Oooh, a post title with a double-meaning.

Well, for one, there have been a few additions to the Zalewski Surname Project over at Family Tree DNA. Thanks to everyone who has joined! If you’re a Zalewski or related to one, see what you’re missing by looking at my Zalewski Surname DNA Study page.

Also, everyone can welcome Darcy Zalewski to the family. Darcy is my new wife and she is so excited to have a new, more-complicated name to use. Oh, don’t forget about being last in line for everything now.

I really need to get back into doing some more research on my family tree, but I just haven’t had the time. I also don’t want to waste my subscriptions, because you know how expensive they are.

Sorry that I haven’t been updating this site. It’s been an extremely busy month and I haven’t had much time to do much else. I don’t think that I mentioned it yet, but I’ll be getting married on May 27th. So, everything these last few weeks has been about that. That also means that I’ll probably be adding another family tree to mine to make it easier for us to keep it in once place. There should be more updates once this is all complete.

Well, no luck on the headstones I was looking for. We first looked at the cemetery in the old Dheinsville, Wisconsin near Germantown. I have an ancestor that’s listed as in this cemetery. Unfortunately, all of stones from that time period are beyond readable, some don’t even exist anymore. So, I couldn’t see if there were any other family members buried also.

I then went to the Fredonia area to check some of the cemeteries around there for some of my Quinette family. Supposedly, they passed away and are more than likely buried in the area. Well, we checked four of the cemeteries that we could find with no luck. Again, a lot of stones are very worn. Though, there are other cemeteries I didn’t find, so I may go back. It was also brought up to me that they may have been buried in the DePere area, since a lot of the rest of the family is buried there. It is possible that they traveled up there before they died. We’ll have to wait and see.

Well, it’s springtime (though snow is on the ground as I type) and it looks like its time to get some of those headstone photos that are needed. I have noted a bunch of them in the local area that I can hunt down. There are some farther away, such as in the northern tip of Wisconsin, but those can wait a little bit. I may make a day out of it and try to hit them all in one day. I have a few in the Green Bay area, some just north of here, and some in Washington County to check out.

Sometimes you find very helpful information from headstones and cemeteries. Sometimes you run into unknown family members buried nearby, or dates that you didn’t know about. I find it a useful, yet under-utilized piece of information for genealogy. A now, with the Internet, you can usually find some very helpful people that will take photos/notes for you in the area that your ancestors are buried. Here are some helpful sites:

• Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness [RAOGK] - Though, it’s not the prettiest site, it does have tons of helpful information.
• Find-A-Grave - You may get lucky and find an ancestor listed on here, or at least famous individuals buried in the same cemetery. You can add you own listings.
• Genealogy.com’s Virtual Cemetery - Similar to Find-A-Grave, but aimed more towards your normal individuals instead of famous people.

I’ve been doing a lot more research on the east coast states, mainly Virginia, Delaware (Hi, we’re in..Delaware), Maryland, etc and it’s not as easy as I had assumed it would be. I say this because I had assumed there were a lot more records since those states have been around the longest. I’ve been doing some more research for my fiancee’s tree (which will soon be merged with mine) and she has a lot of east coast ancestors. I have absolutely none, all of my ancestors either came straight to Wisconsin via foreign lands, or through Canada, eh? It’s very boring on this side, plus it’s not the easiet thing to find records for some of these other countries.

Does anyone have any tips on doing research (mainly online) for the east coast? I have yet to travel to our local Family History Center since it’s rarely open when I’m available. I do have nearly full-access to Ancestry.com.

I imported my complete family tree file yesterday. Be aware that I probably don’t have information on anyone in the tree that is not a direct ancestor. Everything I have is on the site, so if you email me about them, don’t expect much more information. Thanks.

I broke through another brick wall last night with some research. This one is probably more sure than the last one, I give this one an high 80%-90% chance of being correct. I decided to do some more research on a line that I had inserted into my tree in the beginning of my family tree stuff, though I’ve never really done much research on it. For one, the family name was THOMPSON, so it wasn’t easy to pinpoint them. Her name I had listed as FRANCES QUINETTE, but I could not find much info on that name.

Last night I did a search for it on the Ancestry/Rootsweb Message Boards and found a few things. I found the jackpot in the QUINET forum. It turns out that a bunch of other people are researching this line of QUINETs. And it also turns out that Frances’ parents lived and are buried in the town next to my hometown. All of this time and they were right there. Well, now I have some more info on the QUINET line and it’s great.

Also, if you read this, please comment on my postings. Comments will help me know what you’d like to know about and it will help me make better posts. A login is not required for posting a comment, but I do need to approve it first.

I’m not sure when it happened, sometime between college and now. Throughout school, from elementary through college, I really didn’t like history. I’d shuffle through it, learning enough to get by, but it really didn’t do anything for me. Even in college, when I needed to take US History or Western Civilization, or whatever it was called, I didn’t get into it. Now, I love history, well most of it anyway. If the history has something to do with my family history or to me, in general, than I love finding out about it. All I can say on that note is “Thank (insert your god here) for Wikipedia!”

I’m really more interested in local history, since I’ve lived in the area and I like finding out more about it. But, I also like to read up on places that my ancestors hailed from to see what it was like back then. Doc Brown, I’m calling your name here..

I guess this is why genealogy really interests me, it scratches all of my historical itches very nicely.