Hi! I’m Annette Hatch Donofrio, a native Arizonan married to a Pittsburgh guy.
Welcome to the Family Tree Binders site. The binders refers to the collection of three ring binders I store all the stories, documents, family group sheets and maps in, on a shelf in my family room, where no one gets to see them except me. I hope by sharing them on-line that they can be enjoyed by other members of the family.
I began collecting family stories when I was still a teenager. I was fascinated by how different life was for my grandparents growing up in the early 1900s in Northern Arizona. After I married, I began collecting the stories of my husbands family, most of whom had been in the United States for only two to three generations. I learned how they had come from goat herding in Italy, escaping from Russia controlled Poland, and looking for a better life from Croatia.
I have copied, transcribed and shared these stories and documents so that they would not be lost even though all of the loved ones who related the stories are gone now.