JAROSZEWSCY everything I know about my family
Ladies and Gentlemen,
as fate would have it, it so happened that in addition to my main activity in the field of photography, i.e. developing original albums, I have been involved for several years in work related to family histories, personal biographies and family histories.
I probably gained the foundations of my skills in this area from my work (many years ago) at the Museum of the History of Photography in Krakow, where I worked as an archivist and many old photographs passed through my hands.
From that period I have retained a deep conviction that photographs should be described IMMEDIATELY – here and now – because when the last person who could recognize people in the photographs dies, it will be too late.
Please describe the photographs – here and now, immediately – "it is later than it seems" (Baptiste Beaulieu).
That is what I did – I described the photos from my family archive, but my mother did it earlier, in the years 2003-2013.
In the years 2014-2024 I developed a history of my family, the culmination of this work is a family saga, 424 pages long, containing over 1,700 photos and documents. This book is available in the resources of the National Library and the Jagiellonian Library (link to the e-book below).
► > JAROSZEWSCY everything I know about my family
The story of my search ended with a magical journey to the "places found" during a trip to Ukraine in August 2023. Indeed, this touching of places, views and emotions encountered there closed the stage of many years of writing down the history of my family, in the name of my spiritual need so that the fate of my ancestors would not be lost, because I could not allow it. I made this trip to Ukraine during the ongoing war there, and I found all the places that were in the photos in my archive. I met with great kindness from the local people, they provided me with all possible help. I wrote about this extraordinary, most important journey of my life in addition to the main family saga and titled this account:
> JAROSZEWSCY - everything I know about my family. POSTSCRIPTUM 2024. (link to e-book).
During my stay in my hometown of Horodenka, the director of the local Pokutia Museum, Andrij Kraviec, suggested that I organize an exhibition in the museum dedicated to my family, consisting of photos from my archive. After returning from Ukraine, I prepared 29 boards with compositions of photographs from Horodenka, provided them with descriptions in Polish and Ukrainian and sent them to the museum. On December 27, 2023, the opening of the exhibition took place at the Atonement Museum in Horodenka.
I received a report from the opening, the exhibition was opened by the director of the museum, Andrij Kraviec, and a local priest, the local intelligentsia arrived, and it was obvious that they accepted my ancestors as their own.
On the walls of the museum, there is an exhibition with photos of my ancestors: great-grandmother Wiktoria, grandmother Helenka and her sister Zofia, and grandfather Eugeniusz, Anna and Józef Jaroszewski, and my little dad, everyone. Here, 50 meters from the church where they visited every Sunday, three kilometers from where their house was.
Then I understood.
They came back together, after 80 years, they came back home.
► Here is link to exhibition
Photograps from the Jaroszewscy family archive were published in prestigious magazines
presenting the culture and everyday life of eastern Poland before World War II.
Photographs from the Jaroszewski family archive were also presented on the YouTube channel of the Carpathian Society ► here link
Negatives from the Jaroszewscy family archive (town Horodenka in the Stanisławów Voivodeship, 1930.)
