Birutė Zubrienė and Vytautas Zubrus show us the site where the Mardosa family house was located.

So I’m way behind on blogging this trip.  Between doing stuff, meeting people, taking pictures, photo editing, and writing, there’s barely time for eating and sleeping.

Verebiejai, Lithuania.  Doesn’t look much different from Manor, Texas, actually.  The slash shows the town you’re leaving.

On Saturday, mom and I took the stinky Astra with the gorked clutch out to the country, to a little village called Verebiejai (ver-bee-yay), which my great grandfather Antanas Mardosa listed as home on his naturalization papers. Turns out we definitely found the right people! We were made so welcome by mom’s 2nd cousin Birutė Zubrienė and her son Vytautas Zubrus (pictured above), who provided excellent translation.

Here’s how we know we definitely found the right people: in a drawer somewhere, Birutė had a picture of my mom when she was two (shown being held by Anthony and Mary Mardosa in New York).  I guess the proud grandparents sent the snap to show the folks back home.  It’s the same picture I saw for the first time just a few days earlier in Texas (featured on a previous post).  Imagine my surprise to see it again across the world!

Of that generation, Anthony and two sisters, Cecilia and Mary (below), ventured to the United States around 1906-1909, landing in Brooklyn, NY.  Here’s more pictures we didn’t have before.

I was helped tremendously by Anne Marie’s daughter, Patricia Tift, who lives in Fresno and who did a ton of research on ancestry.com that made my discoveries possible. Thanks, Patricia.

Birutė’s grandmother, one of the three Mardosa sibilngs who stayed in Lithuania.

Mary was my great grandfather’s sister, and Joe hailed from the nearby town of Balbieriškis. They settled in Scranton, PA and mom used to visit them when she was young.

Three other siblings stayed in Lithuania, apparently.  Konstancija (pictured with the outside group, seated) had a large family and is Birutė’s grandmother.

Visiting in the gazebo with 91-year-old Isabele (mom’s 1st cousin once removed)

I don’t believe we have pictures for the other sister Morta and brother Juozas, but we did meet Juozas’ 91-year-old daughter Isabele, who is a neighbor of Birutė’s.  Pictured is us chatting with her in her little gazebo outside the house (most of the houses there have one to sit and visit outside in the summer).  I suppose that makes her my mother’s 1st cousin once removed, and the closest possible relation we could find.  She was super sweet and still getting around the house (in Crocs, no less!) at 91 despite a tough life and the loss of her children and husband.

It was such a treat to visit with these cousins.  Birutė — who is cousin Eglė’s grandmother and our chief informant on all things Mardosa family — outdid herself and made us a wonderful meal of cold beat soup (šaltibarščai), a bacon and potato dish called kugelis, vegetables from her garden, and many other wonderful dishes.  She sent us home with most of a poppy seed pastry roll from the store that was scrumptious and quite similar to the Czech version Dan likes so much.

How we connected is kind of amazing.  Credit the power of the Internet coupled with the small-town grapevine.  About a month and a half ago, I emailed the administrator of a local history website about Verebiejai, having found some descriptions of the Mardosa family that I was able to read with the help of Google Translate.  I listed all the relatives I knew about and fired off the email as a shot in the dark.  Well, that email apparently got passed around the staff of the regional history museum in Alytus, which sponsored the website, and a neighbor of Birutė’s, who works there, came by to chat about it.  Birutė realized that yes, indeed, those were her peeps I was talking about, and she put her English-speaking granddaughter Eglė on the case.

You bastard!

The Verebiejai history website takes several oral accounts from old codgers in town, and talks a bit about the rough 20th century history that the town (and really, all of Lithuania) had to endure.  German soldiers apparently took up positions at the Mardosa farm during WWII, which brought the fighting with the Russians right to their doorstep.  That must have been scary as hell.  Then later, when Stalin took over, many people who owned land, or were otherwise in the way of the glorious new Communist order, got unceremoniously shipped to Siberia, most never to be seen again.  This is a story we heard over and over again: “sent to Siberia.”  I’m told you got a knock on your door at night and one hour to pack a bag, and that was it.  The Soviets pitted neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member, and tried to remake the country per their own model in the most brutal fashion.  Very rarely did we hear that anyone “came back from Siberia.”  I have to think that less than 1% did, with most dying of starvation or from the cold.  Lithuania suffered brutal abuse from two foreign invaders in one century.  Makes me feel quite lucky that my great-grandfather moved where he did, when he did.

Bessie keeps watch. What’s Lithuanian for “moo”?

The website says that the Mardosa house was later used as a school for the village children in the 1950s and early 1960s before a larger school was built nearby.  But in an extra twist, Birutė doesn’t think that this Mardosa house was filled with our Mardosas.  According to her, there were two Mardosa families (Siberia for both, apparently), and our peeps were in the other house.  Both houses are gone now, but she and Vytautas showed us the fields where our Mardosas lived.  A cow keeps watch now.

I’m still astounded at how this visit all worked out. Apart from the clutch, it couldn’t have gone better.

I stupidly did not take near enough pictures in Verebiejai that day.  More pics are below, including some shots from our drive through Giluičiai, where my great-grandmother Mary Kupčinskaitė was from.  It’s even smaller than Verebiejai, just a few houses along the deep lake that gives the town its name.  I saw kids going fishing and swimming on a nice summer day.  A country boy himself, I think my Dad would have loved living there.  The other town we buzzed through was Balbieriškis, where Mary Mardosaitė’s husband Joseph was from.

It’s amazing how this all worked out. I wish we could have stayed longer. I could tell Birutė would have hosted us all week if we’d asked.

Many thanks to Irma Žvinakienė from the Alytus history museum for writing that website and giving us the grand tour.

is beautiful.

Lots of trees, farm land, and rolling hills.  And wildflowers.  Lady Bird Johnson would approve.

Logistically, it’s also mostly fine.  The roads are decent (fair amount of roadwork on the country roads, but it proceeds orderly).  Cousin Eglė warned us to be ready for aggressive drivers, but I didn’t find them that way at all.  People were very reasonable at roundabouts and intersections, stopping politely for pedestrians, and nothing too aggressive on the highways.

That’s not to say we didn’t encounter a few quirks:

1. Everyone here drives stick.  Ergo, our car rental was manual.  Which I haven’t driven in 25 years and wasn’t that good at even then.  So when we set off in our little Opel Astra, I knew we were in for some herky-jerky starts and a few stalls.  (Mom was freaking out).  What I didn’t count on was for the clutch to stink to high heaven 3 minutes after I picked up the car and continue to smell all day no matter what I did.  I still don’t know what I did wrong (if it was my fault).  I’m certainly not the smoothest manual driver, but I didn’t do anything overtly destructive.  There was a release button on the back of the stick, and maybe I was hitting it inconsistently, but that shouldn’t gork a clutch, I would think.  No?  After a smelly and nerve-wracking first day, I took the Astra back to the auto rental and got a lovely little VW Golf automatic, which I like a lot.  The Astra didn’t smell at all on the trip back to the car rental shop, so who knows?
2. Lithuania invites you to play “Guess the speed limit!”  WTF!?! Lithuania?  Our car rental guy said there were different limits for different roads, up to 130 kph on the highway, but I never once saw a sign posting the maximum.  There were signs telling you to slow down for this or that.  But you have to guess the max where you are.  And sometimes you also have to guess when the slow zone is over (some signs do say 70 kph for the next 800m and such).  I did my best to match the flow of traffic (which can easily vary by 30 kph between different drivers).  But it didn’t always work.  In one town, with no speed guidance, and as I slowed down to approach a speed bump that came up without warning, I saw a flash from a white box by the road.  A ticket is probably in the mail.  Grr.
3. They really like roundabouts here.  Washington state, too, so not too strange.  I think Lithuanians are better than Washingtonians at navigating them.
4. Cell coverage is generally very good here, even in the boonies.  Good enough for Apple Maps to do turn-by-turn in the smallest of towns.  It faded out at Žemaitija National Park, but then it does that in the U.S. at national parks, too.
5. Google Maps is AWOL.  Was really glad I had choices.
6. Apple maps horribly mispronounces each street name, but it does it in a way I can easily track.  “IN A QUARTER MILE, TURN RIGHT ON VYTAUTO GAT!” (rhymes with cat)  I guess someone abbreviated gatvė (street) as “gat.” in the database.  I was GAT-to-GAT all day.
7. Apple maps needs to take a chill pill.  Yes, little dude, I just turned one street too early, but you could easily re-calculate and get me over to the right place via one of the many cross streets I see in front of me.  Saying “MAKE A U-TURN AND PROCEED TO THE ROUTE” every time I deviate a little makes you seem inflexible, dude.
8. Turn-and-merge road design can be very disconcerting.  On some roads, another driver is headed right for you for a second while he merges.  At the last moment, the road turns and he has his own lane to go in.  It works, but damn if I didn’t think we were going to get side-swiped once or twice.  I saw this on our Basic Bitch Bus Tour, and the driver turn-merged with another car without batting an eye.  However, when it was my turn, those eyes batted, I tell ya.  Yet another reason to be in the country a couple of days and observe the scene before getting behind the wheel yourself.

The preferred medical treatment

for your weekly bowel report.

KLAIPĖDA (AP) — In a stunning reversal, Lithuania has somehow liberated Betty’s bowels and dobbed up JJ’s.

“This is great!” the relieved septuagenarian declared.  “I haven’t pooped like this in years.”

Reached by phone, JJ had no comment, except to say: “I’m buying some yogurt and see if that helps.”

And now, we turn to the lovely Aušra for today’s weather …

Mom and I have been covering a fair amount of ground in the old city in Vilnius.  I was going to try to avoid marching her up Gediminas Hill, but the funicular was out of service, so up we climbed.  Apparently, the city cut down the trees that stabilized the hill years ago, leading to years of work and engineering to shore it up.

They apparently admired the hippy freedom thing, and our cousin thought that perhaps he came to Lithuania and said some supportive things at one point.

Some of these pics were from my 6 a.m. walkabout this morning.  I was surprised to find that at 6 a.m. on a Sunday, the streets were mostly occupied by young people who were finishing their night, piling into taxis, grabbing a sober-up snack at McDonalds and/or just stumbling home.  Many looked surprisingly fresh, given the many hours of debauchery I presume must have preceded.  I was also surprised to be passed by a quartet in a late-model white BMW convertible who were singing, waiving, positively rocking out to “Funkytown”.

Despite the total lack of Starbucks in the country, Vilnius appears to be very current on many other American trends.  I’m seeing some hipster beards and Man Bun 2.0 hair styles.

Some fun English phrases spotted on t-shirts worn by locals:

• “Stay messy”
• “You looked better online”
• “Pizza: It’s cheaper than therapy” (on employees of a pizza shop)