Matryoshka dolls--more commonly known as Russian nesting dolls--are sets of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. Matryoshka means "little maiden" or "mother," and the dolls have become a symbol of the babushka, a strong female matriarch and central figure in the family. My grandparents are Polish--not Russian--but my grandmother always had Russian [...]
Serafin Zielinski, according to my grandmother, was quite the catch. He was born in 1909 in Dunkirk, New York to John Michael Zielinski and Pauline Louise Gostomski, two Polish immigrants who arrived in America at the turn-of-the-century and purchased land in nearby Springville, New York. John worked as a machinist at Brooks Locomotive Works--a profession [...]
You can tell a lot about a person by the house they’re sorted into at Hogwarts, or so I've been told. Back in December, I sorted my family members--Gramps, Grandma, Mom and Aunt Holly--into Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Slytherin, respectively, and I've decided to sort the previous generation of Kuznicki's and Zielinski's this month. There's [...]
Left to Right: Gramps, Aunt Holly, Mom & Grandma, 1993 You can tell a lot about a person by the house they're sorted into at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I grew up in the 1990s and, unsurprisingly, some of the first books that I fell in love with were the Harry Potter series [...]
Every year until I was in high school, my family would make the twelve-hour drive to Buffalo, New York to visit my maternal grandparents, Tom and Janice (Zielinski) Kuznicki. We would stay for a week or two at a time, and my sister and I would beg my grandmother to tell us stories the entire [...]
Applegate Genealogy 
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