Today the family-tree project moved away from documents, archives and computer screens.
We went to the cemetery in Trușeni, just outside Chișinău, with a fairly specific objective: to try to find the burial places of some of Viorica's relatives and see what additional information we could collect directly from their graves.
We did find some of them, including several of her uncles.
But, predictably, genealogy did what genealogy usually does. We went there looking for answers and came back with considerably more questions.
Finding relatives — and then finding Grozavs everywhere
Locating known family members was already useful. A grave can confirm dates, identify spouses, reveal naming variations and occasionally provide information that has never appeared in the documents already available to the family.
Then we started noticing the surname Grozav.
Again.
And again.
And again.
By the time we had walked through a significant part of the cemetery, we had found dozens of different people named Grozav.
At this stage I do not know who most of them are.
Some may turn out to be close relatives. Some may belong to collateral branches several generations removed from Viorica's direct ancestry. Others may simply share the surname without having any relationship that we can realistically establish.
But given the family's connection with this area, they cannot simply be ignored.
So today's visit has produced a second body of work.
Besides updating the people we already knew about, I now need to catalogue these other Grozav graves and begin comparing them with civil records, family documents, photographs and the information we have already accumulated.
Some will probably lead nowhere.
Others may eventually connect branches of the family that we do not yet know exist.
Then I found 1821
One grave caught my attention for an entirely different reason.
The person buried there had apparently been born in 1821.
I stopped at that one for a while.
Dates behave strangely in genealogy. On a computer, 1821 is simply four digits in a database field. Enter the date, save the record and move to the next person.
Standing beside the grave is different.
Someone born in 1821 lived an entire human life in a world that preceded almost everything associated with the Moldova we know today.
That person was born roughly a century before the creation of the Soviet Union. Whatever political borders, administrations, languages and social structures surrounded that life, they belonged to a completely different historical period from the Soviet documents I am now regularly examining for Viorica's family.
And yet there was the grave, still physically present in Trușeni, linking the twenty-first century with a person born more than two hundred years ago.
This is one of the aspects of genealogy I had almost forgotten during the ten years in which I largely stopped working on my family tree.
The information is interesting.
But occasionally the physical evidence makes the passage of time feel real.
Where are all the older graves?
The 1821 date immediately led me to another question.
Chișinău is certainly not a young settlement. Its first surviving documentary mention dates from 1436, and archaeological evidence indicates that human occupation of the area is considerably older.
Trușeni itself belongs to the same historical landscape.
Yet, from what I could see while walking around the cemetery today, the surviving graves did not appear remotely as old as the history of the surrounding settlements would suggest.
That struck me as strange.
Of course, the absence of visibly ancient gravestones does not mean that people were not being buried in the area centuries ago.
There are many possible explanations.
The present cemetery might not be the original burial ground. Older graves may have been marked with materials that simply did not survive. Sections may have been reorganised or reused. Earlier burial places may exist somewhere else entirely. Political and social upheavals may also have affected what survived.
I currently have no answer.
But I would now like to find one.
Was there an older cemetery in Trușeni? Are there parish burial registers? Were graves moved? How far back can the surviving local records actually take us?
This was not something I intended to investigate when we left home today.
It is now on the list.
And why are all the graves facing that way?
There was another detail that became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Almost every grave we saw appeared to follow the same alignment.
With only one obvious exception, the headstones seemed to be oriented consistently, and from the geography of the cemetery they appeared to be looking away from the valley.
Once I noticed this, naturally I started checking more of them.
The pattern continued.
I do not yet know the reason for the exact orientation at Trușeni, and I do not want to manufacture an explanation simply because one sounds convincing.
There is, however, an obvious avenue to investigate. Traditional Eastern Orthodox burial practice commonly places the deceased on an east-west axis, facing east. Orthodox burial guidance describes the body as traditionally being buried with the feet towards the east, symbolically awaiting the Second Coming.
Whether that completely explains what I observed in Trușeni — including the relationship between the headstones, the valley, the cemetery layout and the single apparent exception — still needs to be checked.
And I admit that this particular question has almost nothing to do with constructing the family tree.
I simply want to know.
This is one of the risks of genealogy: curiosity continually creates subsidiary projects.
A completely different side of my family research
What makes this new phase of the project particularly exciting for me is that Viorica's ancestry takes me into a historical environment quite different from the one I knew from my own research.
My family history has taken me principally through Germany, Italy and Brazil.
Now I am working with Moldova and the wider region around it.
That means generations who lived during the Soviet period, generations who lived before the Soviet Union existed, Romanian and Russian influences, Slavic names and traditions, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, changing political borders and several overlapping cultural worlds.
It is neither simply "East" nor simply "West".
That mixture is exactly what makes it so interesting.
A single family can cross several states without necessarily moving very far geographically, simply because the borders and administrations around it changed.
A name can be written one way in Romanian, another way in Russian and perhaps differently again when transliterated into a modern database.
A person born under one political system may marry under another and die under a third.
For family-tree software, these are fields.
For the people themselves, they were lives lived through history.
Now the less romantic work begins
Today's fieldwork was the enjoyable part.
Now I need to process it.
The photographs have to be reviewed. Names must be transcribed carefully. Birth and death dates need to be recorded. Known relatives have to be connected correctly. Unknown Grozavs need to be catalogued rather than immediately assigned relationships that have not yet been proven.
Then comes comparison with everything else we have already collected.
This is important because genealogy becomes unreliable very quickly when a plausible relationship is allowed to turn into a "fact" simply because two names and dates appear to fit.
The objective is not to make the tree large.
The objective is to make it correct — or at least to make very clear which relationships are established, which are probable and which remain hypotheses.
So the immediate next step is straightforward: update the family tree with everything we confirmed today.
After that, I can begin investigating the dozens of other Grozavs we encountered.
I am becoming increasingly excited about this project.
I restarted genealogy after roughly ten years away from it, initially thinking mostly about continuing the research I had already begun into my own German and Italian ancestors.
Instead, I now have an entirely new historical landscape in front of me.
Soviet generations. Pre-Soviet generations. Slavic and Romanian influences. Eastern and Western Europe intersecting in the same families. Old cemeteries, civil archives, photographs, documents and perhaps eventually people who still remember stories that were never written down.
And today, somewhere among all those Grozav graves in Trușeni, we probably walked past people who belong somewhere in Viorica's family tree.
We just do not know where yet.
That is the next mystery.
Where relevant, factual references were checked against the sources cited in the article. AI assistance does not replace professional historical or genealogical research, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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