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Eight Steps Later: Following Up on the Blackman/Peck Marriage Record

Image: rawpixel.com   In the never-ending quest to get my act together, I've been doing some email clean up lately. I'm finding emails I did not follow up on, including ones with photos I neglected to download, correspondence with other researchers I'd forgotten about, family stories that I didn't write down, etc. I've been assigning follow up on these emails to random days in the coming week to finally process them. Here's one example I worked on this week. Back in 2024 I was on the trail of a marriage record for the Hub's 4x great-grandparents Sylvester Blackman and Clarissa Peck. I was working from an entry in the Ancestry database "New York City, Compiled Marriage Index, 1600s-1800s " where I found an entry for the couple. 1   This Ancestry database source was the book Early Settlers of New York State, Their Ancestors and Descendants , Extracts from Vol. 4, No. 5 (Nov 1937).  I found the book digitized on FamilySearch and the entry that Ancestr...
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Mom's Big Trip

Mom, and friends Janet and Zora, in traditional Croatian costumes, taken at Braddock, Pennsylvania, May 1953.
By Nancy Gilbride Casey

"Boy were we surprised. We never expected anything like this hotel." 

A trip to Pittsburgh was the ultimate in excitement for a 15-year old from Cleveland, Ohio, back in 1953, if a letter home is any indication. My mother, then Anna Margaret "Margie" Kozlina, had just checked in to The Penn-Lincoln Hotel in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. Mom was a member of a Cleveland-based Croatian dance ensemble, and had set out to perform at a Kolo festival in the Pittsburgh area.

Mom was exposed to kolo by her father's family, who immigrated from Croatia in the early 1900s. A traditional communal dance, it is performed in a closed circle, a single chain or in two parallel lines. One of many European chain dances surviving from ancient times, kolo is spirited and often fast-moving. 1  (Click here to view a video of a kolo dance from the Sv. Jana region of Croatia; 2  my great grandmother Vjekoslava "Louise" Baltorinic, was born in Sv. Jana, near Zagreb, Croatia.)

Mom's postcard and a longer letter capture her wide-eyed thrill at staying in a fancy hotel—on probably her first solo trip away from her family—as well as youthful antics with her friends. Four photos of her troupe taken on a hillside in Braddock, Pennsylvania provide a visual backdrop to her exciting teenage adventure.

It's a wonderful snapshot of a time in Mom's life which she clearly treasured.

Penn-Lincoln Hotel, where Mom stayed in May 1953.

Writing home to the family in Cleveland.




Captioned on the photo reverse: "Friends: Margie, Madeline & Janet. Taken at Bradock, PA, May 30, 1953"

Mom, standing, far left, and the rest of the ladies of the ensemble.

The men of the ensemble, enjoying a beverage!


 NOTES

 1 Encyclopaedia Britannica Online (https://www.britannica.com : accessed 29 Nov 2019, 09:38:00), "Kolo."

2 J.I.M. Video, "Kolo “Croatia “ Croatian Independence 2019 San Pedro," uploaded 27 May 2019; YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMQNUpTmz7I : accessed 29 Nov 2019).  



Until next time... 

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