Author: Kirsten M. Max-Douglas
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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…
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The 1973 NPRC Fire – When Flames Destroyed Military History
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On July 12, 1973, flames tore through the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, destroying 16 to 18 million military personnel files in a four-day inferno. No duplicate copies existed. No microfilm had been made. For genealogists researching World War II and Korean War veterans, this fire remains one…
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Diving Into the Names That Built Our Family Tree
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My family tree reads like a passenger manifest from Ellis Island’s busiest years. The Marcisak and Hurkala families fled Slovakia’s mountain villages for Pennsylvania coal towns. The Dubnianski and Knyz families left Polish Galicia behind, though not all found happy endings in America. Swedish ancestors remain partially mysterious—my great-grandfather claimed…
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Unlocking Family Histories: The Power of Cemetery Research
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Cemeteries hold a special place in every genealogist’s heart, preserving not just our ancestors’ remains but their stories carved in stone. From Brooklyn’s Holy Cross Cemetery to Queens’ Calvary Cemetery to Pennsylvania’s Byzantine Catholic burial grounds, multiple branches of my family tree found their final resting places in three states.…
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Finding the Lost Daughter: The Search for Letitia Plunkett
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Every genealogist has that one ancestor who simply vanishes from the records. For me, it was Letitia B. Plunkett—my great-great-grandfather’s youngest daughter. I had census records showing her as a child and young woman in Brooklyn, and then nothing. She seemed to disappear into thin air after 1910. But people…
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Advanced City Directory Research: Professional Genealogy Methods
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City directories are one of the most powerful yet overlooked genealogical tools. Unlike census records, they provide yearly snapshots that capture where ancestors lived, how they worked, and how their lives changed over time. In this article, I explore advanced strategies for using directories effectively—from browsing images instead of relying…