Her name was Anna. It was a name passed down through family telling rather than anything I've been able to find in a document, because Anna, born in the Northern Pomeranian Voivodeship sometime in the late 1800s when that region was the German Empire and not yet Poland, is almost impossible to find in the records.

I do know that she died in Carlton County, Minnesota, in the northeastern corner of a state she likely reached through Duluth and the Great Lakes ports rather than through Ellis Island, through waterways whose records are less indexed and less searched than New York's. She arrived under a married name, either Erickson or Holt depending on which family telling you follow, neither of which signals Kashubian, Polish, or Slavic origin to anyone looking at a record.

She came from a people whose language had been declared nonexistent by two separate governments. She arrived in America as a woman from a region that was officially German, whose ethnic identity had no recognized name in the administrative systems that would have recorded her, whose language was classified as a German dialect by German authorities and would later be classified as a Polish dialect by Polish ones. She passed through American ports that history has paid less attention to and settled in timber country where immigrant labor left fewer records than the cities did.

Every layer of Anna's story points away from easy documentation. My 3rd great grandmother's story is one of erasure.

Kashubian is a West Slavic language spoken historically in the Pomerania region of northern Poland, the region Anna left when she immigrated to Minnesota. It is distinct from Polish, with its own grammar, vocabulary, and centuries of independent development. The language not only has its own letters (ã, é, ë, ò, ô, u̇), but it also incorporates something called kaszubienie, a pronunciation that takes the soft Polish sounds and makes them into harder, sharper sounds. The language also has its own unique vocabulary, which includes words that come from everything imposed upon the Kashubians over time, including Low German.

But calling it a dialect was never a linguistic choice. It was a political one.

A language implies a people with a claim to land and self-determination. A dialect implies a regional variation of someone else's language and therefore someone else's land. Linguist Max Weinreich put it plainly: "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." The line between language and dialect has never been purely linguistic. It is political, and it has always been political.

Choosing to relabel the Kashubian language as a dialect was a rhetorical strategy to wipe out the Kashubian ethnic group and consolidate political power over the Pomeranian region. If Kashubian is just another Polish dialect, then Kashubian land is uncomplicatedly Polish land. If it is just a German dialect, it is uncomplicatedly German land. Who cares what it means for the culture that comes with the language and region? Their strategies began with Germanization policies under Prussian and later German rule and continued into Polonization pressures after Poland regained independence and especially after WWII.

What is remarkable is that two opposing national projects (Germany and Poland) used the exact same rhetorical tool against the same people for the same territorial reason. Erasing a third claim to the contested Pomeranian region gave each of them a stronger claim. The Kashubian people were caught between two nationalisms that agreed on nothing except that Kashubian identity was inconvenient and simply had to go.

Kashubian is not alone in this. Across Europe, minority languages, like Silesian, Rusyn, and Võro in Estonia, have faced the same dialect or language debate for the same political reasons. The pattern repeats: a dominant nation-state relabels a minority language as a mere dialect to consolidate territorial claims and national identity. What looks like a linguistic classification is almost always a political act.

Anna was born into the specific machinery of what I've just described. The Northern Pomeranian Voivodeship in the late 1800s was under German administration, which means Germanization was the school system she either attended or was excluded from. It was the administrative apparatus that would have recorded her, if it recorded her at all, as German rather than Kashubian, because Kashubian wasn't a category the German Empire had any interest in maintaining.

When she left for Minnesota she was leaving a place that had spent her entire life telling her that what she was didn't exist. She arrived in America already erased in the official sense, already carrying an identity that had no administrative home, already named by a system that wasn't hers.

Of course I can't find her. The records weren't meant to remember her.

Kashubian goes deeper than just words and letters. It holds an entire culture within it. It preserves some of that pre-Christian folklore that was lost when Poland was turned Catholic. Ancient Slavic deities and nature spirits remain directly within Kashubian folklore, like Bòrówc, the protector of forests and Gosk, the god of the sea, along with other stories tied to the Baltic Sea. With this connection to the sea comes a centuries long maritime history and inherited identity, a connection still celebrated through local tradition.

I wonder if Anna carried any of this with her. I wonder if she observed Pusta Noc. What is Pusta Noc you ask? Well, it’s only one of my absolute favorite Kashubian traditions. It’s the ceremony held the night before a family funeral where all mirrors must be covered or turned towards the wall so that the dead do not get confused on their way beyond. During Pusta Noc, or Empty Night, the family, friends, and close community stay up singing, telling stories, and praying. There's also a lot of eating. It's really just the Kashubian version of a traditional wake. I wonder if she covered the mirrors the night before funerals held in Carlton County, Minnesota, far from Pomerania, and sang through the night in a language her neighbors couldn't name.

I wonder if she sang Kashubian lullabies to her children or wrote it in a diary, or if she gave it up completely when she left her homeland. I wonder if she identified herself as Kashubian or as Polish when anyone thought to ask. I doubt anyone in Carlton County would have known the difference. Catholic and West Slavic was probably bad enough in their eyes.

While Kashubian does hold some of its pre-Christian folklore, the Pomeranian people also adopted the Catholic Church alongside the Polish people. The lowest status Kashubians held onto their Roman Catholic identity with fervor despite being surrounded by German powers. Their adherence to their language, their culture, and their faith was a direct act of resistance against Germanization. The language even has its own paraliturgical songs and religious devotional poetry that has been passed down verbally and not written down over generations. Anna's Catholicism, the part of her identity I can confirm because it shows up in American records, was itself a form of resistance in the place she came from.

The Kashubian ethnic group hasn't vanished yet, but it becomes smaller with every generation. Most of the remaining speakers come from older generations in the Pomeranian countryside while the younger generations are speaking primarily Polish. There are some revitalization efforts happening in Poland, as the Kashubian language is taught in some schools now, and there is a collection of Kashubian literature and language media thanks to the Kashubian Institute, or the Instytut Kaszubski. In spite of these resilient efforts, the language is fading, just as German and Polish national leaders wanted long ago.

Kashubian was finally recognized as a regional language in Poland in 2005, more than a century after Anna left the region it was spoken in. That recognition was itself a political act that was shaped by EU minority language protections and Poland's 2004 EU accession. It was as much geopolitical repositioning as it was linguistic justice.

It came too late for Anna and for the generations between her and me. Linguists generally classify Kashubian as its own language rather than a dialect, based on mutual intelligibility standards, which is the same standard used to distinguish languages from each other. The classification that was denied for over a century for political reasons has now, at least officially, been corrected.

Whatever Anna carried across the Atlantic, the lullabies or the Pusta Noc traditions or the prayers in a language that wasn't quite Polish, I don't know if any of it survived the passage.

What I know is that she existed. That she came from a specific place with a specific language that carried pre-Christian deities and Baltic maritime traditions and funeral rituals involving covered mirrors and community singing through the night. That she crossed an ocean and settled in the northeastern corner of Minnesota and died there, and that somewhere between her arrival and now, whatever specifically Kashubian she carried stopped being named as such.

This essay is the record that wasn't made when it should have been. Not because Anna wasn't worth recording but because the systems that kept records had already decided that what she was didn't need a category.

Her name was Anna. She was a Kashubian woman who immigrated to Minnesota and married a Scandinavian man. Her story before him and before this country is worth recording, even if census records disagree.

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Sources I read:

https://polishmuseumwinona.org/what-is-a-kashubian/ 

https://www.languagetrainers.com/blog/polish-dialects-accents/ 

https://culture.pl/en/article/kaszebsko-mowa-freeing-the-kashubian-language 

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/2/231 

https://neweasterneurope.eu/2025/11/24/the-many-aspects-of-kashubian-identity/