Raising the dead

This was the long-planned for day when Joyce would finally visit the very soil her ancestors had once farmed. We guess. You see, we tried to hire an "expert" at Ancestry.com to find out for us, and they wanted hundreds of dollars to reconstruct an entire family tree. No one wanted the job of saying, "Yeah, this (or that) was your town." So we went with the census information I was able to find on my own.

Neither the guide nor the driver had ever heard of Ulaszewo. But there is such a place. Here you can see a sign to it.



When you get there, you can't find any signs that you have arrived. We had to stop and ask people.

We asked here:




And they directed us to here:



which is a very fine restoration of the kind of farm house Joyce's ancestors probably did live in. It's now being used as a vacation retreat. Feel free to squint at these pictures. We didn't figure out all the camera doo-dads till partway through Budapest, and even then we sometimes messed it up. Not to worry, there's a whole lot of fuzzy pictures that aid clear memories. Which we have and you don't. Sorry, we wish we would have done better, too.

Although farming continues in this area, a lot of people from Warsaw are building weekend getaways out there. We rode around the neighborhood for a while with our very enthusiastic guide, Jadwiga, asking everyone we saw about the history of the area. We came across this roadside shrine which has been on the same spot in some form or other for centuries. On this day, it was decorated up for the Corpus Christi celebration, and there'll be lots more about that later.



Don't forget to squint! Or get up and stand across the room. It looks much clearer that way.