June 8, 2025 – Nowy Secymin to Plock – 68 kms – Sempre B & B

Ruth: Today was such a lucky day, and it all happened on the birthday of my Great Great Grandfather, Johann (John) Gottlieb Gatzke.

Johann Gottlieb Gatzke was born on June 8, 1839, in Posen, Prussia, which is now Poznan, Poland. He would be 186 today.

Although Poznan is a distance from here, his family, and mine, lived in this area from at least the early 1700’s. In preparation for this trip I had marked a few places in Poland where I knew some of my ancestors on my Dad’s side came from. They were German speakers who lived in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth even before the Russians, Austrians and Prussians carved up Poland, erasing it from the map by 1795.  My family would have been joined by the many German settlers who were sent to what was now Prussia. 

Our cycle route passed an open air museum of the Vistula Settlement in Wiączemin. It turned out to be a museum about the Olender culture of Dutch and German Protestants in the area. The members of the Olender group built their houses on an artificial mounds so they could avoid flooding from the Vistula. Over time the culture was more defined by their religion and persecution rather than by their country of origin.  

One of the staff members at the museum told me that if I had German family from the area I should leave my name and number and they would look for family connections.

This evening when I was doing a bit of digging on the Ancestry site I did a google search for the town that my earliest Gatzke ancestor was from. It turned out to be the town where the open air museum is located. 

Now back to our birthday boy Johann, or John as he was later called. He immigrated to United States in 1856 and lived in Ellington Township, Dodge, Minnesota. My Great Uncle Archie described how John enlisted as a soldier in 1861 and fought with the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was injured at the battle of Gettysburg. Gatzke was described as having a light complexion, blue eyes, and light hair. He and his wife Elisa McCadden had eight children. After he was widowed he once again pulled up stakes and moved to homestead with his children in Webb, Saskatchewan, Canada. He passed away there in 1914.

https://muzeumplock.eu/oddzialy/skansen-osadnictwa-nadwislanskiego/

Gordon: Engineering fun fact about this area: When I was in engineering school I recall reading that the tallest manmade structure in the world was a radio mast in Poland.  It turns out that it was located near the town where some of Ruth’s ancestors lived.  It was called the Warsaw radio mast, although it was located in Gabin.  From 1974 to 1991, when it fell during a cable refit, it was the tallest manmade structure in the world.  It was used as a propaganda transmitter, and it was so powerful, and at such a frequency, that its transmissions could be received anywhere in the world, including Antarctica.  Imagine taking a break from your scientific research in Antarctica to enjoy a glass of vodka and listen to some Polish communist propaganda; I’m sure it was a daily occurrence.  Two taller structures have now been built in Dubai and Malaysia, both actual buildings.

Płock