I found them! The Novaks (Nowaks)! The Siedlec clue was what really broke it all open (see Series Post #3 for those details). But of course there are quite a few Siedlec/Siedlce towns in Poland. Most are in the state of Poznan (Posen). I wasn't sure to which parish Siedlec would have belonged, and there are hundreds or thousands of pages of church books to search if you can't narrow it to a specific parish and year. Thankfully, though, there is an amazing searchable resource

I finally found the ship's manifest listing Bruno Novak and his wife and children, and with extensive FAN Club (friends, associates and neighbors) research was able to confirm that it is, in fact, the correct family. On that ship's manifest it says the town of most recent residence prior to immigration was . . . wait for it . . . sort of illegible. 😂 But, with some help from the Meyers Gazetteer and creative asterisk wild card searching, plus analyzing the other examples of

Green represents my maternal grandmother's mother's family line, the focus of this research. Mystery #2: From where and when did they emigrate? Generally, it is very difficult to trace immigrant families' lives back into their home country without a town of origin found in American (i.e. post-immigration) Probably the clearest source for the hometown would be a naturalization record, but many immigrants never went through the process to become an American citizen. I have not