…. September 9th, 2009, that the steps to my 2011 trip to Poland began, and that was with a short, seemingly innocuous, email message from someone I had never heard of. I received a short email from “Alice Grabowski” and in a few short sentences it said “Hi, I am a relation of yours via the Symbal side of your family.” I was amazed. And also a bit skeptical, I will admit. In the past, I exchanged emails with someone who was going to be in the hometown of another ancestor, and after he was supposedly there, he offered to send me some pictures…for a price. So i treat all unknown email on the Internet with some degree of polite suspicion. But I responded to “Alice” who is really Alicja, and, lo and behold, she set back pictures of my great-grandparents and some great-uncles and cousins. It turns out here family had been in contact, many years earlier, with some other of my family. It did not take long to break down the barriers there and realize that we were indeed family. We exchanged several emails with family history, aided in translation by my dear friend, Ewa.
And then in March, 2010, my sister Mary sent me a brochure about a trip to Poland being led by a friend of hers. And before you know it, I was on my way to Poland where, at almost the last minute, there was a knock on my hotel room door and there was Alicja, my third cousin, along with her husband and oldest son, Wojtek and Bartek. We had a chance to talk and take pictures and they invited me to come for a visit, a long visit. That was about 11.5 months ago.
And so I sit here today. Tomorrow I will be traveling, on my way to Poland, and in two days I will be there, In Gdańsk, and they will be picking me up at the airport. I will be spending three weeks with them. We will spend about a week in Gdańsk and about two weeks traveling in Poland and Ukraine. Ukraine is where our shared ancestors are from, and we have relatives there to this day. To say that it will be an amazing experience is probably quite an understatement. Somehow, I know it will be an amazing three weeks, and I am really looking forward to it, and to sharing it with you, all who read my blog and will follow my adventures.
Stay tuned, the fun has not even yet begun…..
