Why I started looking.
Beyond the usual family tree
Family Tree and Ancestry are useful places to start. They are not, however, the whole story. That is good news, because my mom was not happy to hear that she was deceased.
The further I got into this, the more I found: parish records, church archives, immigration records, old maps, historical documents, photographs, alternate spellings, and records that live in places you wouldn’t necessarily think to look.
And then there are the stories.
Some turn out to be true. Some turn out to be almost true. Some turn out to be something somebody's grandfather said once in 1947.
For example, did you know that we did not come through Ellis Island, but it seems that most of our ancestors came because of the Russian rule over Polish lands? Poland had been partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria at the end of the 18th century, and by the 19th century a substantial portion of Polish territory was under the Russian Empire.
Did you know that one Trepinski left Poland in 1876 with his 9-year-old son and came to America on the ship Pommerania, which made many such treks across the ocean, sometimes more than once a year?
Did you know that the ship's captain, H.F. Schwensen, went down with that same ship two years later after a foggy collision with a Welsh ship, only to rise from the whirlpool and be rescued days later and commended for his actions?
There is so much more!
That's part of the fun. It is part of the puzzle. It is why we are here.
Following the evidence
I'm trying to follow the family backward using original records whenever possible, rather than simply copying information from one family tree into another.
That means following names through different spellings, finding the towns people actually came from, looking at the records surrounding a particular person, and occasionally spending an unreasonable amount of time chasing a tiny clue that may or may not lead anywhere.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.
Either way, I tend to save what I find.
A note about the larger record
We are in a position to correct information that other genealogy services have propagated. We will make those corrections based on our own research. We are not, however, undertaking to pay those services to correct their databases or to compensate their customers for information they supplied.
So... how did I get Trepinski.com?
This is probably the second question people ask after, “Wait... you have the domain Trepinski.com?”
The short answer is: I've been in IT for a long time, and I've spent enough years around computers, networks, servers, websites, and the general machinery of the internet to know what to do when a domain name I actually want is available.
And, well...
Trepinski.com was available.
So I got it.
At first, it was simply a family name with a domain attached to it. Now it has become a convenient place to put the things I'm finding.
A work in progress
I'm not a professional genealogist. This isn't intended to be the definitive history of the Trepinski family. It's an ongoing investigation, and I fully expect some of what I currently believe to change as better records turn up.
In fact, that's the point.
If I find that something I've written is wrong, I'd rather correct it than preserve a nice-looking mistake.
So consider this site a living family project.