About Brian

I started genealogy research about mid-1999. My grandfather had passed away in April of that year. About the same time I had run across an article in our local paper about a new website that was opening called FamilySearch.org by the Latter-Day Saints (and how much traffic it received on day one.) This sparked something in me. It made me realize that if I want to get the most out of my genealogy, I’d probably get a lot more information from the people that knew some of these older ancestors, my grandparents. For most of those years, one of my major brick walls in my research was my Zalewski line, whom my Grandpa Zalewski would’ve probably been pretty helpful with.

Since then I’ve done a lot of research not only for myself, but for friends and other relatives. I feel like I’ve learned a lot from my time doing this, especially with the advent of the Internet. It’s been a big help.

In 2006, I married the love of my life, Darcy, who also runs a blog over at Darcy & Brian. The original inspiration for that blog was the birth of our wonderful daughter, Aerissa Jean. Her middle name was borrowed from her grandmother (my mother) and her great-grandmother, my maternal grandmother. Our son, Xander Lee, was born in 2012. I can’t wait to tell them stories about all of their ancestors.

I have been designing and developing websites since about 1996. After many years of practice I have implemented many new web technologies into my sites. I have worked with all sorts of web technologies and my experience keeps growing. This site specifically is run on(self-hosted) WordPress.

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee with a degree in Management Information Systems. I work as a software engineer at a large digital media company located in McLean, Virginia. You can see more about my background at brianzalewski.com.