Diggin' for Family: August Objective Recap

Saturday, September 3, 2011

August Objective Recap

So, here it is September 3rd already, August really went by fast. But, even with a busy schedule which included the start of fall sports, our 2nd grader starting school, and a short vacation, we were able to accomplish most of the objectives we laid out back on August 1st. I gave an update to these in the middle of the month and you can read that here. Here is what we laid out and the results:

~~We will find and write to the local churches to see about a birth record for William Capen.~~ Yeah! We can mark this complete because my wife completed this. We did not find a birth record (boo!) but we did find a record of his baptism in the church register. We will have to add getting a copy of this to our to-do objectives.
~~Relook at the past searches I did for Joseph Lucas’ birth record – see where I need to look next.~~ I looked through my Lucas files and found some interesting things that I don’t remember seeing before. The big thing is that I think I’ve narrowed down his place of birth to Northbridge, Ma. I’ve also came up with a couple other leads to go on. I will save this whole story for a separate research story post. But, I can count this as complete. Yeah!
Plan the visit to William Capen’s grave and the WWI battlefields which are nearby (this satisfies my military history needs also). Ran into a little snafu here. We live in Germany and the grave and battlefields are in France. Doing a little investigating I discovered that France is sometimes a little ‘anal’ about passports. The whole family has our ‘official’ passports that got them over here but they all don’t have the tourist passport which France wants to see if asked for. So, we will get that process started next week and continue this objective. I’m glad we figured out the passport thing before we were ready to hit the road.
~~Danzig – do some initial probes as to what records are available for this area and the time period we need to look at.~~ I pulled a complete brainfart on this one. I started to look at sources for Polish genealogy and I realized that many years ago when I started this family history endeavor I found out that my maternal great-grandmother spoke Polish (She is Joseph Lucas’ mother). Years ago I got two books to help my research along. They are ‘In Search of your European Roots’ by Angus Baxter and ‘Polish Roots’ by Rosemary A. Chorzempa. We looked through these and what a wealth of information I had sitting on my bookshelf, right under my nose. So, this is a complete also.

So, all-in-all, it wasn’t such a bad month for getting some research done and we got a long weekend on the Rhein River in to boot. I’m happy with it and we are now ready to move on to September objectives, which I will write up this weekend and post.