Forever more I will have the fondest affinity for red geraniums and white lace curtains…they are the welcoming symbols of every Polish living space.
Photo credit: our guest from July 2018, Dawn S.
When my childhood and lifelong friend, Sue, and I were chatting last fall she said that she hoped to visit Poland one day, I agreed and said, “Let’s go in July!” and so we did. Many of you have asked how my visit was. This is my story, and these are my memories.
We began the following day, Thursday, with a visit to a government office at the neighboring city Bielsko-Biała, to look at military records. A remarkable thing that happened was in the process of requesting bundles of documents, an archivist came up from his area and talked to Zbigniew. He had recognized Zbigniew’s name on the request slips and remembered that Z had helped him with personal genealogy work in the past. Z said that he helps so many people that he did not remember this man, but was appreciative of his offer of help to us. It turned out that the archivist did help us with some additional documents of our family records.
This past April, my son and I had the most wonderful experience with our tour planned by PolishOrigins. I wanted to share some of the highlights of our trip since it was so much more than what I was expecting.
We decided early on to focus on the Kraków area and we later discovered that two branches of our family tree were from that general area. PolishOrigins helped us organize our trip into three parts: several days of touring the city, followed by several days of research and more touring in the countryside, and then finishing with a final day in Kraków. For the first part, PolishOrigins set us up with fantastic guides for tours of the Wieliczka salt mine, a city tour of Kraków, Wawel hill and castle, and a tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau.
