Ancestry Magazine

“It all started because one Saturday I wanted to see how the demolition was going at the old Lloyd Brothers Walker Monument Company.”

So says Christine Zywocki, the woman who sat across the street in her lawn chair with her lunch and her binoculars, keeping an eye on the old building near Toledo, Ohio.

“It’s a run-down area, so looters had been in and out and some doors were left wide open when the garage was demolished,” Christine says. “I figured if they could go in, so could I.” Christine walked downstairs, where she found a foot of standing water and “records, all stacked in file cabinets, rows and rows of them, most of them not opened for 34 years. When I came back the next day, two of the bigger cabinets were already gone. So I hired some looters of my own—two big, strong guys who hauled around boxes of meat down at the grocer’s. We got two loads of boxed stuff out before the code inspector busted me.”

Eventually, Zywocki generated enough media attention to get the files rescued—records dating back to 1846, with birth and death dates, burial locations, stone rubbings, photographs of grave markers long since eroded, and letters from customers.

Would she do it again? “Of course,” Zywocki says. “My mother did genealogy when I was a kid, and I guess it’s in my cells. Besides, someday someone will come looking for their ancestor who was buried in Wales and had a stone carved by Lloyd Brothers. And I’ll be here with the information they need.” breaking and entering or saving history?