Information, tips, and other interesting finds on this personal journey
Mathias & Pauline (Thompson) Firmenich family, Ashland, Wisconsin - 1895 - Family Group Sheet
I haven’t been posting much lately since I haven’t had a lot of time for research. The holidays are busy with work and..well..holiday stuff. There are a few other things going on that are making it hard to find the time. I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holidays and a wonderful start to 2012.
I am participating in this week’s “Sunday’s Obituary” with my great-great grandfather’s obituary. I’m told that he received a larger obituary since he worked for the city of Milwaukee. From The Milwaukee Journal on Saturday, August 9, 1941.
FRANK ZALEWSKI
Frank Zalewski, 82, of 2630 N. Buffum st., was found dead on the floor of his home late Friday afternoon by his son, [my great-grandfather] Joseph, a police officer, who came to visit him. He had been living alone since his wife died two years ago. Death was due to natural causes, according to coroner’s assistants.
Mr. Zalewski was born in Germany and came to this country 51 years ago. He worked for the department of public works for 39 years, retiring six years ago. He and his wife celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 1935. Funeral services will be held at 8:30 a.m. at St. Casimir’s church, with burial in Holy Cross cemetery.
Survivors include two sons, Joseph and Frank, jr., and five daughters, Mrs. Angeline Pierzchalski, Mrs. Mary Gierszewski, Mrs. Frances Cybela, Mrs. Helen Stroinski and Mrs. Agnes Walczak.
You can actually view the obituary in the newspaper using Google’s News Archive website. I found it when I searched for “Zalewski” in their archives. Fortunately, he had a larger obituary that was picked up by Google’s character recognition software. Most of the normal obituaries aren’t picked up.
© 2011 - Kaja Gwincińska
After some research, I think I’ve traced the marriage of my great-great grandparents, Frank Zalewski & Anna Lindner, to Parafia św. Barbary w Świętem (or the Parish of St. Barbara at Święte.) According to a translation of their Polish Wikipedia entry:
The parish was founded in about 1300 by the Teutonic Knights. During the Thirteen Years’ War the church was destroyed and the parish declined. The present wooden church was built in 1723 on the land of the owner of the village – Waclaw Kozlowski. The last thorough renovation of the church took place in the 1990s.
Also according to their (wonderful) website, this church is the largest wooden structure in the area and one of the largest in Poland.
Their website has a great photo gallery of the church, inside & out, including the adjacent cemetery. They also have a very cool gallery of the cemetery on All Saints Day, November 1st, 2011. The photo above is from that gallery. Click on it to view more photos from that day.
It’s very cool to see the actual church from across the world that your somewhat distant ancestors were married in and baptised some of their children in.
I recently took another shot at translating an entry from the Slownik Geograficzny. This time I worked on translating the entry for Święte, which is the town where my great-great grandparents were married and some of their family had lived.
Here is my translation. You can find the original entry by visiting the University of Warsaw’s website that allows you to view the original book with a Firefox plugin. You can also view it on this site, without a plugin, though the site is in Polish so you may need some translation.
The translation is a work-in-progress and is obviously not completely perfect. I am grateful for some help from Al at Al’s Polish-American Genealogy, who has translated many entries himself. I will mark the words or phrases that I am confident are wrong or are not even translated as I could not find any information on them, with italics. The rest, while they may not flow very well, are mostly right and just need some small tweaking. Some of the diacritics on the letters did not copy over, I plan to fix those once I have some time. Any errors in the translations are completely my own. [Continue reading…]
I thought I’d participate in this week’s Sunday’s Obituary by transcribing the obituary of my great-great grandmother, Augusta (LUEDTKE) LAST, who lived to be 100-years-old. It was from a July 18, 1963 Ozaukee County newspaper. MRS. AUGUSTA LAST Mrs. Augusta Last died Sunday morning, July 14, just 11 days after observing her 100th birthday. She [...]
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My wife, Darcy, made me aware of Pinterest. She does a lot of work with the web and is always finding these new, interesting sites. Pinterest is best described by a story about it on the MySanAntonio website: [Pinterest is] a “virtual pinboard.” Creative types often use actual pinboards or corkboards for inspiration on projects, [...]
[Continue reading…]I’m going to participate in this week’s Sunday’s Obituary theme. This is the obituary for my great-great grandmother, Emma Jane (FIRMENICH) CORRIGAN in from April 28, 1941. I’m not sure exactly which newspaper since I found the article in my grandmother’s collection and she didn’t note it. If I had to guess, it’s probably from [...]
[Continue reading…]Up until this weekend I had never done any Czech research. I knew my wife’s great-grandmother was born somewhere in Bohemia, which is in the Czech Republic, but we didn’t dig much deeper. As you may, or may not have, read in my last post, I sort of fell into researching my wife’s Czech line [...]
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