October is flying by and it’s the weekend, once again, so it’s time for a new challenge from Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

I didn’t ask Randy, but wonder if this week’s topic was inspired by the UK Society of Genealogists’ All About That Place 2026, which is currently up and running for ten days from 7 October 2026. About ten new videos are posted each day, but each is only about ten minutes long. The talks cover all kinds of topics related the the study of a single “place” (or event).

It’s well worth checking out the videos as they are all well done.

Back to Randy’s choice for today’s SNGF:

1)  What geographic and community places matter to you?  

2)  Pick one place (building, village, town, city, county, state/province)  and describe your connection to it and why it matters.

I think I’d have to choose the parish of St. Demetrius Greek Catholic Church, which includes the villages of Udol, where it is located, and Hajtovka, both in eastern Slovakia.

I haven’t been fortunate enough to visit, except virtually via Google maps, but it is the ancestral home of 1/4 of my family tree – that of my paternal grandmother, Julia (Scerbak) Sabo (1893-1985).

Hajtovka, on the left, today has only about 68 residents, down from 300+ when Nana grew up in the late 1890s. Udol is on the right and the cross marks the location of the parish church. They are a mile apart, so in the old days, those in Hajtovka walked to church every week. Today, they have a small chapel of their own.

The image above is the road going through Udol and you can see the church in the distance. There are about 300 residents in Udol today, down from 800+ when my grandmother lived there.

I would love to visit this area, as I have second cousins living nearby, and keep in touch with one of them a couple of times a year with the help of Google Translate since Helena doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Slovak or Rusyn.

I have more or less created a one-place study of the parish as its church registers are digitally available on FamilySearch and, a few years ago, I went through and created Excel databases of all the baptisms, marriages and burials from 1828 (when they begin) to 1920. The parish records actually continue to 1935, but in 1920, local authorities switched to the Cyrillic alphabet, which was too much for me to figure out!

The parish is in the foothills of the Tatras Mountains and is beautiful, but the land has never been good for farming and there is no industry near there. Young people have left for cities where they can earn a living.

This week’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver on Genea-Musings is an interesting one:

1)  Do you recall what you were doing in 2001?  Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc?

I have to admit that nothing comes to mind that marked 2001 as a year any different from the years before and after it.

I was teaching language arts at a junior high school and my husband was busy commuting via carpool to work in Los Angeles. We also had a teenager at home.

I don’t remember where we vacationed that year either. We mainly focused on visiting sites in the National Park Service (I’ve been to about 240 monuments, historic sites and parks) so I imagine that we traveled somewhere to visit one or more of those sites.

The family was quite involved with Children of the American Revolution in this time period. My son was an enthusiastic member and my husband and I both served as senior officers.

We did always look forward to Christmas, as my mom cam out for a couple of weeks every year to spend time with us.

That’s about it for 2001. Not a memorable year by itself.

Thanks, Randy, for another weekly challenge.

It’s hard to believe that September comes to a close this week and fall has arrived.

Randy Seaver has presented the last Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge of the month for us:

1)  What is “Your Oldest Confirmed Record?”  What is one of the oldest documents you’ve personally found for any ancestor? 

2)  Share your oldest confirmed  record:  what it is, where it came from, and what it revealed. 

Randy clarified what an “oldest confirmed record” is:

I was unsure what “oldest confirmed record” means.  Is it “a record only I have?”  Is it “a record that is old in years that I’ve found in a repository or online database?”  Is it “an old church confirmation record?”

 I asked Google Search AI and it told me:

An “oldest confirmed record” is the furthest back verified document, like a birth certificate or census entry, that proves a specific ancestor’s existence in a family tree.

Like Randy, I have some documents from the 1400s and 1500s – English wills – but, offhand, I can’t remember the ancestors who left them.

Since I’m much more familiar with ancestors in New England in the 1600s, I’m going to stick with the 17th century.

Sampson Mason is my 8X great grandfather, baptized on 6 December 1624 at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Bolton, England in the Greater Manchester area, the son of Robert Mason.

Sampson is one of my rare north-of-England colonial ancestors. Most were from the southern counties.

Sampson settled in Rehoboth, Bristol, Rhode Island and is last mentioned in records on 1 November 1676. He married Mary Butterworth, c1650, and became the parents of thirteen children. I’m descended from the youngest, daughter Thankful, born c1672, probably also in Rehoboth.

Another fun SNGF challenge. Thanks, Randy!