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Saturday, October 28, 2017
9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
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Category: places
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St. Bonaventure Cemetery, Allegany, NY
More Photos from Cousin Bernie.
Since Bernie is the photographer, he naturally chose a cemetery with family in it. St. Bonaventure Cemetery in Allegany, New York is quite a large cemetery, and I found many family names among the Kwiatkowskis buried there, including my great grandfather and great-great grandmother (Bernie’s great-uncle and great grandmother), . The family relationships can get a bit confusing when I try to position myself and Bernie with the dead relative, but I did use the cousin finder, and I think I got it right. If you see any mistakes in family progression, please feel free to let me know so I can straighten it out.
Bernie’s grandparents’ tombstone (my great-granduncle and “Babci Mary”). 
Bernie’s namesake who died in WWII when his plane crashed, probably in Papua New Guinea (my first cousin twice removed). 
The cemetery is named for a local university that students claim to be haunted. Who knows whether the stories are actually true. You can read them here and decide for yourself. In the meantime, here’s one as a great companion to those late night readings. You may want to keep the light on. -
Graveyard Month 2017
Happy October! I’m featuring cemetery photos from my cousin Bernie Kubiak this month. This one is from Chestnut Hill Cemetery in the village of Portville, New York (near Olean).
Photo by Bernie Kubiak I don’t think we have any relatives buried here. You can find a complete listing of interments here.
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Cousin Connection #2 My Cousin Married My Cousin
This isn’t a William Faulkner novel, it’s reality. It’s also not like it sounds. When your family has deep roots in the same area where you were born and raised, it’s bound to happen, and it doesn’t take much digging to find family members marrying family members. They probably don’t even know they were doing it.
This case is different because my cousin on my grandfather’s side, married a cousin from my grandmother’s side. They are not related at all to each other, but it’s not totally coincidental that it happened. All of my New York cousins come from my great-great grandfather who was born in Poland. Their roots are not nearly as deep in American soil, and they know who most of them are, so the chances of marrying one of the Kwiatkowski cousins are pretty remote. My grandmother’s genealogy can be traced well into pre-revolutionary America though. They settled in Pennsylvania, a wild and untamed frontier, approximately two generations before my Chuck’s grandfather and my great-grandfather arrived with their parents from Poland. (more…)
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I went to the cemetery looking for my family. I think I found them.
A few days ago I decided to change my screensaver on my PC. I thought I’d look up places where my ancestors lived and fill my screensaver scroll with interesting photos of those places to provide inspiration for my family search and for blog posts. You wouldn’t believe the stories I uncovered! Right here, in the good ol’ U S of A!
But first, a few shots from my past in the old world:
Wimpassing Im Schwarzatalle, Lower Austria , where my maternal grandmother was born. Yes, those are the Alps in the far background.(http://www.bergfex.at/sommer/wimpassing-im-schwarzatale/) 
Hanstein Castle, near Hanover Germany where my maternal grandfather was born. (http://posture.doonks.com/hanover.html) 
The only Jewish synagogue in the old Jewish sector of Pressburg, Austria, now Bratislava, Slovakia. Did my maternal great-great-grandfather, Rabbi Rudolf Abeles preside over a congregation here?(http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Slovakia/Bratislava-686020/Things_To_Do-Bratislava-Jewish_Life-BR-1.html) 
Bydgoszcz, Poland where my great-grandparents immigrated from. (http://allworldtowns.com/cities/bydgoszcz.html) 
One of the few remaining buildings in a tiny place called Kwiatkow in Poland. If I go back far enough, will I find that my surname originated here? The photographs of the old world are amazing, but I do have ancestors from the colonial days in America too. My paternal grandmother was born in Potter County, Pennsylvania, and my grandfather, son of Polish immigrants, was born in Cattaraugus County, New York. The two counties share state borders, and from what I’ve heard, Grandma must have crossed the state line where she met my grandfather. I’ve actually driven through Cattaraugus County, and I even stopped in the City where my father and grandfather were born (probably the same city where my grandparents met, considering it is rural New York, and it really is more of a small town), so I really was more interested in seeing images from the Pennsylvania side. (more…)
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What Happened to the Skeen Family?
I wrote the original Untold Stories more than ten years ago. At that time, there was little information to be found on the internet, and since I no longer lived in the area, I had to wait to get my questions about the Skeen family answered. I’ve been doing my research on my own free time, knowing that there was a story there. I haven’t been disappointed. Thanks to a few phone calls, Family Search, Ancestry.com, Plain City Utah.org, and one more trip to the Plain City Cemetery, I was able to find all the information that I needed to complete the Skeen’s story. The story coincides with the history of town itself, so it must be told as part of the town’s history.
William Skeen. Courtesy of Ancestry.com William Dolby Skeen was born in 1839 in Steelville Pennsylvania, son to Joseph Skeen, and brother to Lyman Skeen, all of whom were primary settlers in the Plain City , Utah area. The three men were among a larger group of Mormon pioneers who had originally settled in Lehi, but left to scout out an area in Weber County for a place with rich land for farming and a good water source. The area now known as Plain City lies at the edge of a delta where the Weber River fans out upon entering the Great Salt Lake. These early pioneers found that they could use water from the river for irrigation, and culinary water could easily be found by sinking wells. It was a good spot with plenty of water for their small party of pioneers. This group of men staked claim to the land, and are therefore among the founders of Plain City. (more…)
StoriesFromthePast.com 