Category: Ancestor Stories
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A Hard Choice When Your Heart Wants Everything
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This week’s #52Ancestors theme is “A Hard Choice,” and for once, the hard choice isn’t my ancestors’ story, it’s mine. Between a thirty-year paralegal career, genealogy certification coursework, building KMD Genealogy LLC, and a family that needs me present, I’m constantly choosing what gets the next hour. I used to…
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Great Aunt Ida – The Ancestor Who Stays With Me
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Some ancestors stay with you. Ida Svensson is the ancestor who stays with me. In 1998, a letter arrived from Sweden. An attorney in Kristianstad was settling the estate of a woman I had never heard of: Ida Svensson Bengtsson, my grandfather’s sister. As a newly minted probate paralegal, I…
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The Possibilities Clifford Never Had – and the Truth Still Waiting
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What does unknown parentage genealogy look like when the DNA points one direction and the records haven’t caught up yet? That’s exactly where the Mystery of Mr. Max stands in its fifth installment. Clifford Frank Max grew up believing his father died before he was born. The DNA evidence now…
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A Ticket, a Harbor, and a New Life — The Place That Matters to Me
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A harbor on Sweden’s west coast became the place that matters most in my family history, even though I have never set foot there. In November 1926, my eighteen-year-old grandfather David Svensson Sten left a Blekinge farm and boarded the Gripsholm at Gothenburg, bound for New York and a sister…
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Paraskevia: The Powerful Meaning Hidden in an Ancestor’s Name
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I almost missed her. The first time I worked through the parish records from Leluchów in Austrian Galicia, I noted the mother’s name with a question mark and moved on. When I finally came back to it, I discovered her name was Paraskevia — and that it carried a meaning…
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She Lost So Much, But Found Unexpected Strength
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Julianna Knysz Dubinsky was not easy to find in the records. Name changes, a second marriage, a death certificate filed under the wrong name: she slipped through every net I cast. But once I found her, I stopped seeing a research puzzle and started seeing a woman. She buried two…
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The Records Got Me This Far: Now It’s Time for a Cemetery Visit
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For more than twenty-five years, I have traced my Plunkett, Dowling, and Marcisak ancestors through census records, death certificates, and newspaper notices. I found them on Find a Grave, built virtual cemeteries, and confirmed plot numbers. But not one of my Plunkett or Dowling ancestors at Holy Cross Cemetery in…
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Two Brothers, One Vocation: The Lives of the Plunkett Priests
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Two of my great-granduncles, Reverend Bernard Plunkett and Reverend Peter H. Plunkett, grew up in the same Red Hook, Brooklyn household and both became Catholic priests in the 1870s and 1880s. Both died young. Bernard at thirty-two in 1883. Peter H. at thirty, on his birthday, in 1886. Three years…
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How a Simple Tradition Became 45 Years of Christmas Memories
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I am not entirely sure when the tradition started, but the why is pretty clear. Sometime around age eleven or twelve, when our family was still living in my childhood home in Lynbrook, New York, my mom hatched a quiet plan. My dad always meant well at Christmas. He had…
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40 Years: A Lifelong Genealogist in Disguise
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This week’s #52Ancestors prompt asks me to write about an ancestor’s livelihood. I am writing about my own instead. Somewhere along the way, I realized I had been doing the same job my entire career. I just kept changing what I called it. Thirteen years in estates and probate. Ten…