His Name was Józef Pater

Who was Józef Pater?  I came upon Józef by accident while searching for my 2nd great-grandfather of the same name. I discovered that this particular Józef was my ancestor’s nephew, his brother Marcin’s son. What I learned with that search result was a forgotten story of a family – my family – who perished in [...]

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Time Travel to 1940

“One hour, okay?”  He looked at me skeptically. “Then you have to come back to me. We have places to go!” “One hour – got it!” Wow, even time travel has restrictions. I turned on the machine and within a minute I was back in 1940 and walking the streets of Philadelphia. I didn’t have much [...]

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The Cost of Dying in 1919: Funeral Home Records

Recently Ancestry.com put up a new set of records called “Historic Pennsylvania Church and Town Records.” The collection contains a wide variety of miscellaneous records from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.  I actually found a few items of interest in the collection.  One subset of records comes from the Wackerman Funeral Home, a funeral home [...]

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Sto Lat – 100 Years

If my grandfather Henry Pater was still alive, today would be his 100th birthday.   This post is in his honor: Just the Facts: Parents: Louis Pater (born Ludwik Pater, 1893-1957) and Elizabeth Miller (born Elżbieta Müller, 1891-1972) Born: 25 March 1912, Langhorne, Bucks County, Pennsylvania Baptized: 04 April 1912, Our Lady of Grace RC Church, [...]

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What Happened to Uncle Herman?

In my quest to prepare for the 1940 Census by documenting all of my relatives and their potential 1940 addresses, I realized there was a relative or two I never found in earlier censuses.  One such relative was my great-grandfather’s half brother, Herman Goetz. Herman and his brother, Julius Goetz, left a rather good paper [...]

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February: Short on Days, Long on Family Facts

In everyone’s family there seems to be a “birthday season” in which many family events fall in the same month.  In my family, February is not one of those months.  So I was rather surprised as I looked through some of my genealogical data that February had a huge significance in the life of one [...]

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Surname Saturday: ZAKRZEWSKI

Welcome to the very first “Surname Saturday” of 2012.  Somehow I managed to go through all of 2011 without a single surname post! But I have many more family names to get to, so I am hoping to post a different Surname Saturday at least once a month.  Let’s see what happens this year… Surname - ZAKRZEWSKI [...]

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Genealogical Serendipity

Sometimes my genealogical research takes an organized and methodical approach akin to the scientific method – or at least obsessive compulsive disorder.  And then other times my research resembles the dog in the animated movie Up who gets distracted every time a squirrel runs past him.  While the former research approach may be more useful [...]

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Matrilineal Monday

I missed Randy Seaver’s SNGF (Saturday Night Genealogical Fun) this weekend, but it’s been so long since I’ve posted here I decided to turn his SNGF challenge to List Your Matrilineal Line into “Matrilineal Monday”.  Randy asked us to: 1) List your matrilineal line – your mother, her mother, etc. back to the first identifiable [...]

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Praying With My Ancestors: The Stadtpfarrkirche

My family’s history in the town of Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, Oberbayern, Bavaria, Germany, goes back several hundred years.  While that’s a long way back with regard to genealogical research, the town itself is much older than my family’s history recorded in its church registers.  Pfaffenhofen was officially recorded as a town in 1438, but [...]

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Who Needs an Index?

Genealogists are eagerly awaiting the release of the 1940 U.S. Federal Census in April 2012 so we can track down the information on all of our relatives. While Ancestry will have the images available for free, they will probably not be indexed for some time. For me, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing…my family’s track [...]

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Sweet Sixteen Redux

Back on August 9, 2009, Randy Seaver presented another Saturday Night Genealogical Fun (SNGF) challenge for readers to document their sixteen great-great-grandparents.  I responded to the call with Sweet Sixteen: My Great-Great Grandparents.  But, my tree was a little bare in some spots.  I did not know at least 4 names and was “iffy” on [...]

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