Sieminski, Casimir A.
(Dec. 1, 1888 - Oct. 1, 1958)Had he been killed in a mining accident in his greenhorn years, nobody would have known his real name. It was written Charles Shemanski in 1910 and Simmansky in 1920 when his life was bound up with Maltby Colliery, on a back road of Swoyersville (the second "s" was added in 1950), where the Lehigh Valley Coal Company had a mine shaft, a patch named Maltby, and dumping grounds for coal it couldn't sell. Nearly everybody in Maltby supposedly had a Polish name. Only few knew how to spell it, on account of illiteracy, and Swoyersville, Luzerne County, across the river from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was worst than a three-ring circus. In 1910, for example, three of the 5,396 persons in Swoyersville were from Poland, 743 from Russia, and 1,057 from Austria, but most of them were Polish. Casimir, who changed it to Charles, Sieminski was a case in point. Born in the village of Baboszewo, 45 miles northwest of Warsaw, Poland, he arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, aboard the 7409 gross ton vessel Koln, directly from Bremen, Germany, on July 26, 1906, and continued his journey to Chester, on the Delaware River, 15 miles southwest of Philadelphia, where an older brother, Adam, awaited him. Soon after Adam's first child was born in Chester on August 5, 1907, the brothers moved to Maltby and went to work together in a coal mine. When Casimir Sieminski got married, they all lived together for several years in the coal patch. When the census was taken of Swoyersville in 1910, it had 322 married Polish women and 174 boarders from Galicia.
Adam and Charles Sieminski were married to Polish women and lived in a patch of twenty houses. On payday at Maltby Colliery, $5.25 was taken out of their wages each month for their living quarters. In 1915, when he still spent 10 hours or more a day, six days a week, crouching over his tools underground, Charles Sieminski was elected Justice of the Peace in Swoyersville, without the second "s," and in 1925 was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Borough Council. In between, he graduated from the Wilkes-Barre Mining Institute and was promoted to inside mine foreman.
He came out of the mine patch in the 1920s and bought his own home, valued at $8,000 in 1930, at 80 Watkins Street, where he and his wife raised seven children. Their church, Holy Name of Jesus, had been opened by Bishop Hoban in 1905. In Sieminski's time the Polish community seized control of the borough hall and the school board. After serving as treasurer of the borough council, he was a school director and head of a Polish society in Swoyersville. The latter belonged to the Polish Union of the United States of North America, with headquarters in Wilkes-Barre, but it was organized first in 1889 at St. Paul, Minnesota. By 1900 it had 31 societies in Pennsylvania, 49 in New York, 23 in Minnesota, and less than a handful in other states. Shortly afterward, the fraternal organization broke up into two parts, with one office in Buffalo and the other in Wilkes-Barre. Each one changed its name a little bit. In 1941, when Sieminski presided over the headquarters in Wilkes Barre, the loans it made to Polish parishes to meet their obligations and members to buy their own homes, virtually broke the monopoly that banks in Wilkes-Barre, Scranton and other towns held over the Polish community. Unfortunately, he did see the fruit of his labors. He left office in 1946.
For years he had an agency of the Sun Insurance Company in his home. In 1945, he was elected president of the Polish American Congress of Northeastern Pennsylvania. He was secretary of Forty Fort State Bank at the time of his death.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)
Sieminski, Casimir
Fraternal executive. National president of the Polish Union of U.S. of North America, a fraternal organization with headquarters in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Roman Catholic. Married. Active in social and civic affairs. Residence: 80 Watkins Street, Swoyersville, Pa.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943