I first encountered genealogy thirty years ago while studying history.
The genealogy I was taught at that time concerned the lineages of kings, noble families and famous figures, none of which interested me.
However, I found that I greatly enjoyed transcribing old handwritten archival documents written in Latin, German, Russian and my native language, Polish.
Additionally, I became very interested in the Polish archives and documents relating to the lands of present and former Poland and Polish lands.
Ten years ago a client asked me to find early 20th century documents concerning their ancestor who was born before World War I in the former Austro-Hungarian partition.
The only trace of their ancestor could be found within a list of deportations from 1945 that were written in Russian.
As I quickly discovered, the ability to read old handwriting and a working knowledge of archival databases were the most important tools for finding the documents I was looking for.
This led me to become a genealogist professionally and the rest, as they say, is history.
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