Zalewski Family Genealogy

I thought I’d do a general post about recent updates to family tree research and the site itself.

I just updated the Family Tree section of the website to the latest release of The Next Generation of Genealogy Site Building (TNG) to version 8.0. I have yet to see all of the new features and changes, but if previous versions are any indication, it should be pretty nice. So far, there is now a Calendar on the Dates & Anniversaries area, a nice photo viewer and slideshow (example), and many other “under-the-hood” tweaks. I also changed the background image/color of the family tree site to be a bit lighter. I noticed, even for my young 30-year-old eyes, that some of the smaller text was hard to read. It seems better. As always, please let me know if anything is hard to read or broken on the site. More than likely I just didn’t notice it yet.

On the family tree research front, I’m still going back through every census record for our families and inserting much more detailed source information, including house and family numbers and exact pages, etc. My previous sourcing wasn’t too good and I had accidentally deleted a lot of the details when I merged sources in my software. Anyway, it’s good to go back through. I’ve noticed some small details that I missed.

I haven’t broken down any major brick walls on my family recently, but I have added more people to my wife’s family tree. They are temporarily inserted as I find more credible sources. For example, some info was only found in Ancestry.com’s family trees area and I don’t exactly trust it due to many problems/wrong info in the past. But, it’s good to at least get the data in there so I can research it more in-depth. Again, her family history is much more “exciting” than mine. I say that with much humor, because all family breakthroughs are exciting. Her’s just has a lot more history with it, especially early American history. This latest line ties back into the ROGERS family of Connecticut, which seems to be pretty well-researched and rumored to be both possibly connected to the Mayflower and John the Martyr, but more research is obviously pending on those. We’ll just add that to the list with her connection to English royalty. *sarcastic eye roll* All kidding aside, doing Colonial American research is fun for me since my family is basically all European straight from Wisconsin (and some Canadian.)

I plan on doing an export and updating the info on the online family tree soon.

I am forgoing the normal “Weekly History” post this week for a special announcement.  It’s now been 12 weeks into the 36 weeks of the pregnancy of our first child. A big announcement that was hard to keep a secret until this point. 12 weeks is usually the point when most couples make the large announcement. Obviously, we told family and some others previous to this point. Our parents are very excited and everything is coming at us so fast, but it’s also extremely wonderful.

As a genealogist, this has another layer of joy for me. Now, officially, my tree and my wife’s tree are merged into one. Now when I do research on her tree, I’m actually doing it for my own child. They will come into this world with a pretty solid family tree already made for them. I’ve now ruined any fun and mystery they may find looking into their family history (haha.)

6 Weeks

From my wife’s description: I know, it’s hard to decipher this thing. Heck, it’s tough for me and it’s my baby’s first screenshot! (Well, it is a screenshot…) The big round part is NOT the baby, it’s the yolk sac. The tiny little blur between the arrows is the baby at 6 weeks. We’re 6 more beyond that and it has grown, but we haven’t had a new ultrasound yet. We did hear the heartbeat for the first time this week though!

Well, we’re taking this one day at a time and the mother is doing great. Completely prepared and also scared out of my mind of things to come, but in a good way.

I recently re-installed the Family Tree area of my website. You won’t really notice anything different, but I had to do some back-end stuff. It’s been awhile since I had originally installed the site, so it became pretty confusing. A clean install is much nicer.

But, along with this new install, I also uploaded a ton of photos, documents, and headstone pictures that I had been wanting to take care of. It’s not everything that I have, but there is a lot more than there was before. Plus, everything is linked to the people in the photos! I’m working on getting some of the “Places” set correctly so that you can see interactive maps of all of these places. It’s a very powerful system that I never fully used before.

Note that some of the info may be wrong, sometimes my tree export picks a non-primary date from the list (like a date that was different from most records, but I entered it as alternate data.) Also, some special characters in certain locations and names may show up as a “?” or another weird character. I’ve worked out most of those, but there may be a few rogue ones. I have only exported my direct ancestors (and their children) and the same for my wife, Darcy. I used to export everything in my tree, but then I got a lot of weird emails asking me for info about some 18th cousin that I only had a name entered for. I plan on exporting some other non-direct individuals that I deem interesting, but I have not yet gone through that process.

Thanks to everyone who helped me build this. Take a look.

Photo courtesy of Bart van Damme on flickr

Thanks for everyone who sent me an “Ancestor Approved” award.

In recognition for receiving this award, I will follow the directions and list ten things about my ancestors that have “inspired, surprised, humbled, or enlightened me and to then pass the award along to ten other bloggers whom I feel are doing their ancestors proud.” Though, I will not be passing it along to ten other bloggers since almost everyone I read has already received the award, but thank you to everyone.

1. As always, humbled by many of my ancestors for their courage and faith in leaving their homeland to come to a different country on the other side of the world.
2. Surprised at some of the chance moments that came to be for my ancestors to meet and fall in love.
3. Humbled by my great-grandfather, Joseph Zalewski, who between 1939 and 1941 lost his mother, his wife, and then his father.
4. Inspired by many of my ancestors who worked extremely hard everyday just to keep food on the table for their families.
5. Surprised about how closely-located all of my ancestors are. They go back many generations in this local area, or at least in Wisconsin.
6. Also, surprised that I have no (as far as I know) English ancestry. (Though, I do have Irish and possibly Scottish)
7. Humbled by my veteran ancestors who risked their lives for this country in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II and who knows how many wars in the past.
8. Enlightened by the jobs and skills my ancestors possessed. Sometimes they had to learn many things to survive.
9. Humbled to know that everything that my ancestors did in their lives all add up to me. If one thing were different, no matter how good or bad it was, I would not be here typing this.
10. Inspired by my ancestors to pass on their legacy and stories through my genealogy and this website.

Thanks again to Laura Ann at Dreaming About Home, Theresa at Tangled Trees, Julie at GenBlog, and Miriam at Ancestories for giving me this award.

Thanks to a higher amount of Polish records online and the help of some of the usual friendly genealogists (Thanks, Al and Rita!) I have traced a few of my Polish ancestors back to Poland.

I now have the baptism location of my 3rd-great-grandparents, Ignatz Peter SZULTA and Nepomuncena SYLDATK. Ignatz was born in Bukowa Góra in the Sulęczyno Parish of Kartuzy County, Pomorskie, Poland. Nepomuncena was born nearby at Gowidlino in the Sierakowice Parish. Their first three children, including my great-great grandmother Clara SZULTA, were all born in Sulęczyno before the family emigrated to America. I also found Ignatz’s parents, who are Anton SZULTA and Marianna MALSZYCKI and also Nepomuncena’s parents, who are Jacob SYLDATK and Tecla KREFFT.

Rita also found information that my great-great-grandfather, Joseph TROKA, was probably from Lipusz which is a village in Kościerzyna County, Pomeranian Voivodeship, in northern Poland. The one family that still eludes me is my ZALEWSKI family. I have not yet been able to trace them back to Poland/Prussia. All I have is that Frank and Anna ZALEWSKI were married in the Poznan Province, but I have no source information on that besides it being listed on a family tree I have. I also know that they immigrated from the Port of Bremen, Germany, but that doesn’t really help pinpoint anything. I’ve checked the Poznan Project website and haven’t run across anything, but hopefully someone indexes their records at some point.

Breaking down these brick walls piece by piece, while aggravating at times, is really very fun. Plus, I am meeting some great people. Hopefully we will help each other more along the way.

I started using the Google Maps system to plot some of my family’s locations awhile back, but I never got around to finishing it. Recently, I plotted most of the major Milwaukee locations for my family and it’s interesting to see how it looks once you know where things are. I’ve always had an idea, but it’s better to see it in it’s final state.

An interesting thing about Milwaukee is that it went through a massive addressing overhaul in 1931, so a lot of the address information from census records is different today. Fortunately, I found a website that has some basic conversion tools and was able to (hopefully) pinpoint these addresses. Give it a try sometime. It’s neat to see how your family moved around.

View Milwaukee Locations in a larger map and access to the legend.

Richard Zalewski, Miami, Florida, Sept 1941

This weekend I picked up the mother lode of photos, documents, and information on my grandparent’s families. My aunt and uncle were holding on to my grandmother’s heirlooms, which included my grandfather’s stuff after he passed away. I knew my grandmother had a few photo albums since I previously borrowed them and scanned some photos. I was pretty surprised at all of the other items in the boxes. There were old documents, death certificates, baptism records, funeral cards, old Navy photos, and even film/video from the 30s and 40s (fortunately, on VHS.)

I only scanned a few things so far, but I have a lot of work ahead of me. I’d like to get everything scanned just as a way to digitally back it all up. I also happen to have a VHS-to-DVD machine that I bought to transfer my parent’s home videos to DVD as a Christmas gift one year, so that makes backing up the video pretty easy. One problem there, I can’t find the remote control for it and it has a lot of little important buttons on it. One of the cats probably stole it and made a bed out of it or something.

That does bring me to a question for somebody out there. My paternal grandfather served in the Navy during World War II. He didn’t see combat overseas, but he was stationed “overseas” in Hilo, Hawai’i. From what it sounds like from stories, photos, and some news articles is that he was there for the 1946 Hilo Tsunami and helped rescue people. Along with his Navy stuff, he has dozens of photos of fellow Navy men, including their last names and which group they served in. What would be the best way to go about possibly scanning these photos in and getting them to family members? Is there a “Navy Veterans” message board or something similar? I think it’d be very nice to get copies of the photos to some of these people’s families.

Along with that, a very helpful fellow Polish researcher sent me some copies of the baptism record of my 3rd-great-grandfather, Ignatz Szulta, from 1849 and also his marriage record with Nepomuncena Syldakt in 1875 that he happened to run across. Ignatz’s parent’s names are listed on his baptism record, which is new to me. I now just need to try to transcribe it. Those were extremely helpful and very interesting to read. Thanks, Al.

Sadly, there isn’t really any weekly history for these 7 days. There are a few dates from my French-Canadian ancestors, but I don’t have much more info on them then just dates and that’s not too exciting to read.

I haven’t actually been doing too much genealogy research lately, so I don’t have a lot of news. Though, I have been helping a friend of mine by doing some basic research for him. I thought I’d help get him started since I have a lot of paid access to Ancestry, etc that helps a lot.

He, fortunately, had found a book on his mother’s family that goes pretty far back into at least the early 1800s into Virginia with a lot of sourced information. I decided to do some of his other lines. I actually found a good bit of information by just using the census records (and a few others.) It’s amazing how much info you can really get from those.

It’s new territory for me since a lot of his family is from Montana and then from the southern states of Missouri and Georgia, etc. All of my family research has been is mainly Wisconsin and then into Canada and Europe. It’s neat to do research in other states.