Genealogy Research | Steve Szabados Genealogy

Should you give a DNA test kit as a Christmas Present?

November 22, 2021 Leave a comment

Have you started shopping for your Christmas gifts? The DNA testing companies have started their sale ads on TV suggesting their test would be a great gift, and you are probably wondering which company offers the best test.

I can rate each company for my use but can not suggest one for you to take without knowing what you want to learn from the test. The test results give you two types of information. The basic data set is a list and diagrams showing the possible areas your ancestors left and imply these are your Roots! The second set of information is a list that matches your DNA in varying degrees to other people and gives a range of relationships, such as 2^nd to 4^th cousins or 4^th to 6^th and more. The test results will not magically present you with a complete family tree as some ads suggest. To get your family tree, you will have to commit to many days and nights of work uncovering your family history.

If all you want is to know your ethnic origins take the test and review your results. However, this set of data is the least accurate. Also, each company bases its projections on different base data, so comparing results from different companies may present a confusing picture. (Note, this comparison may happen when your siblings or cousins each use different companies for their test samples.) I have not found data that points to one company’s results being more accurate than the others. All are updating their data to improve their accuracy, but I have found comparing the results does give me clues that help. The results are not 100%, but they will provide a general idea. I am sorry, but they can not point to a specific village.

If you want to start uncovering your family history, DNA testing is not the first step. You need to collect family stories, documents and compile a family tree showing at least four generations before submitting a sample for DNA testing. The DNA results will give clues that may tell you how you relate to your cousin matches. If the relationship is not clear, you need that information when you contact your matches.

DNA testing is not magic. It is a science and a tool that may give you clues to your family history. Genealogy Research also is not magic. It is detective work where you need to apply sound and detailed research to be successful.

Please don’t jump into DNA testing without knowing why you are doing it. It may lead to something fantastic, or it may be a waste of your money.

Find the details, do the research, and have fun.

Filed under DNA, Genealogy Research

Helpful Books in Polish Research

October 18, 2021 Leave a comment

The Christmas season will quickly be upon us, and here are some gift ideas for your family genealogist or your Christmas wish list to pass along. I am sure they will find these books very useful in Polish genealogy and make great Christmas gifts. All are available online from various sources. First, check availability at the book stores for the Polish American Journal (http://www.polamjournal.com/bookstore.html) and the Polish Genealogy Society (https://pgsa.org/product-category/books/). Another source is the Polish Art Center (https://www.polartcenter.com/).

Research and Translation

Polish Genealogy: Four steps to success by Stephen Szabados (2013) – The book outlines a simple process that will help identify where your ancestors were born and where to find their Polish records.
In Their Words: a genealogist’s translation guide to Polish, German, Latin, and Russian documents (4 books (2003, 2007, 2013, 2017) – each covers a different language) by Jonathan D. Shea and William F. Hoffman – Four separate books covering the languages found in Polish records. The books discuss documents and extracts from American and European sources, analyzed and translated
Going Home – A Guide to Polish American Family Research by Jonathan D. Shea (2008) – Another great guide discussing where to find U’S’ and Polish records for your ancestors.
Sto Lat: A Modern Guide to Polish Genealogy by Cecile Wendt Jensen (2010) – This is a workbook that offers a plan for researching based on the techniques developed by the author over thirty years of research and teaching.
A Guide to Chicago and Midwestern Polish-American Genealogy by Jason Kruski (2018) – Learn to access the Chicago and Midwestern records relayed to your Polish ancestors using both paper records or the wealth of information available on websites.
The Family Tree Polish, Czech and Slovak Genealogy Guide: How to Trace Your Family Tree in Eastern Europe by Lisa Alzo (2016) – This is an in-depth guide that will walk you through a step-by-step process of finding your Polish, Czech, or Slovak roots.
Polish Roots. Second Edition 2nd Edition by Rosemary a. Chorzempa (2014)
The Study of Obituaries as A Source for Polish Genealogical Research by Thomas E Golembiewski (2009) – This book provides information on deciphering and using Polish language obituaries.
Haller’s Polish Army in France by Paul S Valasek (2006) – An excellent reference for information if your ancestor was part of the Polish Army in France, aka Haller’s Army, aka the Blue Army.
Slownik Geograficzny by Filip Sulimierski, Bronisław Chlebowski, Władysław Walewski and others, Warsaw, multiple volumes published between 1880 and 1902 – available on DVD from Polish Genealogical Society of America (PGSA.org)
A translation guide to 19th-century Polish-language civil registration documents: including birth, marriage, and death records by Judith R. Frazin. Great translation guide for Polish records found in the Russian Partition.
First Names of the Polish Commonwealth: Origins & Meanings by William F. Hoffman and George Wiesław Helon (1998) – This is an excellent reference to decipher the correct first name for your ancestors.
Polish surnames: origins and meanings by William F. Hoffman (2012) – must have reference to determine the proper Polish surname for ancestors.

Books on History, Culture, and Customs

Polish Immigration to America by Stephen Szabados (2016) – This book gives excellent insights into the emigration and arrival in America. A must-read for the family historian.
Daily Life in Immigrant America 1820-1870 by James M. Bergquist(2019) – This book will give us great insights into the lives of our ancestors who arrived in the 1800s.
Daily Life in Immigrant America 1870-1920 by June Granatir Alexander (2009) – This book will give us great insights into the lives of our ancestors who arrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Jadwiga’s Crossing: A Story of the Great Migration by Aloysius A. Lutz, Richard J. Lutz (2006) – Must read to gain insights to challenges to crossing the Atlantic on sailing ship in the 1800s. It will change your perspective of your ancestors.
God’s Playground: A History of Poland: In Two Volumes by Norman Davies (2005) – Best and most accurate Polish history book.
by Sophie Hodorowicz Knab (1996) – Must have to learn more about your Polish heritage.
Creating Kashubia, History, Memory, and Identity in Canada’s First Polish Community by Joshua C. Blank (2016) –
Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on The South Side, 1880-1922 (1991) by Dominic A Pacyga – Great reference with many stories of Polish life in Chicago.
Chicago’s Southeast Side by Ron Sellers and Dominic A. Pacyga (2001) – Great details of life in the southside Polish neighborhoods.
Chicago’s Polish Downtown (Images of America) by Victoria Granacki (2004) – Book contains many pictures detailing Polish life in Chicago.
Forgotten Doors, The Other Ports of Entry to the United States edited by M. Mark Stolarik (1988) – Not all immigrants arrived through New York. This book covers the history and describes coming through the other major U.S. ports.

Wesołych Świąt

Filed under Culture and customs, Genealogy Research, Polish genealogy, Writing Family History

October is Polish Heritage Month

October 5, 2021 Leave a comment

Polish workers were among the craftsmen who English agents recruited to produce materials needed to build the Jamestown and to manufacture tar and resins needed to repair the ships. The Polish workman also setup the first glass works in America. Your Polish ancestors may not be in history books but their labor helped build America.

When did your Polish ancestors immigrate? Why did they leave their homes? If you do not know, explore some possible reasons. Do not assume that the cause was economic or to avoid the military draft. Did other siblings immigrate? Did their parents immigrate? What was the status or occupation of your ancestors in Poland? Multiple factors forced the migrations from Poland, and your immigrant may have been affected by more than one element. Remember that each immigrant has a unique story, and it is part of our Polish heritage. We need to search the records and write down our oral history to save it for our future generations.

My Polish grandparents came from neighboring parishes, but different circumstances caused their immigration. My grandfather, Stefan, had ancestors who were nobility, but his family worked their farmland because their farm was very small. It could barely support their family. My grandfather, a brother, and a sister had to leave home to find a better life. My grandmother, Anna, came from the same area as Stefan and also had ancestors who were nobles. Her family farm was also very small and could only support one family. However, her life in Poland and the immigration story is different from Stefan. She and two older brothers were the only members to survive World War I. However, Anna had to find a husband, but her brother could find one for her in Poland. She was sent to her brother in America to find her husband.

It was not easy to immigrate to America. Leaving home was a very emotional decision. Those who left saw immigration as their only chance to escape the poverty of their life in Poland. Not only were they leaving their family and friends, but the emigrants were leaving their beloved homeland behind. Some may have been excited about emigrating, but there was also fear of the unknown — most left home with tears in their eyes.

They were mostly farmers who were forced to leave Poland. If they were married, they left to find food for their children. If they were single, they left to find work because there was an excess of farm labor and no room for them on the family farm.

After the immigrants arrived in America, they felt joy and relief as they walked past the gate into the United States. However, their journey was not over. They were tired and probably hungry from their trip. They were thrilled and bewildered by what they saw of their new land.

Try to describe their lives in America. Look through old pictures in family albums and also history books of the local area and neighborhoods. Pictures of their homes, neighborhood, and their church are vital. Identify where they worked because this would have been a significant part of their lives. Look at their overall experience in America. How did they enjoy their new life? Did they do anything outside of work? Did they have a hobby? Were they active in a fraternal group? Did you find pictures of family gatherings? How was their life here better than what they would have had in Poland?

You will not find answers to most of these questions. However, asking the questions and doing the research will give you a perspective of what your ancestors experienced and give you a better understanding of their character and your Polish Heritage.

Our immigrant ancestors were heroes, and they are the foundation of our roots in the United States. Our lives would be much different if they did not endure the challenges of emigration from Poland. Do not underestimate their contributions. They may have left us some material wealth, but their most significant contribution is their role in the factories and farms of the United States. Their names will not appear in history books, but their efforts impacted American history, and without their sacrifices, our country would not have developed as it did. Their lives were the building blocks in the growth of their new country, and their immigration influenced the quality of our lives today in the United States. Remember that they made many sacrifices for you and helped build the United States.

Save the stories for your future generations

Have fun, and enjoy your Polish Heritage.

Filed under Culture and customs, Genealogy Research, Polish genealogy, Writing Family History

Converting FTM facts to Family History Narratives

September 6, 2021 4 Comments

My initial efforts in genealogy research were adding as many names, dates, and facts to my family tree using a tree on Ancestry.com and offline using FamilyTree Maker. This format gave me a massive warehouse of information but a challenging landscape of organization when trying to use the genealogical reports to analyze my facts. It was even worse when I tried to share the trees and charts with my family members.

I began converting my FTM data to text documents to become more organized and have a better, more readable format to share with my family. My initial conversion methods used the Descendant Reports and Individual Reports to copy and paste their contents to Microsoft Word documents for each direct ancestor. Today, I use FTM’s Smart Story function to generate my initial text document.

My first step in editing the text document is to make each fact a Bullitt Point. Next, I organize each fact into chronological order. This method seems tedious, but I get excited when I see my ancestor’s life story start to appear. Seeing the facts come together then encourages me to add photos and maps. I search for pictures of my ancestors, their homes, schools, places of employment, vintage images of the area, and maps. I place them next to the text where appropriate or at the end of the narrative. These pictures bring my ancestors more alive.

My individual narratives now become my primary research document. I save all new facts, photos, and documents to this summary of my ancestor. First, the facts and stories are added to the narrative with references to my sources. When I find a new document, I add the information from the document in the narrative. Then, place the copy of the document at the end of the narrative with a citation of its source.

I still use FTM as a reference for names, dates, and relationships. In addition, I refer to it often when I am writing to get the family group information correct or to review where to place a new name in the family tree. However, I do not run another Descendant Report, Individual Report, or Smart Story. Instead, I run Pedigree Charts when I need to add them to a section of the family history to show how the individuals are related.

I have found that using narratives as my research document makes most of the challenges of using linage software disappear. Narratives are flexible in adding information, more readable, and can be easily shared. Converting your FTM data to narratives may be tedious, but you will see more of your ancestry in the narratives.

Filed under Genealogy Research, Software, Writing Family History

Make Sharing Your Genealogy Research Exciting for Your Family

August 16, 2021 3 Comments

Trying to share our family histories with our family memories can be an exciting aspect of our work. However, sharing can be very frustrating if our approach is boring or filled with genealogical jargon. Whatever your first sharing attempts were, keep trying. Besides the feeling of fulfillment when you notice family members getting excited, sharing can also open doors to find more information.

Once you began researching your family history, did your family ignore you when you tried to tell them what you were doing? Did they avoid you by moving to another room? You were excited when you found records and wanted to tell everyone how you did it. Why did they ignore you? Are they genealogists?

My experience has been that non-genealogist wish to know about the family history but not how we found the information. I found genealogy forms, charts, and documents were boring and hard to understand by most non-genealogists. They wanted to see the stories of what’s in the documents.

When I began writing narratives that include photos and maps, the attitude of family members changed, and they started asking questions about my research. As a result, my research began to advance faster because my narratives helped me become organized, and relatives began offering photos, documents and told me stories.

There are several ways to share our family history narratives. Genealogists have used newsletters for many years, but the internet has introduced blogs and social media as additional avenues to share our stories. I have taken a more significant step by expanding my narratives into published books. I feel a bound book will be saved by my descendants, thus saving my hard work. Posting online could give my family instant access to my narratives, but I need to be cautious of privacy issues. Also, I believe my online posts may disappear in the future. Newsletters are easy to write and distribute, but they are easy to throw out when someone cleans off their desk. Some people save their newsletters by putting them in a ring binder, so this becomes almost like a book. These are some of the reasons why I use one of the online platforms to self-publish my family histories in bound books. Note, my research does not stop once I publish. I keep digging for more stories and trying to answer those nagging questions about why my ancestors did something or settled where they did. I update my narratives and use them as my primary research documents, so the book content is always up-to-date.

Start saving your research in a narrative format. Then, your genealogy work will be accepted and enjoyed by your family members and help your family remember your ancestors more.

Save their stories and honor them.

Filed under Genealogy Research, Writing Family History

My interview on researching and writing my family history

August 12, 2021 Leave a comment

I was recently interviewed by Polatron which is a group in Australia helping Polish descendants gaining dual citizenship. We discussed how I got started with my research and tips on researching, saving and writing it down in an organized method.

Filed under Genealogy Research, Polish genealogy, Writing Family History

Immigration Paths in America

August 1, 2021 Leave a comment

Tracing the path your family took from the port where your immigrant ancestors arrived and migrated to your birthplace is an essential part of your family history.

In Colonial America, ports developed where colonists had developed goods for exports such as tobacco, dried fish, timber, and flax. Shipping routes between Europe and America developed primarily to take American exports to Europe. The ships made the Atlantic passage to pick up raw materials in the American colonies. For the return voyage to America, the ships carried finished goods ordered by colonial merchants and also people — typically new immigrants. Some immigrants freely determined their destination and paid their passage to one of these ports. However, colonial governors or land speculators recruited many others to settle in specific colonies. The colonies needed immigrants to settle and clear land and make money for those who the British government granted land charters. The indentured immigrants arrived at the ports determined by what group paid the captain. After our ancestors landed, they moved away from the seaport seeking available land. Late arrivals moved further west, pushing against the frontier and Indian territory. They also turned south down the Great Valley Road into the Shenandoah Valley and further into the Piedmont of North and South Carolina.

Colonial roads usually developed over already established Indian trails. As settlements developed, roads expanded to handle carts and wagons, and more immigrants came. The Forbes and Braddock’s Roads were two exceptions because British soldiers built them over previous Indian trails to handle cannons and wagons during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. After the Revolutionary War, settlers pushed westward through the Appalachian Mountains to find new land in western New York, Ohio, and Kentucky. They used and expanded Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and Tennessee. They followed the Indian trail along the New and Kanawha Rivers to the Ohio River and Kentucky. Forbes and Braddock’s Roads transformed from a military road to a westward migration road as settlers pushed to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River, which became a major natural highway to new lands in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Settlers in the Northeast used the Mohawk and Catskill Turnpikes to push into western New York and then Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. After completion, the Erie Canal supplanted these two turnpikes and acted similar to the shipping routes on the Atlantic.

Use land transactions, tax records, and probate records to determine where your ancestors settled in colonial history and the early 1800s. Census records after 1850 can also make tracing the migration path much easier. If they arrived in the late 1800s or early 1900s, find the train route they took from the port to where they found work. Identify why their friends or relatives came there — they were your ancestors’ destination.

Map the route, find accounts of life in these areas when your ancestors lived there. Did any historical events happen around and affect them?

Find their story, write about it, and save it for your future generations.

Filed under Culture and customs, Genealogy Research, Writing Family History

Get Organized!

June 19, 2021 Leave a comment

Success in our genealogy research will come more accessible if we are organized. Being organized allows us to quickly access what information we have and keep us on the correct path to find more information.

Being organized means we can quickly find all of the information we have on an individual to do the next search. I also believe it means we can quickly review what we have for an individual to restart our search for his documents after being away from his details for a while.

I do not rely on rows of cabinets and piles of color-coded folders to retrieve my information. I found storage space is always in demand and never enough when you have paper copies. So I now save only electronic copies. My laptop, thumb drives, and external hard drives give me all the space I need to store my copies. They are also easier to carry when I am going to a library or archive to do research.

The most challenging aspect of saving electronic copies is labeling my files with a consistent naming system. Our computers will automatically sort our files alphabetically, so our files need names that place them in a predictable order. In addition, the naming system will allow us to find and review the documents quickly.

However, the most critical aspect of my organization system is prioritizing compiling the information from my documents into summaries for each ancestor. This step is because summaries are the core document in my research method and organization.

Benefits of Summaries

Lists everything I have found for an individual in one place
I can quickly find the criteria needed to do the next search
The summaries make my research efficient
I spend less time searching my files and more time finding more documents
The system also allows me to analyze the summaries to see what I need to do next and see the stories in the information I found.
Its format is flexible, and I can easily add information in a logical order
It is readable and understood by our non-genealogist family members so we can exchange our treasure-trove of stories
Listing the information in chronological order allows our ancestor’s story to develop and reveal itself to us as we do our research.
Combining the individual summaries is the beginning of our written family history.

Saving the documents using an organized system is essential, but organizing the information that is in the documents is critical to our success. The summaries are the core of my research, and the family histories that I publish for my grandchildren come directly from these crucial narratives.

Begin compiling your data into summaries to be more successful and having more fun!

Filed under Genealogy Research, Writing Family History

Christmas Suggestions for Your Czech Friends and Relatives

December 12, 2020 Leave a comment

Filed under Genealogy Research, Writing Family History

Legacy Family Tree Webinars

September 16, 2020 Leave a comment

Great News! Legacy Family Tree Webinars us celebrating their 10th Anniversary and are unlocking for free viewing of their top Webinar from each of the past ten years.

https://familytreewebinars.com/top10

Filed under DNA, Genealogy Research, Writing Family History

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