Welcome Home’s 2024 Lecture Series
In Search of Kaszubia
Speaker Biographies
Aleksandra Kacprzak
Aleksandra Kacprzak is a genealogical researcher living in Poland and the owner of the genealogy research company “Genoroots.” Ms. Kacprzak graduated from Copernicus University in Toruń with a degree in archival science and completed the Eastern European Genealogy course in Salt Lake City. Ms. Kacprzak is a genealogical lecturer in both Poland and the United States. In the U.S., she has spoken in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey. She will be a webinar presenter on RootsTech 2024. Ms. Kacprzak is a founding member of the Polskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne [Polish Genealogical Society] and a founding member of the Stowarzyszenie Polscy Profesjonalni Genealodzy [Association of Polish Professional Genealogists]. In addition to her genealogy work, Ms. Kacprzak also provides heir tracing services for both lawyers and the courts. She is a licensed tour guide and organizes personal ancestral tours, as well as cultural-oriented tours for larger groups.
Aleksandra Kurowska-Susdorf
Aleksandra Kurowska-Susdorf is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Naval Academy in Gdynia, Poland. Her scholarly interests include death studies, Kashubian culture, and autobiographical pedagogical approaches in education. In her research, she examines how the Kashubs, an ethnic indigenous group in north-central Poland, celebrate death. She is ethnographically analyzing the educational dimension of participation in death rites. The study unpacks how tradition and folk myths reinforces and extends the structure of society as well as basic values. She is also involved in emigration studies, analyzing Kashubian emigration to America in various contexts: reasons, settlement, Kashubian language, tradition, death rites, and myths. Beneficiary of: Federal Assistance Award. U.S. Department of State 2014 w Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in the USA, New York (2014) and DAAD short-term research funds for Ph.D. students in Germany, Jena (2015), The Graduate Student/Young Scholar Grant PAHA, Denver, 2017. Participant of PAHA Annual Meetings in Atlanta, Denver, and Washington. She is also an active educator in places of remembrance (Piaśnica Forest and Stutthof Concentration Camp) and a licensed tour guide in Kashubia. Author of books “Oswoić śmierć. Edukacyjny potencjał kaszubskich rytuałów pogrzebowych” PWN 2019 and in the Kashubian language “Żëcé jak nudle” ZKP 2022 and many articles, also in Polish American Studies.
Jakub Bodaszewski
Jakub Bodaszewski (b. 1979) studied history and administration at the Jagiellonian University. He is a senior archivist at the Rzeszów State Archive (Sanok branch) and has written several dozen articles. His interests include: Galician cartography, the independence movements in 19th century Galicia, the economy and society of Galicja between 1772 and 1850 as well as political parties of the Second Polish Republic. He is passionate about genealogy, especially when it involves the Borderlands. His email is bodaszewski88@vp.pl
Katarzyna Bozińska
Katarzyna Bozińska is the head of one of the Civil Records Offices in Poland. She has been working with civil registers (vital records) for almost 17 years. Privately, she does genealogy. Katarzyna graduated from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and completed her postgraduate studies at the Catholic University of Lublin. She is a member of the Association of Civil Registrars of the Republic of Poland (https://www.usc.pl/) and vice-president of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian branch of the Association of Civil Registrars.
The result of her own genealogical research is the discovery of over 400 ancestors. She has accessed many documents which helped discovering her heritage.
Lucjan Cichoki
Lucjan Cichoki began his genealogy career by accident. He was working as an English teacher in Poland and was considering a career change. In 2013, he went to the diocesan archive in Przemyśl with a friend and Mr. Cichocki saw the nineteenth century vital record books for the first time. He describes it as “love at first sight.” He is now a full-time professional genealogist. His areas of research include Poland, Slovakia and Western Ukraine. In addition to genealogical research, Mr. Cichocki provides translation and transportation services to Americans visiting Poland in search of living relatives. He is a member of the Association of Polish Professional Genealogists.
Contact info for Lucjan Cichoki:
website: www.polishancestryresearch.com
email: info@polishancestryresearch.com
Michał Wysocki
Michał Wysocki became interested in genealogy in 1998, when he saw the family tree of a restaurant owner in southern Poland. In 2007, he joined the Pomeranian Genealogical Society, and began an impressive history of leadership in the Pomeranian Genealogical Society and indexing genealogical records. At the Society, he has held all the leadership positions at the Society, from Indexation Coordinator to President. He is currently serving as the Society’s Vice-President. He has personally indexed over 260,000 genealogical records.
Wysocki has successfully negotiated agreements with two facilities which opened up the records for indexing. He worked with the State Archives in Gdańsk, resulting in an agreement, which facilitated the search for researchers and people indexing the books of civil registry offices. He also successfully negotiated a contract with the museum in Starogard Gdański to digitize their collections.
Currently, Wysocki is digitizing the collections of the Archdiocese of Gdańsk. He enjoys sharing his genealogical experiences with young genealogists from all over the world.
Contact info:
e-mail: wysocki.ptg@wp.pl
Mobile number & WhatsApp: +48 501 378 223
Rafał Patla
Rafał Patla was born in 1985. In 2009, he bought his first Nysa 522 and started to show Warsaw in alternative way. He founded the company “Adventure Warsaw.” Driving a Nysa 522, he showed foreign guests the places regular tourists rather never get to see. Since childhood, Patla was interested in history, especially World War II and Communist times. He found his first artifacts from the times of the Polish People's Republic in his basement. From then, he started collecting items. First, he has gathered it in a garage. Then he has set up the first exhibition called „Czar PRL”. In 2018, he moved into the Warsaw City Center and with the extended exhibition setting “Life under Communism Museum.”
Tadeusz H. Pilat
Tadeusz H. Pilat, known as “Teddy” to his American friends, holds a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Marie Curie-Sklodowska, Lublin, Poland. At the University, he studied “supralibros” -the coat of arms applied to the book covers to identify the book owner. He has extensive knowledge of family coat-of-arms.
In 2003, Mr. Pilat became an Accredited Genealogist specializing in Polish research. In addition to Polish, Mr. Pilat does research in German, Russian and Latin records. He is a frequent visitor to the United States to speak at genealogy conferences. For his clients that chose to visit Poland, he will accompany them to look for living family and provides translation services. He is currently working on both a Lemko extraction project and a Silesian database. He is an active member of the Polish Genealogical Society of Texas.
In addition to his genealogy work, Mr. Pilat performs heir tracing for lawyers both inside and outside of Poland.
Contact information for Tadeusz Pilat:
thpilat@gmail.com