Our EJZ has a different middle name on his birth and baptismal certificates than he has on his marriage license and on Marty's baptismal certificate.
Here is the EJZ birth certificate: 10/07/1923 is given as birth date; date of issuance is four days later; there is no raised seal, as occur on certificates from later eras; the name is given as Eugene Daniel Zdrojewski.
Baptism was 10/21/1923, and again here we see Eugene Daniel.
Note that Eugene's sponsors that day at St. Luke's were Joseph Mostkowski and Wiktorya Zdrojewski.
Then something happened. I heard, or partially heard, a story, or part of a story, about a priest from St. Luke's visiting the house and persuading Dad's parents that Daniel was not the best middle name for this child, and that John would be better. Can anyone confirm this or provide details?
So all through his school years he knew himself and recorded himself as Eugene John. His 1948 marriage certificate states his name as Eugene John. His son Martin's birth certificate gives Martin's father's name as Eugene John in 1951.
Bzzzzzt! The bureaucracy must have caught on to the scam at that point, 28 years later. Why do I guess this? I guess this because the issuance date of the Certificate of Baptism for Eugene Daniel Zdrojewski is 07/24/1952. Why did Dad get himself a Certificate of Baptism in 1952?
Well, maybe since they moved from their Buffalo apartment to their Bowmansville rented house, he joined a new parish, Sacred Heart in Bowmansville, and had to hand his new clergy proof of baptism in order to join. Or maybe he had to gather up every scrap of official paper he had and show it to the civil authorities in order to prove that he was in fact the father of Martin Zdrojewski, and that Marty had not been kidnapped from somebody else. That would make a more exciting story.
But since we will never know one way or the other, we may just as well return to speculation as to why the kerfuffle originated in the first place. Did some meddlesome priest, as Shakespeare says, call on the family one day in late 1923? Why did he care what the child's middle name was? Did he have any understanding of the annoyance it could cause the lad later on, or the confusion as he looked at his birth certificate and saw what he considers somebody else's name? Did this priest of legend and mystery understand all that, but not care? Did Grandma Julia offer him Christmas cookies and coffee?
When we open an old box or folder, to behold and handle old family items, it is as if little wraiths curl up as well out of the box or folder, and coil silently and invisibly about the room. Then we change as if we had breathed those wraiths into ourselves; they possess us, usually in a mild form of possession, and work on us, usually slowly. In this case, the folders lay open atop the unpracticed piano for six days while thoughts, like little gears, turned slowly in the back of my mind. I did not know what to think until after deciding to choose three documents to scan. So I scanned three and started writing. I am far from sure that this writing is evidence of thinking, but I do proclaim it to be robust and unashamed piffle.
My piffle is potent stuff; now the atmosphere in the room has become less congenial to the wraiths. I will pack up the file folders, and just before I close the lid on their box, the last of them will slide inside to be shut away again.
