A Touch from Slovakia

When I started working on genealogy, I really couldn't find much information on the web about our families. I decided I'd leave tracks across the internet, so that other family members wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.

Over the last few years, I've been contacted by a good number of distant relatives and it's been wonderful! Many have shared information. Some relationships have resulted.

Toward the end of January, I got a totally unexpected message from Slovakia! It was from Beata, who didn't think she was related to the Valachovics (original spelling), but was wondering if we knew of some of her mother's friends who had immigrated to the US.

Their names were familiar to Larry, from his childhood in upstate New York, but he didn't know anything about them. I forwarded the message to his cousins [brother and sister] Rodney and Dee. I soon heard from Rod, who said that he (and his wife Jean) and Dee (and her husband Dick) were thinking of taking a trip to Slovakia in September--and would we be interested in going, too. Yes, yes, yes! More about that later. Back to Beata.

Beata is a teacher in Bratislava, although she lives outside the city. We exchanged several messages and at some point, I told her about Larry's great uncle Tony who had made a trip to Czechoslovakia in 1963 for the ordination of another great nephew. I told her the name, as I remembered it. Wouldn't you know! I had the correct name and Beata was able to locate him easily! She even went to visit him in his office in Bratislava! Now we're looking forward to meeting Beata and her family, as well as members of Larry's family when we get there! I love the internet!!!

Some Questions

We're finally firming up on our plans to go to central Europe next fall!

Right now it looks as if we will be landing in Budapest about September 11, going on to Bratislava, and coming home from Prague (with a side trip to Vienna) about seventeen days later. I've always wanted to visit that area and Larry's genealogy works in, so it's win-win.

We've got our passport apps in the works and I've been thinking about whether I'd like to blog over the trip. I have two main questions:

• Will I enjoy blogging or will it quickly become a burden?
• Do I want to schlep my laptop, along with bags and whatever?

I've done the schlepping in the past, so I'll be able to figure that out by the time we leave, but I haven't done the blogging. To help figure that out, I thought I'd start now and learn to use the program before I leave, rather than on the plane. I can also see how I feel about this "journaling" kind of thing. Most content will have to do with our trip. I'll tell you who we're going with and about the wonderful connection I [serendipitously] made in Slovakia.

I think I missed the place where they tell you how to add a caption under a picture, so I'll tell you that the above pic is Old Town Bratislava. Blogging is much different that starting out writing the HTML coding myself--I don't feel as if I have as much control.

I'm going to close for now because I'm getting very anxious to see this on the web.