Faith of Our Ancestors

Faith of our fathers, holy faith! We will be true to thee till death. ~ Faith of Our Fathers1 The theme for the 99th Edition of the Carnival of Genealogy is Religious Rites.  My ancestry is mostly Polish and a quarter Bavarian.  Since Poland is about 99% Roman Catholic and Bavaria is the Catholic region [...]

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Laboring Over the Details

…and detailing their labors Recently I finally admitted defeat with my complete lack of organization of all things genealogical, so I’m on a crusade to rebuild my database from scratch and take care of some of those pesky little details like, oh, you know, source citations and whatnot.  In addition to documenting the sources I’ve [...]

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Genealogical Smackdown: Colonials vs Immigrants

In this corner, weighing in with over 300 years of American roots, crossing the ocean on the Mayflower and other sailing vessels, we have the sons and daughters of the Revolution, the founders of the Republic, our COLONIAL ancestors! In the opposing corner, coming to the ring in the late 19th and early 20th century, [...]

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Surname Saturday: DROGOWSKI

Surname – DROGOWSKI Meaning/Origin – The name DROGOWSKI (hear it pronounced in Polish) is derived from the Polish word drogi meaning “dear” .   (Source: Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings, Second Edition by William F. Hoffman) Country of Origin – The surname DROGOWSKI is Polish.  According to the World Names Profiler, Poland has the highest frequency [...]

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Vacation Lampoonery

The following article first appeared on June 27, 2009 for my The Humor of It…Through a Different Lens column for Shades of the Departed.   footnoteMaven has graciously allowed me to reprint my Humor of It articles here on What’s Past is Prologue.  I’m currently on hiatus writing this column for Shades, but I encourage you [...]

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The Name Game: Week 1

Welcome to the first edition of the Name Game at What’s Past is Prologue.  Names are integral to genealogy, and very quickly researchers discover that it really doesn’t matter whether the records are in English, Latin, Russian, Italian, or any other language – bad handwriting is bad handwriting! So, to help you sharpen your handwriting [...]

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Online Indexes and Flexible Spellings

Recently I tried searching the collection of German vital records at the FamilySearch Record Search site.  There are three indexes for Germany: Germany Births and Baptisms, 1588 – 1898 Germany Deaths and Burials, 1582 – 1958 Germany Marriages, 1558 – 1929 The information in these indexes was extracted from original sources and entered into a [...]

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