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Three Men at War, One Family Keeping Hope Alive
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.…
4 min read
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Four Sets of Twins: Two Families, Remarkable Stories, and Missing Records
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…
4 min read
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Life Before America: Farming, Famine, and the Roots of Emigration
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…
4 min read
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A Quick Look at My Ancestors Who Chose the Urban Chaos of NYC and Brooklyn
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…
4 min read
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The 1973 NPRC Fire – When Flames Destroyed Military History
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…
4 min read
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Diving Into the Names That Built Our Family Tree
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…
4 min read
