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April 13, 2016: Hidden away and almost forgotten

We have transcribers to thank for records like this one. And as I looked at it, I wondered whether it was even worth pursuing an actual copy of my late aunt's Chicago birth certificate. It seems that everything was in place with the transcription.

Except it wasn't. There was more revealing information in the actual certificate image, which you can click to enlarge.

The transcription is via Familysearch.org in the collection "Illinois, Cook County, Birth Certificates, 1871-1940." But using the handy service at Genlighten you can often find a researcher who can pull the actual record in less than a day, and more affordably than it would cost to go through the Cook County Clerk's office.

Most of this certificate was written by my grandfather, whose handwriting is unmistakable. Previously unknown information is that Dolores Caroline, my aunt, was one of twins, the other of whom died at birth. I'm basing this theory on the fact that Alva reports one child stillborn -- most likely the other twin. If this was the case, there should be a death certificate somewhere in Cook County.

There had also been a previously-unreported child of the family who was born alive but was dead at the time of Dolores' birth. It seems logical that Alva wouldn't have distinguished a second stillbirth this way, since the categories are separate. This means one more birth/death certificate to search for to find the name of the elusive child.

Vital records weren't required in Cook County until 1916, and even then not all local folks paid attention to the regulation. So it's possible that the names of the two missing children will never be found.

A cursory look through Familysearch.org and Ancestry.com doesn't turn up any candidates so far. But new transcriptions are becoming available all the time (as this random seach for "MacLaughlan" proves). And there are microfilmed birth/death indexes for Chicago that could also prove handy, provided the patience is there to peruse.

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April 3, 2016: A trip from Hamburg

Looking more deeply at the life and times of Peter Bellman (see previous post) reveals an actual Hamburg ship manifest. This is excellent news. Examining documents from the point of departure, where available, carries certain benefits that can't be found in arrival documentation.

This ship manifest is a prime example. Click the image above to enlarge it. Peter is listed on line 12.

Peter mentioned on several census records that he emigrated in 1884, and this manifest matches that year. We also know that he was from Schleswig-Holstein, and the manifest is consistent there as well.

In fact, it's specific. Ancestry.com transcribes the city as "Biebelholz, Schleswig" but there is no such place in Schleswig (a good case for having German-fluent transcribers on staff). The place is actually Brebelholz, Schleswig-Holstein, a little to the southeast of Flensburg.

The collection "Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934" is a real gem of a resource, providing the last place of residence for each immigrant. That location may not be the same as a birthplace, but it helps to define the general area where he lived, and that could put us in touch with archives local to the region that would have more detailed information about Peter. The record also clearly spells his surname as Bellmann, with two n's in the German fashion, further distinguishing him from our clan of Bellmans (with one n).

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March 25, 2016: Hidden language gems in the 1920 census

Because of a recent random query from a stranger, I learned something new about the 1920 U.S. Federal Census that I hadn't noticed before.

He wrote because he had an ancestor called Peter Jacob Bellman in Nebraska and he wondered whether there was any connection with the Bellmans that I happen to research. None that I can find -- his were from Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, mine were from Lithuania.

But when I looked more closely at the 1920 census record for this family, I saw some odd notations over the "mother tongue" column. The family spoke German, but what does "L.C." mean?

According to the Genealogy Gems Newsletter for July 2007 (no longer directly available on the web but preserved for us at Archive.org, the "Wayback Machine,") the 1920 census was particularly determined to capture accurate information about non-Native English speakers and had categories not only for the language used customarily in the home, hence "L.C." listed over the word "German."

Peter's parents were both Danish, so we see a record of the languages they spoke in the home as well. Schleswig-Holstein belonged to Denmark until 1864, when it became part of German territories. It's not unusual to see both languages represented in the region, and it's a pretty good bet that Peter had a command of both German and Danish from childhood onward.

As a result of this query I have a new-found respect for the details of the 1920 census, and will be focusing on the language columns more closely.

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March 12, 2016: On this date

On a day like any other, or maybe because today's date is March 12th, I was destined to get lucky when searching for the birthdate of Julia Rinck, born in Charleson, South Carolina.

She's related to us via our Müller clan of Charleston. Her mother was Margarethe Luise Bernhardine Müller, the middle child of ten of Pastor Ludwig Müller and his wife Caroline Laurent. For reasons unknown, Margaretha married in her mother's hometown of Zweibrücken, and ocean away from Charleston.

The groom was Karl Theodore (or Theodore Karl) Rinck. No trace of him is found in the New World, and there's a considerable distance between Margaret's marriage year of 1872 and her daughter's birth in 1889. Did she live in Zweibrücken and have more children with her husband? Did she decide to return to Charleston with her daughter Julia after her husband's death? We don't know for certain.

Margaret, a music teacher, ended up in Chicago with Julia. In 1906 Julia Rinck married Samuel Jesse Beckley, a native of Pennsylvania, possibly with presidential ancestry (his father was a John Adams Beckley). They lived with their four children in Pennsylvania for a time, eventually returning to Charleston around 1951, Samuel's 1959 death record suggests.

Both Samuel and Julia were buried at St. Andrew's Cemetery in Charleston, suggesting a break with her grandfather's parish of St. Matthew's.

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March 3, 2016: A stroll through the database

It's fun browsing through the newly-updated Ancestry.com database "Germany, Select Deaths and Burials, 1582-1958 (in German)." Although I have this particular death record from microfilm, I can tell that it's a correct transcription of the original handwritten record.

Some records, such as the one for Ludwig Philipp Laurent, also include the parents' names, which helps us further identify Ludwig as the right little boy who died just a few months old so many years ago.

I wish I could be just as certain about the second indexed record. If this were my Johann Michael Müller it would at least help me identify his birth year. But there's no way to conclusively verify that this is the same forester who was originally from Frankfurt am Main and who lived in and around Kriegsfeld.

No parents' names are included in this record, although that wouldn't help much with verification. We don't know Michael's parents' names.

We know that at the time of his death Michael was married to a Sophia Lenz. If her name had been included, we'd have the verification we need. But it's the luck of the draw with old German parish records. Sometimes the standards for record-keeping were verbose, sometimes cryptic, depending on the local standards.

It could be our Michael, who was born sometime between 1730-1745 and whose last child with Sophia Lenz was born in 1788. But without further corroboration the connection is not adequate and doesn't measure up to the rigorous proof standards that we need.

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February 24, 2016: Württemburg for the win!

One of the earliest collections currently available is "Württemberg, Germany, Lutheran Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1500-1985," available both at Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org, the latter for free. I sampled it just a few weeks ago.

But here's the real kicker. Baptism records go back as far as 1558, which isn't such a bad deal when you think of all the other German parishes whose records were burned, lost, or were never even initiated until much later.

This record of Barbara Hartkorn, daughter of Hans and Barbara Hartkorn, dates from 1561. She's the older sister of the Maria Hartkorn, wife of Martin Kientzle, mentioned earlier this month.

It's hard to grasp the fact that this birth occurred three years before Shakespeare was born in England, and that Barbara is part of our family...a very remote part, but family just the same. The godparents are Gregorius Dupper and Anna Schübelin, very likely relatives of the family, whose names may (with further study) provide us with clues to other connections in the parish.

The records are fragmentary here and there. I wasn't able to find Maria Hartkorn, our direct ancestor, but did locate another child, a son Johannes who was born in 1563.

These records from Dörnach uber Remmingsheim in Württemberg also include some of the surrounding community where there were no parishes, so sometimes you find a bonus record from nearby. Thus the Hartkorn events, which took place in nearby Wolfenhausen, were actually recorded in Remmingsheim.

Wolfenhausen records exist from 1644 onward, but without the ruling of the The Council of Trent (1545-1547), which ordered local parish priests to begin recording all marriages, births, and deaths, we might not know about our sixteenth-century family. As it was, the Hartkorns were obliged to trek to Remmingsheim for that all-important registry.

A modern map shows what Remmingsheim (now Neustetten) looks like today, and just how close Wolfenhausen (where the Hartkorns were from) was to Nellingheim (where the Kientzles resided). You might say that the parish brought them together.

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February 16, 2016: Long-lived Laurent

One of the positive outcomes of genealogy is finding out just how sturdy certain families were.

Louise Laurent was born in 1827 in Zweibrüchen, Rheinland-Pfalz, to a bookbinder, Philipp Heinrich Laurent, and his wife Philippina Jungblut, a former laundress.

Louisa's older siblings had been born before her parents' marriage, and oversight that was corrected in 1825 when the couple was finally free to marry. Situations such as this were common. A parent might object to the union and refuse to give permission, for instance, and there are plenty of examples where the baby comes first and the marriage afterward.

Louisa had nine other siblings, several of whom came to America before her. An older sister, Caroline Laurent, married Lutheran pastor Ludwig Müller in 1942 and they settled in New York at first, Charleston, South Carolina later and permanently. An older brother, Friedrich Laurent, settled in Philadelphia and became a confectioneer.

Louisa spent a brief time in Charleston and then married Julius Eduard Stohlmann, a publisher of German-language religious books, in New York in 1851. Together they had eight children. Until running across this obituary in the online collection of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle I didn't know Louisa's death date.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle is searchable online. If you have family or ancestry in Brooklyn, give it a whirl and see what you can find.

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February 11, 2016: Party like it's still the sixteenth century

A bouncing baby girl had just entered the home of Martin Kientzle and his wife Maria Hartkorn. The year was 1597, the town was Dörnach uber Remmingheim in Württemberg, and the Ancestrylibrary.com collection called "Württemberg, Germany, Lutheran Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 15001985 (in German)" lets us see the details in sharp focus.

Of course these films can also be rented from any local LDS family museum, but there's a particular thrill in having such easy online access to the collection. The binding of the church book is tight so we don't know whether Maria was born on April 6, 16, or 26. The next record is May 29 so one of those April dates is bound to be correct.

There are a few other records indexed in the town of Dörnach uber Remmingheim with the name Kientzle, so it will be worth exploring to see whether there's any family connection with Martin. We know very little about family members with this surname. In a subsequent marriage to a lady called Anna, Martin Kientzle is identified as the son of Martin Kientzle, a "Schulsheimsten" (maybe a schoolmaster?) from nearby Nellingsheim. Maria Hartkorn was from Wolfenhausen.

It'll be an jolly stroll through the remote past to explore this collection in detail.

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February 4, 2016: Fade to black and white

As the once-sharp color drains from this image it in no way diminishes a grandmother's delight in her grandson.

Taken about 1955, Marie Jatho MacLaughlan and David Brewer pose for a quick snapshot.

The only hues remaining are shades of red and grey. In real life the armchair behind them both was deep forest green and steel grey trim.

Marie was only 57 here and she was to have a short life. She died on her older son's birthday a year later of heart trouble.

It's a rare photo of her that shows her with such a bright smile.

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January 21, 2016: Mystery and imagination

It's useless to shout 116 year back in time (or however far back you want to go -- I'm estimating that this photo was taken about 1900). You can shout but they won't hear you suggest that they write somewhere on the photo, preferably not on the face of it, who these people are. We have no idea.

It was given the modern label "Florida Jathos" because it came from their collection. That would be related to the Carl J. Jatho family who settled there sometime in the early 1910s. But the surname of these folks could have been Smoot. Mary Susan Smoot, born in 1896 in Alabama, was Carl's second wife.

Carl and Mary Susan started having children in 1919, so this photo clearly predates that time. Mary Susan's mother was Mary B., surname unknown, married to Edgar Smoot around 1889. Mary B. was born in 1868, so this conceivably could be her.

Edgar and Mary B. Smoot's last two children were born in 1896 and 1899, respectively, so this photo could be Mary Susan and Laura E. Smoot, if we're confident that the approximate date of the photo is reliable. The clothing style for the mother fits that timeframe. It's our best guess...but, alas, it's only a guess.

Label your photos, people!

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January 11, 2016: The name game

Carrie Collins, head of her household in 1940, was the widowed wife of Edward, a man of Irish heritage. Oddly that was a rare choice for one of the Gohr girls of Chicago, all of whom spoke German as their first language at home.

Even odder is the presence of an 11-year-old granddaughter in the home. Carrie's two children, Harold and Evelyn, reached adulthood with relative ease, but who had the child Patricia? Her surname is listed as Collins but the only son in the household is 33-year-old Harold, who's single. How did Patricia's surname get to be Collins?

The clue was in Evelyn's death record index. Searching for any child of Edward Collins and Caroline/Carrie Gohr, a couple pop up in the collection "Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1994." One of my genealogy mail lists mentioned that this Familysearch.org collection had been extensively updated, to the point where you almost forgive them for not having images themselves to examine.

The transcriptions are very detailed. Evelyn E.C. Justin-Dale died on May 31, 1935. A music teacher, she was the daughter of Edward Collins and Carrie Gore (close enough for Gohr), the wife of Ray, and Harold Collins, her brother, was the informant.

No luck finding the name Justin-Dale in the 1930 census but shortening it to Justin we get a good hit. Evelyn, her husband Ray (an insurance agent), and their daughter Patricia live with Carrie Collins and Harold, Carrie's son and Evelyn's brother.

But in the 1940 census Ray isn't with this family...and Patricia is now a Collins, not a Justin or Justin-Dale. Where did Ray go?

Whatever happened to him -- a divorce from Evelyn, or his own death -- clearly Carrie has taken on the task of raising her own granddaughter, albeit with a name change. It could have been an enumeration error, of course, and it may be that the enumerator was confused. But Patricia, who died in 1989, is listed in the Ancestrylibrary.com collection "U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007" with three name changes: originally in June 1943 as Patricia Mary Collins, then in 1977 as Patricia M. Justin Collins, then the final claim in 1989 as Patricia M.J. Collins.

The name change probably wasn't done through legal channels because of the cost involved. But it appears that Patricia was at least willing to leave some trace of her Justin legacy hidden within the depths of Social Security paperwork, and that makes it a little easier to find out a little about her life.

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January 4, 2016: Which Helena?

Some of my Laurent folks ended up not in Charleston, South Carolina, where Caroline Laurent settled with her pastor husband Ludwig Müller, and not in New York where Louisa Laurent married German book publisher Julius Eduard Stohlmann, but in Philadelphia.

Frederick Laurent, born in 1824 as Christian Frederick Laurent to Philipp Heinrich Laurent and Philippina Maragethe Jacobina Jungblut, emigrated to America in 1846. He became a confectioner there and with his wife Mariana had twelve children.

Helena, whose twin brother Marion did not survive to adulthood, was probably named for her cousin Helena Müller, although there's a slim chance that she was the namesake of an ephemeral family legend, Helene De Vigny, a colorful character whose existence is impossible to verify. The family roots reach almost as far back in time as the written record allow, to a town called Labaroche in Haut-Rhin, but it's doubtful that Helena or her parents knew about it.

On November 11, 1893 the Philadelphia Enquirer reported the marriage of Helena Laurent, age 23, to the Rev. John W. Horine, himself the son of a man of the cloth.

A sidenote: Helena's nephew Stewart Frederick Laurent's papers and writings have been collected by the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan for those who would like to explore a Laurent's return to France during World War I.

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December 17, 2015: Glancing sideways

It's a hard concept to grasp for some. The idea that to find European ancestors we have to find out about them in the U.S. seems counterintuitive. But it's exactly the right procedure to follow.

Without a city or district of origin, you'll never close in on the archive or repository that holds records pertaining to them in the old country. You need a starting place. And it's very likely that a clue to their home base is buried in the American town where their families settled.

There's a value, too, in looking for siblings of the person you hope to track down. The sideways step can lead to productive information

Adelaide Nussbaumer isn't part of my family, but she was the sister of a person trying to track down this family's original home in Switzerland. We're fortunate that Pennsylvania is now sharing images of some of their death records, such as this collection called "Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1963" at Ancestrylibrary.com. The person was searching for information about the parents of Adelaide, Fridolin Nussbaumer and Verena Wenderle. She had the name of her direct ancestor but not the sisters and brothers.

Adelaide's 1941 death certificate gave her birthplace as Berne, Switzerland. Bern or Berne is a Bundesstadt or "federal city" and it's where a number of Swiss civil registrations were recorded from 1792-1876. A number of Nussbaumers appear in the Familysearch.org online index "Switzerland, Bern, Civil Registration, 1792-1876." Perhaps something will turn up there for Fridolin and Verena.

At the very least, it's certainly a clue to the new direction!

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December 4, 2015: Look it up

This impressive collection of Los Angeles (and vicinity) city directories is housed online as part of the Los Angeles Central Library collection. When your elusive ancestor lived in L.A. only between 1920 and 1930, this collection can be a goldmine of possibilities. Not only is Los Angeles represented from 1875-1987 in this discontinuous collection, but there are scattered directories for Santa Monica, Watts, Westwood, and other communities.

The city was much smaller then, but the need to find housing outstripped the city's ability to provide it. So homeowners became landlords and rented out converted garages or rear structures for a monthly income. When someone's address is marked as, say, "1120 1/2 (r) E 22d" you know you're not dealing with a homeowner, and that it would be fruitless to search for property records.

David Stein is one such elusive fellow. He doesn't appear in the 1920 or 1930 census at any address we have for him. We don't know his age. We know he had a wife called Anne from a deed of sale, and we know that when the deed was processed he and Anne lived in the rear apartment at 1120 East 22nd Street in Los Angeles, a neighborhood then (as now) just a tad southeast from downtown proper.

In fact there are a good handful of David Steins from 1920 to 1930 living in roughly the same neighborhood, which was close to east-side Boyle Heights, then the center of the Jewish neighborhood. The illustrious Canter's Deli was there at the time and so were other Jewish shopping areas and synagogues.

One of the David Stein candidates, the one at 1366 East 21st Street, was a rabbi, a fact not revealed in this 1926 directory entry just above, but we know it from his declaration of intent to become a U.S. citizen. The same address was listed on his papers.

The David Stein at 1786 West 37th was a chauffeur, but he's not at the address we're looking for, so we can eliminate him as a likely suspect.

From the 1926 directory entry we know that our David on 22nd Street was a salesman, but what he sold wasn't revealed.

The sum total we know about our David: he rented a home at the address above, he was a salesman, he had a wife called Anne. But where he went after this brief appearance in Los Angeles is anyone's guess...and leaves a frustratingly fragmentary trail for us to puzzle over and -- someday, we hope -- to solve.

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November 18, 2015: The lady in question

Who she is is anyone's guess, and guessing is our only option here.

We know she was in Charleston, South Carolina, likely not born there but a resident at some point. The family who ended up with this daguerreotype was that of Carl Louis Henry Müller, who was regularly known as Louis Müller. His wife, Mary Amme, had a mother born in Germany and living in Charleston, but Catherine Klesieck was born in 1826 and was too young to be this woman, who appears to have prepared herself for this portrait in the 1850s.

There's a better candidate, in fact. Louis Müller's grandmother was born in 1785 as Jacobina Elisabetha Lommel in Frankfurt am Main. Sometime after her son Ludwig Müller became pastor at St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church in 1848, Mrs. Müller made the long voyage to Charleston to join her son.

Jacobina (or Jacoba, as her name is rendered in her 1858 St. Matthew's death notice) lived until her grandson Louis was ten years old. Whoever received her photo was probably the luck of the draw, but nevertheless it was part of the collection that Louis' descendants currently own...unmarked and undated, of course!

But there are some resemblances between the older Pastor Ludwig Müller and his presumed mother. The noses in particular, both strong and resolute, are noteworthy. So are the blue eyes in both. See this image for an enlargement of Ludwig's face, where his light blue eyes are obvious even in black-and-white.

The older lady is wearing a simple dark dress with high ruffled collar and cloth-covered buttons typical of the late 1850s, plus an oval cameo or neck ornament. Her hair is pulled back simply behind her head. Younger women might have had elaborate curls in the 1850s but older ladies were more likely to keep it simple.

Looking through other available images from this family, no other candidate seems to fit the age and timeframe suggested by the use of this daguerreotype process or the type of sartorial and tonsorial choices made.

Ludwig Müller's own wife Caroline Laurent Müller was decidedly too young (and too formidable!) to be a candidate for this demure and stately image. Nor do any of the other women associated with the Müller clan and their in-laws in Charleston during this era suggest themselves as candidates.

So while we can't confirm the identity of our Müller-related lady, the likelihood that this is a treasured keepsake and someone important to the family leads us to explore this theory. If it's really Jacobina, we do have a treasure indeed.

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November 1, 2015: Just out of reach

Here's an old record from New York in desperate need of re-filming. Click on the image to enlarge.

This fellow could very well be related to our Charleston, South Carolina Schuchmanns (whose name was regularized to Schuckmann) although he first ended up in Brooklyn, New York and then in Savannah, Georgia.

George Philip Schuchmann kept the original German spelling of his surname. From the New York City Book of Common Pleas, this fellow is at this date twenty one years old and ready to become a citizen, having renounced what looks like (or is meant to be) the Grand Duke of Hesse Darmstadt.

Some of the text remains just beyond legibility and focus. Here's a positive image of the same document but it's not much easier to read.

We know our George Schuchmann was indeed from Hesse Darmstadt but there's some uncertainty how old he really was in 1864. A ship manifest for the ship Madison listed him (or someone with an identical name) as 19 years, six months. But once George decamped to Savannah his age consistently points to a birth year of 1848 or 1849.

This is an ongoing project to be solved at some point in the future...not very far in the future, we hope.

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October 10, 2015: William Müller of Atlanta and Charleston

This headstone at Fulton Cemetery in Atlanta marks the resting place of Matthias Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, who had long since Anglicized his name to William Müller.

Although William's younger brother Ludwig (Louis) Müller D.D. remained in South Carolina, Pastor Müller still kept his older brother's name in mind for his six child, duly named William Albert Christian, born in 1857 in Charleston. Ludwig named his first son for yet another brother, Frederick, who never emigrated to America as far as we know.

Like his father, William (known as W.A.C.) was also a Lutheran pastor and spent some time back in Germany to study as his father did. After a stint at a congregation in Pennsylvania, W.A.C. came back to Charleston to support his father's parish and was happily preaching into the 20th century.

Did William the younger ever meet William the older? Entirely likely, and probably at his baptism at St. Matthew's parish.

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September 16, 2015: Treasures from the past

Both Ancestry.com and Ancestrylibrary.com have released a new series of online databases for digital wills and probate information.

Nothing obvious came up from searches on my common ancestral surnames in South Carolina and Illinois, but once I searched for a surname without specifying the state, I got an unexpected hit from "Georgia, Wills and Probate Records, 1742-1992": a link to the will of William Müller of Atlanta, Georgia, brother of my great-great-grandfather Rev. Ludwig Müller of Charleston.

Gradually I'm getting to know more about William and his descendants. He was born Mattias Friedrich Wilhelm Müller on July 8, 1816 in Hochspeyer, Rhineland-Pfalz, and he emigrated with his wife Louisa Poch and their children, probably in the early 1850s. He spent at least some time in Pickens, South Carolina as a carpenter before settling in Atlanta as a master mechanic.

He lived a long and happy life, eventually residing with his daughter Elisabeth Charlotte Breitenbucher, as indicated in the will above (click it to enlarge and read more comfortably). The website Find A Grave includes a transcript of the 1902 obituary printed in the Atlanta Constitution.

What intrigues me about the will is Item Two, wherein William listed the items he wanted his daughter to inherit: a German walnut case of some kind, a clock, and "the picture of my Grand-father" in addition to books and other belongings.

By picture, William can't mean a photograph. He must be referring to a painting, and with only two grandfathers, this can only mean either his paternal grandfather Johann Michael Müller, who lived about 1730-1805, or his maternal one, Johan Georg Lommel, whose birthdate we don't know but who died in 1809.

The possibility of finding this portrait, either still with descendants of William, or perhaps in an Atlanta museum somewhere, is an alluring thought. But it could easily have drifted away from the family collection, as some tenuous items do over time.

It's worth exploring, however, and I've reached out to cousins from William's line to see what they may know.

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September 2, 2015: Handy with a needle

You never know what will happen when you take your basic search engine and plug in your ancestor's name.

In this case, using the name Elise Schuckmann Jatho and Chalreston, the city where she lived after emigration, up popped this gem.

The Charleston Museum has been collecting artwork produced its citizens for centuries, and my great-grandmother's hand-worked embroidery is now a part of the local collection. It's too delicate for public display, but this is almost better: an entire museum at the click of a mouse!

Billed as America's first museum, it was founded in 1773 with a focus on the South Carolina Lowcountry, of which Charleston was certainly a part.

Elise's mother was the better known seamstress. Marie Dressel Schuckmann was the focus of several newspaper stories highlighting her flag-making skills, but the fact that her daughter was so accomplished at a young age really shouldn't be a surprise, considering her mother's talent.

Elise's rendering the the flowers is particularly delicate, with most of the blossoms identifiable. I certainly see morning glories, violas, chrysanthemums, and periwinkle, among others.

I contacted the museum to ask how they were sure about the identity and date of this bit of embroidery, and they had records of the actual donation of the piece. One of Elise Shuckmann Jatho's granddaughters, Maryliese Jatho, inherited the embroidery from her grandmother Elise. It was Elise herself who told her she'd embroidered the piece when she was fourteen years old.

That's a helpful bit of information. Elise was, in fact, fourteen in 1843. It also suggests, based on the plant forms pictured here, that she was copying southern flowers, rather than having worked the piece in Reinheim, Hesse Darmstadt, where she was born and raised. The morning glories are helpful here, being a typical southern flower and not hardy in colder climates.

If you'd like to find out more about the Charleston Museum, visit their website.

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August 20, 2015: A doctor in the house

Medical folks are few and far between in our family history. In fact, we have only two. One is a current-day descendant of this man's father and is a practicing physician on the West Coast.

The other is this man: Dr. Charles Müller of South Carolina, a pharmacist and farmer.

He was born Johann Georg Carl Müller in Charleston, South Caroline. His parents were prominent in town. Charles' father was the Rev. Ludwig Müller D.D., pastor at St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church from 1848-1898.

Charles' mother, the former Caroline Laurent, was formidable in personality with an invented French pedigree designed to lure away researchers from her more accurate but decidedly humble birth.

Charles was educated in Charleston and married Margaret Cobb, the daughter of Ephraim Cobb and Louisa Turner. They seem to have had a yen for the country life and spent most of it in Wagener Township, Oconee County, very near the town of Walhalla, where Charles' father Ludwig had co-founded Saint Johns Evangelical Lutheran Church.

In fact, Reverend Müller spent so much time in Walhalla that the officials of St. Matthew's Church back in Charleston suggested that the good Reverend might want to choose which church he actually preferred! Rev. Müller wisely chose St. Matthews, but he, his family, and Charles' siblings kept in regular contact with their son/brother in Walhalla and Wagener over the years.

Charles and Maggie Müller raised eight children and had homes in both Wagener and Walhalla. Sadly they lost all their belongings in a house fire, as was reported in the newspaper The State on July 8, 1913.

His death certificate from 1925 identified him as Dr. John Charles Henry Müller, but the parents are correct so we know it's the right man.

He was buried at the church cemetery where his father once preached in Walhalla, and his grave can be viewed here.

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August 11, 2015: The bride of mystery

The lady at the center of this group is the focus of this week's genalogical mystery. It's more about a curious name change, one that can't be explained from available resources.

Brothers Tom and Al MacLaughlan, plus Al's son Bob, form a friendly family unit with Al's wife Doris. She was born Doris Vern Rohde, daughter of Frank Rohde and Marie or Mae Garrity in Chicago in 1925. Doris can be found in the 1930 U.S. federal census with her parents. No other children are listed so it appears that Doris was their only child.

Doris and her family appear to be missing from the 1940 census, but the next mention we can find of her is in a suburban Chicago weekly newspaper, the Auburn Parker, pictured at left.

The pseudonymous author of this gossip column notes that in April 1941 Doris was keeping regular company with one Pat Ekman. The entire column was rather odd with a distinctly voyeuristic tone.

But things had changed just a few months later. The same home-town newspaper reported (below) on August 27, 1941 that Doris was engaged -- not to Mr. Ekman but rather to Al MacLaughlan Jr.

The odd thing about this: her surname had changed. In this clipping she's listed as Doris Vern Kaske with a different set of parents.

Searches for Mr. and Mrs. Kaske, using any number of spelling variants, bring up no useful documents, so we're left to assume that her father died or her parents divorced and the former Mae Garrity married a Charles Kaske, whose surname was taken by his stepdaughter.

Or perhaps the error was with the Auburn Parker newspaper, which, despite its devotion to local gossip, may have neglected the facts.

When the couple married a few months later in Kankakee County, Illinois, Doris was using her original birth surname, Rohde, again. The collection "Kankakee County, Illinois Marriage Index, 1889-1962" lists the marriage date as November 15, 1941.

It remains a curious footnote to a romance of the past.

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August 2, 2015: Happy home

My cousin's photograph collection, documenting our Petersen clan from the the 1870s and moving forward through time, often included random snapshots of houses. Sometimes the address was written on the back, sometimes not, leaving us to wonder whose residence was being captured, and for what purpose.

This house was in Omaha, Nebraska at 869 South 50th Street. We know that our ancestor Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen traveled from Chicago to visit her brothers Alfred and Peter about 1933, so a fair assumption is that this was one of their homes.

Close! It was actually the home of Alfred's daughter Elizabeth and her husband Charles J. Hoffmann, a mechanic in Omaha.

Charles and Lizzie had three boys (Charles, born in 1918, John, born in 1920, and Albert, born in 1922. But according to the Omaha city directories that family lived elsewhere for most of the period between 1920 and 1950. They moved house fairly often, for reasons unknown. But the 1954, 1955, and 1956 city directory shows Charles and Lizzie at that address.

In fact the boys appear to have moved out in their own by the time Charles and Lizzie relocated to 50th Street. But Lizzie and her Chicago cousin kept in touch throughout the decades, and a picture of the Hoffmann's new house (maybe it was the first they'd ever owned, or the one they liked best) ended up in the Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen collection.

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July 21, 2015: Violets are sweet

The new Ancestry.com database, "U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007," has a lot of useful information for those who applied for social security benefits or who may have made a claim for benefits.

My grandfather's niece, Violet Petersen, was "lost" for the reason that women are often difficult to trace: by changing her surname with marriage. I knew about her first marriage to James A. MacEntee in Chicago in 1940, but I figured that marriage must have ended, because I was getting no hits searching for Violet MacEntee.

Searching for Violet in this new databases brings up multiple name as one marriage ended and another began.

She married again about 1953 to someone named McGraw, then again in 1969 to someone called Fickling. The SSDI record also provides her verifiable birthdate, a fact that had been missing from my database.

Luckily Violet turns up in California divorce records and in California and Nevada marriages, so I'm able to focus more on the details of her life using this SSDI index as a platform.

In cases where the person's parents are unknown, this resource also provides that information, making it a useful tool to push back a little further into family history.

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July 14, 2015: Two little lambs

We have so little to go on in identifying these children that all we can say is: they're probably Petersens, or closely related to them.

The cabinet card came from the collection of Catherine Petersen in Chicago, so of course they're unmarked! Presumably Catherine recognized them without an inscription. We're not as fortunate as she was.

We actually know more about the photographer himself. Louis Gamer was born in Germany in February 1851, according to the U.S. federal census for 1900, and emigrated to the United States in 1858. His wife Frances had a more rare birthplace. The census states that she was born "At Sea." Her parents were from Scotland and emigrated in 1861 or 1862. Louis had a photography studio in Omaha in the 1890s on South Sixteenth Street, where this photo was produced.

The image is slightly out of focus, which suggests that it may be a copy of the original. It's even possible that these children never lived in America but were the offspring of Catherine's sister or brothers back in northern Schleswig-Holstein, where the family lived before a large number of them emigrated.

The dark-haired girl is dressed in finery that would point to the late 1880s or early 1890s as a date, although it could be earlier as well. The blond-haired boy, seated, wears a typical dress that could be used for either boy or girl babies at the time. The trick to knowing that this is a boy: his hair is parted on the side.

Facially the girl resembles Catherine (in her youth) as well as Catherine's daughter Margaret. Of all the children of all the Petersen family members, only one exhibits the older-girl-younger-boy constellation. Andrew Petersen and his wife Karen Marie Johansen lived in Illinois for a time and their first two children were born there: a girl, Alma, in 1889 and a boy, Walter Andreas, in 1892. If this cabinet card represents those two children, if must have been taken around 1893 when Walter was still a baby. This fits the time frame, but there's no proving the theory.

What's more puzzling: if these are Andrew's and Karen Marie's children, why was the photo produced in Omaha? Well, if it were a copy of an original, any photography studio would have been equipped to duplicate it. Andrew did return from Kenosha, Wisconsin (his final home) to Omaha sometime in the 1890s for a reunion with his brothers. Perhaps he brought the photo along at that time to share with his brothers. And somehow the card made its way into his sister's collection...where it remains as a speculative mystery.

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July 2, 2015: A marvel in marble

On the day of Ludwig "Louis" Müller's funeral in Charleston, South Carolina, it was clear from the picture above that his tributes were many. Just look at all those flowers!

If you click the image to enlarge it you can just about read the inscription on the marker, all in German, giving praise to the man who was the pastor of St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church in Charleston for fifty years. From 1848 until his death in April 1898 he was the symbol of his congregation and an inspiration to many.

It's unclear whether the marble is to blame or whether it was insufficiently treated to brave the elements for eternity, but the inscription is all but unreadable today. It has faded into softness and the letters' sharp angles are worn. This is one of the times we can be glad that a clearly professional photographer was on hand to record the wording.

Below (and click the image for an enlargement) you can see what Rev. Müller's headstone looks like today.

Click here to read more about the accomplishments of the Rev. Müller and his family.

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June 19, 2015: The whole picture

It looks like a simple snapshot, showing two older folks on a sunny day in Mason City, Nebraska. But that's just part of the story.

Unmarked (of course!), we nevertheless know that this is a photo of Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen and one of her brothers, Peter Hansen Petersen. Family resemblance to his brother Alfred makes it clear who's who. Alfred is seen here in this photo.

Note Alfred's snappy attire and the domestic setting in his garden, compared to another photo of Peter Hansen and wife Anna in front of their cornfield in Mason City.

But it's the background of each photo that has something to communicate. In the featured photo Catherine and Peter are posed at the edge of a cemetery. That wasn't a random decision.

Because we know that this trip took place in 1936-1937 (Catherine came from Chicago with her family for the visit) and we also know that Peter's wife Anna died in March 1936, my theory is that they were visiting her grave at the time of the photo.

It may have been unplanned, but it was an opportunity for the photographer -- likely Catherine's daughter Florence -- to emphasize, however slightly, the loss of Peter's wife.

The background of any photo may be random, but it's worth extra scrutiny in case its clues help to identify the time, place, or deeper meaning of its setting.

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June 10, 2015: Changing fashions, 1820s-style

Before photography existed — before the late 1830s, that is — capturing an image was the work of painters. And the cost of commissioning a portrait was out of reach for many middle-class folks in Europe at the time.

It's remarkable, then, that Johann Philipp Dressel could afford to have his daughter Anne Marie painted by a local artist. Mr. Dressel was a Metzgermeister, a master butcher, but not otherwise a rich man.

Perhaps the quality of the portrait indicates his financial limitations. It's not the most accomplished piece of work but it's pleasing and direct, probably accurately capturing much of Anne Marie's particular beauty and charm.

Dating this portrait depends mostly on her estimated age (she was born in 1810 in Reinheim, Hesse-Darmstadt) and her style of dress.

Compare Anne Marie with this portrait of Marie Caroline du Barry, she of the red feathered hat, painted in 1825. The bodice of their dresses is very much the same style with horizontal pleats gathered below the collarbone with a small jeweled brooch in the center of the low, dramatic neckline.

Both ladies also show evidence of a figure-hugging corseted waistline, a new fashion element beginning in the mid-1820s. This replaces the high empire waist and floating straight skirt popular in the previous decades.

We can see another similar dress style on Countess Amalie Maximilianovna Adlerberg, resplendent in her pearls and lofty hairstyle below, who was born in Paris but brought up in Darmstadt.

Here the horizontal pleats are gathered by a vertical strap sewn into the bodice, just like in Anne Marie's dress, and in place of a brooch there's an old-fashioned pink rose. The Countess also shows her tightly corseted waist with narrow vertical panels similar to the ones we can see on Anne Marie's waistline.

Both the high-born ladies have shorter sleeves than Anne Marie Dressel, but that's simply a style variation. And both the older ladies' portraits are clearly the work of a more accomplished artist. But Anne Marie's is pleasing enough, and quite a rare find when most family photographs can only reach back to the early 1840s...if you're lucky enough to own one.

By comparing these three paintings, two of which carry reliable dates, we can estimate that Anne Marie's portrait was painted about 1826-1827. That would make sense given her age at the time, 16 or 17 years old.

Was the painting a commemoration, perhaps of her engagement to up-and-coming haberdasher Ludwig Schuchmann? That's a distinct possibility.

They were married in November 1828 and had two children, Elise (1829) and Philipp (1830). About a decade later all relocated to Charleston, South Carolina.

Ludwig, known as Louis Schuckmann once he established his business there, was a respected purveyor of fine fabrics and decorative accoutrements. Anne Marie Schuckmann was a respected lady in Charleston society and became renown for her fine needlework.

Thanks to her descendants, who kept the portrait as a treasured legacy, we're fortunate to know what our ancestor Anne Marie looked like.

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May 20, 2015: A death in the family

The reliability of index transcriptions is all over the map. Thus, when I came across a wildly improbable spelling in Ancestry.com's collection "Illinois, Deaths and Stillbirths Index, 1916-1947" for Elizabeth Bruns' death record (her first name is transcribed as "Villamino"), it took all my wits to figure out how they saw Villamino in Elizabeth. Could the handwriting be that bad?

Seventeen dollars is all it takes to order the actual death certificate from Cook County's Genealogy Online service, and sure enough, my great-grandmother's first name appears to be "Villamina." Everywhere else she was known as Elizabeth or Lizzie. What's the deal here?

Most of the other information on the full death certificate seem to check out. Her husband, the informant, was indeed B. A. Bruns (Bernard Augustus, known in the family as Gus). In the 1920 federal census the family lives at 6003 Archer in Chicago, and that's the place of death listed on this certificate.

The other information is approximately correct. Her father's and mother's names (as seen above in an 1855 baptism record for their twins Clemens and Gerardus) were John (not Gus!) Robers and Theresia Schulte. Elizabeth was born on June 29, 1860 (the death certificate says July 29, 1959...close enough for our purposes).

But where was Elizabeth or Lizzie ever known as Wilhelmine -- my take on the name the clerk was trying to spell?

Currently we don't have Elizabeth's baptism record from St. John the Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was born, but I've put in a request to see whether they can find it. My theory is starting to develop. It was common for children of German immigrants as well as Germans themselves to discard their actual first name (Vorname) and used what we'd call the middle name and they called the Rufname or appellation name.

Perhaps that's the case with Elizabeth Robers Bruns. Gus Bruns, her husband, used a nickname for his every-day monicker that was derived from his middle name Augustus. It makes sense.

If so, it suggests that Elizabeth's actual first name was Wilhelmine, and widower Gus was following legal guidelines for reporting her true and accurate name, as best he could remember. If St. John the Baptist can come through with a baptism record for Lizzie, as they have for her older siblings, we may be able to prove it.

Fingers crossed!

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May 7, 2015: Portrait of a lady

When you find an original cabinet card in the family vault, it can really help you reconnect with the past.

Karen Marie Johansen, born in Felster, Denmark, was probably nineteen in this photograph, which was taken in Chicago, Illinois shortly after her 1889 marriage to Andreas Petersen.

The marriage itself took place in York, Nebraska, where Karen Marie and her sister Anna Christina had emigrated in 1887. In fact, both Johansen girls married brothers. Andrew, as he was later known, had an older brother Peter Hansen Petersen, who had married Anna Christina in 1887.

Peter and Anna stayed in Nebraska where they farmed for the rest of their days. Andrew and Karen Marie lived for a time in Russell, Illinois north of Chicago before making a permanent home in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Andrew was a teamster, a driver of horses, and he and Karen Marie had six children.

This image shows the beginnings of the sleeve puffs on her dress that would give way to the more exaggerated leg-o-mutton sleeves some five years later. But in 1889-1890 this is a neat, tailored look, with woven wool trim and a nice brooch in the shape of a crescent at her throat. The other brooch may be a watch chain.

The Bell photography studio listed its address as 96 State Street, but perhaps they moved around the neighborhood. There was a Bell Art Company at 209 State Street in the early 1890s, found in a listing in Chicago Photographers, 1847 through 1900, published by the Chicago Historical Society.

Andrew died in 1918 but Karen Marie went on to a second marriage to a Christian W. Feldschau and travelled to the West Coast with him. He died in 1925 in Mt. Ranier, Washington. Twice a widow, Karen Marie Feldschau settled in Lake County, California to be near her grown children. She died there in 1949 at the venerable age of 79.

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May 2, 2015: Baby's first portrait

In times like these, when babies who were just born today can be photographed when they're only a few hours old, it's easy to forget that most babies in the past weren't seen by the camera lens for weeks, if not months.

In the 1880s, photographing a newborn meant navigating to a local photography studio, and generally required that the baby be able to recline or sit up, assisted or not, and keep still while doing it. Daunting tasks!

Young George Henry Bruns, born March 26, 1887 in Cincinnati, Ohio, was probably about four to five months old in this portrait (click to see an enlargement). He's dressed in an elaborate gown of white linen and lace with decorative eyelets at the collar and hem. His parents, Bernard Augustus Bruns and Elizabeth Robers Bruns, probably used the gown for all their four children. This style was very popular for boys as well as girls all during that decade.

The background of the photo is worth noting. At your left you'll see the leather arm of a comfortable chair arranged perpendicularly to baby George, and there are two fabric-draped protrusions behind him. Do they look like...human arms?

There's a good possibility that the fabric-draped backdrop is actually Elizabeth Robers Bruns herself, covered with a patterned blanket and holding the baby upright. Think that's farfetched? Take a look at these photographs for similar arrangements.

It made sense. The mother could provide a soothing touch and whisper a calming word or two during the photographic sitting, which by the 1880s, when dry photo plates were the norm, required only a few seconds of stillness to accomplish. An older child could be trusted to follow directions, but for a baby a more elaborate scheme was required.

If you have any solo baby pictures from the 1880s or 1890s in your collection, haul them out and give them a closer inspection. Maybe you also have hidden parents in the background.

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April 26, 2015: A life well-lived

If you have a few folks who came from the former Duchy of Oldenburg, this site can be very helpful. A group of volunteers in Germany has been providing emigration information for people who left Oldenburg for the New World. One of these immigrants to Charleston was Sophie Friedericke Ulrichs (born Hinrichs about 1801), who was known in her later years as Johanna Ulrichs.

Her Von Oven grandchildren, all merchants, came to settle in Charleston in 1878 and apparently she accompanied them. Johanna appears in the 1880 federal census sharing their home.

The Oldenburgische Gesellschaft für Familienkunde e.V. website had Johanna's emigration year but had no information about her death year, which realistically must have occurred in Charleston.

But the Charleston News and Courier for October 28, 1884 carried Johanna's funeral notice, and we notice some familiar surnames. The Von Oven men were her grandsons, all of whom managed successful grocery and wine shops in Charleston. Arnolda, her granddaughter, had married George W. Jatho, a successful merchant broker in Charleston.

It's uncertain where Johanna was buried. There were two cemeteries associated with the local German community. Her name doesn't appear in the list of burials for Bethany Cemetery, so it's likely that she was interred in Magnolia Cemetery, a more popular option for the Von Oven and Jatho families.

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April 19, 2015: Baptism en masse

On April 6, 1873 and surprising number of Jatho children were baptized at St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In fact, the entire family was involved, with their uncle Philip Schuckmann and grandmother Elise Schuckmann acting as godparents, along with their mother Elise Jatho. Click the image to enlarge.

Philip, the oldest, was by this time twenty-one years old. The youngest, Carl Julius, was seven.

There's a mystery about the family's religious affiliation during these years. A reasonably exhaustive search for any church documents for this family turns up only one prior to this event:
a one-line index to an 1853 marriage between Wilhelm Jatho, a watchmaker from Kassel, and his twenty-three year old bride Elisabeth Schuckmann, born in Darmstadt. The marriage index is from Saint Johns Lutheran Church in Louisville, Kentucky, a city where there is no known familial connection on the bridegroom's side, and an only speculative one on the bride's (she may have had cousins there).

Until this 1873 record from St. Matthew's, the children's records aren't found in the city. They're not in the other local Lutheran church, St. John's, an even older German congregation in Charleston, nor in any of the non-Lutheran parishes in Charleston.

This is curious, because there are several news stories in the Charleston newspapers about the two elder children, Philip and Pauline, participating in St. Matthew's church picnics and even winning awards for archery or singing. Those stories appeared prior to this en masse baptism record.

Whatever the reason, we're lucky to have this record, penned in the fine hand of pastor Ludwig Müller who had led St. Matthew's since 1848, because it contains the full names and exact birthdates of all the children. Lacking their original baptisms, this entry is the next best thing. It's still a derivative record, based on secondary information, but it's still a valuable and usable citation for genealogical purposes.

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April 13, 2015: Seeing double

I know this document well. It served as a substitute for my father's birth certificate, which technically didn't exist. Cook County didn't require them until 1916, and even then some folks were inclined to ignore civil registration altogether long after it had become the norm.

Baptism certificates, especially fancy ones like this with its heavy embossed official registration stamp, were regarded as official documentation in the absence of any other. A person could even qualify for a U.S. passport with a baptism certificate like this in hand.

To my surprise, there was a German version too.

Both versions bore the same scriptural quotations and formats, just in different languages. They remind us how heavy a German presence there was in the Midwest during the early twentieth century.

The Eden Publishing House in St. Louis, Missouri was the source for these elaborate templates. The blank certificates were printed in Germany, then were shipped back to the United States, and likely sold popularly wherever an evangelical or Lutheran German congregation happened to exist.

The Eden buildings are still standing in St. Louis. Now part of the National Register of Historic Places, parts of the structures have been converted to trendy loft condominiums.

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April 7, 2015: Lady in waiting

Waiting to be identified, that is!

Around 1907 someone in the Mikkelsen household got a camera to use at home. Snapshots begin to show up around that time documenting everyday events at their Chicago home---Catherine Mikkelsen's new baby Florence, who was born in 1907; proud father Thomas Mikkelsen walking with toddler Florence a year later; Florence, now a young schoolgirl, posing with her half-brother Clarence Petersen in the front yard.

Catherine, as we've lamented before, wasn't always diligent about marking photos with names. If we're able to recognize some, all's well and good. But the one above, with an out-of-focus Catherine on the far left...well, who are the other ladies?

Another shot from the same day shows Catherine more sharply (with that impossibly small waist... one can only imagine the staying power of corsets at the time) standing with two older women. The younger woman all in black, with a not-yet-standing baby, is the central focus of the picture. Who was she?

Sometimes it takes years for all the clues to line up as neatly as pins. The woman is dressed all in black, and the outfit, apparently in black satin with lace trim, would be fashionable for the later part of the 1910s. She wears glasses, and that's important to note, because there weren't very many other spectacled relatives in Catherine's family. The baby wears the standard white dress that was popularly used for both girls and boys until they were old enough to walk. There's a hint of a side part in the baby's hair, which tells us this is likely to be a boy.

The mother's dress, and the older woman's black blouse and skirt, we can interpret as mourning clothes. The rules weren't as strict in the nineteen-teens as they had been in earlier decades, but some families, particularly those with old world customs, still observed them.

Then there's this photo, from some time a bit later.

This one was marked on the reverse and shows the studio setting for a wedding portrait of Martha Petersen, widow of Catherine Mikkelsen's son Peter H. Petersen, and Herbert Allen, a teamster. Martha is dressed in her best, from her cloche hat down to her sparkling patent-leather shoes, her bouquet at her side. Herbert, natty in his new suit and bow tie, stands proudly beside her.

The resemblance between the lady in black, holding the baby, and Martha Krohn Petersen Allen, is now striking, and I think it's safe to say that we can identify her in the earlier photos. The baby was Alvin Herman Arthur Petersen, born in July 1917, nine months after his father Peter Petersen died of nephritis in Chicago.

Who were the other older ladies in the photos? One of them may have been Martha's mother, Augusta Krohn---possibly the other lady in black. In the 1940 census Herbert and Martha Allen, along with Augusta Krohn, lived together with Martha's youngest sister in Milwaukee. Thus we know that Augusta was alive when her grandson was born, and she'd have been an expected member of the family group picture.

The other lady, with her hair piled high atop her head, appears in several snapshots taken in and around Catherine's home at 531 36th Place, where Catherine and Thomas Mikkelsen lived at the time. Another relative? A close neighborhood friend? That's still unknown and yet to be determined. She turns up in engagement and family photos regularly, so perhaps some clue will lead to her identity at some point in the future.

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March 29, 2015: The mysterious Peter Petersen

First things first: none of these Petersens were from Norway. They were from Schleswig-Holstein, so if the enumerator had done his job (click the image to enlarge it), he would have written Germany as their country of origin.

Enumerators managed to mangle things often, but getting an entire nationality wrong wasn't that far out of the imagination. It depended whom you asked---a member of the family was the best resource, but even they might give wrong information on occasion. Or in this case it looks more as though the enumerator made the mistake himself. There was another Norwegian fellow below the Petersens and maybe the census fellow had Norwegians on the brain.

But this is clearly my great-grandparents and their children, who showed up in nearly the same arrangement in Chicago in the 1900 census. Here they're living on a farm they owned in Brookfield, Wisconsin, just outside of Milwaukee. The family is minus elder daughter Margaret, who died in 1903, but they've gained a cousin, Peter Petersen, born about 1838, presumably in northern Germany like the rest of the adult family.

So who's Peter?

The only person in the family who matches that birth year and who could possibly be described as a cousin---a term with a bit of fluidity in its definition at the time---was Enewald Petersen, who was actually an uncle to Hans and Catherine Petersen. State census records were often not as verbose as federal census records, so Wisconsin didn't record an emigration year. That would have been helpful in trying to determine who this fellow really is.

Enewald wasn't a popular name in the New World, and it's possible that this Peter Petersen attempted to pick something that sounded less foreign. Peter was also a very common nickname for anyone with the Petersen surname.

No trace of a likely candidate has turned up in any other records, either in earlier censuses, death records from Wisconsin, or subsequent censuses. Hans Petersen died this same year, just a couple months later. Catherine and her children moved back to Chicago. By 1910 Catherine was remarried to someone who was likely a family friend from the Old Country, Thomas Mikkelsen. Peter was nowhere to be found, but there's a chance (with luck!) that some evidence will be revealed someday.

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March 16, 2015: Marry once, marry twice

There are two prominent Lutheran churches in Charleston, South Carolina and my ancestor George Jatho was married in both of them...to the same lady!

Until the online collection "Charleston, South Carolina, Marriage Records, 1877-1887" became available via Ancestrylibrary.com, all I had was a scan of a registry entry for St. John's Lutheran Church marriage books, the original German-language congregation in Charleston. I assumed that this was all there was.

Now that the actual marriage record is available, I see that there was also a marriage under the auspices of St. Matthew's as well. Click the image to enlarge and read the details.

The bride was Arnolda Cornelia von Oven, who had emigrated from Oldenburg along with her brothers, who were all active merchants (grocery mostly) in the city.

She was marrying George William Jatho, the Charleston-born son and namesake of a German immigrant, Georg Wilhelm Jatho, who had been a jeweler and watchmaker in the city until his death in 1870. There were still plenty of Jathos in Charleston, and you can bet they and their cousins were all a part of the ceremony.

Both German congregations held services in German, but by 1881 St. John's had relaxed its language requirements and switched to the more common English service. Arnolda, new to English, may have felt some comfort in a service performed in her native tongue, for which the Rev. Ludwig Müller (who signed this document) was renown.

The verbose certificate gives the witnesses too: the bridegroom's brother and sister William G. Jatho and Elise Jatho, the bride's brother John von Oven, and a family cousin, Jennie Bischoff.

It never hurts to leave as many records as possible. Here's a double wedding with a very different meaning.

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February 27, 2015: Photographer F. Brandt, Flensburg

Identifying the lady at left (click to enlarge) was not easy. For a long time she was completely unknown. The only available clue was the photographer and the location of his studio, and the datable time frame for the image itself.

In fact, we have more documented evidence for the photographer than we do for the lady.

First, the image itself: it's a small-format Card de Visite, cream card stock, original size about 1.75 by 2.5 inches. There's significant color damage from a fabric or cardboard matte of some sort that was used to encase it.

The lady's style of dress, with its prominent buttons, high collar, pleated cuffs, dark neck ribbon with some kind of floral brooch, help us date the photograph to 1869-1972. So too the hair, center parted with an elaborate braid crown, which could be a hairpiece or possibly the lady's own hair.¹ The decorative carved chair and table are also representative of photo studio decor during this era, as is the size of the original image itself.²

The reverse of the Carte de Visite (click to enlarge) carries the stamp of F. Brandt, royal court photographer, winner of the Grand Golden King's Medal, and winner of photography competitions through Europe: "Preisgekrönt auf den Photograph Ausstellungen zu Berlin, Paris, etc."³

This photo of Margarethe "Magretta" Jensen Petersen was taken at the midpoint in the career of Christian Friedrich Brandt. He was born in 1823 in Schleswig to Christian Wilhelm Brandt, a bookbinder. Friedrich was trained in the craft by his father and was expected to join the business. After a sojourn throughout German territories to learn more about graphic art---and, one source believes, to work with Gregorius Renard in Kiel, then the most accomplished daguerreotypist in Schleswig-Holstein---Friedrich returned home.⁴

Friedrich Brandt collaborated with his father as a bookbinder from 1848 but by 1852 had opened his own photography workshop in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and was known for his good-quality portraits. His reputation as a photographer was enhanced around 1863 beginning with a series of architectural and still life photographs. His innovative approach to photographing altarpieces was achieved by temporarily dismantling them to situate them outdoors where he could take advantage of direct sunlight and dark backdrops to highlight strong shadows and angles.

In 1864 Brandt achieved his greatest acclaim for a series of photographs taken during the final days of the Danish-German war, showing troops in situ on the battlefield. He was, in fact, one of only four photographers to be invited to do so.⁵. This commission resulted in an economically advantageous period, during which Brandt continued to explore photographing and documenting medieval sculpture.

From 1863 to 1883 Brandt worked chiefly as a portrait photographer in Flensburg, with at least five photography studios open throughout the town. Brandt closed his workshop in 1883 but suffered monetary reversals and was unable to work further. He and his wife survived in local alms-houses and Brandt died in 1891.⁶

Notes

1. Maureen E. Taylor, Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs, second edition. Cincinnati: Family Tree Books, 2005, p. 89.

2. Gary Clark, "Carte de Visite," PhotoTree.com (website online: http://www.phototree.com/id_cdv.htm), 2013, accessed February 22, 2015.

3. F. Brandt, photograph of Margarethe "Magretta" Jensen Petersen, from the collection of Cathie Meyer, Chicago IL, digital image created in August 2005.

4. Klaus Oberländer, "Photospuren...Photographen + Ahnenforschung" [Photo tracks...Photographers and Genealogy], http://www.photospuren.de/ph_brandt.htm, accessed Febuary 21, 2015.

5. Rolf Sachsse, "Brandt, Christian Friedrich (1823-1891): in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, John Hannavy ed., New York: Routledge, 2007, p.201, accessed online via Google Books, short URL http://goo.gl/b58C3B, February 21, 2015.

6. Ancestrylibrary.com, Flensburg, Germany, Death Index Cards, 1874-1982 (database online), Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014. Original data: Karteikarten zu dem Personenstandregistern Tod, index cards, Stadtarchiv Flensburg, Flensburg, Deutschland. Accessed February 23, 2015.

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February 9, 2015: Mikkelsens in Flensburg

Thomas Mikkelsen and his first wife Helene Sievertsen were both living in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein when their second daughter was born in 1878. Records from Flensburg are not easy to obtain and are generally available only to local researchers who have access to the archives.

But here's a bit of luck, although the message is a sad one. Ancestry.com has been adding cards from an index of records from the region. From 1874 in Prussian provinces, such as Schleswig-Holstein, a civil registry was set up to record information kept up until that time by ecclesiastical repositories. The database "Flensburg, Germany, Death Index Cards, 1874-1982" is now available online, as are birth and marriage records too.

We can tell now that Catharine Bothilde, born January 19, 1878, died at the young age of three years, two months, and this is new information, not previously available. I'd suspected a death because the name was repeated for a third daughter born in 1884, one who lived to adulthood after emigrating as a child to the United States. Both girls were named for their maternal grandmother, Anna Cathrine Bothilde Petersen.

Although the record doesn't give the child's parents' names (an odd omission if the record was meant to be helpful to anyone), the age of the child corresponds almost exactly to Catharine Bothilde's birthdate. So I'm pretty confident that we can accept this record as proof of the first Catharine's short life.

I'm more reluctant to make the same claim with this second record. Thomas and Helene did have a son called Niels Jacob Andreas who appears not to have made the trek across the pond to America, so the assumption is that he died too. But the birth date recorded here isn't correct for the Niels whose baptism record was previously supplied by a local researcher.

Our Neils was born February 21, 1880 while the family was still living in Ladelund, about twenty kilometers west of Flensburg. This record appears to indicate a child who lived only one day, February 27, 1886, and who died in Flensburg. Although the name matches our Neils, without the name of the parents there's no way to verify that he's from the same family.

I noted that these indexes are actually transcriptions of the original records, which were likely not typed neatly on modern index cards but were more likely handwritten in quill pen and ink. It's possible that the transcriber made an error (and it's tempting to imagine a misreading of 1886 for 1880 in whatever handwritten record the typist was transcribing). But at best this scenario is unlikely.

Although we don't know what happened to Niels Jacob Andreas Mikkelsen, there's no mention of him in the family's emigration records, no surviving photos in the family's collection. My assumption is that he too died young, but we're left with a mystery as to where, when, or why.

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January 30, 2015: Lamenting the late Mrs. Jatho

It was accurate, I suppose, for the 1954 Charleston News & Courier to describe Mrs. Jatho as the widow of Carl J. Jatho. Legally she probably was, although they hadn't lived together as man and wife since 1910 or so...and in any case C.J. had died himself in 1929 in Bartow County, Florida, where he'd married again and raised a family.

Of course it's very likely that C.J. had never divorced Mary Eugenia Linn Jatho. South Carolina was the only state in the Union to ban divorce outright, for any reason, prior to 1950. Most states made it difficult to seek a divorce. In nearby Kentucky it required that the state legislature be convened to rule on any divorce proceedings. But in Charleston, where Mary and C.J. had lived, there was no way out...except to disappear.

With C.J. ensconced out of state with his new family, Mary Jatho continued to live inconspicuously in Charleston. She was not the first "grass widow" (a polite term for the situation) in the Jatho family. C.J.'s elder brother Edmund had similarly left his own wife, Edith Ripley Jatho, in New Orleans, where it was also difficult, not to say expensive, to end a marriage. In Edmund's case it appears that financial reversals (plus a little bit of larceny) compelled Edmund to leave town, where Edith had already attracted the attention of Robert Macmurdo, whom she married in 1895.

In Mary Jatho's case there was no remarriage. She made her living as a clerk and spent her later years in a retirement home in Charleston. This obituary mentions no surviving Jathos, although there were still a few in town, only her sisters and sisters' husbands. It was a quiet end to a life lived discreetly.

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January 20, 2015: Research your German ancestors online...soon!

I was pleased to see a major effort on the part of Germany's civil and religious archives to launch a new site. Archion is doing what the Danish archives began doing a decade ago: digitizing and uploading archived record books to the Internet.

It's a massive undertaking due to the fragmentary nature of German records. Prior to the unification of Germany in 1871 records were kept locally in archives that were reachable only by researchers who were familiar with them.

Here's a look inside the viewer, where you'll be able to select individual pages from a list at left, enlarge, and scroll from page to page.

Indications are that Archion will be a fee-based service after it launches at the end of March, but you can explore it now to see what categories of records will eventually be available online. Few actual records are online so far (they're highlighted in green) but there's great potential here to fill in gaps in regions where the cost of obtaining local records is prohibitive.

Yes, the site's in German for now, but an English language option is planned, probably in time for its official launch. Or you could just brush up on your German and dive right in.

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January 3, 2015: Images from the past

Back in August I wrote about a cousin from Germany -- previously unknown to us -- who had discovered that our families share a surname. Our two lines branched off in the early 1770s and because none of our male Vonderschmitts every made it to the New World (we think, based on the evidence), we've never seen a photo of them.

Our new cousin was kind enough to share this image of his ancestor Georg Vonderschmitt, who was born in the 1880s in Germany.

Handsome fellow, too! Georg is shown about 1900 dressed stylishly with an elaborate cravat and pearl-tipped collar pin, with the high collar so common in the first decade of the twentieth century.

For genealogists the web can be a productive endeavor. Using the power of online tools like search engines, you can selectively post information about your family surnames in the hopes that search engines will index them. Once that happens, be ready for some surprise meet-ups.

We're very grateful to our cousin for reaching out. That's one of the true delights of genealogy. Only connect, as E.M. Forster wrote. What follows may just be a bounty of family history.

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December 16, 2014: School days

In the first half of the twentieth century it wasn't always a given that someone would graduate from high school. Some teenagers left school after eighth grade (or earlier) to look for work, the better to help their families. But in the case of Lolus Ella Bruns, she made the big time. And the bonus: here's a photo of her that we'd never otherwise have.

A senior in 1941, she attended Lake View High School in Chicago, Illinois. Her academic interests are in keeping with her later skills when I knew her. Remarkably Lake View High permitted students to specialize in an area of interest, whether general studies, science, commercial (probably something similar to business preparation), and special arts.

Lolus, we note, was a member of the school's girl's athletic association and art club, was in the honors society, and received a silver pin for some unspecified accomplishment.

Was the rest of her family shy, or are they afflicted by that perennial problems that bedevils genealogists, Not Enough Records Online? Her older brothers Bernard and George and older sister Lorraine don't appear in Ancestry.com's collection "U.S. School Yearbooks, 1880-2012." The range of this collection suggests that it might just be a matter of time.

Lake View High exists today with an impressive dedication to academics, if their website is any indication.

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December 6, 2014: Crisp as new kroner...and free to peruse

As I was saying about those Danish church books....

Click the image to enlarge. The quality is often amazing, and in this bigger image from Arkivalieronline's free genealogical archive you can see the book's binding, pages, and even the weave of the physical page. It gives us quite a three-dimensional sense of what it must have been like to touch pen to paper and add the latest record for posterity...though I doubt the clerks imagined how long their work would be visible!

This parish was Arrild in the county of Hviding in the Tønder municipality. Danish research is not always linear, so although this area was home to our Petersen line, it also includes ancestors who never bore the name Petersen.

Denmark's patronymic naming system meant that Peter Hansen Petersen -- the first of his family to used his patronym as a fixed surname -- had a father named Hans Petersen. But Hans had a father called Peter Hansen, whose own father was Hans Christiansen, the son of Christian Tÿggesen, whose father was Tÿgge Jacobsen -- and there we stop, not because there are no more steps to take backward, but because the necessary records are missing from the church books. At least it's safe to assume that his father was called Jacob.

That's always a sad circumstance for any genealogist, but when you consider how fragile pen and paper were, it's remarkable that anything has survived. We're also at the mercy of clerks whose skills varied wildly. A researcher quickly learns to appreciate any clerk whose hand was steady, who cut his quills deftly, and who mixed his inks properly to withstand time.

We can get a little further back than Tÿgge Jacobsen, who was born about 1678, by side-stepping to his wife's family. Wolburg Hansdatter married Tÿgge rather late in life in 1719 at age 41. What's helpful here is that her name is sufficiently rare (Wolburg was the Danish form of Walpurga, an old saint's name) that we can find her baptism record, and thus her parents as well. She was the daughter of Hans Smid and Karin Pedersdatter.

And miraculously Hans' and Karin's marriage was recorded in the book above, the last one of 1673 on the eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, a complicated dating system involving the Julian calendar, which was still in use. The Danish Moveable Feast days changed every year even after the Gregorian calendar was adopted, but luckily Familysearch.org has developed a handy online chart for figuring out the actual date corresponding to modern calendars.

If you have Danish ancestry, it's worth diving into these records to see what you can find. Arkivalieronline is continuing to re-film their holdings, so check back with them to see what's new online.

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November 28, 2014: Seeing things in a new light

Denmark is one of the most responsive countries in terms of providing online source material, and this is one example of their willingness to share.

In fact it's an example of them going overboard to make improvements to their holdings. My great-great-grandfather Peter Hansen Petersen was born on June 15, 1822 and was baptized on June 23 that same year. I had captured the image about eight years ago when their archive offered this kind of image quality, which was useful but rather low resolution.

Not having checked Arkivalieronline for some time, I didn't realize that they were slowly but surely re-filming their church books at a much higher resolution. As seen in the example above the quality difference is marked, and much appreciated. On some pages you can actually see fiber details of the paper used in those old books.

Peter Hansen, named for his grandfather of the same name, was the first-born son of Hans Peter Petersen and his wife Ellen Jürgensen, both of whom lived in Jündewandt just north of the border with Schleswig-Holstein. As the record indicates, the three godparents are Lorentz Jacobsen, Christian Sörensen, and the intriguingly-named Madame Saxesen, if I'm reading it correctly.

The apellation "Madame" wasn't unusual for Burkal Parish, apparently used for senior ladies who might have had special standing in the community. Madame Saxesen, who also stood as godparent to other infants in the parish, was most likely Adelhed Poulsdatter Callesen, whose second marriage was to a Hans Ludwig Christian Saxesen. No clue whether these people are related to the family. In many cases godparents were related. In Burkal Parish that seems to be less often the case.

It's particularly odd here if baby Peter Hansen's paternal grandfather was still living and was not one of the godparents. This might be a clue that either he was already dead by 1822 or was otherwise not available, due to illness for example, to be at the baptism.

In the naming conventions of the time it was customary to have the first son named after his paternal grandfather, and when Peter grew up he returned the favor and named his first son after his own father, Hans Peter Petersen. Peter Hansen Petersen is someone we know fairly well because he, his future wife Elise Momsen, and half of their eleven children made the great trek across the pond in 1878 to settle in Nebraska.

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November 6, 2014: That little old clockmaker

As much as I like to be helpful, this conundrum has me stumped. Click the image above to enlarge.

A clockmaker/restoration shop emailed me recently about this inscription on the inside housing of a clock they have in the shop for repair. It's an old French style mechanism with a heavy pendulum and counterweights that hang from cord attached to the roof of the clock with hooks.

While they had the works out of the case for the restoration, they noticed this inscription stamped on the metal housing: "GABAUT [Gebaut], EN, 1738, ALSAS, LORINE, W, JATHO" which translates to "Made in 1738, Alsace Lorraine, W. Jatho." The use of commas is fanciful if not decorative.

The clock shop emailed me, having found that I have a plethora of Jathos in my family line, and I do -- one in particular who was actually a watchmaker and jeweler, Georg Wilhelm Jatho. But he was born in 1824 and couldn't have been making clocks in 1738. He also came from Dransfeld in Hanover and Kassel in Hesse-Kassel.

It wasn't impossible in those days for someone to travel the almost 500km from the region where most Jathos are congregated to a region like Alsace, but it would be a rigorous journey, not to be undertaken lightly. It's entirely possible that a Jatho relocated there for a golden opportunity to make clocks. I just can't match any of my own various Wilhelm Jathos to this clockmaker.

Clock restorers often resort to books of European clockmakers' names to match a clock to its maker, but W. Jatho doesn't turn up in any of those volumes, nor is he in Google Books (a frequently useful if overlooked resource). So what about vital or church records for the region?

This curious area, shared variously throughout history by both Germany and France but
with a mainly German speaking populace, has some archives available online, such as http://www.archives-numerisees.ain.fr/. Nice, but a search for any Jatho in the Ain region results in "Il n'y a pas de réponse pour votre recherche"...no response to my search. There are some other regional archives listed on this helpful site, and that should keep me busy for awhile.

There are online church archives too but they're accessible by village name, not by surname. You'd need to know the town W. Jatho came from to try to look him up. Without that information the only option would be a kind of needle-in-a-haystack process, searching each one of hundreds of villages page by page...and you could still find nothing if he wasn't born there, married there, or died there.

I have other family surnames in Alsace so I'm familiar with the archives and church books. I'm intrigued enough to keep looking around, but the identity of Mr. Jatho in Alsace may remain unknown, despite our best efforts.

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October 27, 2014: Archival treasures

Pennsylvania has been, historically, notoriously reluctant to share its vital records, but thankfully that's changing now. In a newly-online collection called "Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1963" I found a couple death certificates related to my late uncle Leo Skiba. The one above is for Theresa Baran Skiba, his mother, who died in 1929 when Leo was only twelve.

The document is fairly informative and appears to be notated in several different hands and by several different pens. The left-hand portion looks like it was notated using a dipped steel-nib pen with black ink from a bottle, judging by the thick-and-thin lines of the nib.

The right-hand portion, by contrast, shows the doctor's notes in fountain pen (pen strokes are nice and even) in blue-black ink, referencing the primary cause of death (carcinoma) and the secondary cause (exhaustion).

Then the bereaved widower, Michael Skiba, Leo's father, signs in a more spidery script.

It's nice to have the names of Theresa's parents. I knew she was from Rzeszów, Poland, based on her 1923 ship manifest, but it was a surprise to see that Leo (listed there as Leon) was also born in Poland. It wasn't something that my family talked about, and I suppose it's possible that Leo himself didn't know. He was only four years old when he came over with his mother and younger sister Helen.

It occurred to me that Leo may have felt as close as he did to his mother-in-law Bertha Gohr Bruns because she herself had roots in what's now Poland. Although Bertha was born in Chicago in 1886, her parents came from Kreis Bütow and Kreis Stolp in what was then Pomerania but is now Poland. Bertha's family spoke a Polish-influenced form of German. Perhaps it created a bond between them, he who had been motherless for so long.

Because Leo and his wife Lolus Bruns Skiba never had children, I've felt an urge to document what I can of his line in case someone ever shows an interest. Polish records are hard to come by and archival access is problematic at best. Records aren't online, so sources like this death certificate help us fill in a little more information about Theresa's background. Her parents' names now go into my database, ready for reference for anyone interested, whoever that may be.

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September 20, 2014: "If you ever plan to motor west..."

Post World War II, trailer courts sprang up like crabgrass in Southern California. Housing shortages were a reality and the construction industry couldn't work fast enough to provide new real estate projects. Some families returning to the Los Angeles area or emigrating here for the first time stayed in motels because apartment vacancies were equally hard to find.

For a man of retirement years -- for whom retirement income was inadequate -- managing a trailer court was just the thing. Often it provided free housing to managers and their families, and there was minimal back-breaking work involved. It was perfect for Alva MacLaughlan, who had been an accountant before retirement. For his wife Marie Jatho MacLaughlan it was an occupation that ran in the family. Her sister Ethel Jatho Crossey and her husband Orrie ran a trailer court in the town of Vista, near San Diego -- a nice one with room for a trailer for two, a pool and lounge area, and a small garden with room for outside seating and an awning if you wanted one.

Alva's and Marie's trailer court was located on Route 66, smack dab up against the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and just east of Flappy Jack's Pancake House. You won't find it there anymore. It's now an autobody repair shop, but the address is the same.

I always thought that my grandparents ran a trailer court in Barstow, California ("...Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino" croons the famous song "Route 66") because that's where Marie died in 1956 of a heart attack. An autopsy report was done and it made a point to mention that the MacLaughlans has been there only three weeks. So the Glendora court must have been an earlier endeavor. And I believe now that this is a picture of it.

What leads me to think so? Well, the trees are pretty lush for Barstow, which was situated in the high desert over the Cajon Pass, eighty miles east of Glendora.

There's also this directory listing from the Azusa city directory from 1954, courtesy of Ancestrylibrary.com. The name of the business on the sign in front of the office matches the entry in the directory.

And if more evidence is needed, Alva advertised pretty regularly in the Covina Argus-Citizen, the local newspaper. Ads begin in late 1952 and continue until February 1956. Marie died in mid-March 1956 in Barstow so they must have made their move to the desert in late February of that year. Alas for Marie.

I do random searches for Alva in the probably vain hope that one day he and the family will turn up in the 1940 census, to which he seems to be allergic (i.e. no trace of Alva). But this directory entry and the newspaper adverts (courtesy of the Godfrey Library's Newspaperarchive.com database) are nice enough, and bring with them new information -- always a good thing for a genealogist.

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August 27, 2014: Gone but not forgotten

Pictured here with her family in 1959, she was my favorite aunt, though I haven't said a word to her in over twenty years. Not for lack of trying -- I simply couldn't find her...until now.

However you wanted to spell her name -- Dolores Caroline MacLaughlan (as she was when single in Chicago), Dolores Brewer (from her first marriage in California), or Carole Walkley (from her second in Texas). I was hopeful that one day I'd find her alive and willing to share what family lore she knew. Or perhaps she'd have preferred to find out the most recent genealogical discoveries, which are considerable.

At the time of this photo (which you can enlarge by clicking) you can sense the family pride. Everyone was included: Jim Brewer, who was born in Arkansas but became an insurance adjuster in Los Angeles; wife Dolores, youngest daughter of Alva Elwood MacLaughlan and his wife Marie Jatho; four kids, even Suzy the cat, who doesn't look terribly amused. And note the back shelf, where portraits of the older generation are carefully placed: Jim's parents on the left (Henry Hiram Brewer and the former Mary Mae Wisdom, both from Arkansas), and Alva and Marie on the right, Alva from Chicago, Marie from Charleston, South Carolina.

But all attempt to find Dolores or Carole after 1993 were pretty much fruitless. Directory entries for her second husband, Reuben H. Walkley, pointed to a tiny town called George West, Texas. But mail addressed there came back undelivered. Yet there was a marriage index (Texas, Marriage Collection, 1814-1909 and 1966-2011) suggesting that she and Reuben had been married as recently as 2005. I held out hope that one day I'd track her down.

The SSDI is updated intermittently and is not always a reliable source of death dates for women, who may never have applied for a Social Security number under their own names. That seems to have been the case with Dolores/Carole. Her name still doesn't appear.

But it finally turned up (under Carole Walkley) in the Find-A-Grave website, whose index at Ancestry.com, recently updated, provided confirmation of her death in 2012 at the age of 82. Her second husband Reuben died the same year.

The circumstances of her transformation are sketchy. Over time, after her divorce, she grew distant from the family. She'd sometimes pop up unexpectedly with gifts (once bringing a teapot, once a puppy!), then retreat for long periods of time. She changed her name but thoughtfully let us know what it was before she vanished. I heard that a cousin had run into her in 1998 at a Chicago high school reunion. That was probably the last confirmed sighting we had of her.

People have their own reasons for fading into the background. This is one case that available records can't explain, though the backstory would probably be interesting.

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August 12, 2014: Pistol packin' mama

She looked sweet and demure, but don't let that fool you. If you were a bandit in suburban Chicago in the 1930s, perhaps you might not want to do battle with Marie MacLaughlan.

Thanks to the Chicago Tribune, which is currently offering its digitized archives for free perusal, we know that Marie, all of seventeen years old, confronted a trio of bandits one day in May 1932 in a restaurant on south Western Avenue.

Things didn't go quite as planned. After attempting to hold up Marie and her mother, Marie Jatho MacLaughlan, the younger lady pulled a gun on the ringleader of the group, Charles Harrington, and shot him in the hip.

This clipping from July 31, 1932 was in section 1 page 10 of the Tribune. It was newsworthy due to the unusual number of continuances in the case, which must have received some criticism in judicial circles. Two perpetrators, Alex Johnson and Allen Reynolds, both eighteen years old, petitioned for and received probation in the case, and the Tribune, obviously not satisfied with the outcome, was looking for answers.

The assistant state attorney, Daniel Covelli, was interviewed by the Tribune about alleged irregularities but insisted that the case was entirely "on the up and up." The judge prosecuting the case had been out ill several times and his presence was needed to decide what manner of probation there would be.

"The state's attorney has nothing to say about probation" Covelli clarified. "We merely present the evidence and let the judge decide."

As for the ringleader, Charles Harrington, who at sixteen was younger than Marie, he was prosecuted in juvenile court by another judge entirely...who, the Tribune clearly believed, had also been too lenient. But the Tribune wasn't able to reach the state's attorney Ralph J. Riley for his comments about the troubling continuances in the Harrington case, and Charles was sent to a reform school, St. Charles Home for Boys.

Usually the MacLaughlan clan kept a lower profile. The Chicago Tribune was a big paper and covered major and minor news stories in Chicago proper. Most of the time if the MacLaughlan name came up anywhere in print, it was in the social notes columns of the Southtown Economist other other suburban newspapers of limited circulation, where Mrs. A.E. MacLaughlan might be joining a family bridge party with her daughter Marie.

From available evidence it appears likely that Mr. A.E. MacLaughlan liked to keep his presence a mystery...a theory that might explain why they moved house twelve times in twenty years and can't be found in the 1940 census. Alva was not one to rock the boat. Someone might find out family secrets that he preferred to keep hidden. Heaven forfend newspaper publicity!

But at least one thing is clear. Marie could be trusted to aim straight and true. Until the Tribune archives revealed this particular secret, we had no idea.

See what you can find out about your Chicago relatives before the archive goes subscription-only!

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August 2, 2014: A note from the Old Country

I'm not entirely sure why I haven't written about the Vonderschmitt line before. Maybe it's because they're fairly remote, genealogically speaking. None of their members emigrated to the New World as far as we know. The family lived and thrived in the Hesse-Darmstadt region, mostly in Reinheim, Spachbrücken, and Pfungstadt.

Our most recent Vonderschmitt was Elisabethe Margarethe, whose baptism record (enlarge by clicking the image) is above. Born in Reinheim in 1775, she married Georg Philipp Schuchmann in 1797. They had eight children, and Elisabethe died at the relatively young age of thirty-nine.

One of her sons, Johann Ludwig Schuchmann, did make it to America, settling in Charleston, South Carolina in 1840. He and his son Philip established a thriving haberdasher's shop on King Street, and his daughter was named Elisabetha in honor of her Vonderschmitt grandmother.

Elisabeth Vonderschmitt had a brother, Johann Friedrich, born in 1767. And apparently Johann Friederich had descendants. One of them contacted me this week, a happy surprise.

His family still lives in Germany. He was curious about our connection. I was too. He knew his grandfather as well as his grandfather's brother, Konrad von der Schmitt. As with most surnames, spelling variations exist. But the name's the same.

Konrad had quite a visible life, as this Wikipedia page explains (if you view it using the Chrome browser, you'll have the option to translate it to English).

Konrad, the son of a shoemaker also called Konrad, was a member of the Hessian parliament, a teacher, and a member of the Germany Communist party (for which he was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp during World War Two). He survived Dachau and served in the Offenbach labor office and the school board in the Hessian ministry of education.

Our new cousin knew just this much about his grandfather's brother but not whether there was a connection between our families. Turns out there is! I'll need to re-order the microfilms for Reinheim to verify completely, but Albert Esser has uploaded results of his research at geneanet.org, a site where a lot of helpful clues can be found, particularly if you have European ancestry. Mr. Esser's work points to our common ancestor, Johann Georg Vonderschmitt, born in Reinheim in 1720. Johann and his wife Elisabethe Margarethe Frey were the parents of our cousin's ancestor Johann Friedrich and ours, Elisabethe Margarethe.

I feel sorry for folks who are too afraid of sharing material on the web. Of course there are always reasons to be careful -- no names or dates for people still living, no information that would compromise family security, of course. But without the wonder of the web and the crawlers that index our information, we might never have met via email. "Only connect," said E.M. Forster, meaning something rather different. But in the genealogical world the phrase has its own special resonance.

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July 23, 2014: Hiding in plain sight, take two

This time I have no excuse. It's my fault. And an idle search through a book I've already read proved to me that I need to pay attention to what I'm reading. She was right there all along: my great-great-great grandmother Jacobina Lommel Müller. She somehow sneaked across the Atlantic without my noticing her. Click the image to enlarge.

Bethany Cemetery Inscriptions, Charleston, South Carolina by Mildred K. Hood is an essential resource for anyone, like me, who has ancestors from Charleston. The German community there was enormous, with a big boom in emigrations from 1830 onward through the rest of that century.

I knew my great-great-grandfather Ludwig Müller had made his way to Charleston (see the post below) but the fact that his mother also came over was a real surprise.

The reason I missed this? Jacoba Müller (as her name is spelled here) doesn't turn up (so far) on any emigration or census documents I can find. The death record above is it. In fact, she's only indexed in the Bethany book because she was buried in an earlier cemetery used by St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, called Hampstead. The book contains an index of Hampstead as well, but I'd never perused it, thinking that all my Charleston folks were either at Bethany or across the street at Magnolia Cemetery.

Hampstead, for all intents and purposes, was forgotten over time when St. Matthew's bought new land for the cemetery that was to become Bethany. Headstones disappeared. The land changed hands several times during the twentieth century, and its identity as a cemetery was lost.

Tenement buildings were put up on its surface, with inhabitants no doubt unaware that the land was the burial place of scores of German citizens of Charleston, some old, some younger, some only infants. There were epidemics that hit Charleston hard during the period when Hampstead was actively in use, among them a deadly outbreak of yellow fever in 1858. One family lost eight members in a day to the disease.

Today we know much more about Hampstead because it was discovered, upon its most recent sale, to have been that lost cemetery of yore. A detailed study was performed in 2009 by Brockington & Associates, a professional archaeological firm, when the city of Charleston agreed to undertake an excavation and partial reburial of Hampstead's inhabitants.

437 people were relocated from old Hampstead to Bethany. The project revealed some fascinating details about funerary practices among the German community at that time (the report is available in PDF form from the website, and requires registering to download it, but it's free).

The sad truth, for me, is that of the 437 reburials, only ten could be positively identified due to eroded metal nameplates and the complete non-existence of headstones. This isn't really too much different from burial practices in Scandinavia and Germany, where, as any good genealogist familiar with the region knows, cemetery plots were rented to families on a yearly basis. If the family couldn't pay or if they moved away from the community, the plot was reused, old headstones were discarded, and new headstones for subsequent inhabitants were put in place.

Of course with Hampstead the circumstances were much simpler. The city forgot its own consecrated ground. So the only "monument" that stands to register Jacoba Müller's death is the church book at St. Matthew's, which gives us the simple words that mark her death. Jacoba Elisabeth Müller, born in Frankfurt-am-Main, "Mutter des derzeitigen Pastors d. Gemeinde," mother of the current pastor of the parish. She was 76 years of age, and the cause of death was "Hohen Alten," old age.

We can hope, at least, considering the circumstances of the time, that it was a peaceful passing.

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July 11, 2014: Memento mori

She was the family favorite, charming even as a young girl, adored by her shy cousin Jack Burrill about 1933 in Chicago. Lolus Ella Margaret Bruns carried not only her own unusual name but those of her two aunts, Ella Gohr Schultz and Margaret Gohr Meyers.

Lolus left surprisingly few footprints in the genealogical records generally available. Her birth was recorded in Cook County in 1923 and she's in the 1930 and 1940 census. But until her untimely death fifty years ago today there's not much else.

She was movie-star-struck and rendered admirable pencil drawings of elegant young ladies, one of which was framed and hanging up in her home.

Her older sister Lorraine was the more glamorous sister, and her handsome brother George was the tallest of the three, but Lolus had a vivacity and playfulness that shows through even formal portraits. The three are pictured below in Chicago about 1940.

She was the second of her siblings to marry. Her 1945 marriage to Navy seaman Leo Skiba was small and quiet, her dress demure, her flowers understated. The two were well matched: calm, earnest, happy. They were the first in their families to make the big move away from Chicago toward the west.

In 1946 Lolus and Leo came to California and lived in Temple City, a suburb just east of Los Angeles. They both worked---unusually for married couples in those days when the wife usually kept house. There were no children. Children were wanted but never arrived. Leo and Lolus focused their love and affection on two nieces instead.

Their home was tiny but just the right size for the two of them. Occasionally it was filled with friends and relatives from the midwest: navy buddies of Leo's, cousins and relatives from near and far. They had a plum tree in the back yard that flowered generously and fruited gloriously. Leo was a surprisingly good cook. Lolus was an enthusiastic homemaker.

The auto accident that took her life in 1964 put an end to their charmed life. Leo survived but never really recovered from her loss. Fifty years on, it seems vitally important to acknowledge this sunny, bubbly woman whose life was cut short but who lives on in memory. She is remembered, and she is loved.

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July 7, 2014: Forged and flown

The mystery of Edmond D. Jatho has just been solved, courtesy of some sleuthing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. And it's not a pretty picture.

His early life was promising. Born the penultimate son in 1860 to Charleston, South Carolina jeweler G.W. Jatho and his wife Elise, he was named Edmond Dantes after a character in the Alexander Dumas novel "The Count of Monte Christo," which suggested hopeful literary pretensions on the part of his parents.

Edmond was the only child of seven to attend college, graduating from the College of Charleston in 1879. His older brothers George and William were skillful merchandise brokers in town, and an even older brother, Philip, was a district court clerk. Maybe it was the pressure to do well that bedeviled Edmond.

We knew that he married well to Edith C. Ripley, daughter of a New York journalist Philip Ripley, whose heritage has been traced back to the Mayflower and beyond. Four children (two surviving to adulthood) followed from 1885 to 1891, and Edmond set up his own business in New Orleans.

Directory entries in New Orleans seemed to show a steady slide down the economic scale, with no apparent reason. In 1891 he was a merchandise broker on Poydras Street. But in 1892 he was merely a clerk on Euterpe Street. And in 1894 only Edith Jatho is listed...as a widow of Edmond. But we know he lived until 1910 because we have his death certificate from Chicago, where he'd been living at the time, working as a U.S. government inspector quartermaster, a provider of military uniforms and paraphernalia.

Newly-available stories from the Times-Picayune tell a more complete tale. These news items also suggest why it was that Edmond's New Orleans descendants were never told anything about him, never recalled him, nor remembered him with any reverence...and why Edith was suddenly known as a widow.

A September 1892 notice in the Times-Picayune refers to an auction of household goods resulting from a legal case, J.J. Weinfurther vs. Edmond J. [sic] Jatho, where the proceeds were apparently sold to satisfy the lost lawsuit. Dire straits led to desperate measures, and during the next year Edmond used his charm to finagle friends out of their money. Then he disappeared.

And if the reports were correct, this wasn't the first time Edmond had resorted to larceny. But his family (presumably his older brothers) had reimbursed the injured parties and staved off prosecution. This time Edmond chose flight.

But he didn't fly far afield. His brother George, who had already rescued their youngest brother Carl Julius from the arms of the law (that's a story in itself), seems to have set Edmond up in a fresh business, the Carolina Broom Works, as this advertisement from the 1895 Charleston News & Courier suggests. Perhaps George paid off his brother's creditors again.

The fact that Edmond sold off his collection of law books and other ephemera in 1897 may be a clue to his course of studies during his far-off college days. Or perhaps, as a penitent and reformed rapscallion, he was ready to leave lawyering to others.

Edmond lived for a time in Charleston, then with an older sister Mrs. Marcellus (Pauline) Foster in Augusta, Georgia, behaving himself (it seems), catching up on business, and writing occasional letters to the editor of local newspapers. By 1908 he was in Chicago, overseeing the installation of military camp incinerators to dispose of camp refuse and reduce instances of typhoid fever. An article from the Chicago Heights Star, "Large Government Order for Heights", quotes him as a trusted authority, voicing his opinion that the installation would "result in great benefit to the men."

Edmond died of pneumonia on New Year's Day in 1910 and was brought home by brother George for burial in the Jatho family plot at Magnolia Cemetery. He rests there today. And thanks to the Times-Picayune, we have a more complete understanding of Edmond's life...even if it wasn't always sunny.

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June 17, 2014: Rev. Muller, I presume?

For fifty years he was a steady presence in Charleston, South Carolina. Born Louis Müller, he was known as the Reverend Doctor Ludwig Müller in Charleston and graced the pulpit of St. Matthew's German Evangelical Church with eloquence and tireless devotion to his flock.

Finding traces of his career before 1848, however, hasn't always been so easy. We know he emigrated with his bride Carolina Laurent in November 1842. He didn't come to Charleston until 1848. Where was he before that?

He was in lower east side New York and Brooklyn, according to his 1898 obituary from the Charleston News & Courier. Some of the article is a bit hard to substantiate, though I've seen familiar sentences make their way into family narratives. What type of tears he shed at age eight, for instance, would be hard to document.

But in other ways the obituary is most informative. It's interesting to note that "unfavorable circumstances for Protestant theologians" was the reason for Rev. Müller's emigration from Bavaria -- actually Zweibrücken, Rheinland-Pfalz -- to New York. Ludwig's grandfather, the huntsman Michael Müller, had been Catholic and his father, Frederick, took a Protestant wife. The region where Ludwig was born, Fischbach, was staunchly Catholic, but Ludwig's predilection had been towards Lutheranism.

Also of interest is Ludwig's initial intention to settle in Philadelphia, where the article notes that he had relatives. These could only have been his wife's Laurent brothers, although available documentation suggests that they didn't actually arrive in Philadelphia until after Ludwig and Caroline Laurent Müller were ensconced in Brooklyn. Journalism was ever thus.

Ludwig's first establishment was the German Reformed Church. The obituary designates his initial pulpit at the Forsyth Street location (21 Forsyth Street to be exact), where a schism already existed between rival Lutheran and Calvinist interpretations of the church. This sheds light on the obituary's reference to a lawsuit between several members of the congregation, who apparently had differing views on what sort of theological focus there should be. Ludwig and his followers were forced out for eighteen months, decamping to Grand Street's Columbia Hall while the matter was settled.

In fact, a website includes a version of this same story where the ruckus seems to have swung this way and that from 1838 and on into Ludwig's tenure from 1842-1844. He's referred to as Rev. Lewis Miller, but what's a little spelling oddity among friends? It's indubitably the same fellow.

It was too much uncertainty, and Ludwig moved to another German Evangelical Church on Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn, where he passed two years at the helm of his new congregation. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, celebrating the church's 90th birthday on October 9, 1931, confirmed Ludwig's brief tenure here.

The Charleston News & Courier article finally gives us the exact reason for Ludwig's migration southward: his health. Whether it was the harsh Brooklyn winters or some other malady, Ludwig traveled to Charleston to preach two sermons at St. Matthew's in February 1848 and was elected pastor two days later. His command of German was likely his strong suit. Ludwig's preaching was usually entirely geared toward the German-speaking congregations where he officiated.

Ludwig brought with him his Zweibrücken-born wife Caroline and children Helena and Frederick, both of whom were born in New York. The family grew and prospered in Charleston, and it's very clear from his obituary how much he was revered by the townsfolk. Thanks to the News & Courier, we now know a bit more about his life prior to Charleston.

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June 4, 2014: Wedding bells, repeat as necessary

You don't see these very often in Chicago's Cook County clerical archives. On May 13, 1911 this couple took out a marriage license but never used it. It was returned to the clerk's office and resides there today.

At first glance it looks pretty standard. William R. Aylen, age 28, an insurance broker, was set to marry Jennie Ethel Jatho, age 22.

Research tells us, however, that at this point Jennie Ethel was eight months pregnant and was passing herself off in Chicago as the widow of a Mr. Louis Campbell of Charleston. No trace of a marriage to Mr. Campbell has every been found, so the story probably existed to cover up a surprise pregnancy, and it's a pretty good possibility that the Jatho family's relocation from Charleston to Chicago in late 1910 was also a convenient way to hide Ethel's situation.

All that aside, had Ethel been the actual bride, she would have listed herself as Jennie Ethel Campbell. Circumstances point to an explanation that would have accounted for this telling mistake. The young lady using identification to prove that she was of age had probably borrowed it from her older sister. And she wasn't of age. She was thirteen years old. But why let that stand in the way? William was a handsome fellow, as you can see below left.

In later years Marie Jatho admitted to one of her daughters that she'd eloped at thirteen with a much older gentleman but the marriage never took place. I wonder who investigated? Did the nearest justice of the peace have suspicions about the bide's true age? Was there something amiss on the baptism certificate that Marie presented as her own? Or did William Aylen get cold feet?

William himself may have actually been married at this time and may not have been able to prove that he was free to marry. The 1910 census tells us that he was married to a lady called Lillian, had been married for five years, and had two infant daughters, Irene and Iris (called Gertrude in the census).

But in 1912 and 1913 the Cook County marriage index shows that he married or took out licenses to marry the same woman, Lillian G. Baillieull, to whom he was presumably already married and who was the mother of his two girls. This is a confusing development, one that available records don't fully explain.

Also in 1912, just a week after the first marriage with Lillian named as his wife, William is listed as marrying Florence O. Brandon. And in 1920 in Indiana William married Catherine Morrison. In the 1930 census his wife was Mabel Alice Walker. Perhaps William had a thing for the clerk's office.

As for Marie Jatho, she had a couple more years to wait for matrimony. On June 4, 1914 (one hundred years ago today) at the mature age of fifteen she married Alva E. MacLaughlan in Chicago. The adorable couple are in the photo at right, with their glowering teenage son Thomas just barely hidden in the background shadows.

Anecdotal evidence informs us that it was not a happy marriage, but Alva and Marie weathered the storms as best they could. They had four children, raised them in Chicago, and moved to California about 1946, where they continued to get on each other's nerves until Marie died in 1956 at the age of 58. I wonder whether she ever thought back on her almost-marriage to William? Well, a girl can always dream.

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May 30, 2014: Revisiting the past

This little girl has languished for some time in my photo archives as Unknown Girl, yet another image from my great-grandmother's collection. It's marked on the margin in white ink, but the best clue I have is this: Withrow & Howe, W. Pullman. No notation on the back about the girl herself, who looks about five years old.

Looking over old Petersen photos has become de rigueur of late, now that I've found a new cousin from this line who might have questions. And just having had a breakthrough the other week, identifying my great-grandmother Catharina's older sister, I realized that there's a bit of logic I can apply to her record-keeping.

Catharina didn't label photos of people she knew really well, or people who were close to her.

Another clue: West Pullman was a neighborhood in south side Chicago. The photographers' names, we can safely theorize, were Withrow and Howe. They had not been a partnership long enough at the time this photo was taken to have arranged for imprinted card stock with their names engraved, as was customary with other studios. Perhaps they didn't stay together very long. Searching through available online lists of Chicago-area photographers doesn't reveal any studio with that name, although there were a couple of Howes.

As for the little girl herself, there's something compelling about her cool, calm stare somewhere to the left of the camera. Her dress is elaborately decorated with lace trim, her high-button boots are fashionable rather than workaday. She holds a lace handkerchief in one hand and a dark-haired doll in her arm.

As I looked at her face I realized that she strongly resembled someone I could identify: one of Catharina's older sons, Peter Heinrich. He's the dark-haired boy seated in the picture at right, taken about 1900 or 1901.

If that's the case, noting the details of the child's presumed age, this girl must be Margaretha Petersen -- Maggie to her family -- and at the time this photo was taken she was the only surviving girl in a family full of brothers.

Assuming this really is Maggie, the picture must date from 1892 or 1893, when she was four or five years old. Naturally Catharina would always know who this little girl was. She didn't need reminding. But we do.

In the second photo with her two brothers, Peter and Alfred, there's a new sister, Maria Catharina, born in 1899. Maggie stands or kneels behind her. Maggie's face has begun to change and there's evidence of photo distortion or illness in her face, it's hard to tell. But I think that her resemblance to Peter gives us the best clue we're ever likely to have about the identity of the little girl in lace.

As a genealogist, I don't like having to rely on circumstantial evidence to generate a hypothesis. But that's all we have with this particular photo, and sometimes a hypothetical identification is better than none at all.

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May 22, 2014: Something new has been added

For some reason about eight years ago I jotted down a note about a marriage record from New York City between a Philip Laurent and a Minnie Stetson. The marriage took place in 1902. I suppose I was planning to follow up and see whether there was any connection between this Philip Laurent and my great-great-grandmother Caroline Laurent Müller, whose family lived in Charleston, South Carolina. But instead I tucked the note away in a file folder and lost track of it. And forgot about it.

But old notes sometimes pop up again, and this one did. I looked at a transcription of it online. Funny...Philip's father was called Frederick Laurent. My great-great-grandmother had a brother with that name. And her father was called Philipp.

At some point I must have looked at the original record, perhaps via microfilm, perhaps online (if it was once online, it no longer is), because I noted that the witnesses to this marriage were Mary F. Corvie and Lulu Laurent.

A quick check of the 1870 U.S. federal census record, above, turned up a Philip with a father called Frederick in Philadelphia, and the father's birth year roughly matched the one from my family. He was a prosperous man, a confectioner, the founder of F. Laurent & Sons, and by newspaper accounts it's clear that his children were well regarded in society. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported regularly about Philip's accomplishments as a marksman in local tournaments.

In the 1900 U.S. federal census there's also a Louisa Laurent, born in February 1874, listed as Frederick's daughter and Philip's sister. Is this the Lulu Laurent who was a witness to the New York marriage?

A transcribed birth record for Helena, one of the children of Frederick and his wife, Marianna Schaefer Demme, also show the father's name as Frederick Christ. Lorent [sic]...one step closer to Caroline's brother Christian Frederick. And a 1904 death notice in the Philadelphia Inquirer narrows down Frederick's age to within pitching distance of 1824, the year he was actually born.

I don't normally use online trees as conclusive evidence for anything but they can offer good clues if used carefully. One at AncestryLibrary.com seemed to have the relevant information: Frederick Laurent, son of Philipp Laurent and Philippina Junglbut, born in 1824 and died in 1904. Same parents as my great-great-grandmother. I think we have ignition!

Why I didn't stumble upon this earlier is anyone's guess. Caroline's sister Louisa emigrated to the USA and was based in New York, I knew that. Is it really so strange that another sibling might have joined them in the New World? In fact, there was an Augustus Laurent in Philadelphia, a druggist, with the same birth year as Franz Ludwig August Laurent, another brother. More research is needed to connect him to my family, but there's a good chance that two Laurents in Philadelphia may have more in common than coincidental surnames.

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May 5, 2014: A lily by any other name....

In 1911 a woman named Lilian Bruns was a witness to two marriages held within a week of each other in St. Joseph's Church in Chicago. One of those marriages involved my grandfather, George Bruns, and my grandmother Bertha Gohr. The other was the marriage of Laura Bruns to John Burrill.

Brunses I know. George and Laura are brother and sister. But who is Lilian? My database had no such person, and a quick search of various census years resulted in no Lilian or Lillian Bruns in my family.

Until ProQuest offered a recent "open house" of its obituary collection, Lilian remained a mystery...then I found this obituary from the Chicago Tribune from 1945.

Among a number of familiar names is a survivor, Lillie Dowling. The surname rang a bell, and another quick consultation with my database cleared up the matter.

George Bruns' older sister, Elizabeth Bruns, married a Joseph Dowling in Chicago in 1916. If she was referred to as Lillie in the obituary, wouldn't it make sense that she was using the nickname Lilian in her capacity as witness to her brother's marriage some thirty-odd years earlier?

It's true that sometimes families assign nicknames for relatives that don't have expected antecedents. But if Lillie had originated as a derived nickname for Elizabeth (her mother's name), then Lizzie → Lillie isn't that far a stretch!

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April 18, 2014: A journey across the sea

Traveling with two small children on an airplane these days has its ups and downs. Imagine attempting a voyage like this, but in 1883 and on a ship!

Christine Petersen's name appears on a Hamburg, Germany manifest, a helpful document, worth seeking out if your ancestors came to America via the indirect route, e.g. Hamburg to Liverpool and then Liverpool to New York, or directly from Hamburg to New York. The latter option was more expensive, and in this case, that's the way Christine and her family were traveling.

Hamburg departures helpfully give the last residence of the individual. In this case it's Leck in very far north Schleswig-Holstein. That's a town I know well. My great-grandmother Catharina Petersen was born there, and it was the departure point for several of her own family five years earlier. They were bound for Nebraska, where Catharina's cousin and fiancé was already living.

Based on new information from a cousin, I now know that Christine's husband Hans was Catharina's older brother, and from the look of this listing he's already in America, probably in the town of Hebron, Thayer County, Nebraska, where Hans' other siblings were living. Christine and the children are coming over to join him. The departure date is September 5, 1883. That's a good clue toward finding their arrival in New York, probably some three weeks later.

And we have it! The Frisia docked at New York's Castle Garden emigration port. This was nine years before Ellis Island opened. Christine is now reported to be from Prussia, but Prussia's a very big place. If this arrival document was all we could find, it would be harder to prove that this is our sought-after Christine and her family. If Hamburg was the departure point it's worth seeking out the manifest from this database due to its extra information. Ancestry.com is one place to look for Hamburg manifests. They're also available on microfilm.

Son Peter, age 5, and daughter Line, age 2, are traveling with their mother in the second deck area of the ship Frisia. We next see the family in America for the first time in the Nebraska state census for 1885, configured in just this constellation, with Hans Petersen at the head, so this is likely the right family.

What happens after that is a mystery. There's no 1890 census, and the family can't be found in the 1900 census. Did Christine and the children meet some unfortunate circumstance? These were times when illness could run rampant and devastate a family. But Hans' first family appears to have vanished without a discernable trace.

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April 4, 2014: Getting warmer

Online repositories like the Lowcountry Digital Library are becoming more plentiful, bringing a host of materials to the Internet that would otherwise be accessible only to local researchers. Charleston is across the country from me, so I appreciate the little tidbits of information I can glean from them.

One of my favorite search terms is also one of my rare ancestral surnames. I use it to test a database to see how responsive it is. So when I plugged in "Jatho" to the Lowcountry database, I assumed I might get something back...my Jathos were all over Charleston from 1848 through the 1950s.

This is a neat little gem at right. My great-great-grandfather G.W. Jatho, a German immigrant who worked as a watchmaker and jeweler in Charleston, appears on a list of volunteer firefighters in 1864. He would have been forty years old that year. I hope he wasn't expected to climb ladders and haul tubs of water into burning houses!

In fact, the little collection of documents included within this search is useful for more general details. It shows a blank form (below) that the local fire official would fill out to prove a man's enrollment in the fire companies of various sections of Charleston. His services "being indispensable to the safety of this City," said individual would be exempt from military service in the Civil War (in the south also referred to as the War Between the States or "The Late Unpleasantness"). That was a good thing for a man with a wife and seven children to support, not to mention a man in his middle years.

The blank certificate also illustrates examples of the kind of equipment available to firefighters of the time. The enlargement at left shows the hose-keeper and the fire "truck" itself with a large vessel for holding water. Both units, it appears, could be pulled by a horse to wherever the fire happened to be. Under siege as Charleston was during the height of fighting, fires must have been commonplace, and a local band of volunteers would have been essential to city services during the conflict.

This document also verifies another fact about G.W. It places his residence squarely within Charleston at least in 1864, and probably throughout much of the Civil War. It's in keeping with other documents, such as advertisements for his watchmaking and jewelry business, that give his location at 87 Cannon Street in the northern part of the city. His wife Elise and seven children, legend has it, lived away from the conflict, and later research suggests that this might be true.

In 1869 and 1870, we now know, they can all be documented as living in Greenwood (see the post below for more details). The Jathos may have been living there earlier. If I can get to directories for Greenwood from 1860-1869, assuming that any were published, it might give us better information about their life in western South Carolina during that time. Sounds like a new research project is brewing....

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March 26, 2014: Once was lost

The work they're doing at Chronicling America, the Library of Congress project to scan and upload historical American newspapers, is a wonderful project. Not only is it free, it can offer previously hidden details about the families you're researching.

For almost ten years I've been looking for some printed evidence (other than the engraved note on his widow Elise Jatho's grave marker in Charleston, South Carolina) that her husband, G.W. Jatho, died in some city somewhere. Today it popped up in the October 28, 1870 edition of the Abbeville Press & Banner, a small regional newspaper in Abbeville, South Carolina.

Death records were not state-mandated at this time so all we have to rely upon are alternative sources for information about G.W., who was only 46 when he died (oddly the same age as my great-grandfather William G. Jatho, his middle son).

We do have the elegantly penned note about the funeral in Greenwood, the next town over from Abbeville, which had been carefully saved by another son, George William Jatho, along with the black ribbon of mourning that George wore on his sleeve that early autumn day in 1870. You can click the image to read it.

No clue about what G.W., a jeweler and watchmaker from Charleston, was doing across the state in Greenwood, far from Charleston. The Abbeville Press offered an article from April 1869 relating a social event in Greenwood, where Mrs. Jatho and her friends put forth an entertainment meant to benefit the local Presbyterian and Methodist churches.

We also know that G.W. and his family were enumerated in Greenwood in the 1870 census. Perhaps it was a country get-away, meant to spare the family whatever diseases were running rampant in Charleston, where the climate was more tropical and waves of illness from typhoid to scarlet fever were a serious problem for the local populace. Alas, G.W. didn't escape his fate in Greenwood. We just don't know the exact nature of that fate, just a generic "illness."

Another surprise today: someone has been transcribing deaths at Greenwood Cemetery and look who's there! Findagrave.com is another invaluable resource for the genealogist.

I've been through published books of cemetery transcriptions for the region and have never managed to find G.W. in any cemetery until today. Traditional genealogical research certainly has its place, but the Internet clearly has some gems of information to be gleaned. We just need the patience to wait.

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March 14, 2014: A new identity for an old photo

This was once one of my most puzzling unidentified photos. A lady well dressed for her era, posed with a gentleman I assumed to be her prosperous husband...but what country were they from? Denmark or Schleswig? And why did my great-grandmother Catherine Petersen not mark this photo from her collection? Of course Catherine wasn't diligent about captioning, but this photo remained a mystery for almost ten years.

Then my new cousin sent me a copy of the very same photo, in much better condition, and marked on the back.

My cousin's grandmother was meticulous about organizing family memorabilia and photos, and she had noted that the lady was Helena Burmaster and her husband Fritz, sister of Alfred Petersen of Omaha. Therein lay the surprise, for me. If she was Alfred's sister, she was also my great-grandmother's.

But previous investigations into the family structure back in Schleswig, even a thorough research project by a hired genealogist in the local archives, had uncovered no such lady in the family. I had assumed (wrongly, it appears now) that Catherine Petersen was the only daughter in the family. She was not!

The faint writing on the back of the photo says that Helena died in the old country, never having emigrated as most of her brothers and sister did. The suggested date was clearly just an estimate. It's easier to determine the right era, based on the style of Helena's dress with its distinctive fabric front piping, and her hairstyle, which was most often worn in a coil on the top of the head from the late 1860s to the early 1870s. So if I had to date it, I'd suggest that range of time.

No wonder Catherine hadn't bothered to caption the photo. She'd never have forgotten who her sister was. But she neglected to consider the family historians who might struggle to properly identify all her artifacts.

To prove that this was truly a daughter of my great-great-grandparents Peter Hansen Petersen and Elise Momsen, I needed to do a bit of research. The Danish Archives had done a truly wonderful job of scanning and making public their church books and census records. I knew that this family had lived in Sudtöndern during this time, which is northern Schleswig, and as luck would have it they had a copy of the 1860 census for Karlum, the district where these Petersens lived at the time.

And the census proved it. There was Helena Maria Petersen, listed fourth in the family, age 13. So that narrows down her birth year to 1846-1847. To find out for certain when she was born, I'll need to hire my researcher again to visit the local archives. Alas, Schleswig church books are not online.

It also occurred to me that this older girl was named Helena for a reason: she was the first girl born to the family, so considering the standard naming conventions of this area of Schleswig (and in fact in many Danish and German households) she must have been named for her paternal grandmother Ellen Jürgensen. Ellen was born in 1799 in the town of Jündewandt, just over the Danish border. At Helena's baptism she may in fact have been one of the godparents.

That would be a terrific record to find. I guess we'll know for sure if and when my researcher is able to find a record of her birth.

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March 9, 2014: Five boys from Schleswig

This is why I love the Internet. Okay, one of the reasons.

I received an email from out of the blue. Someone had come across an old online forum post of mine mentioning my Petersen connections in Nebraska. It's where the two families -- Peter Hansen Petersen and his brother Lorenz -- started out in the 1870s.

The fellow who wrote is a descendant of Alfred Petersen, my great-grandmother Catherine Petersen's older brother. I knew he'd stayed in Omaha, Nebraska because she kept photos in her collection of a visit she made there about 1937. She and her brother Alfred are pictured together along with their respective families.

So my new cousin shared the first in a series of photos with me, and they're genealogically mind-blowing.

This is something I never thought I'd see: a photo of five of the brothers together in Nebraska. Seated from left to right are Andrew, Louis, and Alfred. Behind them, according to the inscription, are Peter (left) and Peter Hans (right).

Wait a minute...Peter Hans? Does this really mean Hans Peter? Because if it does, that means one more brother came over to America. Until this photo, I had no idea he was here.

More to come as I get everything settled. There are more surprises afoot, I'm sure.

It goes without saying -- which is why I'll say it -- that I'm eternally grateful to my new cousin for reaching out. Genealogy gets no better than this. Only connect!

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February 22, 2014: On a French roll

When an ancestral line opens up like this, sometimes you can't stop.

The biggest challenge comes from trying to sort through multiple records for men called Lorentz in Haut-Rhin. Sometimes your get three guys called Joannis Lorentz and you don't know which one is the direct ancestor of the previous one.

The wrench in the works comes in the mid-1600s, when from about 1638 through 1645 pages are missing from the local church books. I have yet to sort through the precise, documentable chain of command. But I'm pretty sure that this marriage record from 1637 has something entertaining for everyone.

Even if your head is swimming with people called Lorentz, focus for a moment on the pretty Gallic calligraphy in this record. This is a sure-handed clerk who mixed his ink properly and cut his quill like a professional. The descenders are delicious, the flourishes are fabulous. And the ligatures? I like 'em. You can see the record bigger, here.

One thing to note about this man, Michael Lorentz: he's not from Ammerschwihr, where this marriage was recorded. He's from the little village of Zell, also known as Labaroche. When the clerk notes a place of origin for one of the marriage partners that's different from the marriage place, we're meant to pay attention. The bride, M[aria] Magdalena Luxman, is from Ammerschwihr, notes the clerk. It's customary for the marriage to take place in the bride's parish, and that's what we see here.

Michael Lorenz has brought a trio of witnesses with him from Zell, one of whom is Joannes Lorenz...very likely his father, though it could be a brother or an uncle.

Alas, we're not likely to know. Parish records from Zell were filmed beginning in 1683, not earlier. It could mean that previous records weren't kept, or didn't survive, or ended up somewhere else and were lost. If this marriage hadn't taken place in the bride's home village, we might never have met Michael Lorenz at all. But we might find some Luxman families going deeper into the past.

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January 8, 2014: Bennwihr bonanza

One step to another is all it takes, sometimes, even when you're moving backward.

Lorenz Dominique Laurent is right there in the record book, in an eminently readable record. The region is now Alsace, the community is Haut Rhin, and in the ancient town of Bennwihr (which dates back to the year 777 CE and where official records of the region were recorded) Laurentius Dominicus was baptized on 5 August 1743 -- written in Latin because this is an almost entirely Catholic part of the world.

His father, Joannis Jacobus Laurent, was a citizen of Bennwihr. The mother was Anna Margarita Weegbächerin of nearby Eguishheim, his wife. Joannis Jacobus would have been known in French speaking circles as Jacques. So that fits neatly with our previous record, Lorenz Dominique's death record.

The first godparent, in the next box to the right, has the phrase "laudatus dominus" ("praise the lord") before this name. He was Joannis Josephus Barthe, a head clerk of bailiffs. The other godparent was Carolina Weÿin, wife of the local citizen Joannis Metzger. Unusually, both godparents sign the document --- so we know that both were literate.The parish clerk, Joannis Michael Werner, signed the entry too.

The same microfilm, FHL #0724716, includes marriages as well. Sure enough, there's a 1742 marriage record for Joannis Jacobus (Jacques) and Margarita. The bridegroom was the son of a councillor in nearby Ammerschwihr, Joannis Laurent. The bride's father isn't listed, which is customary when she's been married before. The record identifies her as the widow of the deceased Antonÿ Barthelmé.

The French love signatures! Joannis signs as Hans Jacob Lorentz ("Hans" is a diminuitive of Joannis). His father Joannis Lorentz also signs as a witness, as does one Anthony Meÿer. Margarita cannot write, so she signs with an X.

This record tells us to watch out for earlier versions of the Laurent surname, spelled Lorentz. That's what we'll be looking for as we go further back into researching this name.

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December 18, 2013: Gone but not forgotten

I've known about this record for several years at least, but I've had too much else going on to find the time to order the microfilm and sit down with it. The death of a Laurent Laurent was indexed in Familysearch.org's voluminous database of records. The specific collection, called "Germany Deaths and Burials, 1582-1958," is incomplete but did yield a hit for me when I attempted to search for any information on my 5x great-grandfather, Lorenz Dominique Laurent.

The actual transcribed results were for a Laurent Laurent, whose death occurred in Kusel, Bayern, Germany in 1812. Knowing that Laurent is the French form of Lorenz, I thought there was a pretty good chance that this could be my guy. I ordered the film at my local family history library. If the father and mother checked out, I might be able to move this line back a generation or two.

Germans had a reputation for being officious, but the French are really no different. They just take longer to say it. At least half of the full record tells us when, where, by whom, and how old the reporting party is. We only get to the details of Laurent Laurent's death in the bottom half of the document. But I wasn't disappointed.

Laurent, a court clerk and bailiff by profession, lived in "Cousel" (Kusel) and was born in Colmar in 1743 -- new information! Also new: the birthplace of his father, Jacques Laurent, in Bennwihr. That's over the border in France. So at last I can confirm French ancestry for all of us who descend from this line.

The birthplace of Lorenz' mother, Marguerithe, isn't recorded on the form, nor is his father's profession. But if Bennwihr is small enough, perhaps I can find useful results in films for that parish as well. And with a confirmed birth year for Lorenz of 1743, perhaps he'll be easy to spot in the record books.

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November 22, 2013: Tire tracks

Now and again a little tidbit is thrown my way and my mysterious paternal grandfather, Alva Elwood MacLaughlan, becomes slightly less mysterious.

Polk's 1925 city directory for Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda City provides the first resource showing that Alva and his family lived in Oakland, California for a time. It also clears up what I thought was a mistake in a 1925 article in the Oakland Tribune describing a cross-country auto trip that the family took that same year.

They were referred to as residents of Oakland during a period where I presumed they lived in Chicago, the city of Alva's birth and the location where he's usually seen in Chicago directories and census records. But for a short time I guess they really were Oaklanders. On his 1942 World War II registration Alva claimed to have been born in neighboring Berkeley. The region must've made quite an impression on him.

He was partners with an I.W. Anderson, a vulcanizer (tire repairman), which makes sense when considering an old family story that he sold tires at some point in his career. More likely he was the accounting side of the business, basing this on his usual career as bookkeeper for a variety of offices from the 1920s through the 1940s.

Alva and his wife Marie became real Californians in 1946, when they relocated to the Los Angeles area.

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October 2, 2013: It's about time

The Southern Business Directory and General Commercial Advertiser, Volume 1, was published in 1854. Looks like my great-great-grandfather G.W. Jatho took out an advertisement for his business.

Google Books often has nice surprises like this and is a surprisingly useful tool for the genealogist. Browse the entire directory here.

This advertisement tells me that G.W. had at least two shops on Meeting Street. I knew about a place at 121 Meeting Street, from which he was unceremoniously removed in 1858 due to losing a lawsuit against his landlord (the nature of the lawsuit remains nebulous). But I was surprised to see him earlier in this location between Pickney and Hayne Streets during a more prosperous time.

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September 8, 2013: Here a Dressel, there a Dressel

A long time ago when I was just starting out in genealogy, I was researching Dressels from Hesse-Darmstadt and not doing a very good job of it. There are lots of Dressels, but I didn't quite grasp the fact that you can't just assume things about them, you have to prove who's related to whom.

Searching for a father for my 4x great-grandfather Heinrich Philipp Dressel was a case in point. I grabbed a random microfilm for the region and duly scrolled through the pages, and having found a fellow called Johann Philipp Dresssel and his wife Sophia Friderica Gengebach I assumed he must be my guy's father. Who else could it be? There weren't any other Dressels on that film.

Except it wasn't correct. I was in the wrong village. I learned to visually scour the films with more aplomb and realized to my horror that I had linked a fellow to our Dressels who had no actual connection to us, i.e., I couldn't prove that they'd ever had a son called Heinrich Philipp.

Eventually I found the right father, working backwards from Heinrich Philipp's death date and age, and the great genealogical crisis of 2007 was averted. I deleted Johann Phillip and his wife Sophia Friderica from our database and thought no more of them.

Until now. They're back. And I have to find out how they fit in to the family this time.

Sophia Friderica Dressel, wife of the "fürste Hof-metzger Dressel" or royal court butcher Dressel, appears in the record above as godmother to Sophia Friderica Künzel, who was the sister of yet-to-be-born Catharina Elisabetha Künzel. Catharina would one day be Heinrich Philipp Dressel's wife.

The royal court butcher was apparently Johann Philipp Dressel, whom Sophia Friderica Gengebach married in 1751. Their connection to the Künzel clan at this earlier point is not clear. But it's likely to get interesting if I can prove how this interconnection works.

Germans loved to invite folks who were connected to them in some significant way to be witnesses at a marriage or godparents at a baptism. It's one of the best lessons I ever learned in genealogy. And there's a reason here why Sophia Friderica shows up as a godmother to this child...and perhaps a more complete explanation why my Künzel ancestor married a Dressel one generation later!

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August 1, 2013: Silver threads and golden needles

James E. Spear was a Charleston jeweler, silversmith, and watchmaker of some renown. Even today pieces made at his shop on King Street between 1845-1871 sell at auction for prices that are quite beyond most budgets.

This pocket watch is one example of the lovely engraving and finishing that was Spear's hallmark. It was priced between $4,000 and $7,000 at a recent sale.

I knew that my great-great-grandfather G.W. Jatho had worked for J.E. Spear for a time in the 1850s, but the Civil War, or the "late unpleasantness" as some still call it, forced G.W. and his family to a remote part of Charleston up on Cannon Street, far away from the guns and conflict of downtown. Until yesterday I didn't realize he went back to work for Spear in the late 1860s.

The Library of Congress has been digitizing newspapers for some time but new material must have been added recently. Many states are represented at this helpful database, Chronicling America.

Newspapers are viewable in the website's browser or can be downloaded as PDF copies.

I found this clipping from the May 10, 1869 issue of the Charleston Daily News, which indicates that G.W. had lately returned to the store to be in charge of the watch department. The question remains: returned from where? From G.W.'s own shop on Cannon Street?

We may never have an answer to that one.

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June 30, 2013: Stormy weather

This ship arrival notice has nothing to do with my family but it's an excellent reminder of what difficulties our ancestors endured on their passage.

I was doing a look-up for someone whose ancestor arrived in New York on December 24, 1858 and found this description in the New York Times the next day. Sounds like a challenging crossing!

It reminds me that, for those folks in my own family whose New York arrival dates are known, it might be of value to check the Times for details like this. Any out-of-the-ordinary details of the journey are sure to add context to what might other be a dry recital of emigration statistics.

Sounds like the poor folks on the Saxonia weren't any too dry by the end of their crossing....

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May 5, 2013: A family secret no more

I knew that my grandmother looked nervous in this photo. Weddings can be nerve-wracking, particularly when all your sisters were married before you were.

But there's something else going on here. George Henry Bruns looks like he borrowed his suit. Hertha Alvina Louisa Gohr (later Bertha, a name she liked much better) looks a picture in her tulle and lace. Is the fabric a bit more strategically draped than not?

I didn't notice all those details at first. Then I looked at the date on their Chicago marriage license: August 3rd, 1911...almost 102 years ago. But my mother told me the marriage was on August 3, 1910.

In this case, it's complicated. In 1952 someone ordered a transcribed copy of the original church marriage record. Plain as day, it says that they were married in 1910.

But we have the document that contradicts the mis-transcribed record, and considering its official provenance, it's far more likely to be correct. The date was really August 3, 1911.

Three and a half months later George and Bertha's first son, Bernard George, was born. So now we understand the reason for the slight obfuscation of the marriage year. Nobody likely wanted any of their descendants to get the wrong impression.

And we don't. Genealogists have seen it all and we're used to noting brides and bridegrooms on the cusp of parenthood who show up at the church door. This wasn't the first time a marriage had a certain amount of hurry-up involved.

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April 7, 2013: Stats rights

I do love my stats. No matter how fiercely or tepidly my research is going, I can always take a moment to review the keywords of folks who landed on my website, and it comforts me somehow.

But the anonymity of web searches keeps many, I'm sure, from actually reaching out via email when they've found something of interest. Franz Melchers, pictured at left, is one such subject of numerous web searches ("Franz Melchers Charleston").

So are Franz' siblings, four of whom settled in Charleston, South Carolina. This Daguerreotype , for instance, may be the earliest formal portrait of the publisher of Charleston's German-language newspaper Die Zeitung. So, Melchers folks, why not drop me a line if you have any questions? I'll never complain about too much email...or if I do I certainly know what to do about it.

Some search terms excel at verbosity: "angela comfort/campett married johan georg friedrick phillip dressel in beaufort sc in 1909"...yes, I have an Angela Comfort in my database and certainly have enough Dressels to please all manner of interested parties. Why not tell me why you were looking for her?

Then there's this: "The earliest Jathos Dransfeld"...yes, I have a nice collection of vintage Jathos from Dransfeld and surrounding towns. Got a question about any of them? I can probably answer it.

"Marriage certificate template": I'm tired of this one, actually. It always hooks my various marriage certificates that I have online. I'm not sure what good it would do the searcher. This is why you pay your local county authorities the big bucks: so they can provide the marriage certificate template for you. No need to reinvent the wheel.

"Maggie committed suicide" -- yes, alas, she did, and it's a sad tale all on its own. I don't think there's anyone but me and a scattering of contemporary folks who know she once existed.

"How much is a silver pitcher from 1850 Charleston worth" -- excellent question. I don't know, but I sure wish my great-great-grandfather, who created such delights, had left me a few to inherit. So far the only thing I've been handed down from my Charleston ancestors was a military button, and I had to pay for it myself to get it.

"Peter Hansen Petersen" -- why yes, I have one of those. Also have a few "Hans Peter Petersen" fellows too, if you'd like a little variety.

"Where is Bensheim Reichenbach Starkenburg Hesse-Darmstadt in Germany?" I don't know right off the top of my head, but I'll bet Google Maps could help you find it more efficiently than I could.

"Succession of Norwood Jatho" -- uh, no, there was no succession because he wasn't a king, and before you start wondering, he didn't own any castles in Germany either.

"October 1 1844 on the ship Elise" -- This one leaves me hanging. Not even a clue what happened that night on the ship Elsie? A dance in third class, maybe? A stormy crossing? A passenger list? I'd be glad to help if I had just a little more information.

"Dr Robert Maclaughlan of Calgary" -- nope, don't have one of him in my collection, but I'll bet he came by his name naturally.

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February 14, 2013: Just another wedding...in 1576

Yes, it's a big deal. All on my own, without paying someone to do the research, I've finally broken back into the sixteenth century with a documentable, verifiable ancestor whos mine, all mine.

On 17 February 1576 two folks from the Groß Bieberau area of Hesse-Darmstadt were brought together by love or circumstance, or perhaps both.

Hans Schuchmann "d[er] Jung", the younger, married Anna Funck, daughter of Philip Funck. A passel of children were the result, including several sons called Hans Schuchmann. One of them survived and married around 1599 or so (research is ongoing). His son was Peter Schuchmann, who had thirteen children of his own, including one pair of twins and one of triplets.

It's fun having the name of an ancestor who was born about fifteen years earlier than Shakespeare.

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December 29, 2012: When it rains...

...it pours. And I mean that in a good way.

With my local family history library closed for a year and a half for major renovations, I had to rely on L.A.'s Central Library to order LDS microfilm. Some libraries, I've found, have been "certified" to act as interlibrary loan portals in such cases (and it's worth checking to see if your local public library can be used in this fashion, should you ever need it). What a cornucopia of ancestors I found!

I spent the better part of two months delving into records from Groß Zimmern, a town that today has a population of only 14,000 people. In the 1600s it was much smaller. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my family was related to about half the inhabitants, with a vast web of intermarriages and cousinships to decipher.

In times past I would have lamented the lack of an index of names or more verbose church record entries -- it would be nice, I think, to have the mother's name as well as the father's when a baby's baptism was recorded. Perhaps the clerks in Groß Zimmern were focusing on what they thought was essential information: father's, infant's, godparent's names, dates, that's it. But you can't quibble effectively with people who have been dead for 400 years. I had to get creative instead.

A researcher I once hired taught me via his own methodology how I should be looking for clues in unexpected places within the same collection. So I focused on all the names in the record books, particularly godparents. Sure enough, the wife of Velten Störger, who wasn't named in any of her own children's baptism records, is identified clearly when she sponsors a neighbor's child: "Elisabetha, Velten Störgers hausfrau."

Another record (above) shows Velten's daughter, Anna Störger, at her marriage to Hans Jacob Dietrich in 1668. Someone at GeneaNet had transcribed the bride's father's name as Wieland Velten Störger. Common mistake, I guess, though rather surprising from a native German speaker. To be charitable, it's true that the clerk's handwriting as well as the quality of the microfilm present some orthographic challenges.

The word is actually "Weiland" (spelled "Weÿland" here, to note the archaic letterform), which means "deceased". A look at deaths for the same region confirms this. Velten died three months before his daughter's marriage.

Velten was my 10th great-grandfather. If someone had told me ten years ago that someday I'd know his name, and that of his wives and offspring, I think I would have laughed. Ten years ago I didn't know anyone further back than my own grandfather. What a difference a day (or a decade) makes!

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November 9, 2012: Have you got any castles?

The answer is no.

There are no castles associated with our surname Jatho. Searching for "castle history Jatho" or "von Jatho" or "jatho castle" will get you absolutely nowhere. Don't think I didn't notice what search terms you were using.

In the 1600s our Jathos, at best, were teachers in the old country, and pretty poverty-stricken ones at that. They might have procured a small house associated with the church where they were schoolmasters. They might have had a bit of land to plow. But there was no title, no "von" in front of the name, and certainly no grand inheritance.

Everybody loves stories of wealth and nobility. But wealthy, noble people didn't emigrate to the new world looking for a better life.

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October 1, 2012: Third time's the charm

The 1910 federal census was the only one that used superscripts to indicate which marriage it was for any married individual, a helpful clue that until this week has led to nothing substantive for me. Thomas was in his third marriage, Catherine in her second. I've found Thomas' first and third marital partners. What about the elusive second Mrs. Mikkelsen?

If I could find Thomas in the 1900 census it might have helped. But he was hiding that year. So I've been on the hunt for five or so years for his second wife. This week she finally popped up, though not in a previously-available database.

The LDS folks finally have a new beta version of their search site (http://beta.familysearch.org/) where, for fun, I tried out one of my more rare surnames. Imagine my surprise to see this.

Thomas married Mrs. Maria Hansen in Chicago in 1889. We don't know much about her, who her previous husband was, what her maiden name was, or where exactly she was born. But Thomas is the right age (born in 1850) to be our Thomas, and a death certificate for Maria Mikkelsen in 1902 shows her to have been German-born like her husband and living at 36th Place in Chicago, the same street where Thomas and Catherine lived in 1910. So I think we have the right person.

One less mystery to solve!

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August 31, 2012: Hiding in plain sight

Solving one mystery often reveals another one lurking in the wings.

For years I've been looking for the marriage -- in Charleston, South Carolina, I assumed, since they lived there -- for G.W. Jatho and Elise Schuchmann. Must've been around 1852, since their first child, Philip, was born that year. But nothing ever turned up, not in either of the two German Lutheran churches in the city, nor in any other Charleston marriage index.

Turns out the trick was to look in Kentucky. Perfectly intuitive, right? The first part of the record shows Wilhelm Jatho, the bridegroom's information.

The second part shows the registry entry for the bride.

The records were part of the holdings for St. John's Evangelical Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and the marriage was recorded on July 19, 1853, using a familiar German handwriting style. So why Kentucky? Did the existence of their then-nine-month-old baby Philip make a Charleston wedding inconvenient? Or did they tell everyone in Charleston that they were already married when Philip came along? That's a reasonable hypothesis for holding the wedding in a town rather distant from Charleston.

Makes sense. But why Louisville?

Census information shows the presence of another Schuchmann family, headed by Ludwig or Louis Schuchmann, a tailor born in Hesse-Darmstadt around 1818. The bride's father was also called Louis Schuchmann, but the two aren't one in the same because they were born about 15 years apart. Cousins, perhaps? Both Louis Schuchmanns were born in Hesse-Darmstadt. If there was a family relationship, it might explain why the marriage took place in Louisville rather than some other random town.

So who are the Schuchmanns? Louis emigrated in 1842 via New Orleans and married an Adeline Pfleger or Pfliger, born in Pennsylvania. Their first daughter, Elisabeth, was born in Pennsylvania too. Another child, Louis or Leo, was born in New Orleans, the rest of the kids (Bertha, Friedrich, Henriette, and another Louis) in Kentucky.

Available records don't indicate how the two families might be related, alas, and the line seems to have daughtered-out over the years, the sons never marrying, the girls losing their distinctive German surname in marriage to others. Saddest of all, no one else seems to be researching the Schuchmann line of Louisville.

Any answer leads back to the Hesse-Darmstadt church records, especially around Bessüngen, where Elise Schuchmann was born in 1828. If we can find our new Louis Schuchmann at all, that'll have to be the place, and perhaps the connection will become clear. Or not....

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July 8, 2012: By any other name

Was he a rose? Perhaps G.W. Jatho was nowhere near that sentimental. But he was, apparently, recorded on this ship manifest using the literal pronunciation of his Germanic surname. So searching for passengers named Jatho would get you nowhere. But spell it as it's pronounced -- G.W. Yatto -- and you hit gold.

This newspaper notice was typical for its time. The New York Times reported who was arriving at its ports and whence they'd come. Near the bottom right of this notice for September 4, 1855 is G.W. Yatto, arriving on the steamship Nashville from Charleston, South Carolina. Who else could it be but the founder of our Charleston Jathos?

What he was doing in New York City is unknown. He was a watchmaker and jeweler back home. Was he picking up supplies? Visiting a colleague or a relative? His wife, Elise Schuckmann Jatho, must have stayed home, probably not in any condition to travel by ship at the time (the couple's third child, George William, was born a few months later).

I suppose this means we could be related to some of the folks who stuck with this spelling of the name, too.

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June 23, 2012: Open my eyes

Or is it more accurate to say I should open my mind? Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself. It could be that this information wasn't in the Dansk Demografisk Database the last time I looked -- they're adding new material all the time. But finding this entry in the 1845 Danish census was an unexpected delight.

Hans was my great-great-great-grandfather. After his marriage to Ellen Jürgensen he remained in his birthplace Burkal, a little town over the border in Denmark, with his wife Ellen, who was born in nearby Jundewandt. I've visited the church records via Arkivalieronline, the Danish database, for this town many times and knew that they had had three living children there (a fourth died as an infant). But why no recorded births after 1827? Hans and Ellen were still in their twenties, presumably healthy and (if following the normal pattern) would likely have had one new child every couple of years. I simply couldn't figure it out: the record at Burkal were silent on any new additions to the family.

But the census record tells a different tale! And what an interesting one. They'd moved across the border to Medelby (where church records aren't available online) and now we see a plethora of children. Their eldest son, Peter Hansen, is in his own household by this time with his own family. But their second son, Lorenz, and everyone on down are listed, plus a lodger whose name appears only partially transcribed (a session with the microfilm of this census is clearly in order, just in case I can read the name). Now there's a total of eight kids.

But I can see an interesting pattern, one not immediately obvious to the casual observer. Oldest sons Peter Hansen and Lorenz are named for their paternal and maternal grandfathers, respectively. Three daughters are called Anna, all after their maternal grandmother.

But not a single girl is named for her paternal grandmother, Hans' mother Barbara Sørensdatter. Knowing the naming conventions of the Danes and Germans, that would seem like something more than an oversight. It suggests that there was something about Barbara that no one wanted to acknowledge.

Barbara had died three years before this census was recorded, and she died in a particularly sad way, wandering alone on a road near the parish of Hostrup, near Sjelborg, the village where she was born in 1774. A member of the parish found her body and brought her back to the church for burial. It seemed odd to me that she was living with neither of her two sons, Hans and Adam Petersen, before her death. And if you look at the 1834 census you'll find her living with a small group of women in an alms-house, essentially a poorhouse.

If she had two hardworking sons, why was she living there? Or was there something more to the story? Sometimes people with mental illnesses or dementia were placed in alms-houses if they could not be kept at home. Was that Barbara's fate?

Was it deliberate that the family named no daughters after her? Is it possible that they feared it would bring on the same fate to their children?

Whatever it means, it's likely that there's a deeper meaning to the absence of the name in her female descendants.

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May 6, 2012: At rest in Hebron

This afternoon in Hebron, Nebraska it's warmer than it was a few months ago when this picture was taken in a now-abandoned local cemetery. Winter no longer clings gently to the headstone of a little girl, called Elise Christina after her grandmother of the same name. Her grandmother was born in a town called Süd-Klixbull in the northwest corner of Schleswig-Holstein. Somewhere in Hebron, or nearby, the grandmother is buried too. We don't know where yet. But her namesake, who died at the age of two in 1885, has been found.

Thanks to the diligence of researchers at the local Thayer County Museum we have a photo of Elise Christina Petersen's resting place. She was the first-born daughter of Hans and Catharina Petersen. According to the 1885 Nebraska census, which carried mortality information for the region as well as standard census data, Elise died of a brain inflammation and was attended by a local doctor at the end of her life. That's all we know about her.

The Petersens had poor luck with daughters. Elise was the first they lost. A second, Elise Margaretha, lived a little more than a year and died in 1887, presumably buried nearby. A third, Margaretha Christina, made it to age fifteen before succumbing to suicide in 1903 in Wisconsin. Marie was born in 1899 in Chicago and was the only girl to survive to a comfortable old age.

Two young sons died in infancy too, Johann Christian (1890-1891) and Edward Andreas (1892-1893), both buried in Chicago, we think at Mt. Greenwood Cemetery. One of Catharina Petersen's granddaughters remembers Catharina wandering to the children's side of the cemetery where there were no headstones for the two boys, only memories.

Elise's headstone is so elaborate. Were there financial reversals that made it impossible to afford markers for the rest of the children? Perhaps so. Margaretha Christina and her father Hans were buried at Pilgrim's Rest in Brookfield, Wisconsin, and neither one has a marker either. But at least we know where they are. The more we know, the better we can remember them.

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April 14, 2012: Family secrets

It's a little frustrating to get mail from someone who thinks he or she must be related because there's a Jensen or a Petersen in their family history, just like in mine, therefore we must be cousins. If only it were that easy! In cultures where patronyms were common, you can have a village full of Jensens and none of them might be related. They may just all have fathers who were called Jens.

But after the latest such note from a kind lady whose enthusiasm I had to reluctantly curb, I decided to go back and look at my own Jensen, my great-great-grandmother Margaretha Jensen Petersen, known in her family as Magretta. She's at left in a photo taken in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein sometime around 1870, before she, her husband Lorenz, and son Hans emigrated to the USA.

A useful site that I don't check out often enough is the Dansk Demografisk Database, a site that transcribes census information for Denmark and parts of Schleswig-Holstein, which was periodically under Danish or German control. It's a database in progress, which makes it hard to wait for if you're anxious to find out something but easy if you get distracted and forget to look at what's new. I must have let months go by, and it never occurred to me that more records from Klixbüll, Magretta's birthplace, might be uploaded and ready for my perusing pleasure. Note to self: try to keep focused a bit more, if at all possible.

Magretta's in the 1845 census now with her stepfather Christian Hansen, mother Catharina Petersen, and a mystery boy Paul Christian Lorenzen. There's a mix of patronyms and surnames going on due to the Danish king's proclamation that Danes and their subjects should pick and stick with a surname so people could be tracked in the census more easily. So much for clarity: Christian's father was Hans, but Catharina's father was Nis Petersen (so she has his "surname" but sometimes appears as Nissen too). Margaretha, whose father was actually Paul Christian Jensen, could have been called either Paulsen or Jensen.

Now the boy: who is this boy Paul Christian Lorenzen? Is Lorenzen likely to be his surname or was his father called Lorenz? Magretta is unmarried. The note after Paul says "deren Sohn", which can mean either the son of the older couple ("their son") or "her son." Magretta's mother is 57 here...could she have been a 50 year old mother? The possibility seems remote. More likely, the unmarried Magretta is the mother, and the fact that the boy is called Paul Christian like her own father suggests that the boy is truly hers.

Three years later Magretta did marry a man called Lorenz Petersen, my great-great-grandfather, but the idea that he's the Lorenz involved in Paul's birth is pretty farfetched. Lorenz was born in 1825. When Paul Christian was born in 1838 Lorenz was thirteen. Stranger things have happened but in this case I think there's a better explanation.

When Lorenz and Magretta married in 1848 they both had to present certificates of confirmation and vaccination as was the custom in the region. This I knew from archival research done a few years ago. But a second look at the documents (very hard to read due to their tenuously preserved calligraphy) reveals that something in her past was "canceled" and further that someone who normally signs off on divorces and the like had done so for Magretta in 1846. Such notes would be an essential part of any subsequent marriage record. Had she been married or betrothed before? This was news to me, but if she had, that could explain a son we knew nothing about before this.

So now what? It's expensive to hire researchers in the old country, but the cheaper option involves looking at microfilm of the 1850 and 1860 census for Klixbüll. If Paul Christian Lorenzen is still part of the family he should be there. I think that's what I'll do.

Odd how a stray query and re-focus your attention in a productive way.

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March 7, 2012: A Westphalian breakthrough

I once had a dream that I had Dutch ancestors. At least I think it was a dream. This isn't evidence for it but it's just about a twenty mile journey from the border between The Netherlands and Germany -- pretty close. It also opens up a side of the family that has languished for years for want of some little piece of evidence.

My Robers clan (that's not a misprint -- they were never Roberts) were in Cincinnati from the time of my great-great-grandfather's 1837 emigration, making him the earliest of my ancestors to come to the USA. But he was unhelpful in suggesting a true place of origin other than "Prussia" or "Germany" despite my attempts to comb through all the documents available in Hamilton County.

But his emigration record gave an accurate birth year, which pointed to the only Johann Gerhardus Robers born in 1805 in Germany, near the town where his manifest suggested he last lived. The records of the parish in Dreierwalde have been filmed too, though the microfilm turned out to be pretty dark. Photoshop was a great help in making the records intelligible.

Johann's mother, Anna Margaretha Terbeck, is revealed in the third record above, which even shows the heavy laid bond of the paper and the church book's binding. The handwriting's nice too, always a pleasure to see. Anna Margaretha was baptised in Dreierwalde in 1775, the middle child of five born to Gerhard Terbeck and Anna Margaretha Diercks -- hooray, two new surnames to add into the database!

No Robers appear in these records until 1800, when Anna Maria Terbeck married Joannus Bernardus Robers, so her husband must have come from a nearby parish. But Terbeck and Diercks people abound, showing up almost to the point the books were first kept in 1661. Alas, non-verbose records lack handy identifiers like the ages of the bride and groom, their parents' names, their occupations, so the story of their lives lacks color, you might say. They trot in, they marry, a baby is baptised, they trot out.

What we can say: we're probably related in some way to every Terbeck and Diercks in the church book, though in most cases earlier than 1775 we won't know exactly how. But it's nice to have them join us, nevertheless.

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January 31, 2012: Goodbye Andreas, hello Valentin

For a few years I've been working with a very capable researcher in Germany to review some of our most distant ancestors and we realized we have a problem. It has something to do with swineherds and teachers.

Simply put, our seventeenth-century folks were not particularly grand or wealthy, but they were literate, we now know, because our earliest documentable ancestor on the Jatho line, Christoph Jatho, was a teacher. But in retrospect the man we thought was his father, Andreas Jatho, probably was not, because Andreas was a herdsman of pigs.

Nothing wrong with pigs, they were a good steady source of income at the time, but the children of such a man were unlikely to have jumped rank and become teachers. We consulted three historians. Two say it would have been impossible, one said maybe...but that's not very comforting. Much more probable, they say, that a teacher would have had a teacher for a father. Hence the record above that we're considering, which details the baptism of a daughter of the teacher Valentin Jatho.

Records in seventeenth-century Hanover were not verbose. Marriage records were not always forthcoming about who the happy couple's parents were or where they were born. Some baptism records left out the name of the mother entirely. And some records, due to the vagaries of war and sloppy bookkeeping, are gone forever.

So for our Christoph Jatho, no matter where we look, his parents aren't mentioned. But he was a teacher and so was Valentin Jatho, who lived in the same general neighborhood. A good candidate? Very possibly. Perhaps some future records will come to light that could verify our suspicion.

And what about poor Andreas, is he to be cast adrift? Not necessarily. There are enough records where these various Jathos show up as godparents to each other's offspring, and the pattern of sponsorship can indicate a relationship too, just one that may not be entirely clear.

The further back in time you go, the less absolute is the historical record. It's something you learn to accept in genealogy as with any area of history. At some point you won't be able to prove what you'd most like to know. "I think so" becomes the best you can say.

The document above says: Ich Schulmeister Valentin Jatho undt meine eheliche Haus Frawe Anna zeugen eine junge Tochter, ist den 25. Julius getauft , die Gevatter sind Margrete Brückmans ober Möllersche undt Tias Jatho von Hemlen seine Haus Frawe Margrete, undt Bestian Jatho von Dransfeld Junggeselle, das Kindt hies Anna Margrete.

I, the schoolmaster Valentin Jatho along with my lawful wife Anna declare that our daughter was baptised on the 25th of July [1663]; godparents are Margrete Brückmans of Möllersche and [Mat]tias Jatho of Hemeln's wife Margrete, and the bachelor Bestian Jatho of Dransfeld; the child is called Anna Margrete.

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December 21, 2011: A plethora of Petersens

At least two sides of my Petersens have been exploding (in a nice way) with new information, and it all comes from posting something on the web and waiting for cousins to come calling.

First it was a descendant of my grandfather's sister Marie, and a couple months later the granddaughter of these jolly folks. Both provided me with a plethora of new family information and photos.

Clarence and Dora Petersen had been a particular stumbling block. An elderly cousin in Chicago remembered him vaguely, mainly as the uncle who used to ride a loud motorcycle and scare all the kids on the block with its roar. Clarence disappeared to Arizona, as she remembered it, and wasn't heard from again.

She was mostly right. Clarence's granddaughter set me straight on most of the family after he and his wife Dora left Chicago. For awhile they ran a lodge in Palo Verde, Arizona, and eventually Clarence's love of mechanics led him and his family to Date City, California, east of El Centro in the desert. There Clarence and Dora ran a motel, a general store, and a gas station. His granddaughter remembers riding in Clarence's truck and visiting the store, which sold everything from cowboy shirts to canned goods. By all accounts Clarence and Dora lived a happy life in their little corner of California.

Whether or not Clarence knew that his two brothers were living in California too is something no one knows. Alva (born Alfred) was in the Los Angeles area, while brother George was in Yolo County near Sacramento. Did they come west to get lost from relatives back in Chicago? If so, it only worked for half a century!

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October 10, 2011: The fruits of private archives

Here's a little country church that I'd never have seen without a chance Internet connection.

A couple weeks ago I received an email from someone working on records in Nippoglense, a town now in Poland but which was in Pomerania when my great-grandfather was born there. Polish records are notoriously difficult to access today, usually requiring expensive archival fees and months (if not years) of delays. As a result I'd pretty much dismissed ever obtaining any data on Wilhelm Gohr or his parents.

This researcher had done an online search for Nippoglense, looking for some of his own ancestors, and the web in its wisdom brought him to one of my web pages (keywords are such fun). So he dropped me an email and I'm glad that he did. My new friend generously offered to do some look-ups for me, resulting in the names of Wilhelm's parents and his many siblings. He even took a photo of the church (Lutheran in Wilhelm's time, Catholic now) where all the baptisms were registered. Without this fellow's kind offer I'd never have known anything about Wilhelm's life in the old country. As it is, now I can see from the naming patterns of Wilhelm's children in Chicago why they were given those names -- to honor those who never reached the new world.

There were no Gohrs left in Nippoglense after the early 20th century, and from what I can tell only one of Wilhelm's siblings came to Chicago. That leaves more Gohrs to track down one day, somewhere other than Nippoglense.

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September 30, 2011: Learning to read like a genealogist

Over the past five years I've spent a passel of time looking for this handsome fellow in the land that was alleged to be his home, Denmark.

I ignored two essential principles of research: (1) work from what your know and (2) pay attention to what your ancestor said about himself, not what his children said, even when they seem to be very sure.

Thomas Mikkelsen was my step-great-grandfather. He married the widowed Catherine Petersen (my great-grandmother) in 1906 in Chicago. I know where Catherine was born: Leck in northern Schleswig-Holstein.

But Thomas' children from his first wife knew all about him and recorded his birthplace as Middelfart in Odense, Denmark. I suppose my main mistake was to believe them. Not only that, but I'd been told that as grown-ups they argued incessantly over whether they were Danish or German. Why such fervor? If Thomas was born in Denmark, no argument needed.

Except, of course, even with such a precise birthdate and place, I'd never been able to find Thomas anywhere in Denmark.

So I bit the bullet and ordered his daughter's Chicago death certificate. According to her family she was supposed to have been born in Denmark too. Guess what? She was born in Ladelund, a town in northern Schleswig -- admittedly close to the Danish border but not, in 1876, part of Denmark. But the town was about 20 kilometers from Flensburg, her mother's birthplace, and about ten kilometers from Leck, where Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen was born.

If both his wives were from Schleswig, was Thomas born there too?

I went back to Thomas' census records in Chicago, the only town he lived in after his 1887 emigration. How many times had I looked at them? Over how many years? I'd have to admit that I never paid attention to his country of origin, which either he or his wife would have reported to the enumerator. It was Germany, not Denmark. At least that's a start.

So let the first family (or their descendants) argue about it all they want. To find Thomas, I'm going to remind myself how to pay attention to what's there right in front of my eyes.

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September 23, 2011: The adorable couple

This is about as happy as my grandparents ever looked, at least on film. But things were looking good. It was a sunny Chicago day, their son was home from the war, and the family was contemplating a move to a warmer climate. Perhaps an escape from the past was also a motivating factor.

They almost succeeded in leaving no clues about their ancestral roots. But there was still too much left behind in city vaults and record rooms, where clerks were required to note pesky details of marriages almost made, true civil unions, countings of family members, their incomes, their ages, their professions.

Their motives may have been mostly innocent. So many like them embraced the virtues of the here-and-now. Progress is an American dream. Focusing on the past was so quaint and European. The right name, the right set of skills, drafting pencils in your pocket and a nice cigar. With those accoutrements you and your family could go as far as you chose to go. Just a few bits from family remained, unexplained and unannotated: a gold pocket watch and a cameo. Well, a boy always has his father's watch. Was the cameo his mother's?

Another curiosity: no family photo album from these two was ever found. Her past was no more visible than his, though one can understand why. A clearly German surname was a liability during one world war. But she was a Southerner and thoroughly American, her father an American born in the south too, a boy in a German community whose childhood passed through the War Between the States, who thrived and married a minister's daughter, was set up nicely in his grandfather's and uncle's mercantile business. And then her father died not long after the turn of the century.

She and her sister, artistic and passionate, with their more prosaic brothers were whisked to Chicago in 1910 under a shroud of mystery, perhaps something to do with the child her sister had a year later. There my future grandmother met the man who convinced her to elope at age thirteen. Her borrowed older sister's papers convinced the clerk to issue the license but not the judge to perform the marriage. A longer, if unhappier, union followed two years later, with her mother the minister's daughter signing her consent. Here, several decades removed from bride and groom, the couple look as though they'd learned to live with each other.

When I was at the start of my research, I remember thinking that I'd be happy just to know the names of their parents. Seven years ago I started searching with the kind aid and encouragement of friends and family. Now we know a few things about them. He descends from Hans Schmid the blacksmith, born about 1653 in Arrild, Denmark. She from a schoolmaster called Valentin Jatho, born about 1620 near Dransfeld in Germany. My grandfather's ancestors used patronymics, changing every generation until the early 1800. So maybe it's no surprise that he too changed his own surname in the twentieth century.

Ironically, my grandmother's surname was the same as the man born almost three hundred years earlier. Neither of them knew the real story of their roots.

But now I do. And I'm grateful to everyone who has made it possible to know more.

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September 15, 2011: New cousins

Sometimes all you need to do is add searchable content to the web, sit back, and wait for action.

My "Contact" button doesn't get a hit too often, but when it does the results are usually worthwhile. Not so long ago someone doing a search for this lady's name, plus her birth year, brought her to my genealogy web page. I knew this cousin was out there, I just didn't know when she'd drop by. But I hoped that eventually a natural curiosity about ancestry would bring us together.

And now we have another view of a Petersen who's been a mystery. Marie was my grandfather's younger sister, who it appears also inherited the family predilection for automobiles. Her brothers George and Clarence probably owned the garage referred to on the car. I had no idea there'd been a business like this, but it makes sense.

More facts to tuck away from a family who (so it seems) were all reluctant to talk about their past. We're doing our best to unearth their secrets.

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September 2, 2011: Mystery in the Müller plot

When we were in Charleston, South Carolina a few years ago we visited Bethany Cemetery, where a good number of my ancestors were buried, mainly German immigrants and their offspring.

My great-great-grandfather was Ludwig Müller, pastor at St. Matthew's Lutheran Church for fifty (count 'em!) years, so it must have seemed the right thing to do: make sure the family plot is big enough for anyone who wants to be included.

But who was Katheryn Hamel?

No clue on the headstone, no Hamels in my genealogy database...but here she is, nestled next to the Rev. Müller (who died in 1898) and his wife Caroline Laurent (who died in 1910).

My husband, with characteristic foresight, suggested that we take a photo of the headstone anyway, just in case somewhere down the line Katheryn popped up (in a manner of speaking).

So we did. Until yesterday she remained an enigma.

The nice thing about time marching on is that new collections become available online, and ancestry.com has recently released some delayed births, marriages, and death records for South Carolina. I've been having more fun with these records than you might think possible. Wonder of wonders: Katheryn's death certificate is part of the collection, and here's who her parents are:

Now it makes sense why she's buried in the Müller plot. Katheryn was actually their penultimate daughter, who I've seen in the St. Matthew's church records as Adeline Catherina Fredericke Müller, the way she was baptized. As was so often the custom, in Germany as well as in American German communities, children often chose their second name as their preferred everyday one.

I'd been unable to find her because I assumed (and should have known better) that she would be found as Adeline Müller. I also assumed that she would have married and her married name would be forever unknown to me. Patience has its own rewards.

I haven't been able to find out anything about Katheryn's husband, listed as Herman Hamel on the death certificate. The informant, Ruth Reenstjerna, was a niece. This suggests to me that Katheryn and Herman had no offspring of their own. There's more work to be done, but it's nice to have the mystery lady identified at last.

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August 26, 2011: Old country, new country

Cincinnati is one of the towns where my ancestors settled...two different families, in fact, found it accommodating, catering as it did to recent German immigrants in the 1840s. There were churches and businesses where discourse was entirely in German, and a friendly local newspaper in the same familiar language.

Heinrich Joseph Bruns was the more prosperous of the two patriarchs, working as a teamster (in the old sense, driving a team of horses for a local dairy). He was even able to purchase a nice plot at St. Joseph's Cemetery just to the west of town for his voluminous family.

We visited the site several years ago on a warm December day and were stunned to see the nice stone obelisk marking the plot, carved with his name in elaborate Gothic script. Joseph (as he preferred to call himself) managed to fit sons, daughters, his wife Elizabeth, as well as various in-laws and infants of same all in the cozy, southern-facing hill. I don't think that he and the family have had many visitors recently, but it was nice to see him all the same.

Some Bruns relatives who were left behind in Oldenburg didn't have it quite so well. A German cousin sent some documents that illuminate hard times in the little villages around Hohenbögen, where Joseph's uncle and aunt remained. It sounds like a soap opera: the uncle died, the aunt became an alcoholic, the children had to sell the farm, the sons got all the property, and the daughter who should have had a good dowry for her marriage was left with nothing.

It took three generations for the Brunses of Hohenbögen to hobble back to something resembling prosperity. Perhaps they wished that they too had gone to the New World like Heinrich Joseph!

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August 20, 2011: That's the way the brick wall crumbles

Another day, another few kroner in one's pocket, and on January 20, 1736 Christian Tygesen of Objerg was betrothed to Margrethe Hansdatter of Linnet (later Øster Lindet). What became of them? Something worth a closer look, I think.

I've been trying to poke through a persistent brick wall (i.e. back from Peder Hansen, my earliest confirmed Danish ancestor, who was born in 1774) and may have found something of interest. At the moment I can't prove it. But it's looking like a hopeful lead.

Finding his father's name has not been easy. It wasn't mentioned in his marriage record, which is a cryptic, one-sentence entry in the Hostrup church book. It was also in Hostrup where practically everything requiring a church ceremony was done: Peder's marriage to Barbara Sørensdatter in 1799, the birth of their two boys in 1799 and 1806, and now, it seems, their deaths.

I found Barbara's easily in 1844. It only recently occurred to me to check there for Peder as well...and there's a possible candidate in February 1828. But the right-hand side of the page is missing, and this would have contained his age (so we could verify that he's the right one), his wife's name, his birthdate and place, maybe even parents' names.

Some church parishes had two sets of books kept in case one was destroyed, so I'm trying to find out whether Hostrup followed this practice and whether the alternate church book is still available (both the online Danish archive and the microfilm use the same source and both have the missing page). Finding the duplicate book might only happen via a hired researcher in Denmark. And then again, it might never happen at all.

But there's a clue back in Haderslev, the county where Peder was born (as we know from his marriage record). I found a confirmation for an eighteen-year-old Peder Hansen in 1792 and his brother Hans Hansen in the town of Øster Lindet. That's promising!

It's the same town where the 1801 Danish census shows 25-year old Peder (thus born in 1774 or 1775) with wife Barbara and baby son Hans. The confirmation record fits my Peder's age. And this record gives us the name of the confirmation boys' father, Hans Christian Christiansen.

This is good so far---Peder's father has to have the first name Hans, and finding the confirmation in the town where Peder later lived is another bit of luck. Better yet, I looked up Hans Christian Christiansen in the 1801 census. He also lived in Øster Lindet and his profession (like my Peder) was a tailor.

Not conclusive, but having father and son share the same profession and live in the same town suggests a strong possibility that they're related. So does the fact that I can find no other Peder Hansens of the right age living in Øster Lindet or any of the other small towns in the region.

So I still need some documented verification that ties Peder absolutely to this father (I'm waiting for microfilms containing probate and military rolls for these regions, hoping that there might be some further clues). Nevertheless, from just the name Hans Christian Christiansen, I can work backward three more generations from Peder Hansen. If verifiable, this puts our Danish line back as far as 1678.

This probable ancestor was Tÿgge or Tycho (spelled both ways) Jacobsen or Jörgensen. It would be nice to know for certain whether this is one man or two, and I'm still working through the barely-readable images to figure that out.

Tÿgge and Tycho are both the same first name, just spelled differently, and there seems to be only one person using this first name in the town of Objerg, where the records trace him. Objerg was in the county of Tønder, one county south of Haderslev. There are two records that show him as Jacobsen and one as Jörgensen---a priest's typo, perhaps (such things did happen), or perhaps a different person entirely. More scrutiny should help me figure this out.

The records do show without a doubt that Tÿgge had a son called Christian Tygesen, and that Christian had a son called Hans Christian Christiansen. We need better proof that this Hans is the father of our Peder, but I'm leaning in that direction.

It feels precarious doing research this way, relying on probables rather than absolutes, and I don't like to do it if there are other options. But at the moment, other options are scarce, and this is the best I can do for now.

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August 9, 2011: Celebrities in the tree

Who would have thought?

Not me, of course. But a couple weeks ago I got an email out of the blue from someone searching the surname Dressel.

We have a few of those, of course, so far documented to about 1700 in Hesse-Darmstadt, and this fellow doing the search encountered our Dressel web page. So he emailed me to share some new information.

He's related to our Marie Dressel Schuckmann, but more directly to her younger brother Hermann. One of Hermann's sons was Frederick Dressel, the esteemed 19th-century botanist and orchid hybridizer in New Jersey.

And among Frederick's descendants is Patricia Louise Dressel, more famously known as the actress Trish Van Devere, wife of the late actor George C. Scott. The California marriage index, available via ancestry.com, shows that they were married in Los Angeles in 1972. Trish used her birth name Patricia Dressel in the official record.

If Trish Van Devere is interested in her genealogical background and comes across this message, she'd be most welcome to email me. It's a pleasure to add these two luminaries into our database.

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July 31, 2011: Harvest time

They say, when you start out in genealogy, "welcome to the addiction", but they don't tell you that's what really happens.

It also accelerates over time. Not to say you need new and better drugs, just new and better sources. Name-harvesting from other people's trees really isn't the goal (in fact it's a very bad one, especially if their own research lacks good source work).

A nice fellow in Denmark has a service called Gedcomp. He compares submitted gedcom files from hundreds of folks and runs a computer program to compare data. If there's a match, he'll email you and tell you. He found one person who matches our Katherine Jürgensen in Jundewadt. Her marriage to Christian Martensen from 1847 is above.

Katherine was my great-great-great-grandmother Ellen's younger sister. Whoever this fellow is in Denmark has her listed in his files too, though he doesn't seem to know about her siblings or parents, and he lists no descendants for her.

Is he our cousin? Well, if he knows for sure that he descends from her line in some way, there's a chance. But the fact that she and her husband are listed on a spur line suggests that he may have been gathering names for the fun of it...not that there's anything wrong with fun. His gedcom contains 200,000+ names, considerably more than the modest 1,300+ we have in our database. Perhaps he's been combining families from other sources, the better to build a robust file of folks.

However, robustness of one's database does not necessarily result in an accurate collection of names. I didn't add in Katherine or her siblings into our database until I was sure about how she and Christian fit into our familial constellation. Maybe this fellow has proof, for all I know, and that would be good. But his gedcom doesn't demonstrate it, so far. Perhaps, when I get in touch with him, we might discover what's what...or what's not.

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July 23, 2011: Brotherhood defined

You'd think a family with so many naming options could come up with a more original name than Peter Hansen Petersen...but you'd be wrong.

There was the father, Peter Hansen Petersen, born in 1822 just on the southern edge of Denmark. Then his son Peter Edlef, born in 1857 across the border in Schleswig-Holstein. And to follow up, another son, Peter Hansen, born in 1860 in the same little town. One can only wonder how they kept track of themselves at home.

The plethora of Peter Petersens wasn't limited to my family alone. In fact, their ubiquity made it that much more difficult to find the man and his family (in the poorly preserved cabinet card above) in Nebraska, where I knew they had likely settled in the 1880s. How do you find the right one?

The hunt was complicated by the fact that folks in this branch of the family thought nothing of changing their names whenever the whim persuaded them to do it. Peter Edlef Petersen became Alfred Petersen in this country, which made locating him a real treat. But finding Alfred was the first clue that not all the Petersen siblings fled Nebraska as a sister (Catherine) and brother (Andrew) did in the 1890s. Maybe others stayed near Omaha as well.

It proved to be true. Peter Hansen Petersen's younger brother Louis remained in Omaha as well, working as a saloon-keeper until Prohibition, then transforming himself as a confectioner. Alfred worked in farming just outside Omaha as well. It seemed likely that Peter Hansen stayed close...but where?

You've got to know how these brothers defined themselves in the census records to do a successful search for them. Most of them remembered (within one or two years) what year they emigrated: 1878, so that's one clue. All identified themselves as natives of Germany, which had jurisdiction over Schleswig-Holstein, which is helpful too, since most Petersens are listed as Danish. Worth noting: all these Petersen siblings change their nationality to Danish in 1920, which considering anti-German sentiment after World War I was a sensible thing to do.

Looking for someone of the right age in or near Omaha with the right set of circumstances brought me to Custer County, not too far from Omaha, and as luck would have it, the Custer County Historical Society had an obituary for a lady who was married to a Peter H. Petersen. The 1910-1930 censuses all had a likely candidate as well, just the right age, emigration year, the whole shebang. So I wrote to the nice folks requesting a copy of the obit (they appreciated the small donation I sent too, evidently this helped to fill them with enthusiasm for the task).

Alas, the obit showed that the lady was not married to my Peter H. Petersen, but by a stroke of good luck (that's all you can call it) my guy did live in the same county, and they found his obit and one for his Mrs. as well. Very kind!

In one fell swoop I had a new branch of the family to add into the database, and the obits were of a particularly useful type written in the Midwest in the 1930s and 1940s, chock-full of good family information as well. They made Peter H. Petersen's new web page almost write itself.

Best news: Peter and the Mrs. were pretty prolific. Next task: searching for their present-day descendants in Nebraska and elsewhere. When Peter died in 1945 he was survived by nine children, 34 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren. Some of them must still be around, and there's a chance one or two may be interested in their ancestral origins....

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July 12, 2011: On the sensibility of labeling photos

When I visited an elderly cousin in Chicago a few years ago, she unlocked a treasure-trove of photos her grandmother (my great-grandmother) had collected. Since this was a branch of the family I knew nothing about (my father having quite successfully hidden it), most of the folks I encountered were unfamiliar to me.

Many remain unfamiliar to anyone else, alas. My great-grandmother was not as diligent about labeling photos as she might have been. Find out who's who was dependent on what my cousin remembered (which was sometimes nothing) as well as some photo-detective work on my part.

This photo in particular intrigued me so I scanned it without knowing anything about it. There's some damage to the photo but it was such a pretty shot I couldn't pass it by.

I assumed the girls were twins (we have a few in various branches of our Petersen families) and that this was a confirmation photo, usually the case when young teens are shown grasping a small bible-type book. The hairstyles suggest the early to mid-nineteen-twenties, as do the dresses.

There are a couple of good candidates: Louis Petersen's twins Agnes and Anna, born in 1914, or his brother Peter's girls Marge and Myrtle, born in 1911. That's close---it could be either set of young ladies. Then there's this, and we do know these folks.

Peter's widow Martha is at left next to a young man whom we don't know, but the rest of the clan we do know. Their twin girls, Myrtle and Marge, are in the middle to right of the photo with sister Evelyn between them and brother Lawrence below.

This doesn't help much. I think it was taken a bit later than the confirmation picture above, and because it's a family snapshot the girls don't have that slightly apprehensive look they have in the studio portrait. One of the girls, Myrtle, has a slightly more pug-like nose than her sister. That's the key to figuring out which girl is which.

Now in this photo of the ladies at their (assumed) high school graduation, which would have been about 1929, the mystery begins to clear. The lady on the right has that distinctive Myrtle nose. I think the girls in the first photo are definitely Marge and Myrtle. They would have been 12-14 years old in 1923-1925, so that fits the time frame for the damaged confirmation photo.

Am I right? It may be impossible to know for sure. But just recently I found a clue online to descendants of this family and sent off a friendly query to one cousin, who will either (perhaps) be able to enlighten me or (I hope not) run screaming in the opposite direction, fearing she's being stalked by some stranger who knows entirely too much about her family.

But that's my job, isn't it?

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June 28, 2011: The waiting game

A year or so ago I found someone who had been searching online for information on someone from my family. Not surprising, it's happened before. But after contacting her I realized that she had an item of great value: a photo of someone we'd never seen.

Louis William Jatho was my grandmother's older brother. I knew he'd married a Martha Kruschke and settled in Wisconsin, but I didn't expect the Kruschke clan might have his picture when we did not. For some reason family pictures on my father's side of the family (back before 1930 or so) are few and far between. Possible reasons for this are painful to contemplate. I assume they existed once and were discarded by someone who didn't see any reason to keep them.

But tucked away in a family collection was the photo above of a Kruschke family reunion. They'd gathered on the occasion of the 50th birthday of Henry Kruschke, Martha's brother. At the right of the photo, in a white shirt and dark vest, is Louis Jatho; his wife Martha is just to the left. I had to wait for awhile to receive this remarkable image. My benefactor had to track it down in her own photo collection, then figure out how to scan it (her son came to the rescue), and attach it as email. It took a year but it was worth the wait.

We don't know a great deal about Louis. He was born in Charleston, moved with his widowed mother Jennie and siblings to Chicago in 1910, and worked initially as a switchman for the city railway. Later he and Martha moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he became a home decorator, specializing in painting and wallpapering.

The Eau Claire Leader in 1921 called him a well-known man, probably because of a fan letter he wrote about a miracle cure for kidney problems. Poor Louis probably didn't realize that his words would be made immortal via the marvels of advertising. For the next few years he waxed rhapsodic about Dr. Pierce's tablets in newspapers all over Wisconsin. I'm not sure whether he increased sales for the company, but I hope they gave him some extra samples by way of compensation.

The advertisement is genealogically useful, at least. It gives his actual address in Eau Claire, and it shows us how he probably signed his name: L. William Jatho. The Kruschke family knew him as Louis, though, so this might have been his everyday name.

Louis lived with Martha in St. Paul, Minnesota in his later years, where he died in 1956. Martha died in 1962. It's a delight to finally see what they look like.

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June 15, 2011: Forward into the past

Finding living cousins can be more problematical than locating ancestral ones. But I'd like to find the children of these little guys.

They're the three Hoffmann boys, left to right Albert, John, and Charles. Their mother was the former Elizabeth Petersen, married in Omaha to Charles Hoffmann of Germany. Albert was a family favorite, apparently, and his proud grandfather Alfred Petersen exchanged photos with his own sister Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen in Chicago. That's how they came into my hands.

Albert died only recently in 2005 in Baltimore. Searches have unearthed no available obituaries for him so I don't know whether he himself had children. All I know is that somewhere there should be a passel of Hoffmanns who don't know about their Danish side. Could be they don't care. Not every family likes having a voluminous family history dropped ceremoniously in their lap.

But perhaps, if I pursue it, I'll get lucky. Just one chatty obituary in a local paper could tell me whom to contact. Having lost---and then found---my own family history, I'd hate for anyone to go without if they're truly curious and hoping they too will be lucky one day.

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June 2, 2011: Fantasy and genealogy don't mix

All of us have been told stories about our background that turned out not to be quite right. The lady at right is Caroline Laurent Müller, born in Zweibrücken, Pfalz in 1822, later married to Louis Müller, a pastor in Charleston, South Carolina. A formidable and saintly presence (so we were told by relatives who remember her), one did not cross or contradict her.

One legend passed down with great tenacity and fervor was the name of her mother, Helena de Vigny, born into a noble family (so it was said), who was a child during the French revolution and was smuggled to the countryside in a barrel, which was placed in a horse-cart and covered with straw. Thus did the lass escape harm and grow up to give birth to Caroline.

Of course once I rented microfilm and discovered Caroline's baptism record, I realized that there was a misapprehension in the family legend. Caroline's mother was Philippina Jungblut, an unmarried laundress, and a local bookbinder, Philipp Laurent, was the acknowledged father.

When I brought this to the attention of the cousin who told me the tale, he was undaunted. Helena de Vigny must have been an earlier ancestor, he insisted, probably in the era of the Huguenots during their expulsion from France. Never mind that there's no paperwork to indicate the existence of Helena. Better to find an alternate (as well as chaotic) historical period where she could reside in legendary splendor.

I admit it baffles me when perfectly good documents are ignored in favor of fantasy---and there's no other way to describe Helena. Too many details of the narrow escape, not enough hard facts about her birth, marriage, death...in fact, no facts at all. But my cousin loves his own story, and I have to admit it's certainly more colorful than the alternative.

A similar circumstance is in the works with a different cousin from a different line. Granted, he'd believed this for the last forty years so it's hard to let go. While in the military he happened to be stationed in Hamburg, Germany and perused the phone book for his own surname. He found some similar names, called them and hoped they could speak English. Success! One fellow spun a tale of a man who had sent his son to America to look for a place to settle. The son never came back--that must be your ancestor, my cousin was told. And he believed it up until the time I contacted him, having traced him down via census and church records.

Or maybe he still believes it. I have a firm paper trail back from my cousin's father to his grandfather and great-grandfather. The latter was my own great-grandfather's brother. It all checks out, all of it's official, but apparently my cousin is still not convinced 100%.

Not sure what to do at this point, but I sympathize, having been led down the garden path about my own heritage for a number of years. Maybe someone should invest in support groups for family historians who discover the unexpected!

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May 19, 2011: The face of the past

At a recent family reunion, a cousin asked casually whether I was still doing any research or was I "done". It's safe to say, I think, that no one is ever really done with family history. It's more a matter of juggling! Which family line will be the lucky one today?

Similarly, no one every hits the real bottom of the barrel when it comes to old photos. There's bound to be a hidden cache of pictures or a forgotten folder somewhere. If you're lucky enough to find such a thing (or to be on the receiving end of it), a windfall like this can provide an unexpected source of new information.

A cousin of mine discovered the stunning photo of an ancestor in a pile of old papers and forwarded it to me (now that he knows I have a taste for such things). It's Elise Clara Margaretha Jatho, born in 1862 during what had to be a precarious time in Charleston, South Carolina during the Civil War.

When this photo was taken around 1880, Elise's father had been dead for ten years. Her older brothers were keeping the family solvent. None were yet married and the family lived together on Hasel Street in town. Perhaps this was an engagement portrait. Elise wears a ring on her left hand and is decked out in the latest fashion.

Alas, she wouldn't live long enough to be married. Elise died in 1881 of typhoid fever. But her image has been rescued from oblivion, thanks to our cousin who paid attention to what was in that particular stack of papers. We've seen Elise's grave in Charleston, with its marble pillar of roses and lilies of the valley, and somber quote from Byron. But now we can see how lovely she really was, and it's somehow easier to imagine how acutely her family missed her.

Sometimes we're fortunate in this way, sometimes not. Another cousin in Florida---the first family historian, actually, whose work made my life a lot easier---died before her husband did. Upon her death he gathered up her notes and photos and blithely tossed them in the trash, muttering to those who were shocked to hear about it afterwards, "Now I won't have to put up with the past anymore".

For some folks, the past is a burden. I recognize that this is some folk's reality, but I sure don't understand it.

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May 7, 2011: Dressel mystery solved!

Sometimes an idle Google search turns up an unexpected genealogical treasure.

Several weeks ago I was musing about the way some Dressel siblings in Charleston (whose father's first name was Hermann---one clue we knew) kept orbiting around my Jatho and Schuckmann folks from Charleston (see below for details). The nature of their interactions suggested a relationship of some kind, but what, exactly? Church books in Hesse-Darmstadt, their mutual area of origin, were not being particularly helpful.

I had a hunch I was on the cusp of a discovery, I just didn't know whence it would come.

Despite the fact that Google's search parameters are sometimes too wide to turn up such details, there are ways you can narrow down that focus. One is to choose a specific database (web, images, blogs, groups, etc.) and search only that particular area. I'd actually done this before, but not with Google Books. Their Books selections include publications that have gone out of copyright, and Google is uploading new material all the time.So one recent Saturday I noticed that a quick search within Books brought up some nifty new things, or new to me at least. Maybe it was the way I was searching, pairing up one of my surnames with a locale. To my delight, "Jatho Charleston" brought up some good online directories of Charleston (some not available via ancestry.com).

As for "Schuckmann Charleston"...well, that resulted in something very interesting indeed:

Philip was my great-great-great-grandmother Marie Dressel Schuckmann's son...and here's a brother---Hermann, just the man I need!

So what's this book? And does it reveal any more gems? It does:

There are moments in any researcher's life when it's okay to shout a hearty huzzah (or the equivalent expostulation). So I did. Here was the constellation I needed---parents Hermann Dressel and Elisabeth Pattberg, a son called Frederick (previously unknown to me) and Hermann Dressel's relationship to Philip Schuckmann in Charleston.

The book? Carl Wilhelm Schlegel's "American Families of German Ancestry in the United States", published in 1918. Schlegel focused on a number of German surnames and sought out the most accomplished of that clan. And it's entirely free to read on Google Books.

It seems clear from reading it that some of the information came from interviews with family members themselves, so details may be at variance with what church books and census records tell us. For instance, Mr. Schlegel described Philip as Hermann's brother-in-law, a mistake or a misremembered fact from Frederick and his family. Philip was Marie's son, not husband, so Hermann was Philip's uncle. Louis Schuckmann was Marie's husband and thus Hermann's brother-in-law. But people forget things. That's why we look up the records ourselves, in the spirit of verification.

Google has a partial agreement to display pages from Mr. Schlegel's tome, meaning that not all pages are available online. As luck would have it, page 390, where the author described Frederick Dressel's detailed ancestry, was missing. But wonder of wonders, the Los Angeles Central Library had it complete, albeit a non-circulating copy of the book. A few hours after phoning them I was on my way, photocopied the pages in question, and now have Mr. Schegel's version of the Dressel history, which helpfully augments mine.

Another Google book offering gave me Frederick Dressel's picture...will wonders never cease!

Frederick Dressel, pictured at right, was the brother of my Charleston Mystery Dressels, which Mr. Schlegel's book confirms. Mr. Schlegel provided the names of the seven Dressel offspring who survived to adulthood, including George, Philip, and Elisabeth, whom we know from Charleston. Mr. Schlegel correctly names Elisabeth's husband as well, further verifying the connection.

And it turns out that Frederick was a well-respected botanist and orchid collector. His expertise was honed in Europe before coming to New Jersey and establishing himself and his business there.

Frederick's offspring and grandchildren are traceable through census and social security records. In fact, Frederick's great-grandchildren are named in a recent obit for his grandson Fred. I wonder how interested they'd be in a letter out of the blue from a very distant cousin?

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April 28, 2011: In search of Jathos

I guess mysteries are part of genealogy, and sometimes they stay that way.

This is the Seneca County, Ohio grave marker for Charles L. Jatho and his wife Barbara (much obliged to Linda Hickman for the image).

Charles shares a surname with my Jatho clan of Charleston, and from the 1900 census it looks like he shares the birth month and year for my ancestor's half-brother: June 1830. A tempting theory is that he and his half-brother George William both emigrated to the USA.

Carl Ludwig Jatho (if this is indeed the right fellow) reports that he emigrated in 1840---a bit of a stretch since no other Jathos from this clan emigrated to the USA that year and there's no record of his passage. In the 1860 census, however, Charles lived in Brooklyn and was a cigar maker. We presume he married Barbara there because their first child, William, was born in New York. By 1870 however the family had relocated to Tiffin, in Seneca County OH, and they had a daughter too, Katherine, born in February 1867.

Ordering the death records from the kind folks at Seneca County Probate Court didn't result in the right birthdate, alas. The handwritten record for 1904 says that Carl/Charles was born in September 1830, not June as he had reported in 1900. And for place of birth the record is left blank, though Charles reported in the 1870 census that he was from Hesse-Cassel...exactly where my Carl L. Jatho was supposed to be from.

No way to prove this any further, alas. Their children William and Katherine never married, so no DNA testing can be done. William and Kate's death records are online, but William reports his father was born in Frankfort, throwing one more spanner in the works.

A search of Ohio obituaries turned up the slightly macabre news item in the Sandusky Star (February 8, 1904), reporting that the horse-drawn hearse bringing Charles Jatho's casket to his home for the funeral had an altercation with a snowbank. The hearse overturned and the casket was sent through its glass panels, but "no one was hurt", the Star concluded...only poor departed Charles' final shred of dignity, I guess.

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April 20, 2011: The Dressels of Mystery

In my past are a series of folks called Dressel from Hesse-Darmstadt. There's not particular reason why I should be so fixated on finding them any more than some of my other local surnames from the region. Maybe it's the pretty picture of Anne Marie Dressel that does it.

Marie, as she was known, was the daughter of a master-butcher (an almost academic post, a fellow qualified to teach other butchers) in Bessüngen, Hesse-Darmstadt. Her father was sufficiently well-off to have her portrait painted about 1827, when she was sixteen. I doubt I'll ever have a chance to see any earlier images of one of my ancestors. The rest of them waited for photography, probably out of economic necessity.

Marie married reasonably well to Louis Schuchmann, had two children, and the family moved to Charleston, South Carolina to run a clothing and fabric store. Marie was particularly well known as a seamstress and made flags for the local militia.

Around the end of the 1870s some Dressel folks start showing up in the Charleston directories, church records, and censuses, but they're at least a generation (and a long one at that) younger than Marie, maybe two generations younger.

But they're connected to her in some way. One lodges with her widowed daughter Elise Jatho and Jatho grandchildren. Another joins her church, the venerable St. Matthew's German Lutheran congregation. The boys, Philip and George, are noted as witnesses to weddings of their Dressel/Schuchmann/Jatho cousins. One of them runs a business, Dressel & Jatho, an insurance brokering firm in Charleston. Their surnames mix in alluringly intimate ways. So who are these guys?

They have a sister too, Elizabeth, who emigrated in 1888 and married an August Sibberns in Charleston. Her death certificate gave the briefest of clues: her father was a Hermann Dressel. That's a start, anyway. But who was he?

Microfilm of Hesse-Darmstadt civil records is plentiful but confusing. I can find the older generation, I can find weddings. But no microfilm of the region seems to show these kids being born there. In fact, I can't find any Dressel births after 1842.

A few weeks ago I was fiddling with the IGI (International Genealogical Database) at the LDS site, which---if used judiciously---can turn up a clue or two. The extracted records do not have entries for a birth for George (1857, probably Johann Georg); Philip (1859, whose full name was Johann Georg Friedrich Philip), or Elizabeth (1867).

So I decided to search for a father called Johann Philipp Dressel and a mother Elisabetha Mass---these were Marie Dressel's parents. Nothing new, alas, just Marie (born in 1811) and her brother Johann Georg (born in 1813). But I already have them in my collection.

What about a search for parents called Philipp Dressel and Elisabetha Mass?

That did it. They had a son in 1822: Friedrich Hermann Ferdinand Dressel. Could this be the father called Hermann who was listed on Elizabeth Sibberns' 1947 Charleston death certificate?

Hermann Dressel married Elisabeth Pattberg in the Stadtpfarrei evangelical parish of Darmstadt in 1853. But so far not a trace of any children in birth records for the region from 1853 till 1867. Perhaps they had children in secret.

I just ordered new film of records for Bessüngen, Darmstadt. Maybe, with any luck, George, Philip and Elizabeth will show up there and I'll be able to prove them cousins of their Charleston kin. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you haven't had enough of the Dressels, check out their web site.

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April 22, 2011: Lost and found

Among my many Petersens are twin sons of Peter H. and Elise Momsen Petersen. These are not the twins in the photo at left. The seated, stern-looking fellow came to the USA as Peter Edlef Petersen, renamed Alfred once he settled into farming in Nebraska.

The fellow standing is, I believe, Louis, twin of Andrew (see the post below). When part of the family left for Chicago around 1889, Alfred and Louis remained in the Omaha area. Alfred has a robust presence in the census so he's been easy to track. The problem boy was Louis. No matter how I searched for Louis Peters*n (wildcards are our friends) I could never find a definitive candidate in any census.

A recently-available database via ancestry.com solved the mystery of his whereabouts. His nephew Walter Petersen spent some time in Omaha, learning how to be a bartender and possibly involved in a short marriage. But he also applied for a passport in 1913 and the address where he wanted his passport sent was 3601 North 16th Street in Omaha. I thought that address might be handy at some point.

It was. I decided to do a quick search in the 1910 census, leaving out the first name, for a Peters*n living in Nebraska, born around 1867 in Germany (as Schleswig-Holstein was categorized then). Up popped a "Lony" Petersen (which, in the image file, was really "Louy"), born at the right time and place. His address? 3601 North 16th.

Louis was a saloonkeeper, Walter obviously his employee, so it all fit together neatly. After about 1916 Walter returned to Kenosha WI to be closer to his parents and family but Louis, married to a Swedish lady called Marie and with a daughter called Elizabeth, shows up again in the 1920 census, this time a confectionary retailer (Prohibition compelled Louis to seek a new trade, apparently). He doesn't show up in the 1930 census, but at least we've located him now. Without the passport database Louis would still be languishing in obscurity.

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April 15, 2011: A new branch

Last week was one of the fortunate ones for me. I found a new cousin. Okay, we're third cousins, which to some folks is barely being related, but for this particular branch of the tree was like finding someone who speaks my language. His great-grandfather and my great-grandmother were brother and sister. His was a branch that had been out of touch with our branch since (probably) the 1920s.

I owe this to a Rootsweb feature that I didn't know existed until I stumbled upon it---you can add a virtual post-it to a record in their death records database. My cousin left a post-it in 2002 and mentioned the fellow I was looking for---Loren Petersen, born in Wisconsin and died in California---and all Loren's siblings. I knew these siblings from the 1910 Kenosha census so I knew this was the right track.

Tracking down my cousin was yet a different matter. He'd posted with a Hotmail account...my heart sank when I saw it. Those are the first to go dormant when folks find a preferred email situation. Sure enough, mail to that account bounced.

So I did a web search on the email address. That turned up only one hit, to a high school alumni web page in Kenosha...where he was listed with the same broken email address. Couldn't think how to proceed until a friend suggested signing in to the alumni message board and leaving a message there.

It worked! Within half a day the webmaster had sent out my query to the entire high school mail list, where several of my cousins family members saw it, and forwarded my contact info to him.

He had never before seen a photo of his Petersen great-grandparents Andrew and Marie, which I was happy to share with him...as well as a page devoted to his great-grandfather's history, as best as I could reconstruct it.

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April 9, 2011: A fork in the road

Sometimes genealogical information lurks in the china and silverware cabinet...literally.

We were visiting some cousins on the east coast recently. They have a treasure-trove of material involving our Charleston SC ancestors, most of it unrealized or things they'd forgotten about.

Before our arrival my cousin pulled out some unmatching forks and spoons from their silverware drawer, plus a few stray Limoges plates of an unassuming pattern, and casually mentioned to me that he'd never noticed any significance to the monograms on the silverware till now.

But it was obvious all of a sudden. The monograms related to our Charleston ancestors. By looking at the pattern of monograms (single letter or multiple) we could tell whether the silverware was meant for the generic family table or specifically for one of the daughter's trousseau.

Even the plates had a history. By examining the backstamp on the dishes we could date them to a four-year period in the late 1870s, which gave us a good clue which of our ancestors used them on her table.

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April 2, 2011: Please, Mr. Postman

I ran across a Usenet post today from a fellow responding to a thread about how long to wait for a return note from a potential relative. He said he receives queries from cousins, gets distracted easily and sometimes sets aside a letter for years. Years, mind you.

I can understand a month or two, but years?

In my family it's not as if we've all kept in close touch. In some cases I email second and third cousins more often than my first cousins. And of the firsts, I haven't seen any of them in over thirty years. Some first cousins I've never even met.

It's not entirely my family's fault. My paternal grandparents' four children settled in a widely-scattered pattern throughout the USA, and during the time we were growing up none of them were wealthy enough for plane fare so we knew each other mostly by holiday cards.

But there was sufficient mystery about the family background that we often didn't know about more distant relatives. It remains to be seen whether this was an innocent lapse or deliberate disinformation. But it means I have tons of cousins who don't know me...and who don't know we're related.

Found a possible one in Florida the other week. She'd been posting about her New York ancestors online as recently as 2002, and after that...silence. But she'd left enough of a trail for me to realize that we're fourth cousins from a family called Laurent, originally from Zweibrücken, Pfalz.

I tracked her down to a probable address in Ft. Myers, wrote a polite note. Heard nothing. What to think? She's not related but can't pick up a pen (or send me an email) to tell me so? She's become disenchanted with the hobby? Or some other reason for the resounding silence?

Understanding now how some folks set aside mail for "years" leads me to believe I'll just have to be more patient. Maybe, as the fellow suggested, I should include a handy-dandy response postcard in every envelope I send from now on....

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March 29, 2011: How to ask

I wish I'd known how to ask genealogical questions when I was five years old. It might have gotten me further a lot faster. On the other hand -- perhaps considering parental reserve on the subject -- it might not have been much help.

Instead of asking for facts, names, dates, I think I should have been asking for memories, impressions, that sort of thing. Not "What was your grandmother's name" but rather "What do you remember about your grandmother?" "Was she nice?" "Did she like cats?" "Could she speak any languages?"

I might have gotten further with questions like those.

In fact, it might not be such a bad idea to write a little book about how to ask. Maybe there should be a version for kids (who could read it and use the techniques to delay their bedtime) as well as for adults, who might encounter resistance (for whatever reason) using the standard line of questioning.

There are some folks, too, who get suspicious of sharing too many details. This is an age of identity theft, after all. And it's worth reminding yourself that not everyone shares the genealogy obsession. Some folks might think you're crazy for pursuing the hobby with a zeal akin to mining for gold.

And such a book would have to bear a delicate title. Not something like "How To Get Those Pesky Genealogical Questions Answered Before Everyone Around You Dies". Something a bit more marketable. "Genealogical Queries for Dummies", perhaps?

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March 20, 2011: What's in a name?

Everyone's named after someone, aren't they? It felt that way at one time. All my friends were named after grandmothers or great-aunts or some looming legend in their family background. Why not me?

When I asked, my parents said that they just liked the sound of my name, so they gave it to me. "Liked the sound of my name"... what sense did that make? How were ancestors to be ackowledged with a system like that? Who were my ancestors, anyway?

Maybe that was the problem right there.

These were burning concerns when I was about five or so. I figured I must have been adopted because I could get so little information out of my parents. When I asked about my grandfather's parents there was a ripple of discomfort in the air. They didn't know, exactly. What--no names, cities, anything?

Well, there was a great-grandmother about whom they knew next to nothing, didn't know her first name or her last name, just knew that she kept getting married all the time.

This was disconcerting. How many times? They weren't sure, her husbands just kept dying. I had a vision of someone akin to Lady Macbeth, ruthless and amoral, some shadowy merry widow with her eye on the next culprit. For awhile, so they said, she was married my great-grandfather. But they didn't seem to know his first name either.

Their cavalier approach to family history bothered me mightily, but at age five I wasn't in much of a circumstance to do anything about it. You tend to accept what your parents tell you about family, maybe not about politics or religion or how much candy is good for you or whether comic books will ruin your mind or whether "sputnik" is an English or Russian word--you have some backbone after all. But why would they mislead their own child about something so elemental as a surname?

I confess I still don't know. But they did, I think, or at least one of them did. Maybe for innocent reasons (She Doesn't Need To Know That), maybe because of a painful childhood with a dysfunctional (on some level) family, perhaps even due to baggage from further back in the past.

But baggage always calls out to be opened, doesn't it?

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Try a search

There are a number of free and subscription resources for genealogical research. Explore these sites or check with your local public library to see whether they provide no-cost access to these databases. You never know what you may find!