Use of "more inside" forgotten again. Mods - if you want, please edit.

Very, very cool!!! This is my family history story. Yours sounds intense! Are the documents yours to keep?

You should definitely try to get these docs and photos scanned so you can share them. I would love to see them. I really enjoy poking through old, old things like this.

My mom recently sent me a bunch of Japanese figures she'd rescued from a neighbor that was going to throw them out. They hadn't been opened or looked at in fifty years (nothing on your stuff but still cool!).

Better digitize that stuff and get it all mounted acid free. I bet it could make a very handsome full wall piece. That would be a really interesting commissioned project.

I LOVE the net when it comes to genealogy. I Googled my grandmother's maiden name, and at the time, this was the first site that came up. Although I had reason to believe the Kornowski documented there was not related, I emailed the site owner through the link at the bottom.

An hour later, he replied and it turns out the great grandfather for whose grave he was searching was my great-great grandfather as well. How cool is that??!

I now have my genealogy on that branch of the family back to the early Nineteenth Century.

I also found out that the second priest ("The soldier - priest") at this parish in Toronto (sorry, Google cached link; the church's site has apparently expired), who happens to be my great-great uncle, was a war hero.

The documents belonged to my grandmother who passed away a couple of years ago and my uncles are going through the piles and piles of stuff that was left. They're taking some of it to be valued today, although I'm not sure what's going to happen after that. There's been some suggestion that some of what they have might go to a museum (or museums) who could either display it or would at least be able to store them professionally. To me that would be a shame as I could see things like the scrap book being split up - part of the coolness of what I saw last night was that it was all in a thick (~2 inches) book and everything was glued or placed in by one of my ancestors.

One of the coolest things that I've seen was a genuine unopened packed of cigarettes from World War One. We were clearing out my grandmother's house and someone found it - still wrapped up in some kind of metal gauze with a slightly faded sticker on the front. Strands of tobacco were poking out from one side of the container and I just sat there, moving it around in my hand. This box had been out somewhere in world war one, had come back to the UK intact and had been stored away somewhere. It was interesting to wonder exactly what that packet had "seen", who had touched it, where it had been.

Surely you would be the right person to *create* his Wikipedia page, TheDonF?

Yeah, altolinguistic, I guess I could do that. My uncles have a huge amount of info, so it would mean getting that off them and sorting it out. I was thinking also that maybe a dedicated site would be an idea, although that could take a whole heap of work, but could be really rewarding.

One thing, though, is that there isn't too much online about the Donkin family, so citing sources for Wikipedia could be an issue.

redvixen: cool that you've got the book back - holding onto family history is really important

Doohickie: cool story about your great-great grandfather.

When my dad was clearing out the house his parents lived in after they passed away, he found a book that had a small handwritten note in it about a relative that he'd never heard of and that his parents had never mentioned when he was growing up. After some investigation that included contacting the war graves commission, he discovered that he had a relative (an uncle, I think) that, IIRC, was killed in WW2. We went out to France and found his grave. If it wasn't for that one, tiny note written inside a book, we'd never have known about him.

I've never really been "up" on genealogy, but might have to start getting a bit more involved.