Kathleen:
Glad to see your interest in Sierpc. I hired a professional genealogist to do the research for me since most of the records in Poland were written in Cyrillic alphabet since it was under the control of Russia for about 200 years from 1794 to 1918. I found him on
www.apgen.org and his personal link is
http://www.progenealogists.com/tpilat.htm. The Mormon (LDS) church has most of the local church records (Catholic) in Salt Lake City, UT, but again, you need to be able to read Cyrillic to use them. Taduesz lives in Poland, but travels to SLC frequently.
Your grandmother was a brave girl to launch out on her own like that. I am not sure the current American generations could handle that level of stress and the unknown.
Let me know if I can help further.
-Ben