Stupid Blogger

I have been trying to add photos to some of my posts, and it seems as though Blogger has a mind of its own (or I'm doing it wrong...)

Wow! It's a miracle! This is a picture of my Grandma and Grampa on their wedding day. For all you modern brides out there, Grandma's dress is actually light blue velvet.

I wonder if that was a scandalous thing for a pastor's daughter?

Finding Roots

As I mentioned in a previous post, the ladies of the congregation have been busy making cabbage rolls and meat pies for our Christmas bazaar. A few weeks ago, while rolling blobs of raw meat, one of the ladies asked if I had ever made cabbage rolls. I admitted that I even though I have German background I've never made them, and that I couldn't remember ever having tried them (my mom assures me that she has made them but that I probably wouldn't have eaten them).

Anyway, we got to talking about the German background and I mentioned that my Grandpa was German, but had come to Canada from Yugoslavia. There are lots of people here who are German from Yugoslavia - some came to Canada before the war, some came after. She asked if I had any family here and I said that my mom had a cousin here whom I'd never met (and I think my mom had probably only met a handfull of times, too.) When I told her their names she said "I know them! They are planning to come to the Reformation Service on Sunday!"
(I know, I know, it has been a while since I updated the ol' blog...)

Sunday rolled around, and sure enough, I met my second cousin, Philip, and his wife, Eva.
We chatted for a little while and exchanged phone numbers with the promise of getting together soon.
Word got around quickly at church, and now we are greeted as 'relatives' since there are a lot of people in our congregation from the same town as my grandpa was, and many of them could well be related.

This was very cool for me since I don't know much about my mom's father's side of the family. I knew that he had come to Canada in 1930, so I searched their name in the Government of Canada's immigration records. Imagine my surprise when all the information on his family popped up! It recorded the date, port of entry, age, ethnic background, and ship on which they arrived. I was able to search and find a picture of the ship (Canadian Pacific has a website with information on all their ships, and some even have passenger lists). I thought this was all pretty cool...

Then, as I was looking for more information, I stumbled across Ancestry.com which is a website that allows you to put in your information and make a family tree. Again, imagine my surprise when I found that someone had been working on a tree and had input the names and some information on my great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and even my great-great-great-grandparents!

I was very excited about all this, and my 'church relatives' keep asking if I have found anything new. Some of them have offered to get together and tell me about Rastovac (the town they came from, in what is now Croatia). One family even arranged for me to meet a couple from the same town - the husband went to school with my Grandpa, and the wife is a cousin to him.
Anyway, this is pobably much more interesting for me than it is for you, so I'll stop now. I'm hoping to put something together because I don't want it to turn into one of those I-wish-I'd-asked-about-that-before-they-died things.