06/16/2026
A great story worth repeating with the approaching of Father's Day.
HERALD-STAR
Back home to Poland
A bittersweet Father’s Day for former area man
Local News
Jun 19, 2021
JANICE KIASKI
Community editor
[email protected]
HIS HERO — Forty-six-year-old Jacob Muklewicz, back left, of Lehi, Utah, and a 1992 graduate of Wintersville High School, is shown in a family photo with his wife, Alma, and their five children, and his father, Paul Adolph Muklewicz who resided with them. Paul, a 1969 graduate of Steubenville High School, died June 15 at the age of 71. -- Contributed
Father’s Day 2021 is not the observance that 46-year-old Jacob Muklewicz of Lehi, Utah, envisioned.
Instead of spending it with his father, Paul Adolph Muklewicz, he is preparing for the funeral of the 71-year-old who was born in Steubenville and died June 15.
The elder Muklewicz will be buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in Steubenville this week at the feet of his grandfather and namesake, Adolf Muklewicz, who immigrated from Chwaszczewo, Poland, to Steubenville in 1902.
He had, however, been looking forward to relocating in August to Kolonia Studzienczyna in Poland, just a mile from his grandfather’s birthplace of Chwaszczewo. There he would continue living with his son Jacob and Jacob’s wife and their children.
“We were planning this before my father passed,” Jacob explained during a phone interview Wednesday.
“He was excited, getting online, looking at what kind of car we should buy, he was planning his room, his bathroom, what kind of paint on the walls, what kind of tile in the bathroom, he was really excited about it.”
Father’s Day is now bittersweet in more ways than one, he agrees, as his father won’t experience the return to the family’s ancestral roots, and the fulfillment of a family dream of going back to a free Poland.
“He’ll be there in spirit — wherever my children and I are he’ll be close,” Jacob said.
On this Father’s Day, this is a story about a father’s love, a son’s love and the love of family.
FACEBOOK AS A DIARY
Jacob Muklewicz has a page for a specific reason.
“I use my Facebook pretty much as a diary or journal,” explained the 1992 graduate of Wintersville High School who lives in Lehi, Utah, where he is a corporate immigration attorney. He and his wife, Alma, have five children, the eldest 20, the youngest 13.
“I do that for my kids as an easy way for me to make sure my children know the (family) stories. A lot of times I write in Polish — I do that to motivate my children to continue to learn Polish and then I do it for my family in Poland. It’s a way to bridge our families so they know what their relatives here in the United States have been doing ever since my great-grandfather immigrated to Steubenville in 1902.”
A Facebook post he made on May 21 was brought to the attention of the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times by local resident Flora VerStraten-Merrin as a possible human interest story. She and Jacob have been longtime friends, and VerStraten-Merrin, president of the Jefferson County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society, had assisted Jacob and his family with some information in his pursuit to obtain citizenship in Poland, a not-so-easy process.
Here in its entirety is what Jacob wrote.
“For 123 years (from 1772 to 1918) my ancestors could not freely speak their native Polish language in Poland, which was partitioned between the occupying Russian, Prussian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Following the partitions of Poland, the foreign occupiers radically altered the curriculum in schools. Polish students could no longer study in their native language. Instead, the foreign occupiers forced them to attend classes in either Russian or German. In the area of Russian occupation, the authorities often completely closed Polish-language schools.
“My great-grandparents could not freely speak Polish until they immigrated to America. Adolf Muklewicz, my great-grandfather from Chwaszczewo near Sokolka, was forced to speak Russian and never formally studied because the Russians closed all Polish-language schools near his home. Agata Rzeszutko, my great-grandmother from Lukowa near Tarnow, was forced to speak German but continued reading Roman Catholic prayer books printed in Polish.
“After immigrating to Steubenville, my great-grandparents vigorously supported the St. Stanislaus Grammar School, where each of their children acquired an elementary education in Polish while my great-uncle, Ignacy Jozef (Ignatius Joseph) Muklewicz, dreamed about owning and operating his own auto garage. My great-aunt Jadwiga (Ida) Muklewicz longed to open her own beauty salon. My grandfather, Stanislaw Jakub (Stanley Jacob) Muklewicz, aspired to become a newspaper journalist.
“However, the Great Depression and untimely death of my great-grandfather from black lung dashed their young dreams and aspirations. Instead of obtaining further education in high school and college, my great-uncle and great-aunt worked in bakeries. At the young age of 14 years, my grandfather became a laborer on a work gang at Weirton Steel’s mill in Steubenville.
“As my forefathers’ dreams faded into the reality of hard manual labor, it also seemed that the Polish language would perish together with my ancestors. After World War II, my grandparents chose not to teach my father Polish because during the Red Scare many Americans confused Polish with Russian, the official language of the Soviet Union. On Dec. 16, 1971, my grandfather unexpectedly died of a heart attack while working the afternoon shift at the mill.
“My grandfather’s death motivated my great-uncle Ignacy and great-aunt Jadwiga to teach me Polish. I was born in Steubenville on Sept. 17, 1974, nearly three years after my grandfather died. When I was born, my great-uncle Ignacy said that I strongly resembled my grandfather, and he endeavored to instill within me a love of the Polish language and culture. Every week I would sit in my great-uncle’s kitchen, where he would speak to me in Polish.
“After my great-uncle Ignacy died suddenly of a heart attack in February 1979, my great-aunt Jadwiga taught me not only how to speak Polish, but she also taught me how to read and write in Polish. She also spent countless hours telling me about her parents’ struggles in the Old Country, as well as their desire to one day return to a free Poland.
“As a father, I have tried to instill in each of my children a genuine love of the Polish language and culture, which is an integral part of my family’s identity and heritage. All of my children have attended Polish language schools and performed traditional songs and dances with the Karpaty Polish Folk Dance Ensemble. Throughout my life I have done all that I can to preserve and foster the linguistic and cultural heritage of Poland that I inherited from my fore-bearers.
“In a few months, I will fulfill my ancestors’ and my own dream of returning to a free Poland, where my wife, children, father and I will permanently live.
“I now pray that my children will preserve and pass this legacy to the next generation.
“Jeszcze Polska nie zginela, kiedy my zyjemy!
“Poland has not yet perished, so long as we still live! (opening line from the Polish national anthem, “Mazurek Dabrowskiego”),” the post ends.
ABOUT JACOB AND HIS FATHER
After graduating from Wintersville High School, Jacob went to Brigham Young University for one year, majoring in international relations and minoring in Russian. “When I turned 19, I served a volunteer mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for two years in Poland,” he said. He returned to Provo, Utah, to BYU where he later graduated with a bachelor’s degree in international relations and a minor in Russian. He married — his wife, Alma, is from Mexico — and they returned to Ohio where Jacob studied at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, graduating with a law degree and a certificate in international trade and development.
“I was a foreign language area study fellow in Russian so I continued with my international studies and foreign language studies, then I practiced law in Columbus after graduating law school in 2001,” he said. A move in 2005 to Goodyear, Ariz., brought the couple not only closer to his wife’s parents but ironically to his father’s history.
“When I went back to Goodyear, the law firm I was practicing at was in an adjacent town called Litchfield Park, Ariz., and that was the same place where my father and Jimmy Mavromatis, who were lifelong friends, like brothers growing up, they played football at Glendale Community College outside of Phoeniz,” Jacob said, explaining the two were graduates of Steubenville High School’s Class of 1969, there to play on the Gauchos football team.
Jacob said his father and Mavromatis, now Steubenville’s city manager, assumed there were dorms to live in at the community college, while the college assumed they had nearby family or friends they had arranged to bunk with.
“They said we’re two kids from Steubenville here to play football and we’ve got no place to live,” Jacob said in sharing the story. His father and Mavromatis ended up living in a fire station in Litchfield Park in 1969-71.
And that fire hall, ironically, was but a few blocks from where Jacob would practice law for some of his career.
“I started literally following and retracing footsteps my dad had taken three decades before,” he said.
At Steubenville High School, Paul Muklewicz played offensive tackle and was a three-year letterman for Coach Abe Bryan’s teams in 1966-68. Although offered a full scholarship in 1971 to play football at the University of Miami (Florida), he transferred instead to BYU and played offensive tackle under Coaches Tom Hudspeth and Lavelle Edwards.
At BYU, Paul married Deborah Ledbetter, and they had three children — Jacob, Jeremy and Tara. The couple have since divorced.
Jacob’s father worked at TIMET for more than 20 years in the tube mill and lab. He looked after his mother and the late Steubenville Police Chief George Mavromatis, whom he regarded as a second father, Jacob notes in a draft obituary notice.
Jacob said his father had lived with him and his family for 12 years. He enjoyed his role as grandfather teaching his grandchildren Mikaela, Agnieszka, Paulina, Jakub and Jadwiga, how to swim and ride their bikes. He played with them in the park and took them on rides in his pickup truck.
GETTING GOOSEBUMPS
The prospect of moving to Poland in August shortly after Jacob’s oldest daughter gets married is exciting to Jacob.
“We’re literally a mile away from where my family left when they came to Steubenville. and I kind of am getting goosebumps now thinking about the place where we’re going to — Kolonia Spudzienczyna. It almost looks like Steubenville,” he said.
Their new home — about a three-hour drive northeast of Warsaw — is being built on the same plot of land that Jacob’s extended family had lived on for centuries.
“The house I am building, there are a lot of people from neighboring villages coming and taking pictures because they think a new church is being built,” Jacob said.
He will continue to practice law with his current firm, opening an European office and “literally living my grandfather and great-grandfather’s dream of being able to go back to Poland and earn American money while living in the ancestral homeland. We live in the 21st century with computers and laptops. I am a corporate immigration attorney. I have more clients outside the United States than inside, and they don’t care if I have an office in Salt Lake City, Utah, or Poland.”
Jacob said his wife, children and law firm — and father — were all supportive of the move, an idea that began to take root in 2016 when a relative there suggested it. ” Why don’t you just come back, you love Poland and this area and instead of just coming every other year, why not live here in the village with us, this is your family’s birthplace, your family has been there for centuries, come home,” Jacob recalled the relative’s urging.
But there was one hitch.
“My wife said she would only go back under one condition — that we were all Polish citizens, and I started that process in 2016 and received citizenship that was granted by the president of the Republic of Poland in September 2019,” he said.
It was not an easy process.
“Poland has citizenship laws very different from America,” Jacob explained, noting it’s based on bloodlines and birth. “Both of my great-grandparents, both sets on my father’s side, are all from different areas of Poland and I had a lot of information, a lot of contacts. I submitted an application in 2016 basing my citizenship on a bloodline through the Muklewicz family and the ministry of the interior in Warsaw looked at my application initially and said when your great-grandparents left Poland, Poland didn’t exist as a sovereign country,” he said. “It had been divided between Russia, Germany and Austria. After World War I, when Poland regained its independence in 1918, my great-grandfather didn’t leave Steubenville to return to Poland,” Jacob said, noting he was working in the High Shaft mine in Steubenville and had a wife and children at that point.
The application was denied.
“As an attorney, I had researched the citizenship law of Poland in 1920, and it doesn’t say anything about having to return to Poland, it just said you had to claim a permanent residence in Poland. I fought it. The Polish court system agreed with me and reopened the case,” he said.
But then came a request for more information. Did his great-grandfather buy a home in America, serve in the military, etc. Jacob turned to his friend Flora VerStraten-Merrin for help, and she obliged.
But still no luck with the additional information and documentation. The application was denied.
“I am active in the Polish community here in Utah and one of our members of our statewide organization contacted her father, a successful business person in Warsaw, and said, ‘Dad, if anyone deserves to be a Polish citizen, it’s Jacob Muklewicz. He loves it more than people born there.’ He wrote me back and said I spoke to this woman in the interior, very headstrong and stubborn, the only way she would grant citizenship is if the president of the Republic of Poland used his constitutional authority to grant you and your family citizenship,” Jacob continued the story. “It’s a real long shot, usually the president only does that for professional athletes playing for the Polish national team or celebrities who marry a Polish citizen. It’s legally possible but hasn’t been done for someone in your situation,” Jacob was told.
“I wrote a 1,000-page legal brief in historical narrative in Polish that I gave to the Polish consulate general in Los Angeles. The vice consul looked at my application and said, ‘Did you go to law school in Poland?’ and I and, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Well, this looks like it was written by a Polish attorney. Did someone help you or co-author this?’ and I said, ‘No, this is my work,'” Jacob said.
A promise to personally deliver the brief came next.
Approval then took less than a year.
“It wasn’t easy. We fought for it,” Jacob said, explaining that at the end of World War I, his great-grandfather wanted to go back, but his wife wanted to stay in Steubenville. “World War II happened 20 years later so God knows what would have happened if they went back,” he said.
Moving to Poland is something Jacob said he wanted to do for himself and future children and grandchildren, “but looking back I also wanted to do it for my great-grandfather. When I was a kid I would hear stories how he wanted to go back and didn’t get the chance. He died of black lung and was only 49 when he passed in 1935 during the middle of the Great Depression. My grandfather didn’t go back because when he was an adult after World War II, the Communists took over and the Soviets murdered a lot of the men in the Muklewicz family who belonged to the Polish military. They were sent to concentration camps in the Soviet Union and systematically murdered. The family was afraid to go,” he continued.
“My great aunt maintained contact with her cousins and wrote letters and when I was growing up in Wintersvile, the way I learned to speak Polish was I would stop at my great-aunt’s house, which was next to Canella’s, now Zalenski’s. My great aunt would say, ‘I got a letter from one of our cousins — my eyesight is poor, Jacob, I need you to read it out loud to me.’
“And then she said, ‘I want to respond. I’m going to dictate, and you’re going to write it’ and if I made a mistake, she’d crumble up the paper, and we’d start it over again. I’d learn not to make that mistake again because I didn’t want to rewrite a two- or three-page letter in Polish,” he said.
THOUGHTS ON FATHER’S DAY
Jacob’s thoughts this Father’s Day are as a father himself and as a son who’s lost one.
“I am able to look both ways,” he said. “When I was a kid, you always just look at Father’s Day and think of your dad, and being a father myself, I think of my kids and future grandchildren that will be coming, and I think, am I the dad for my kids that my father was for me? What can I do to be more like my dad, to be a better father?” he reflected.
“I think about Steubenville and my dad working at TIMET in Toronto and my grandfather working at the Weirton Steel plant in Steubenville in the South End. They didn’t necessarily pick their jobs, being a steelworker wasn’t their career choice, but at the time they could make good money,” Jacob said. “My dad and grandfather, who passed before I was born, my dad loved and adored his father and always spoke highly of him, and I felt like I knew him even though my grandfather passed three years before I was born,” Jacob said.
“So when Father’s Day comes by, I think of my dad and my grandfather, Stanley Jacob Muklewicz, how they selflessly worked double shifts in steel mills so we didn’t have to,” he continued.
Jacob recalled going to pick up his dad from work not long after getting his driver’s license.
“My dad took me on a forklift tour of the inside of TIMET, and he said, ‘This is the first and last time I ever want to see you in here,’ and he said, ‘If I see you in here after you graduate from high school, then I’ve failed you as a father,'” Jacob recalled the father-son conversation. “He said, ‘I don’t want this for you.’ We were appreciative of the mills. They gave us money, we were able to live and survive, but my dad knew it was hard work, and that work wasn’t always going to be there. He told me, ‘I do this so you don’t have to. My dad did this so you don’t have to.’ Coming from a couple generations of steelworkers and the valley, these guys worked hard, they worked double shifts and did it willingly and did it because they loved their families, they sacrificed everything for future generations and that’s what I think about on Father’s Day,” he said. “Am I making that same sacrifice? Am I making my children’s lives better the way my dad and grandfather did for me? That’s what I think about.”
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