I keep mentioning the rain – somehow we haven’t been able to get ahead of it and the news on TV is filled with reports of flooding. We’ve been fortunate to only get caught in downpours, not stuck in flooding.  Today was a really packed day. We covered a lot of ground.  It started in Przemyśl in the morning – Marek went to finish up getting information at the archive that he didn’t get yesterday. The archives are not open to researchers for all the hours they are open, and there’s so much to get.  When in archives we try to get everything possible that mentions a name we are researching and then go through, translate and analyze when we are back home. When possible, we get all the images from a book of records to guarantee that a record we find we need after analyzing the records we’ve already identified won’t be overlooked.

As we entered a town, a green sign with the name of the town would announce our arrival and a similar sign with a red line through the town’s name announced our departure. We drove through so many towns on our way to our goal.

You can see from these photos what the weather was. I don’t want to belabor it. The day was so packed – visiting cemeteries, taking hundreds of photos of graves, visiting church repositories, my head was simply spinning.  If you’ve never been to a parish office to view records, you would be shocked at the condition of the books.

The priests were wonderful and really good sports.  It’s often very difficult (impossible might be a better word) to get in touch with a priest by phone, email or snail mail to make  an appointment in advance, so we knocked on doors of parish offices and clearly disturbed the overworked and understaffed priests at rest. Not one of the many we spoke to refused to take some time to hear what we wanted, and either look through their own records or let us know where the records might be.

All in all, a very successful day.  We were also really glad for all the duplication of tech “stuff” we carry with us.  Marek’s camera died in the rain at the cemetery.  Cell phones and tablets helped to overcome what could have been a disaster. We ended the day at what is quickly becoming one of my favorite hotels – the Bristo

l in Rzeszow.