By Tim Firkowski on Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Category: Polish Genealogy

A Surprise in the Wrocław Cemetery

I was visiting my cousin Adam in Wroclaw at the end of August during my stay in Poland this summer. Adam took me to the Wroclaw Community Cemetery to show me graves of some family members. Adam prepared ahead of time by calling the cemetery office and found out the location of the graves we were interested in. A smart move!

The person in the office surprised both of us with some information we were not expecting. There were two children that had the family name, but neither of us were aware of these children.

The Community Cemetery in Wrocław is VERY Beautiful, and also very large. This is not a cemetery that you want to just wander through to locate graves of your ancestors.


















We first located all the graves of family members and took photos with my new camera that records the latitude and longitude within the image data.

We then went on to locate the graves of the children we did not know.  The first grave located was for Jadwiga Firkowska. The original sign on the grave marker and been repainted white and the lettering redone at some point in time. There were candles at the grave, so someone had still been caring for this grave. This poor girl only lived for one day.

It was on to find the grave of the other child we did not know. We found the grave and the marker was in very good condition especially given its age. Her name is Janina Firkowska. Janina was only 8 months old when she passed away.

Adam and I would met up with another family member that evening and asked if he knew anything about the two children. He did not know for sure whose children they were, but did have a guess.

There was not any more time to dig deeper into this mystery, but at some time in the future I can get more details from the records. When trying to track down all the members of a family, these types of discoveries are bound to happen.

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