Sunday morning arrived with one final meeting ahead of us.
At one o'clock we were to meet Gabriela Sawicka for coffee.
We had never met in person.
Gabriela was one of the very few people who responded to a message I had sent through MyHeritage. That simple reply drew her into my search. At first she was another genealogy researcher who happened to share DNA. Through countless emails, photographs, family stories, and shared discoveries, she became so much more.
It was Gabriela who uncovered the connection between Leonard Teodor Medwadowski and the Betlejewski family. It was Gabriela who helped transform names on a family tree into people. And when Daniel discovered that Leonard and Józefa had married in 1931, Gabriela celebrated with us as though the discovery belonged to all three of us.
In many ways, it did.
Without either of us realizing it, Gabriela had become family.
Now, at last, we would meet in person.
We had the morning free, so Simon and I wandered back into Warsaw's Old Town, not because there was anything left we needed to see, but simply because we weren't quite ready to leave it.
One memory from that morning has stayed with me.
In the middle of the market square stood a water company truck with a large water tank, freely offering cold drinking water to anyone passing by on that warm summer day. With gratitude, I filled my cup and drank.
Not long afterward, we stepped into the church overlooking the square. Mass was already underway, so we quietly stood near the back.
As I admired the stained glass windows, I found myself praying a simple prayer of thanksgiving.
For family.
For friends.
For persistence.
For the kindness of strangers who had quietly shaped this journey—from the National Guardsman from Louisiana we met in the square, to the Uber driver who pointed us in the right direction, to Father Belgian, and so many others whose paths had crossed ours.
And for the remarkable ability of people to remain connected across oceans and generations.
After Mass, we wandered through an amber shop, where I found a pair of beautiful teardrop earrings for my mom. We also stopped to pick up a handful of little Poland magnets for my siblings, small reminders that, in some way, this journey belonged to them too.
Then it was time.
Time to meet Gabriela.
Just a few years earlier, the three of us had been complete strangers.
Now we were meeting for coffee as family.
Until recently none of us knew that our family stories had been intertwined for generations, more than two centuries..
We are all descendants of Ludwik Medwadowski (born 1817). Gabriela descends from his son Jakub, while Daniel and I descend from his other son, Leonard Teodor Medwadowski.
For years, Leonard had been one of the great mysteries of our family history.
It remains unclear how Leonard and Józefa first met or how their relationship began. What now seems increasingly clear, however, is that theirs was not a brief chapter in either of their lives. Together they raised at least five children and two grandchildren. They remained side by side for decades. Then, in 1931, when Leonard was eighty-one and Józefa was seventy-eight, they stood together before the altar and were finally married—just one month after their grandson Adam Palczewski's wedding.
I often find myself thinking about that.
After all these years spent searching for a name, it seems that we instead uncovered a love story.
Gabriela was already there when we arrived. Daniel arrived about an hour later.
When we gathered together, the three of us looked at one another for a moment, smiling.
Not long ago we had been strangers.
Now we were family.
Gabriela reached into her bag and handed me a small gift.
It was a coin minted in 1817.
The year Ludwik Medwadowski was born.
I turned it over in my hands, almost afraid to touch it.
Somehow that small piece of metal seemed to bridge the centuries between us.
For four hours we talked.
About love.
About hardship.
About hope.
About food.
About the Polish language.
About education and the opportunities it creates—or the conflicts it creates.
We shared family stories, laughed together, compared photographs, and discovered that despite growing up in different countries and speaking different first languages, we somehow understood one another.
Time seemed to disappear.
More than once I found myself looking around the table in quiet amazement.
None of us could quite believe we were there.
And yet somehow it felt as though we had always known one another.
Families separated by an ocean and more than a century found one another again.
Some mysteries remain.
Some always will.
But around that table in Warsaw, I realized that the greatest discoveries are not found in archives.
They are found in people. In connections. In family.
Some journeys are meant to wander before they find their way home.
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