Jan "John" Vincent Copa

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=40842601

http://www.pchswi.org/archives/bios/fv2.html#copa

John and Elizabeth Copa moved to their town of Buena Vista farm in March of 1893, after living in Winona, Minn.

Both had immigrated to Winona from their home villages in what was then part of the German Empire and is now northern Poland. Present day maps identify the area as “Pojezierze Kaszubskie or the Kaszubian Lakelands located just to the west of Gdansk. This area borders the Baltic Sea on the north and extends southward to the area of Chojnice.

John had lived in the tiny village of Kobyle Gory in the Chojnice district of the Bydgoszcz province, where his family had a small farm. He was nearly 21 years old and was facing four years of compulsory military service. Chancellor Von Bismarck's harsh Germanization policies had made life as a Pole in a German state less tolerable. There was always a tone of resentment when John talked about the Kaiser or the owner of the estate on which they lived. As a result, in the fall of 1881, John and his parents, Stephan and Magdalena (Lemanczyk) Copa, and his two sisters and two brothers decided to leave for America. They left the port of Hamburg on a ship bound for England in October. They then went on to the port of Liverpool, where they boarded their next ship, bound for New York. This ship began to sink shortly after leaving the port. John often told how the passengers were transferred from one ship to another while still at sea. Despite stormy weather, the SS England arrived safely in the New York harbor in early November.