An Army of Senior Citizens
Back when my brother and I made our first discovery about Ignacy, I guarded my ancestral “documents” with my life. After my brother and I went our separate ways, I found myself a cheap motel in Vermont, where the caretaker shared with me her sentiment that the latest high school shoot-em-up perpetrator “should’ve gotten more of them uppity folks.” This was one of those motels with the old school “locks”- you just wedge a wooden board in front of the sliding glass door. So, I did my best to hide my prized copper mining documents in my backpack, reassured only by the fact that modern criminals haven’t figured out yet how to pull off a “genealogical document robbery and follow-up ransom note.” Needless to say, my documents and I made it home safely.
As it turns out, the world of genealogical research is full of extraordinarily helpful people. At Chicago’s branch of the Church of Latter Day Saints’ family history library, you can order microfilmed copies of European church records for just the cost of shipping. When I had the soberingly obvious realization that the transcripts were in Polish (a language I didn’t know), the woman in charge of the volunteers gave me a lift to a local bookstore to pick up a Polish dictionary. The volunteers at the Polish Genealogical Society of America devote an entire Saturday morning once per month to helping out researchers like me. One of the volunteers even follows up between the monthly sessions to offer additional help.
If you’re willing to pay a few bucks, you have even more options. The sprawling databases of Ancestry.com, contain census, birth, death, immigration, and other vital records. This is the product of countless hours of transcription, most likely by army larger than this world has ever seen. An army of genealogical researchers- Mormons, for sure, but also senior citizens pursuing what may be this demographic’s most pervasive hobby. Ancestry.com isn’t cheap, is often maligned by many genealogy purists who like to do their research the old-fashioned and inexpensive way, but it is quite a comprehensive database and worth a short term membership to quickly find and retrieve a good number of key documents.
As it turned out, an unsolicited listserv post by one of the volunteers at the Polish Genealogical Society of America turned up an address in Poland- someone with the same last name as my great grandfather Ignacy, living in the very same village that he had left some one hundred years ago. This is a village with two streets, and just a few houses. Coincidence?
Tags: Ancestry, Genealogy, Poland, Travel
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