by Cliff Sakry, with editing, research and additions by Mark Keith Sakry  © 2002

Andrew the First

After Paul I had safely reached America and was able quickly to establish his homestead farm near Duelm in the early 1870's, he must have found this promising new land of freedom and opportunity very much to his liking, for it was not long before his letters home were urging his younger brothers to leave Poland and come and join him in the new world.  Some years passed, but finally brother Andrew, perhaps becoming more and more concerned about the future of his four growing sons should another of Europe's recurrent wars come along, made the big decision.  He would take his wife, Agnes (Fox), and young sons William, August, Adam and Peter, and quit the old homeland forever, to seek a better life in that strange beckoning country beyond the seas.  They made careful preparations, and, as was the custom of departing emigrants, attended mass at their village church and received holy communion, then bade farewell to family and friends.  Carrying with them the few possessions permitted on long ocean voyages, they made their way (probably to Hamburg, Germany, a leading immigration port), where they embarked for America. (The exact place and date of departure, and the name of the ship, are unknown at this writing and remain to be researched.  Marian Sakry, a distant cousin still living in Europe, believes Andrew emigrated to the United States in 1882.)

 It was a tragic voyage.  By a chance stroke of bad luck, (according to reports by several of Andrew's grandchildren many years later), the ship on which he had engaged passage proved to be an old disease-ridden hulk ... waterlogged, slow, unstable and rat-infested ... and ill-suited for the long weeks of wild, heavy seas which it encountered.  It pitched and rolled precariously, and its steerage passengers were cold and wet much of the time.  Under what can only be imagined to have been the most dreadful and miserable of conditions, a sudden deadly sickness (probably typhoid fever) struck Andrew's family in mid-ocean.  It swiftly took the lives of the wife and mother, Agnes, and the youngest child, Peter, both of whom were promptly buried at sea. (Caroline Sakry Bailey of Barnesville, Minnesota, a daugther of Andrew's son Adam, once stated that her father had told her this same ship was so unseaworthy that it sank during a storm on its return trip to Europe!)

Unfortunately, very little information is available concerning this terrible tragedy at sea, but it surely stands as one of the worst ever to have smitten members of the Sakry clan.  The awful, overwhelming misery and despair which Andrew must have suffered aboard that fateful early-vintage steamship is hard enough to imagine, let alone the physical ordeal of rough, heavy seas, crowded and wet and dirty living quarters, and only the plainest subsistence food to keep body and soul together.  One has to marvel at the sheer courage and determination of these simple, common Europeans, and the great strength and endurance they had to have to undergo such hardships.  It is easy to see out of all this the kind of stalwart human quality America got from the old world.  Those who dared to risk and endure so much for freedom were not the weak and the mediocre; they were the cream of the crop.  America soared to supremacy on the staunch backs of these hardy peasants and commoners.  The very soul of America lies in the Andrews and the Adams and the Pauls ad infinitum who came here by the millions to create for themselves what was no longer possible in the stagnant systems of the old world.  And they did it, often enough, at great labor, sacrifice and dedication.