![[Karge J. Grave Picture]](KargeJ_06.JPG)
Joseph Karge - Epilogue
Adventures in Genealogical Research
by Edward Pinkowski
On June 13,1976, when the 16th annual Polish Day was held at Ford Delaware on Pea Patch Island, a summer guest of St. Hedwig's parish in Wilmington, Delaware, created considerable interest among the participants by revealing to his host, Rev. Thomas Gardocki, pastor of St. Hedwig's, that he was a grandnephew of General Joseph Karge, whose picture hanging over a mantle in the Captain Mlotkowski Museum suddenly caught his eyes. The two priests paused a moment to look at the old photograph as they were changing their outer garments in preparation for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on the nation's 200th birthday. The revelation triggered a chain of adventures in historical research and memoirs that have not yet been finished.
Unfortunately, except for a short account of Rev. Ignacy Karge in Chester Grabowski's Post Eagle, August 25, 1976, very littie is known of the attention given to the matter, and people who can recall littie more of General Karge's life than Ann Sidwa has covered in the biography of him will appreciate the discoveries made since Father Karge's visit to Fort Delaware two years ago.
Father Ignacy Karge
The immediate attention was centered, of course, on the grandnephew of General Karge. Rev. Ignacy Karge was born January 13, 1937, the eldest of three children of John and Pelagia Karge, on the same farm in Terespotockie, two and a half miles (four kilometers southwest of Opalenica, the seat of the parish church, where Joseph Karge was bom July 4, 1823.
In the 1820's the village of Terespotockie was German in everything but name. The fields and woods surrounding the desolate village were inhabited largely by German families. The father of General Karge, whose first name is not definitely known, acquired 34 hectares of land at Terespotockie after serving as a cavalry officer under Napoleon. Immediately he turned the land to new uses. Not all his German neighbors remained to witness the transformation. Their places were taken by Polish families.
Although the Karge family worshipped at St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Church in Opalenica, no records, according to Father Ignacy, exist to show how many of the children were baptized there. German troops burned the church records during Worid War II.
Father Ignacy says that his grandfather, Roman Karge, and his father, John were baptized at St. Matthew's and buried in the church graveyard. Roman was the brother of General Karge. When he was questioned two years ago, Father Ignacy did not know the name of the third brother.
After the German occupation of Poland, John Karge joined the Polish underground and hindered Hitler's forces wherever possible. When he was finally caught, the German troops tortured the hell out of him. He died on February 21, 1947, at the age of 53.
His son, Ignacy, was ordained to the priesthood in the large cathedral at Poznan and returned to St. Matthew's in Opalenica to conduct his first mass. For the next sixteen years, from 1961 to 1977, he served in nine different parishes in the diocese of Poznan. Last year he was appointed pastor of St. Jacob the Great and Saint Hedwig at Lusowo.
Visit to Princeton
Shortly after Father Ignacy saw the work done by the hands of the Captain Mlotkowski Society membership, Charles Kilczewski and his wife of 45 years arranged to take him on a visit to the grave of Joseph Karge. It was late in the tenth morning of August when they stopped at my home in Philadelphia to pick up John Kowalewski and me. Kowalewski, then an acolyte of St. Joachim's in Northeast Philadelphia and a pledged member of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, had no time to eat breakfast. We stopped at the scenie Riverfront Restaurant on the Delaware to eat and drink and to find out some of the threads of Father Ignacy's life. The Kilczewskis picked up the tab.
We realized right away that we were to share in an unusual adventure. Not until that day when we were to join two branches of the Karge family together, one living and the other dead, did we know the historical importance of our visit to the famous grayeyard in Princeton, New Jersey. One was an assistant pastor of Immaculate Conception parish at Glowna, Poland, and the other was buried under American soil more than eight decades ago. Whatever time separated them, they were born on the same soil, had the same family name, and in the formative years of their lives attended the same institutions.
To Father Ignacy the contrast in the tombstones of Princeton and Opalenica was inexplicable. His ancestors buried in St. Matthew's cemetery were Catholics. The bodies in the Princeton Cemetery were mostly Presbyterians. Joseph Karge and his wife were received as members of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton on June 3, 1876, he by an examination and she by a certificate. The cemetery in which they were buried contained the tombs of more illustrious men than any other cemetery in New Jersey. Somebody once referred to it as the Wastminster Abbey of the United States.
The oldest grave is that of Rev. Aaron Burr, second president of the College of New Jersey, who died in 1757, shortly after the college was moved from Newark to Princeton. Next to his grave - at his feet, so to speak - lies his son of the same name who was vicepresident of the United States from 1801 to 1805.
The second Aaron Burr and Joseph Karge shared one thing in common. Their bodies were accompanied to the cemetery by the faculty and students of the College of New Jersey, as Princeton University was known to 1896.
Their headstones, however, were not put up the same way. Burr's relatives immediately took care of his stone. No headstone was placed on General Karge's grave untii 1906. The funds for it were raised by the Princeton faculty.
The other bodies in the Karge plot have no headstones. They include his widow, Theodosia Marie, who died September 5, 1896.
When we visited General Karge's grave we found a wreath in front of his headstone and were pleased, especially Father Ignacy, that someone remembered the Polish Civil War hero. It marked the last visit, on Memorial Day, of a delegation from the Polish Legion of American Veterans, Department of New Jersey.
It also recalled the work of a Trenton historian and philatelist, Victor A. Wojciechowski, who discovered General Karge's grave on Aprii 2,1938, and conducted the first Polish memorial service to the Civil War general. The P.L.A.V. picked up where he left off.
The same year Wojciechowski first saw Karge's grave, he also formed the New Jersey Historical Society and used it to conduct campaigns for recognition of Polish notables.
On June 29,1942, he wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and asked him to issue a memorial stamp on the 50th anniversary of General Karge's death. He also sent letters to Postmaster General F. C. Walker, various congressmen and other prominent office holders.
He also got a Polish-trained artist, Boleslaus Cybis. who came to this country in 1939 to paint murals for the polish Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, to do a portrait of General Karge for a group of stamp collectors in Trenton.
After paying our homage, we spent several hours looking for more traces of the Karge family in Princeton. At the public library, in the microfilm files of the Princeton Press, we found a brief obituary, just a few lines, of Mrs. Karge.
By her General Karge had two sons, Ladislaus, born Aprii 2, 1853, and Romulus Franciscus, or Romauld as he preferred to list his name, December 31, 1856, but the local newspaper failed to give any information about them in her obituary. They took enough courses at the University to qualify for professional schools but were not considered graduates of Princeton. Nevertheless, Ladislaus received a law degree from Columbia in 1877 and Romauld, who attended the Physicians and Surgeons' college at Princeton, carried a M. D. after his name.
As we pored through Princeton directories, newspaper files, and other material, we expected to find some of Father Ignacy's American cousins. No one knew the slightest thing about them. Again the obituaries of the two sons were sparse. Romauid died May 19, 1919, at Princeton, and Ladislaus died some years later.
Forgotten Brother
Before Father Ignacy ended his first sojourn in the United States. another adventure awaited us, and it was arranged very intricately.
He wanted to know whether or not the letters his father wrote to Victor A. Wojciechowski were still in existence. Knowing that the discoverer of General Karge's grave had passed away some years before, we decided, late as it was, to take a stab at locating his widow or one of the children in Trenton. We did not know their first names. The telephone directory was no help.
Charles Kilczewski and l went to the rectory of St. Hedwig's church at Brunswick and Olden Avenues for help. If we had known that Victor Wojciechowski was one of the founders of the Polish National church in Trenton, we would not have gone to a Roman Catholic Church to inquire about him. Charles, however, was familiar with St. Hedwig's because his uncle was a member there and he frequently went there to mass. The pastor and his assistant were occupied inside the church, so we asked the housekeeper if she could help us. We walked out of the rectory with the addresses of three familes of the same name and we did not know which, if any, was related to the Victor Wojciechowski family.
From one of these persons we obtained the telephone number of his daughter, Lee King, with whom her mother Helen and her brother Victor lived, and Helen Kilczewski made arrangements with her to visit their home on Clearfieid Avenue the following Sunday. My wife Connie and grandson Mark joined us in this second adventure.
In spite of her poor health, Mrs. Wojciechowski was happy to meet us and recall many trips she made with her husband, to whom she was married in 1914, to the graves of General Karge, Dr. Nicholas Belleville, General Albin Schoepf, Leopold Boeck and other prominent persons. She did not have much of the correspondence between her husband and Father Ignacy's father, but she had references to them in scrapbooks.
Victor Wojciechowski kept scrapbooks containing the items that he contributed to newspapers in his lifetime. He kept an account of them. By 1944, for example, he wrote 256 articles in Polish and 205 in English. I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Wojciechowski for presenting many of them in scrapbooks to me.
In one of the scrapbooks I found an item in which Wojciechowski inquired about General Karge's brother. He used the first name of Jacob and listed him as a pastor of a German Catholic parish at Hoboken, New Jersey, where he died about 1889.
The information was not upheld by the Catholic directories of the period.
What I found when I consulted the Catholic directories of England and the United States for the period from 1850 to 1912 for the same surname was only Rev. Florian Karge. He was in charge of the Church of the Nativity, Portsmouth, Ohio, from about 1852 to 1871, with misssions at Lick Run and Monroe Furnace, and died Aprii 23,1875, when he was pastor of Our Lady of Victory Church at Delhi, Ohio.
I wrote to Rev. J. Paul Gruber, the current pastor of Our Lady of Victory Church, and received a reply written August 23, 1976, that Rev. Florian Karge, O.F.M., was the last Franciscan to serve the parish.
"At Delhi, Ohio, in the old cemetery of St. Stephen now dedicated to Our Lady of Victory," wrote Father Gruber, "we find the grave of Father Francis Karge, O.F.M.
"Father Francis Karge was born in Gratz, Austria, on October 4, 1810, and was ordained October 4, 1834. Coming to Cincinnati in 1852, he labored as pastor at the Church of the Annunciation, Portsmouth, Ohio, from 1852 till 1871 and as pastor of Delhi, Ohio, from 1871 untii 1875. At the age of 65 years he died at Delhi, April 23, 1875. Father Karge was known as Father Florian at Delhi and that many of the oldtimers were named 'Florian' at baptism for their pastor. On the tombstone he is listed as Father Franciscan Florian Karge, native of Posen."
The last phrase, "native of Posen," as Germans spelled Poznan, is important to keep in mind. Joseph Karge was, as we know, born in the same province. Shortly after his death his obituary in the Princeton College Bulletin said that his mother wanted him and his brother (first name not given) to study for the priesthood. Father Ignacy knew that one of them became a Catholic priest. Joseph Karge decided to do something else. When the revolution broke out in 1848, he was wounded in the fighting and his brother traveled with him about 100 miles to Szczecin (Stettin), the main Polish seaport, and boarded a ship for Paris. Somewhere along the way they separated.
When he was well Joseph Karge returned to the barricades in Poland and was captured. Eventually he escaped to England and met his brother by accident in London, where he was seeking political asylum, and they decided to sail for New York, where they landed together in 1851.
There are discrepancies in the Karge story. One is that the Princeton College Bulletin referred to only two sons in the family. Father Ignacy provides the name of a third son, his grandfather, Roman, who inherited the family farm where he was born in 1937.
Another source said that Joseph Karge had a brother in his New Jersey cavalry regiment. It cannot be proven. Another person, Eugene Karge, who lived at 1634 South Catalina Street, Los Angles, California, in 1939, described himself as a nephew of General Karge. Checking out each variation can be more fun than watching Ben Franklin flying his kite in a thunderstorm."
Source: 155th Anniversary of the Birth of Joseph Karge. Polish Civil War Hero at Fort Delaware. Anniversary Bulletin (June 11, 1978).