Wednesday, January 31, 2001
Well, it was one year ago today, still mourning my grandparents, that I got bored and entered my name in a search engine and came up with a page that mentioned my great-grandfather. (That page seems to have disappeared from the net.) It seems like a good time to take stock of what I’ve discovered in the past year.
- I’ve found four cousins
- I’ve made contact with the half of my great-grandpa Brandi’s family from his first wife
- I’ve made contact with the family my grandmother stayed with in Canada when she first came to America
- I’ve traced the Italian branch of my family back to the late 1700s, with promises of more to come
- I visited Michigan this summer and got copies of hundreds of family photographs and documents, and visited with my cousin Carol for an incredible day in Saginaw
- I found the passport that brought my great-great-grandma Brandi and her two children to America
- I jumped a fence into the cemetery where my great-grandpa Brandi and great-great-grandparents are buried
- I found the church in Altoona where my great-grandparents Horbal were married, and where my grandfather and his brother were baptised
- I found the records of that marriage and those baptisms at the Blair County Genealogical Society in Hollidaysburg, near Altoona
- I found records for the family of my great-grandpa Horbal’s brother, who also came to Altoona/Hollidaysburg
- My mom’s cousin Paul got mail from a cousin of ours in Poland, the son of another of my great-grandpa Horbal’s brother
- I found the names of three of my grandma Horbal’s four grandparents
I’m sure there’s plenty I’ve left out, but these are the things that spring to mind.
I feel like I’ve accomplished an awful lot in the past year, and know that there’s a lot left to do, and that the problems generally just get knottier from here on in. I haven’t had any luck finding the marriage record of my great-grandfather and his last wife; in fact, I’m not certain whether my grandfather’s mother was his father’s second wife or third wife. Without the marriage record, I’m not certain of being able to trace that branch back much further, either, as my great-grandmother’s death record was distinctly unhelpful, not listing her parents or anything, even getting her age wrong I think. And the prospect of dealing with all of the details of Ukrainian records for my grandma Horbal’s family is daunting. Ukrainian as a language isn’t one where knowledge of English or Romance languages helps much, and the Mormons don’t seem to have filmed the records that I need to look at, so there will be much writing away to gather that information.
I hope the next year is as interesting and rewarding as this past year has been.
Posted at 2:32:32 PM
