The Prince of Fundy: Maine to Nova Scotia

A distinct childhood memory when I was ten years old was when my Dad, Jack Siulinski, invited me to tag along with him on a work assignment. Jack was a commercial photographer who provided film for mostly local commercials and advertisements. More on the experience of being on the job with my Dad below.

Portland Headlight in the foreground

The Prince of Fundy was a 387 foot car, truck and passenger “cruise ferry”. It made daily trips from Portland, Maine to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. The ship was operated by Lion Ferry AB of Halmstad, Sweden, and it’s crew and captains were mostly of Swedish origin. Lion Ferry operated similar cruise lines in Germany and Scandinavia. The tagline from a brochure from my Dad’s personal collection gives a compelling description: “The ocean ferry offering the excitement, luxury, and continental flare of an international cruise ship." The image to the left is from the personal collection of Jack Siulinski.

Photo advertisement

Life onboard included dining (including the staple Swedish Smorgasbord), dancing, shopping in the tax-free gift shop, and low stakes gambling (roulette, blackjack and slot machines). The round trip price was just $25 for an adult and $12.50 for a child. The charge for a vehicle was $32. One driver (passenger) was included in the vehicle charge. The saving of driving miles from Portland to Yarmouth was 858 miles. Passengers saved on time also; the one way voyage was ten hours. Today, the roundtrip cost of a car ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine to Yarmouth, NS is $210.

Back to my childhood experience on the job with my Dad: The assignment was for my Dad and I to board a small sport aircraft (a 4-seater similar to the image shown here) so that Dad could film the Prince of Fundy as it cruised out of Portland harbor into the Casco Bay Islands before heading out to the great Atlantic. This all sounded very exciting to a young child. Having never flown below, I was anxious what the experience would be like but I did not feel unsafe because I was with my Dad. 

Image Source: Pixabay

Once in flight the pilot putted along more or less in a straight-forward trajectory and soon were were several miles away from the coast. The view was spectacular but once we caught up with the Prince, the pilot started making these continuous swirling motions as the ship cruised along at full speed. I did not expect to experience a constant feeling of merry-go-round. With every turn, I began to feel dizzy. At first I kept the feeling to myself but when the dizziness turned to nausea, I told my Dad I was feeling sick. My suffering did not last too much longer as my Dad got the pictures he needed and we headed back to the landing strip. Was I happy to be on the ground! I remember telling my Dad that when I got off the plane, I felt like I was walking on the moon.

Fishing Boats in Yarmouth

Yarmouth, Nova Scotia is a port town located on the Bay of Fundy in south-western Nova Scotia, Canada. It lies at the Atlantic entrance to the Bay of Fundy, 210 miles by road west of Halifax. The site may well have been visited by Leif Eriksson the Lucky and his Norsemen around 1000 AD. The town of Yarmouth developed with the fishing industry and has a gorgeous heritage district filled with charming ex-sea captains' mansions with elaborately painted wood features, widow's walks and glass-walled turrets. 

During the heyday of the Prince of Fundy's operation, the service provided a boon to tourism in Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Today, there is no longer a ferry servicing Portland to Yarmouth but there is a high speed car ferry service from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth.

Referenced material and source citations: 

1. New York Times,  A New Car Ferry with a Difference, August 30, 1970: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/08/30/archives/a-new-car-ferry-with-a-difference.html
2. Source of Fishing Boats image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotia_Prince_Cruises
3. Press Release by Torben K. Anderson, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, Lion Ferry
4. Brochures and photographs from personal collection of Jack Siulinski
5. Source of paragraph about Yarmouth: https://tinyurl.com/y3zzvsaj

Remembering the Artistic Talents of Jack

Jack at work as WGAN-TV cameraman

For the anniversary post of my Dad, Jack William Siulinski, who passed away six years ago today, I would like to honor the passion he had for his work and his love of photography.

Yesterday, I delivered a speech to a large audience of genealogists at the San Mateo County Genealogical Society in California. The speech was persuasive with a focus to promote blogging as an excellent platform to share and preserve the writing of one’s family history.

For this event, I opened my presentation in a different way. In preparing for this event, I came to recognize that my father and I shared similar passions; that of storytelling. He told stories with the images he created in his photography and film work. I tell stories through my writing with careful selection of images. Although, I don’t have the added talent that my Dad had for painting and drawing, I consider that when I am writing a blog post, I am working on a different kind of canvas. Here are three examples of the creative talents of my Dad's work:

Portland Headlight image taken from a small chartered plane

1963 Christmas Photo Card

A simple but beautiful drawing...

Jack's love of photography began before his formal training at the Rochester Institute of Technology where he received an Associate in Applied Science degree in 1953. That I know because I am in possession of his carefully created photo albums that document his military life from enlistment to discharge. He would learn the technical skills of the craft after his days in the Navy. Here are just a few of the photography tools that were used by my father back in the day:

The author posing for the artist

Part of the legacy Jack left to his family are numerous portraits that he took of us during our childhood.  He was precise in the framing of his subjects. I believe he really enjoyed the tangible aspect to the craft when he was able to physically create prints from the filmed images he took. His work for the studio involved countless assignments on the road to cover news stories and special events. He also filmed several TV commercials often using his children as subjects eager to see themselves on the big screen! My favorite event that he filmed was a whale watching excursion in Casco Bay in Portland which was made into a television program. 

Military Life post World War II

Jack's military life took him to faraway remote places including the Mariana Islands (Guam) and the Aleutian Islands (Adak, Alaska). He entered the Navy in August 1946 as a Construction Electrician. He did his basic training in Bainbridge, Maryland, then went on what he called a "troop train" to California. At Port Hueneme in Ventura County, he attended a Radio and Communications school for twelve weeks (the Seabees program described in an earlier post) before boarding a ship for a five-day cruise to Hawaii via San Francisco. Although in Hawaii for only one day, this provided enough time for checking out the beach and taking some pictures including the image below of Diamond Head on Oahu Island.
From here, he went on to his first major duty assignment that lasted almost two years - the 103rd NCB (Naval Construction Battalion) in Guam in the South Pacific. He lived in a tent for over a year then upgraded to a Quonset hut shown below.

YEAR	LOCATION	ASSIGNMENT
August 1946	Bainbridge, MD	Basic Training
Oct 1946	Port Hueneme, CA	Radio and Communication School
Jan 1947	Guam, Mariana Islands 103rd NCB	Duty Assignment 1
Apr 1949	Adak, Aleutian Islands	Duty Assignment 2
July 1950	Seattle, WA	Discharge

Even though Jack studied communications in the Port Hueneme training program, he ended up operating a power plant in Guam and later in Alaska as well. Besides the extreme heat, the living conditions in the South Pacific offered unusual and frequent visitors in and around the tents, in Jack's own words: rats the size of tomcats. Although, his service in Guam might have been considered a hardship, his experience in Alaska offered a contrast and clearly a different flavor.

Jack's second major duty assignment while serving in the Navy was in the Aleutian Islands at the southern Bering Sea. He was assigned to Adak Island which sits on Kuluk Bay, 1,300 miles southwest of Anchorage on the latitude of Vancouver Island in Canada. It has a population of 320 (source of stats: navy history). Jack may hold the distinction in the Siulinski family to have traveled to the area where man first walked onto the American continent via the Bering Land Bridge. Ages ago, much of the Earth's water supply was locked up in huge ice masses. Eventually, the sea level fell exposing vast areas of land (previously underwater) creating a continuous land bridge that stretched between Siberia and Alaska. Most archaeologists agree that it was across this Bering Land Bridge, also called Beringia, that humans first passed from Asia to populate the Americas. 

Source for the map: worldatlas
Source for the text describing the Bering Land Bridge: PBS
One of the most vivid images that Jack offered during numerous hours of being interviewed for his life story was when he flew over the Aleutian Islands.

"We flew practically to the end of the Aleutian chain.  We were flying a route above the mountaintops, you could see the craters of active mountains [volcanoes]."

Mt Edgecumbe outside of Sitka

Image source: AlaskaPride Blog

While serving in Alaska, possibly brought on by the elements and stress of work, Jack suffered a collapsed lung in June of 1950. While hospitalized in Alaska for diagnosis and observation, the Korean War flared up. He was sent to Seattle on a ship where he was then discharged on July 26, 1950j, and sent back to Maine on a train. Ironically and fortunately, the illness may have prevented a tour of duty in Korea. Unfortunately, though, the July discharge in Seattle was processed just one month prior to Jack completing his full tour of duty. HE would later have problems re-enlisting into the Navy Reserves which he tried to do before meeting his future wife. This issue may have also affected Jack not receiving a full disability upon discharge which would have provided living benefits for him and his family during the time of convalescence. Although his condition was later deemed to be  "service-connected", he was only entitled to the medical benefits necessary to treat the condition. These facts made life difficult for a while but he persevered through the time of marriage and a new family. (source: Oct 1952 VA letter from personal archives of Jack Siulinski)

Although Jack did not face combat in his service years, he did serve in the Navy during the time that the World War II Victory Medal was awarded to servicemen.

Endnote: Much of the material for this post was taken from a recorded interview with Jack in 2007. Also, many documents and pictures saved from his military days were used to create the story of his military life beginning in 1946 to the time period after his discharge and when he met his wife in 1950.

Albin Szulinski Revealed

The odd title to this post comes from the impact that genealogy often provides: information not known about an ancestor is revealed through research and a bit of luck. The children of Adam Thomas Siulinski, Sr. (Jack and Adam, Jr.) did not get to know their grandparents, Bronislava (Bessie) and Albert (Albin) Szulinski. The name change and the son becoming separated from his family of origin presumably came about from Adam, Sr. marrying a woman of another faith from the family's traditional Catholic creed. Here is the only image I have of Albin Szulinski. It came from a photo album in the possession of Adam and Jean Siulinski who reside in South Portland, Maine.

Thanks to Beth Snyder from RAOGK for offering this obituary to help shed away the mystery of who Albin Szulinski really was:

Obituary April 13, 1943 Schenectady Gazette

Mass will be celebrated this morning at 9am in St. Adalbert's Church for Albin Szulinski, 70, retired, who died Saturday at his home, 1019 Second Ave, after an illness of about a week.  Burial will be in St. Mary's cemetery, McClellan St.  The A B Brzozowski funeral home, 644 Crane St., will be open this morning after 3:30pm. He was born in Poland and lived in this city about 50 years.  He worked at the American Locomotive Co. about 25 years and at one time was employed about 10 years at the GE Co.  He belonged to St. Josefa society 181, Z P R K.  He retired in 1931. Besides his wife, Mrs. Bronizlawa Podoraki Szulinski, he leaves three sons, Adam, Joseph and Walter Szulinski.There are three grandchildren.

Although, genealogists can provide factual information about an individual who lived many years ago, offering a sense of what their personality was really like is a challenging task indeed. Mr. Szulinski seemingly was a very traditional, conservative hard-working industrial worker from Schenectady, New York having immigrated from Poland around the turn of the century. Any child's fascination with locomotives might have its origins in the place Albin chose to work most of his life: the American Locomotive Company. Could Albin have worked a train as famous as the Nation's First Diesel-Electric Locomotive, Alco from 1924?

Source: THE SCHENECTADY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE - a service of the Schenectady County Public Library.

Brick Wall Broken!

"Genealogy is a pursuit of hidden knowledge, and success at the end of the search is like the perfect outcome of a mystery murder". -Graham Landrum

It was three years ago when I began searching for the records of my grandfather's family of origin at the Transylvania Public Library in Brevard, NC. After countless hours of research, the mother of Adam T. Siulinski has at last been found one month prior to a planned trip to the city where she raised her family. Bronislawa Podorski Szulinski's obituary was found on Google News Archive which popped up through navigating the Albany State Library website during a late night search at my home in Oakland last weekend. This incredible find will be a point of reference that I can use to find vital documents for my grandfather's family members, and will piece together other documents I have already found to confirm the path of this Polish immigrant family's journey. The source of Mrs. Szulinski's obituary (seen to the left) is the Schenectady Gazette printed on May 14, 1953.

One of the reasons why this find is so significant is because the Szulinski family in Schenectady became disconnected from the newly forming Siulinski family in Portland as far back as 1928 when Adam Siulinski married Ouida Dykeman. Their sons, Adam Jr. and Jack, never got to know this half of their family line. Here is a time that the work of genealogy can open a window (if only for a glimpse) to shed some light on a long forgotten family.

As noted above, the two family names are spelled differently. What has been speculated is that when Adam married outside the traditional faith of the family, a separation occurred thereby cutting off communication for all those years. Or, did Adam just choose to stay out of touch because of other family-related reasons? What is certain is that somewhere along the line, Adam changed his name from Szulinski to Siulinski.

Armed with the facts about Mrs. Szulinski's life, I used another website (fultonhistory) to find the obituaries of Adam's brothers, Walter and Joseph. They both died in middle age, but what of?...Stay tuned. Also, Adam was known to have a sister but she was not named in Mrs. Szulinski's obituary possibly because she was not living at the time. Here is another part to piece together the family that Adam came from.

Over these years, many people have helped me break the brick wall. I would like to formally thank four of them: Jerry McGovern, Marybeth Frederick, Nancy Servin and Michelle LePaule.