Month: November 2025
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Same Name Genealogy Challenge: Four Generations Deep
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The same name genealogy challenge becomes exponentially harder when four generations carry identical names. Four William Dowlings span my family tree, each reflecting vastly different American experiences. The Irish immigrant William (1839-1893) built a Brooklyn dry goods empire from a peddler’s cart. His son William F. (1866-1917) never married, channeling…
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Three Men at War, One Family Keeping Hope Alive
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During World War II, one Brooklyn family’s mailbox became an unexpected archive of wartime experience. Anna and Vasil Marcisak didn’t receive letters from just one soldier—they received three. Two sons and a future son-in-law, scattered across two theaters of war, all writing to the same address. Steve Marcisak became a…
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Four Sets of Twins: Two Families, Remarkable Stories, and Missing Records
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Four sets of twins across two family lines—maternal great-grandmother Anna Hurkala Marcisak and paternal 2x great-grandmother Julia Clarke Smith. I can prove three sets: Bernard and James Plunkett (Brooklyn, 1851), Eva and Adam Marcisak (1911), and Paul and Pauline Marcisak (1922). But the fourth set remains lost in that seven-year…
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Life Before America: Farming, Famine, and the Roots of Emigration
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Before my ancestors became Americans, they were farmers in three very different European worlds. Life before emigration meant surviving conditions most of us can’t imagine. My Swedish great-grandfather David Sten worked isolated farmsteads created by enclosure reforms, where winter brought only six hours of daylight and families lived scattered across…
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A Quick Look at My Ancestors Who Chose the Urban Chaos of NYC and Brooklyn
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When it comes to urban, you don’t get much more urban than New York City and Brooklyn. My ancestors chose to live stacked on top of each other in buildings where you could hear your neighbor sneeze three floors up. But that urban density brought revolutionary infrastructure changes that transformed…