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Did You Hear the One About the Polish Flat?
Courtesy of britmum@Flickr I tried, but I couldn’t come up with a joke for that. “Polish Flats” are common here in the Milwaukee area. I’ve recently been exploring the area where my...
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Fat Tuesday
Fat Tuesday around here in Milwaukee, home to a large Polish heritage, is celebrated as Pączki Day. The most popular local bakery in the area, National Bakery and Deli, expects to sell 45,000 of them....
View ArticleMaps. Maps. Maps.
I started using the Google Maps system to plot some of my family’s locations awhile back, but I never got around to finishing it. Recently, I plotted most of the major Milwaukee locations for my family...
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Way Back Wednesday: Troka Family
This is a photo from my paternal Milwaukee line. I don’t know the names of everyone in the photo, but there are a few I know. My great-grandmother, Emily (TROKA) ZALEWSKI, is at the top-left. Her...
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Tip: Searching Milwaukee Newspapers
If you have any ancestors that lived in the Greater Milwaukee area from 1884-2007, you’re in luck. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s website has access to search and view newspapers from its history,...
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Cold Stones
I probably didn’t pick the best day to do some more research at Holy Cross Cemetery in Milwaukee today. A wonderful “spring” day in Wisconsin, a windy 23 degrees with snow flurries. I also should have...
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Zalewski Brothers
While looking for some other documents, I ran across a record that again pretty much seals the fact that my great-great-grandfather, Frank J Zalewski, and the Jacob Zalewski I have been researching...
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FHL Success!
Well, after over a decade of doing genealogy research, I finally made a trip to one of the “local” Family History Libraries. I put local in quotes, because it was still a good 30 miles away, but not...
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Tombstone Tuesday: Gwiazdowski
Anyone following the latest research into my ZALEWSKI line knows that I’ve run across the GWIAZDOWSKI surname on a few occasions. They have something to do with my ZALEWSKI family, but I’m still not...
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The Unknown Marriage
History and documentation has always hinted that my great-granduncle, Frank Zalewski, Jr, the brother of my great-grandfather, Joseph, never married, never had children. There was never any mention of...
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The Boy With No Hands
This all started when, on a whim, I decided to see what happened in Milwaukee 100 years ago. I went to the Google News Archive site for The Milwaukee Journal and brought up the paper from March 19,...
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Milwaukee Deaths Database
Over the years, I’ve spend a lot of time looking for deaths in the archive of The Milwaukee Journal on Google News. The problem is that these entries are usually too small (or too bad of quality) that...
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Milwaukee Deaths Database Live
My Milwaukee Deaths database is now live (and alive, so to speak.) You can read the details in my last post or on the database site itself. I’m still currently adding new entries when I get time, so...
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A Different Time
There are a few things I learned while looking for deaths in hundreds of old newspapers from the late 1800s, besides that it’s very hard to just scan the page for information. A lot of these things I...
View ArticleMilwaukee Deaths Database Updates
I continue to add data to my Milwaukee Deaths Database, though I have also spent some time adding a few helpful features. I don’t want it to just be a list of deaths, though that is helpful in itself,...
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Milwaukee Death Index: Updates
My Milwaukee Death Index site is still proceeding nicely. Many more entries have been added, we now have over 1300 entries and all of 1884 and 1885 have been completed. The site itself has also been...
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Milwaukee Death Index On Hold
Unfortunately, due to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel removing their archives from Google News and “moving to a new vendor”, my Milwaukee Death Index will probably no longer be updated. Unless I can...
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Zalewski Expert
I’m not sure how I fell into it this past week, but I decided to jump head first into trying to find and record all of the Zalewski lines in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. My main reasoning is to try...
View ArticleMilwaukee Journal-Sentinel Archives Back Online
I forgot to post about this news from a few weeks back. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel archives are now back online at Google News Archive. They had gone offline in 2016 due to the owner of the...
View ArticleMilwaukee Orphaned Photos
A few years back I happened to pop onto eBay and was just casually browsing and searching for genealogy-related items (like my surnames) and I ran across a collection of old cabinet card photos from...
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