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Genealogist’s Neck

Most of us have been told at some point in our lives, “never forget where you came from.” The longer you’ve lived, the more eclectic the mix of hellos and goodbyes, chicken pot pies, black eyes, and alibis that make up the motley stew of your character. And somehow, if you make it alive through the most trying times, you might even somehow believe you’re better for it.

Before this jumbled up world has a chance to mold us into hardened criminals or (more optimistically) functionally dysfunctional progenitors of our own children, we once looked up from a cradle at ancestral eyes, in some house, in some place anywhere in the world. And these eyes saw their own range of experiences, which may have been wildly different from our own. The bearers of these eyes may have not made history, but they witnessed it.

First thing I remember, I looked across the horizon and saw a parade of lights marching across the nighttime sky. I was two years old at the time. It wasn’t until I was twenty nine that I realized this had been Disney World, and thankfully, I had gotten out of there alive.

A few years later, my mom sent me a black and white picture in the mail of her as a baby, held by my great-grandfather, Ignacy (“Nick”), a man who died a year before I was born. My mom and dad each are full of “before you were born” stories. But somebody was telling “before you were born” stories before they were born?

My first clue to prehistoric times (i.e., before MY history) was that my great grandfather, Ignacy, had been a copper miner in Calumet, Michigan. As luck would have it, there’s a mining museum which claims to have employment records from miners who worked in the area, some one hundred plus years ago… As I’d been told that genealogical research is about being about turning over every stone, I knew that this stone had to be overturned.

Without recreating the tedium of a summer’s research, I’ll tell you how I got to Poland in a few short entries. You won’t know to be thankful that you’ve been spared the pain of “genealogist’s neck.” That is, unless you too are inspired to spend the sunlit summer hours indoors, digging through databases and poring over microfilm of past century church records.



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