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Jednota!

March is Women's History Month! It's time for the spotlight to shine on the ladies in our family trees. I'll be writing all month on women I've researched. I encourage all family history lovers to take the month to seek out the stories of our foremothers! They are often under-documented, but they have a lot to teach us.   My great-grandmother, Anna Tatar Simonik.   On 14 March 1988, after my grandmother, Margaret Simonik Kozlina (1913-1988) died, my mother got a letter from the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association. In contained the death claim benefit owed to my Grandma's heirs. 1 What Mom probably didn't know at the time was that this letter represented just one event in a chain that reached back 70 some years and was begun by her grandmother, Anna Tatar Simonik (1883-1 950). Anna joined the First Catholic Slovak Union—commonly known as Jednota, meaning "union"—in 1915, about a decade after she immigrated to the U.S. from then Austri...
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FAVORITE PHOTO

by Nancy Gilbride Casey


This favorite photo of many I have taken over the years comes with a special anecdote.

When our daughter Anne (then known as Annie), was preschool age, she dedicated great parts of each day drawing with markers, painting with watercolors, coloring in books. In summer, she drew with chalk on the sidewalk. 

Every gift-giving occasion was another opportunity to buy a new box of crayons or paints, and reams of paper, tablets large and small, and sheaves of manila and construction paper to feed her never-ending appetite to draw.

Her artwork covered our refrigerator, was sent on to grandparents, and hung on our office bulletin boards. 

Art was already ingrained into her little personality.

Each day Annie created literally a dozen or more creations, in a free flow of imagination, wild, exotic, and uniquely from her sometimes funny and observant perspective.

On the occasion of this photo, I captured her one morning, sitting at her little art easel, paintbrush in hand, engrossed in one of that day's many creations.

"Are you going to be an artist when you grow up, Annie?" I asked.

Without taking her eyes off her artwork, and without skipping a beat, she replied,

"But Mommy...I already AM an artist!"

To this day, I can't argue with that.

 

Until next time...
 
This post was inspired by Amy Johnson Crowe's 52 Ancestor in 52 Weeks Challenge. 

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