Genealogical Jaunts: Travels in Family History

It was wonderful to fulfi ll the dream of touring the ancestral village of Girdziunai. I now know what is at the end of the road. It was also a strange experience. Girdziunai is a poor place, something out of the nineteenth century. It was easy to imagine my grandparents and their grandparents making the same trek from their homes to the clearing at the river. There’s a real sense of a village frozen in time. Yet there are telephone poles near the road and cars parked in the dirt lanes. And...