It’s time for one of my favorite weekly activities – Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings.

This week’s challenge:

1)  Last week we shared the heirlooms that we inherited or obtained from our families.

2)  This week, please show a photograph of one or two of them.

This was a really easy challenge for me because there are two items which easily make the top of my list.

From my (maternal) Adams line is Nammie’s rocking chair:

Early in my early blogging career, I wrote about Nammie’s Rocking Chair and How I Almost Lost It. Nammie was Nellie Tarbox Adams, my 2X great grandmother.  It passed from Nellie to my great grandmother, Annie Stuart Adams, to my grandmother, Hazel Coleman Adams, to my mother, Doris Adams Sabo, and finally to me.

I have some photos of me sitting in it with my son:

Linda and son, 1988

Six generations of family members have sat in Nammie’s rocking chair!

From my paternal Sabo line is my grandfather’s (George Kucharik, aka George Sabo) original baptismal certificate:

I never knew my grandfather, as he died of tuberculosis when my dad was only ten years old. Nana had this certificate among the many photos and records she had stashed away in boxes. I inherited them all in 1985 when she passed away. However, the ancestral village of the Kuchariks/Sabos was unknown to Nana and it remained one of my brick walls until 2011 when I took a photo copy of this church record to the Family History Library.

I learned that the portion relating to George’s parents – Stephen and Mary (Kacsenyak) Kucharik – held a secret that brought the brick wall crashing down:

The record is written in Latin. I knew “origene est” was “origin is”, but I could not find Jebes or Sebes in Czecholslovakia. I also thought  the word before “Hungaria” said “Jaros” and couldn’t find that place either.

The family actually came from a town called Also Sebes (with Felso Sebes being nearby) in SAROS County, in the old Hungary, but today in Slovakia near Presov.

There weren’t any online gazetteers back in the 1980s or 1990s and finding the original names of villages that have been renamed one or more times wasn’t easy. The terrific staff at the Family History Library had the resources to look that up and I had an answer in LESS than a MINUTE!

It’s special to me not only because it proves the family origins in Slovakia, but also because it is about a grandfather I never knew and who, by all accounts, was a wonderful man.

Thanks, Randy. This was a great follow up challenge to last week’s heirloom question.