November 2011 - Zalewski Family Genealogy

Sunday’s Obituary: Frank J Zalewski

Posted on 13 November 2011by Brian Zalewski

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.

Featured Polish Zalewski

Parish of St. Barbara

Posted on 11 November 2011by Brian Zalewski

After some research, I think I’ve traced the marriage of my great-great grandparents, Frank Zalewski & Anna Lindner, to Parafia Å›w. Barbary w ÅšwiÄ™tem (or the Parish of St. Barbara at ÅšwiÄ™te.) 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.

Featured Polish Slownik Geograficzny Translation

Slownik Geograficzny Translation – ?wi?te

Posted on 9 November 2011by Brian Zalewski

Update 11/5/2014: I made another run-through of this translation and am fixing a few things.

I recently took another shot at translating an entry from the Slownik Geograficzny. This time I worked on translating the entry for ?wi?te, 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.

Sunday's Obituary Thielke

Sunday’s Obituary: Augusta Last

Posted on 6 November 2011by Brian Zalewski

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 was in good health and was listening to church services on the radio at the home of her daughter at Grafton when she suddenly hemorrhaged. The rescue squad was called and she was transferred to St. Alphonsus hospital where she was pronounced dead at 9:30 Sunday morning.
Mrs. Last was a semi-invalid for the past five years after breaking her hip in a fall at her home at 312 Van Buren St., Port Washington. Since then she had been alternating her visits and living with her two daugthers, Mrs. Arthur (Dora) Thielke, 13th Ave., Grafton and Mrs. Leonard (Ella) Didier in Port Washington.
The deceased, nee Augusta Luedtke, was born in Germany on July 3, 1863. She and her husband, the late Carl Last, had farmed two miles south of Port Washington on the Lake Shore Rd. in the town of Grafton until August of 1926 when they moved to the Van Buren St. home. Mr. Last died the following summer, on June 5, 1927. She continued to live at her home until suffering the hip injury. She had transferred from the Didier home to the Thielke residence last November.
Survivors in addition to Mrs. Thielke and Mrs. Last are three sons, William and August of Port Washington, and Walter of Milwaukee; two other daughters, Mrs. August (Ida) Schlueter of West Bend and Mrs. Helen Kibbel of Port Washington; one daughter-in-law, three sons-in-law, 24 grandchildren, 58 great-grandchildren and 14 great-great-grandchildren.
The Rev. Christopher Boland, pastor of Frieden’s Evangelical and Reformed church in Port Washington officiated at the funeral services at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, July 16.
Burial was in Union Cemetery, Port Washington.
Funeral arrangements were handled by the Poole funeral home.

Tech Tuesday Technology Tips & Tricks

Tech Tuesday: Pinterest

Posted on 1 November 2011by Brian Zalewski

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, adhering to it magazine clippings and printouts of images, quotations and typography; fabric swatches; cards; and other ephemera. In the business world, it’s more commonly referred to as a “vision board” but contains the same elements. With Pinterest, users – called “pinners” – can organize and “pin” photos of items they find on the Web to various boards on their page.

It may not sound exciting, but it can be pretty addicting like she says in her article. I think, for the genealogy folks, that it can be put to good use for inspiration or even collecting great old photos that you find around the web that you love. I’ve personally pinned some neat ideas for a family tree wall. I see a lot of other people using it (it seems to lean heavily female at the moment) for craft ideas, food ideas, and even fashion ideas. Another fun use is pinning places you’d love to visit or even people that inspire you. Maybe it will create some discussion on the site.

Here is my page if you’d like to browse around. The site looks to be invite-only right now, but I think I can invite you if you’d like. Just leave me a comment on here.

[Photo: AuntyCookie@flickr]