Andrea Bohach Grega has researched and written a great deal about departed members of her family, her community and her culture, including our HHS '65 classmates. We asked Andrea, "How did you get into genealogy and memorializing? Why is this important to you, and how do you go about it?"
Andrea: History was always my favorite subject in high school, so naturally, I was drawn to the history of my family! I also like to solve puzzles and do research. I thought, what could be better than searching for my own history? Little did I know that it would become an obsession! A fascinating search that went far beyond family!
My father was first generation Slovak, whose parents emigrated in the early 1900s and settled in the Shenango Valley, hard-working, religious individuals who had ten children and dedicated themselves to making a better life. My mother's roots are from the Deep South, New Orleans. I have traced her mother's French side to the late 1700s and her father's German-Irish family to the mid-1600s. A very colorful history there! Fascinating stories that would rival the TV series "Who Do You Think You Are." Only, I'm not a celebrity.
Ancestry.com has been my main source, but I also use many other tools available on the Internet. Newspapers and obituaries are the best sources for doing family research. An obituary gives so very many valuable historical facts. The genealogical section of the public library is also one of my go to sources.
While looking for information about an ancestor in New Orleans I found a website called FindAGrave.com where a volunteer had posted a photo of the gravesite of my fourth great grandfather, from the oldest cemetery in the city, St. Louis #1. The gratitude I felt for this volunteer was beyond what I could express.
As a way of giving back to the genealogical community, I also became a volunteer for that website and started by documenting the place where my father's family is buried in Hermitage, St. Michael Byzantine Catholic Cemetery. I became so fascinated with the names and families there that I continued documenting seven more cemeteries in Hermitage. A nice feature of FindAGrave is that families can be linked from one cemetery to another. This is a true help for anyone searching for their family history. I have also added obituaries to the memorials of many friends and family. The histories of the city of Farrell, the Shenango Valley and its great steel, tube and electrical industries are in those cemeteries. Today I have over 13,000 memorials on Findagrave.com. With volunteers all over the world, the site has become such an important genealogical tool that Ancestry.com recently acquired it, adding to their database.
Making the memorial for our HHS Class of 1965 on FindAGrave was a natural thing to follow. For me, it was a labor of love, celebrating our deceased classmates' lives. Gayle Yeager has helped me with so many memorials, as he is our unofficial class historian and has collected many obituaries and records. Other volunteers on the site have contributed photos of headstones of our classmates. My other memorials, called "virtual cemeteries" may be found on my contributor's page.
Now some people may think what I do is morbid or sad! I don't! I think of it as adding one's history to one of the greatest inventions that mankind has known. The Internet! So many people have lived on this earth from the beginning of time and have gone before us, their existence never to be known. My hope is that with a site like FindAGrave we can be recorded and remembered for a very long time!
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