Note

• {#1} I am publishing private sources – including correspondence between deceased relatives, handwriting, documents and photographies – because it deserves to be recorded as a testimony to family ties, times and humanity of individual people. It was important for the subsequent keepers, since it was preserved. The correspondents were not public figures, but they also deserve to be commemorated and preserved from oblivion. The sources contain references to ordinary interpersonal relationships, elements of everyday and family life. It is written in different languages, often everyday, colloquial, ordinary, with errors. To some, reading such notes may seem a bit like violating someone else’s intimacy. However, it is worth keeping such artifacts. Thanks to them, we get to know a bit what kind of people they were, how they functioned. They become closer to us. It’s easier to empathize with their situation. As it once was written by me:“I was not looking for traces of|literally specific people on bicycle routes. After all, my ancestors and relatives did not leave monuments or palaces along the roads. At most, from the names on the cemetery tombstones of (yet) unknown people, I could recognize whether until recently anyone of my relatives had survived there. I wanted to visit churches that they may have visited or seen, like me from the outside (they – because of a different religious denomination, me – because of my dress and closed doors). I wanted to see local monuments in the open air, which did not require securing my traveling belongings for the duration of sightseeing. I just wanted to be briefly and symbolically in the places where they also lived. See the sky they looked at, under which they experienced the events that I imagined after reading the vital records. Breathe in this air and walk along the paths they followed. Before they were asphalted and smog came. I willingly chose field and forest gravel, unless an evening feast of mosquitoes, flies and other insects loving me without reciprocity.”.Source: “Rowerem śladami przodków owczarzy” Parantele 6(2021) Śląskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne Wrocław (ISBN 978-83-959129-6-2 ISSN 2451-4136) s. 173; “Śladami przodków owczarzy” Odkrywca 7/2022 (282, ISSN 1505-6104) s. 26.