The driving force behind the creation of these family trees was Betty Jane “BJ” OʼLeary, daughter of Edward and Joanne Sawicki. BJ assembled the photos and other information about the family that made the task easier. She helped in the research and in the checking of facts.

Edward Sawicki Jr, son of Edward and Joanne Sawicki, did the research both online and phoning relatives. He created this website.

Virginia Lubowiecki, the present matriarch of the Lubowiecki family and oldest living Strauss, contributed her memories of many of the Strauss relatives.

Thanks to Dennis OʼRear, married to Linda Colgan OʼRear (daughter of Anthony and Edith Pogozelski, and granddaughter of Hedwig “Hattie” Strauss), for contributing the work he did in researching the Pogozelski family.

Much of the information about you on this site is available from other sources—it's public. Still, the site is designed to allow only family members to access that information.

It's not been necessary to use cookies, but this will likely change soon when features are added to, for example, let you know when new content has been added to the site. When we do start using cookies, none of them will be used to jeopardize your privacy.

Here's a description of the technical aspects of this site for the geeks. This website was designed to be efficient in its use of bandwidth. Ajax is used anytime you click a name and see information about that person appear. This keeps the initial load times short, and helps out on mobile devices using cellular connections.

A minimum of Javascript is used and none of it comes from a library—there's no jQuery or equivalent. Only the code that's needed is used. So, there's no need to keep library versions current to avoid security holes in code that's not being used.

All photos have been converted to efficient formats, such as .webp. Your browser has a choice of loading audio in either the efficient .ogg format or fall back to .mp3. Videos hosted here and are in the efficient .webm format.

To keep the possibility of successful attacks against this web site to a minimum (and keeping your personal information visible to only family members), all content is static. For example, there are no database lookups to supply content. A database is used by those who maintain the data on this site but it gets converted to static files for the web server.