Genealogy and Family Research -- The Journey

Genealogy--Family Research.  It is a passion, and an obsession.  Once bitten...committed.....to the search, the hunt, the discovery.  My journey began with a conversation with my mother many years ago...as she was telling me about her mother, who she lost early.  My mother was a teenager when her mother died so I never got to meet her.  My mother's father died when I was a year old, so though I have seen him in a photograph holding me as an infant, I never got to know him either.  My mother always told me that they would have been wonderful grandparents.  But I knew so little of them- mostly just their names- John and Mary.
 

Such common names, but these two people were anything but common.  John Stecko was born in Poland, the son of an immigrant by the same name.  He was a cold miner, who started his career at the age of nine.  But he was more than a miner; he was a craftsman.  He was a weaver of rugs and even the Wilkes-Barre newspaper noted that his rugs were of excellent quality and sought after by many people.  He was a hard worker, typical of his immigrant traditions.  When he wasn't working at the mine, he was working at home...weaving, gardening and raising rabbits.   He was a veteran, having served in the Second World War and he was very active in the local American Legion.  His wife, Mary, had been born in New Jersey, the daughter of immigrants from Slovakia. Her family came from a higher social status and circumstances than John's and the Paciga family didn't approve of Mary's marriage, feeling she had married beneath her station.  My mother related that Mary was part of a large family but my mother did not have much contact with them. This information, as well as a few pictures was the extent of my mother's evidence of her family.

Intrigued, I asked after my father's parentage and origins.  My father related that, as far as he knew, his mother's family was of Swiss and Dutch origins.   By Dutch, he referred to the Pennsylvania Dutch, but he wasn't sure if that meant they were from the Dutch country or were German, because he had heard his family refer to themselves as German and he knew our family name was German. He knew that some of the food his mother prepared came from her Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry and traditions.  He could supply me with the names of his grandparents and one great-grandparent, but he knew very little about them.  He told me that his Weiner grandfather, Franz, lived in Wisconsin for a time and that was where his father, Carl, was born, but he didn't know why he had gone there upon entering the country.  There were more mysteries -- for instance,there was a family story about a "brother left behind" in the Old Country. 



Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign on a barn- a commonly recognized type of PA Dutch art.

Armed with this information -- names and a few dates, I began to investigate my family origins.  I had no idea, at that stage, the extent of this journey and how it would lead to an obsession that still grips me after more than 20 years. 

The search for family in the days when I started was largely confined to on-site research and family recollections.  In other words, researchers would ask family to list family members and dates, often referring to family Bibles where some prior ancestor had recorded such valuable information.  Armed with this information, the researcher would travel to the area where their family lived and do on-site research at libraries, churches, and courthouses.  The Internet, as we know it today, hadn't been created yet.  Online messaging consisted of bulletin boards and listservers...not Facebook and Messaging.  Online research through sites like Ancestry.com or My Heritage.com didn't exist either.  Research was slow and tedious.  Eventually, that all changed and it seems like today, we have the world at our fingertips.  And this has made it a lot easier for genealogists like myself to locate ancestors, relatives and connections.

During the first years of my research, I was lucky to locate some other researchers of the Graver line.  This group of women had been researching the line for decades and were very experienced. Some had already begun DNA research, which was in its infancy in genealogical research use. Others had traveled overseas in search of our distant Graber ancestor.  They provided me with a great deal of information, as well as guidance.  Like them, I started my journey through locating documents--census records, birth and death records, marriage records, and wills.  Slowly, my tree grew.

After all these years, I have taken my family lines back 12 generations and solved many of those family mysteries.  My parents and my grandparents did not even know many of the names I discovered.  They did not know where their distant ancestors had come from and what drove them to immigrate to America.  My father's maternal line was indeed Swiss and Dutch - but Pennsylvania Dutch - called such because they spoke Dutch not because they came from the Netherlands country.  Her line traced back to the Gravers who were not English as my mother suspected, thinking the name meant Grave-digger in the manner of taking trade names as surnames. But Graver was originally Graeber, and the family came from Bern, Switzerland most likely, and they and their relatives were part of the community known as the Pennsylvania Dutch who settled in Southeastern Pennsylvania. 

What my father never suspected was that they had been in this country for a long time, coming in about 1720 and that they were colonists. They and their neighbors played an active and important role in the founding and development of this country.  Several served in the Revolutionary War, and through this association, their descendants were eligible to be recognized in several organizations honoring these patriots.  This includes the Daughters of the American Revolution  (DAR) and Sons of the American Revolution (SAR).  Unfortunately my father passed away before I could prove that last fact, but he was able to learn that his mother's family had deep roots in this country.

The photograph here is of the gravesite of Jacob Gehman who was born in 1753 and served for several years in the Revolutionary War. His record includes service as 4th Class in Captain David Strauss' Company (8) Hereford Township, Berks County PA Militia, First Battalion, 1777-1780; and as 4th Class in Captain Miller's Company (8) Hereford Township, Berks County PA Militia, First Battalion, 1783.  He is buried in St. Peter’s Union Church Cemetery in Lower Macungie, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.  The church is located on St. Peter Road, between Shimersville and Seisholtzville,  just east of the Lehigh-Berks county line.

I also made incredible discoveries about my father's paternal line.  The original spelling is Wiener, but my grandfather changed the spelling to Weiner.  The most information we had about my father's grandfather Franz was that he was a butcher by trade; of German or Austrian descent; had come into the country around 1904; and that he went to Wisconsin for several years before relocating to Allentown, Pennsylvania where he lived for the remainder of his life.  My father seemed to recall that he was possibly from Stuttgart, but he wasn't certain of this fact.  After examining Franz' application for naturalization as a citizen, I discovered that his town of birth was Lemisgrub.  This is the German version of the town's name as it was known to Franz when it was a part of Bohemia.  But its name was changed to Hliniste when it became a holding of Czechoslovakia  after the country's formation in 1918. (This was after Czechoslovakia declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)  Further research revealed that after the Berlin Wall fell, and with it the communist hold on the region, Czechoslovakia was peacefully divided into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.  Hliniste was now part of the Czech Republic.  My father had been correct to identify his grandfather as German and Austrian both.  He came from a village along the border with Germany in an area that had been settled by German families centuries before his time. But since this land was held by the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the rule of the Hapsburgs of Austria during Franz's early life and residence there, he correctly identified himself as Austrian.

Franz Wiener's Ellis Island entry record

The town of birth for an immigrant ancestor is critical information for a genealogist.  Armed with this information, it is possible to continue the search for relatives "across the pond," or overseas.  The  town name can lead to church parishes that served the community and therefore to church records which list the person's date of birth and parents.  Unfortunately because this area was under Communist rule for so long, I feared it was unlikely that records would be available from the local churches.

The Church of Latter Day Saints (commonly known as the Mormon Church) is very involved in
Genealogy and Family Research.  They believe that any family member located and verified can
be brought into the church and "saved" through a form of absentee baptism, resulting in a reunion
with the entire line in the Afterlife. (This concept is explained by the Church on their website at here)  Because this is so important to them, the Church has spent considerable money and assets in collecting and storing genealogical information.  They have the largest genealogical library and archives in Salt Lake City, the headquarters for their faith.  They have also sent groups of missionaries into countries all around the world in order to photograph and copy records, especially Church Records.  These records have been micro-filmed and are in storage in Salt Lake, and can be viewed there or in local Family History Centers.

Because the area my father's Wiener line came from was in a communist controlled area during the time these missionaries had done their work, I knew it was unlikely that they would have travelled into these towns to copy their records.  Therefore, I felt the chance of researching in these valuable records was pretty remote, unless I was able to actually travel to the area.  But the certain thing about genealogy is that you are never truly finished with it.  There are always new records becoming available, new leads to follow.  In this case, I discovered in the early part of last year (2014) that the Czech Republic had digitized and made the church records for this area available online.  I spent three months immersed in an intensive examination of these records, reading copies of the actual church book pages.  Through this research, I was able to make discoveries about my Weiner family and extend my family tree back an additional 9 generations!  Most importantly, I was able to find additional family lines and connections to other people living in this country.  I met more cousins, including one who was as actively researching this branch of my family as I was and who had conducted DNA research on this line.  My own DNA study confirmed our relationship.
 

Map of Bohemia, showing its position relative to other European countries.  Lemisgrub, or Hliniste, is located along the western border in the Bohmerwald, or the Bohemian Forest, which is also known as the Sumava Mountains..

This research also answered my questions about why Franz went to Wisconsin.  He settled in an area where many of his Bohemian neighbors had immigrated.  Suddenly the names of families in the area seemed so familiar.  They were from the same village as Franz, or from a nearby village.  These people had come to America together, leaving their homeland, and created a Bohemian community in Wisconsin. Suddenly, it made sense for Franz to travel so far inland upon his arrival to America.

Research into my mother's family has produced some interesting information.  While I have not been able to discover a great deal about her father's line, I was very lucky in my examination of her mother's side of the family.  Luckily, my mother's cousin, Joe Sasjack, became interested in his family.  He was fortunate in that he had maintained close contact with his Paciga family, unlike my mother and her parents.  The Paciga's lived in the Passaic, New Jersey area for most of their lives.  My mother's grandmother was Sophia Galovic, the wife of John Paciga.  After talking to the family about their origins, Joe came into the possession of a letter Sophia wrote to family in her country of origin and from this we were able to determine her place of birth.  Sophia was born in 1888 in Relov, Szepes, Slovakia.  This area is also known as Spis, and is located in the northcentral part of Slovakia near the Polish border.  According to the website, Family Tree DNA for the Spis DNA project, "Spis County was the fourth largest source of emigrants to the United States [from Slovakia] following Zemplin, Abov, and Saros Counties.  An estimated 11 % of the Spis population of eastern Slovakia emigrated to work in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania, the steel mills of Western Pennsylvania, and the many factories in New Jersey." (Information on the DNA project can be found here.)



Houses in the village of Relov

Following this lead, I contacted the LDS (Morman Church) and arranged to borrow and read a micro-film copy of the Church Records from Relov.  One of those missionary teams referred to earlier had photographed the town church's records and through this source, I was able to make numerous discoveries regarding Sophia's origins.  Like Franz Wiener, I noticed that families from Relov relocated to areas of this country in groups.  In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where Sophia and her family relocated to (and my grandmother, Mary Paciga, and my mother were born) can be found numerous families from Relov.  Several of these are connected to Sophia (Galovic) Paciga's line.

At this time I have nearly 9000 members listed in my tree.  I don't believe that family research is all about how many members are in your tree.  It is not a competition, but some researchers seem to think it is, as they proudly proclaim, "I have X number of people in my tree...How many do you have?"  It seems there are two types of researchers in this regard--- One type includes the ones I call Number Collectors... those who just work at adding names and dates to their tree, often without documentation to back up their connections to their tree.  Then there are the family historians... the ones who collect stories to go along with the names; who collect documents to prove the connections between people but also to piece together a mosaic of a person's life.  A census record tells them about the trade of a grandfather; a later census documents his migration across the country with close relatives who are also found on the same census page.  I prefer the second approach as I believe it is important to try to understand who our ancestors were, what was important to them, and what motivated them in their life's choices.  Because my family could not tell me much about my ancestors, I have had to rely on the records of their lives to tell their story. 

Yes, I have 9000 relatives, mostly dead, but relatives nonetheless.  The tree is full of stories, some shameful, others sad.  But each story is important, a testament to the struggles my ancestors faced and overcame.  Obviously the tree contains living relatives, and this includes the new friends and family I have discovered through my research.  Most I still maintain some level of contact with to this day...some more than others.  And some I have even had the pleasure of meeting, while there are others I am still planning to meet.  So despite the fact my own close relatives number few, I have found many additional kin as a result of my research.