92 Years Later

Her name was Hildegarde Nowak, she was a medical doctor and she married my paternal grandfather two years after his first wife, my grandmother died.  They shared their medical office across the street from a hospital at the street address number eleven. Did they also live there with my father who was then 11?  Seven years later my grandfather died and my father became an orphan at 18, starting his law studies.  What happened to Hildegarde I don't know, as I don't know how my grandmother died,or where she is buried.  I have found the location of my grandfather's grave.

All of this more or less, so to speak, information gathered from Internet searches, with little or no certitude. I found the name of Hildegarde Nowak, for example, in a digitized version of a newspaper published in a city some 75 miles from where they lived, four years after they married, and listing the names and addresses of thousands of doctors eligible to vote in the upcoming election of a medical society.

Is there more information to be found in archives of various institutions?  What happened to the records and certificates of births, marriages, deaths, degrees? And if they exist, are they accessible to us, or are they guarded by bureaucrats sitting in forts made of reams of paper?

I suspect I am the last person alive who knows something about Hildegarde Nowak, and certainly the last person who knows something, very little as it happens, about my grandmother.  It's been 94 years since she died.

People say that with today's technology more will be remembered and passed on to future generations.  I doubt it.  Unless you're a Rockefeller, Kennedy, or a famous serial killer, all knowledge about you (and me)  will be gone 92 years from now.