I spent the last day of November binge-adding documents for Laskowski and Gramlewicz collateral lines as my last-gasp kiss goodbye to the eleventh of my Twelve Most Wanted. Today, we'll begin a new research project, one perhaps prematurely chosen based on the assumption that all the records that could be accessed on my father's Polish side had been accessed.
How wrong I was.
No matter. The trouble with long range goal setting may be that we can't always foresee what will happen that far down the genealogical road, but by December, I can always comfort myself with the thought that I'll soon be setting research goals for 2025. We can always start over, based on updated information.
For this month, we'll enjoy a hiatus from my own Twelve Most Wanted—er, eleven for this year—and take this month as a season for giving back. A few years back our county's genealogical society re-introduced a First Families program, for which we've been building trees online in preparation to make the listing of these ancestors publicly available to other researchers.
Quite a few of these early immigrants to our county arrived with some fascinating stories. Almost all of them came from great distances to settle here during the early years of statehood—some, right on the heels of the newsflash about the California gold rush.
This month will be my opportunity to share some of those stories as a way of giving back to the genealogy community. Who knows? Maybe some relatives from your collateral lines stopped by in our county for a while before moving on—or perhaps staying for a generation or two more.
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