 18 (according to her birth certificate), though the ship’s passenger manifest listed her age as 17. The ship Koln, incidentally, steamed the Atlantic from 1899 to 1914, held 1,970 passengers (120 second class, 1,850 third class) and measured 54 feet wide by 429 feet long.

We obtained her passenger ship records from the National Archives. (The Ellis Island website added her name in June 2001, but misspelled her home town as Kannen — it was Kamien). See the passenger records:

Katherine met Wojciech George Lasica in New Jersey and married him in 1913 when she was 22; it was a short courtship since George didn’t arrive until 15 months earlier. After they were married, George and Katherine Lasica lived with George Jadenski (originally Jandzienszki) and Sophie (Lasica) Jadenski (George Lasica’s sister) for a few years at 39 Fourth St. in Passaic, NJ. Robert Bielen Jr. writes in 2018:

“I was surprised to learn that your grandmother lived with my grandmother Caroline at 39 Fourth Street in Passaic. That four-room flat saw many people come and go, including my mother and my three aunts. It was last occupied by my aunt Matilda and her husband Andy Wyka in the early 1990s. (Mattie survived Andy but died in a nursing care facility.)”

By 1930, Katherine and George had bought the wonderful house at 8 Herman St. in East Paterson (later Elmwood Park), a block from Garfield, NJ. She traveled on occasion to Toronto to see her nephew, Adam Lasica (who moved from Poland to Canada) and his family. She applied for naturalization in June 1941 and took the oath of allegiance, becoming a U.S. citizen, on Feb. 25, 1942.

We called her “Babci” (“Babcia” is Polish for Grandmother). She was a kind woman and loved her grandkids. (Joseph Lasica: She died when I was 17, and it was one of the few times I saw my father cry.) We don’t have any early photos of Babcia.