Last night we carved pumpkins for Halloween. One for each of us including Collen. His is the little vampire pumpkin. It started out as a pig that Kristin sketched out but somehow it became a vampire, a vampire pig perhaps?
I’m back from a week of vacation and genealogy. I drove up to Wisconsin last week to do some genealogy research that just can’t be done at home. The Internet and interlibrary loan are great tools, but for this trip I had to head home. Kristin didn’t have any free vacation days so this was a solo trip.
I spent a couple days at the Wisconsin Historical Society library and archive in Madison and at the Area Research Center at UW Parkside in Kenosha.
The trip was a great break from work, a chance to head home again, and a mother lode of good info. For example, I now have a copy of my 3rd-greatgrandfather’s (Carl Ploenske) estate file including thirty pages of testimony by several members of the family back in 1916. I also have copies of immigration paperwork for two great-grandfathers on my mom’s side, John Luba (from Poland/Russia) and Frank Leskovec (from Slovenia/Austria).
