When I wake up, my morning routine often includes grabbing my phone and checking the upcoming day's weather. After all, it can become a helpful guide in cementing the day's plans. It occurred to me that, hungry as I am to know more about what my Polish ancestors' day to day life was like, I could try checking the same mundane record sets for them, so I pulled up my weather report and entered Lubichowo, Poland, to add to my weather site.
Yes, it's a first step, and only a tiny one. I could see that there was a slight chance of rain this morning, and more to come for the following four days. Seeing their high temperatures in the fifties (Fahrenheit) in Lubichowo and overnight lows trailing not far behind, I could compare their weather with mine—it was colder but milder, and far more humid there—and spot differences in other details. Sunrise came later in the morning and sunset about an hour earlier than ours, reminding me that Lubichowo was in a location much more to the north than my current home.
I thought I'd do a bit more exploration of local details. For a town as small as Lubichowo, it is not easy to find many resources about that location in English, although I suspect if I used Google Chrome for translation services, I'd discover more detailed information. Still, I could see that Lubichowo is in a rural part of Pomerania, as the local administrative district includes twenty four villages and "settlements" which combine to represent a total population of under six thousand people. In contrast, just one of the cities in the rural county where I live includes over three hundred thousand people.
I did discover that the territory is a low-lying area, with altitude somewhere between one hundred and three hundred feet above sea level. The ground is said to be poor, sandy soil, so it makes sense to learn that the principal crops there are potatoes or such cereal grains as wheat, barley, oats, or rye. Some small family farms also raised livestock. Perhaps this is as it was when my ancestors called that place their home.
Since I discovered Lubichowo lies on the fifty third parallel north, I decided to take a whirlwind tour of the world to see which other locations are as far north as my Puchała ancestors' native village. Of course, sections of the Netherlands, Wales, and England are located just as far north as Lubichowo is. Surprisingly, Lough Derg, the lake so close to my father-in-law's Tully ancestral home, also is on that parallel. Across the Atlantic, Newfoundland and Labrador lie on that same northern pathway, and the parallel runs through the city of Edmonton in the province of Alberta. The closest that parallel comes to touching the United States is among the Alaskan islands in the Bering Sea, a considerable distance north of my current home.
To begin to understand more of what life was like for my Puchała and Zegarski forebears, I suppose I could conduct some experiments with Artificial Intelligence like fellow genea-blogger Randy Seaver has done concerning his own ancestors, such as the narrative about his third great-grandmother who lived in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada, in 1845. But I suspect a more useful tool for me would be a system which could find resources in Polish, then accurately translate them into English so I could assemble the details into my own narrative.
Mostly, what I'm curious about is, first, what made these family members choose to leave their homeland, and next, why did this one lone branch of the family head for New York when everyone else went to Wisconsin? Surely, there is a story that I am missing.
No comments:
Post a Comment