2024 Week 5 : Influencer #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

My husband's grandfather, Wladyslaw Stepek was a man with strong political opinions. He grew up in Haczow, in south east Poland at the turn of the 20th century. Towards the end of WW1 he was arrested by the Austrian occupying forces for agitating against their presence in his country. When he was released he continued to oppose Austrian rule and, after a fiery speech to his community in a local hall, he persuaded over one hundred men to attack and successfully disarm the nearby Austrian garrison.

Part 2 of 3 documents we have found, giving a contemporary's account of the Wladyslaw's speech to raise volunteers, with some of their names (own photo)

After the war ended and Poland regained its independence, he volunteered to join the Polish armed forces whose task was to defend the newly established borders with Russia. Most of this took place in modern day Ukraine.

Wladyslaw (highlighted) around March 1920 in group defending Poland's borders (own photo)

In the following two decades he championed equality for all the ethnic minorities then in Poland, primarily Ukrainians, Jews, Czechs, Lithuanians and even Germans. He vehemently opposed the right wing regime that ruled Poland in the 1930s and for this he was threatened with imprisonment at a notorious political labour camp, now in Belarus.

He died in 1943, still fighting for Poland's freedom in the Polish underground army during WW2.

Wladyslaw Stepek ( 1893-1943)

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2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...

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2024: Week 41: Most #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however, the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...

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