Big Breakthrough in the Koshuba Family Tree

One of the reasons I started to blog about genealogy was to find missing pieces on my family trees.  For most of the year, this wish was not fulfilled.  My biggest break was to find Jose Gutstein and he helped my to find a lot information about the Monkovski family.  I found his site on the internet when I was searching for information about the village where my husband’s maternal grandparents once lived.  I contacted him and this led to finding several generations of Monkovskis. This was very satisfying, and I felt that it made blogging worthwhile. 

I do keep track of the statistics from Blogger about my blog, and I saw that the posts about the Koshuba-Kleviak family were popular.  Someone was looking at them, and hopefully they would contact me with questions some day.

Pauline Rychly-John Koshuba Wedding, November 1916.  This picture helped solve the mystery of the Joseph Koshuba Family.

Last week I wrote an update of my first blog post, which was about my great-uncle, Joseph Koshuba.  On Monday, I got a phone call from a woman who left a message saying that she might have some information about the Koshuba family.  I called her back, and one of the first things she told me was that she was Joseph Koshuba’s granddaughter!  What an unexpected surprise!  She and I are second cousins and I had no idea she even existed. She told me that she had a copy of my grandparents wedding picture—although she had no idea who they were.   We talked for a while and she filled in several gaps in the Koshuba family tree for me.  Now I know what happened to Katherine Koshuba, the child of Joseph Koshuba and Florence Holmberg, that I had almost no information about.  I also know for sure that the man with the baby on his lap is Peter Wons, not Dymtro Popko.

 

My cousin sent me this picture of her grandparents, Joseph and Florence Kkoshuba, and children Katherine Florence and Frederick, and brother-in-law, Peter Wons, qt the wedding of my grandparents, November 1916.

So now, my genealogy energy is revived.  Searching for family members can be very tedious, and there are a lot of blind alleys and information that might be helpful, but you are not really sure about it.  There is a lot of scrolling through lists of names, which is a little bit like counting grains of sand on the beach.  I think that I am very fortunate to have two big breakthroughs in the first year of writing this blog.  Now, I am ready to tackle the second year.