End of Summer Wrapup

Tomorrow morning I have to report to school. I actually don't have to be at school again until the kids arrive next Tuesday, but this is pretty much my last day of summer, even though I've been slowly lesson planning for the last month or so.

What did I do this summer? Mainly things baseball related or genealogy related. (Unless Jarret wants to point out something else.)


Baseball stuff:

I went to three Yankees games during the summer. Their record while I was there was 2-2, and unfortunately, the 22-4 pwning they got from the Indians in April is the most interesting Yankees game I've been to all year.

The last Yankees game was on my dad's birthday, and it my family was going to surprise him with the tickets and have his name put on the screen saying happy birthday. Unfortunately, he figured it all out beforehand. If he hadn't figured it out before then, three cameras suddenly focusing on the scoreboard in the middle of the sixth inning would have.

In July the AA All-Star game was being held in Trenton, so Jarret got us tickets. We were seven seats away from winning a pair of old Yankee Stadium seats. Nuts.

Took my first trip to Citi Field with my dad to see the Mets play the Dodgers, days after Manny's suspension was lifted. We waited an hour for Shake Shack, missing the entire first inning, and yes, it was worth it.

Jarret and I spent a weekend in Baltimore to finally have Jarret see his Orioles at Camden Yards. They were playing the Red Sox, so we could both root against the other team. And this was days after David Ortiz's name got dropped in with the steroid issue, so there was some interesting heckling. This also meant that downtown Baltimore was crawling with New Englanders carting cases of Yuengling into their cars and yelling to each other "Are you going to the innah hahbah?" Since John Smoltz started the game, Baltimore actually almost won the game...but didn't.

I saw a Sportscenter #1 top play in person twice this summer. Neither were at Yankee Stadium.


Genealogy stuff:

Last summer, I managed to track down living descendants of my paternal grandmother's maternal uncle in Ireland. Though I obviously didn't expect to hit that big of a jackpot this year, I hoped I could uncover some interesting things.

I obtained a copy of my grandmother's other maternal uncle's (Patrick's) death certificate. It contained the information that we were looking for: where he's buried. Still haven't made the trip yet, even though it's less than an hour from my house. Not much reason to go other than to take a photo of the gravestone and send it to the cousins in the old country.

I didn't have as much luck obtaining my grandmother's father's birth certificate. He's the only one of my great-grandparents born in the US, and the city of New York can't find it. It's likely it was never registered; according to their website, birth certificates weren't required until 1910, and about 25% of births before then weren't recorded.

We wanted the birth certificate to see if it had any information about his parents, and to pin a date down on his birth year; I'd seen everything from 1865 to 1872. More searching within the census tried to find out if his parents were married in this country or in Ireland. It's likely that they came over because of the potato famine and married here, but their names are too common to do an accurate search. This is the same reason I can't find any of my great-grandmother's family on an Ellis Island record; everyone has the same name and lied about their ages.

The only way that I could track my great-grandfather down now would be to look for a baptismal certificate. And you'd think the New York diocese would have some sort of central database, but no. I'd have to ask every catholic church in town. So that side of the family has been put on hold for a while, and we turned to my dad's father's side.

I tracked down my grandfather's family in the 1930 and 1920 census, but not 1910. I knew they were in the country by this point, due to an older brother being born in 1907, but I couldn't find them in ancestry.com's search.

Dad and I decided to travel to the town where my grandfather was born: Lansford, Pennsylvania, about a two hour drive. There was a large mine there, which is now a museum. We decided to go on the tour and see if they had any information about the people who worked in the mine. They didn't have any, and were rather surprised that we'd asked. An hour in a 50-degree mine for nothing.

Dad and I drove around the town. The mine had brought in a lot of immigrants, so there seemed to be a church for every ethnicity. We eventually discovered that yes, there was a Slovak church, and it was old enough to have been there when my family was.

When we got home, I found that the church had a record of names that had recorded a birth, marriage, or death there. And there were my great-grandparents, with "birth" listed next to their names - my grandfather's. Next to that were the towns in Slovakia they came from! Score!

Later that night, I found them in the 1910 census, with the last name horribly misspelled. The father was listed as a coal breaker - he didn't work inside the mine, he just waited outside for the miners to bring it out! We definitely had toured the inside for nothing!

Last week, I started to enter information into the family tree program at ancestry.com. With the information you put in, they run searches for you. While some of what they turn up isn't your relative, we believe they found a big one: the manifest of the ship my great-grandmother came on. It was listed as Hungarian instead of Slovakian (which happened a lot in that time), but the age is about right, and it said she was going to meet her sister in Hoboken, and we knew she had a sister in Hudson county...it's very likely her. So that's cool.

I also did some research for my stepmom, and was able to track members of her family quite a ways, but I've already typed enough. And if you're wondering why I'm not researching my mom's side of the family...I am. I just can't find anything.


Well, now I've typed way more than I thought I would, and I must go to sleep now. I've got school in the morning!