Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

The 41st Carnival of Genealogy asks the question: If you could have dinner with four of your ancestors who would they be and why? Since I have four grandparents, it’s only fair to invite one ancestor from each “side”. It would be nice to see all of my grandparents again, but since I had the [...]

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Donna’s Picks: Week of January 20, 2008

Here are some posts from genealogy blogs that I really enjoyed this week.  If you missed any, be sure to visit these sites! At CreativeGene, there are a series of three posts responding to Lisa’s challenge to write about your ancestors in 1908.  Jasia took the challenge a bit further than the rest of us [...]

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Getting Organized: Passenger List Extract Forms

One of my goals this year is to get organized, which includes all of my genealogical files as well as the rest of my house and my life in general. As any genealogist can tell you, especially one who hasn’t filed their “finds” in a while, this can be quite a time-consuming undertaking. Anything researchers [...]

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Photo Mystery: What’s the insignia or medal?

This photo of my great-grandfather, Joseph Zawodny, is one of two that I am fortunate enough to own. It’s a nice portrait, though slightly damaged – the top of his head missing was not the fault of my talent (or lack thereof) at cropping photos. But what intrigues me the most is what I don’t [...]

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Donna’s Picks: Week of January 13, 2008

Here are some posts from genealogy blogs that I really enjoyed this week.  If you missed any of these posts, be sure to check these out! From FamHist, Fifty Questions for Family History Interviews provided some great examples of questions we should ask our relatives.  I wish I had asked my grandparents these questions.  And [...]

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Carnival of Genealogy, 40th Edition

Jasia at Creative Gene has posted the 40th edition of the Carnival of Genealogy. This edition’s topic was living-relative connections. Twenty-two bloggers participated, including yours truly for the very first time. I’m sorry I missed the previous 39 editions because it was so much fun. I’m always amazed that no two posts are alike despite [...]

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1808: Where was your family 200 years ago?

In a post earlier this month, Lisa at 100 Years in America posed an interesting New Year challenge to other genea-bloggers: Where was your family in 1908? Several bloggers answered the challenge, including myself. Before I could list a round-up here, Lisa did it herself in this post entitled “Snapshots of the World Back in [...]

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Finding Cousins in Bavaria

I come from a rather small family, and I didn’t even know my own first cousins until about six years ago. Once they reached adulthood, my parents kept in touch with very few of their own cousins, but they did remember a lot of names. Because our surnames are not too common, I was able [...]

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If At First You Don’t Succeed…Keep Searching!

Since the start of my research nearly twenty years ago, my most elusive ancestor has been the one whose last name I share, John Piontkowski. (That’s a whole other post as to why our last names are spelled differently!) Back in the “pre-online” days of genealogy, one of my earliest finds was the passenger arrival [...]

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Polish Names and Feast Days

Name days, which are the church’s feast day of the saint that bears one’s name, have long been considered important in many Catholic cultures. Even today in Poland, a person’s name day, called imieniny, is celebrated in lieu of or in addition to a birthday. But in the past, the name day and the birthday [...]

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1908: Where was your family?

The idea for a second post came easily enough after reading Lisa’s recent post at 100 Years in America. Inspired after reading a Smithsonian magazine article on the year 1908, she writes about what her ancestors were doing in that year and challenges others to do the same. What a great idea, and a nice [...]

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Welcome

Hello, my name is Donna Pointkouski and welcome to my new genealogy blog, “What’s Past is Prologue”. I have been involved in researching my family’s history since 1989. When I started, I knew nothing at all about my eight immigrant great-grandparents except their names and a rather vague idea of what countries they came from. [...]

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