Family history & genealogy book

A comprehensive personal research project aimed at writing and publishing a book that documents the history of my family across generations.

In progress — a multi-year initiative

Archive research, record analysis, photo restoration, writing

Over 1,000 individuals, traced back to the early 19th century

Fan chart of the Wadas family tree showing several generations of ancestors with names and dates — The current fan chart — over a thousand individuals, traced back to the early 19th century.

Sepia group photograph of around thirty labourers with shovels and wheelbarrows at an excavation site, with a horse cart and a flag — Thirty-odd labourers, a horse cart and a flag. No names on the back — but one of them is my great-grandfather.

Focus areas

Systematically working through parish registers, state archives and historical databases to trace family lines back to the early 1800s — including fieldwork in the villages themselves.

Collecting, digitising and cataloguing vintage family photographs, historical documents and oral histories before they disappear.

Placing personal family journeys inside the broader European and Polish geopolitical shifts of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It combines my interest in data analysis, historical research and long-term project planning into something tangible for the generations after mine.

From the archive

Three of the several hundred documents sitting behind the tree: a family record kept in old German script, a father’s letter to a tracing service, and the back of a photograph.

Most of the work is simply reading handwriting that was never meant to be read by strangers.

A worn handwritten family record in old German script listing births, a marriage and deaths between 1877 and 1927, with later annotations — Adam Kionka, born 1877 in Kobiór — three generations on one sheet, with later hands adding the deaths.

A handwritten letter dated 1950, in German script, addressed to the German Red Cross tracing service — Goczałkowice, January 1950 — a father asking the tracing service about a son last heard from in 1945.

A hand holding a small deckle-edged photograph, its reverse inscribed in ink with a name and a 1941 birth date — An inscribed reverse — a name, a date and an address, which is often the whole record.

A 1956 Polish insurance identity booklet with two mounted portrait photographs and embossed stamps — My great-grandfather Andrzej Pietrzyk, born 1894 in Goczałkowice, on a 1956 insurance card — the same name that signed the letter above.

All projects