Filling in the gaps

Everyone came out for the confirmation party of Ted Maynard, held in Northside, a Chicago suburb, in 1952. The family of Anna Gohr Glawe, Ted's grandmother, kept a number of photos commemorating the event as well as the after-party, which was considerably more relaxed than the official ceremony.

Sometimes a stray snapshot leads to more family research, allowing us to fill in missing information about this extended family.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front and reverse side, collection of Anna Gohr Glawe: Bill and Sylvia Schultz, children Wayne and Vickie, Chicago, Illinois 1 Jul 1952, original photograph from the album of the owner, scanned in 2023, accessed 11 February 2024.

Until I saw the inscription on the back of this photo I didn't know about Bill and Sylvia or their children. Bill was the son of William Charles Schultz and Ella Gohr, which puts him squarely in the Gohr lineage. Ella was the younger sister of Anna Gohr, and there's a photo from this day of Anna and Ella together.

It's amazing what a carefully inscribed caption can tell those of us who inherit these old photos. Bill Schultz is on the left, his wife Sylvia in the middle, son Wayne on the right (a tall fellow for fourteen years old), and daughter Vickie in front. The caption also tells us that the photo was taken outside the home of Bill's parents' home in Northside, Chicago.

A few lookups helped us complete the tree for this family: Bill was born in 1910, his wife Sylvia Skupa Schultz (born in Chicago the same year) had a mother born in Czechoslovakia, and the children (both now deceased) were born in 1938 and 1949.

Somewhere Wayne and Vickie probably had offspring of their own who may, one day, be interested in their extensive family history for both the Gohr and Kramp families. We certainly hope they find us one day.

11 February 2024 | Email your comment.

Who knew whom?

Sometimes a baptism record reveals more than you'd expect. In this case, Maria Catharina Petersen, born in Chicago in 1899, had a very interesting godparent. And we all know what focusing on godparents can do to augment family history.

Maria Michelson, Marren Larsen, Peter Jannsen, and Clara May are all listed as godparents in this baptism record. Maria Michelson is the one we want to focus on because her presence suggests a long-term relationship with the Petersen family

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Citation: Ancestry.com, Missouri Synod, U.S., Lutheran Church records, 1851-1972 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., record for Maria Catharina Petersen 31 October 1899, Saint Martini Lutheran Church [Chicago IL], 1891-1922 Baptisms, accessed 29 January 2024.

Spelling was still in flux at this time, particularly when the clerk was used to Americanized spellings of names. Maria, for whom the child was named, was Maria Hansen Mikkelsen, second wife of Thomas Mikkelsen, a name that looms large in our legend. Thomas later married the mother of this child after both of them had been widowed in the first few years of the twentieth century -- Thomas's wife Maria died in 1902, Catharina's husband Hans in 1905. It's been tempting to speculate that Hans, Catharina, Thomas, and Maria all knew each other once they were living in Chicago, and this record proves it.

We don't know where Maria Hansen was born but we do know that Hans, Catharina, and Thomas were all from the same general area of northern Schleswig, customarily known as Nordfriesland, and had been born within about twenty miles of each other. Thomas' first wife, Helene Sievertsen, was in fact a cousin of Hans and Catharina. But Helene, after a brief time in Chicago, returned to Flensburg around 1887 and her marriage to Thomas was dissolved, either officially or less so.

Thomas then married Maria Hansen in 1889 in Chicago, around the same time that Hans and Catharina relocated there from Nebraska. Thomas and Maria may also have been part of the Saint Martini parish in Chicago or perhaps made a special sojourn there to sponsor Hans and Catharina's newest daughter Maria.

Well into middle age, Catherine and Thomas (right) married in Chicago in 1906, and wonder of wonders, they had a child of their own, Florence, in 1907, Catherine's twelfth (counting her children from her first marriage to Hans) and Thomas' seventh (after six children with former wife Helene). Thomas (divorced once and widowed once) was a mainstay of his blended family, a streetcar mechanic with a penchant for automobiles and cigars, interests that his stepsons inherited from him. Thomas even lent his name and became godparent to his stepson Alva's firstborn son, Thomas William, born in 1916.

But the question of whether Thomas was a close friend of the family seems to have been answered with this particular record. He probably knew the Petersens in Nordfriesland but certainly knew them in Chicago.

29 January 2024 | Email your comment.

A thirty-one year search

That's how long I've been looking for this record.

There were lots of things I didn't know in 1993 when I first started researching to find my grandfather's birth record. I figured that something, somewhere would reveal his background. The names of his parents would be nice. I had no idea who they were. I asked my parents and they had no information (or pretended they didn't know...that's another story!)

And for some time I'd go on not knowing who Alva's parents were. I was searching for Alva Elwood MacLaughlan, born on 24 March 1894 in Chicago, because that was the name I had and it was all I knew. I wrote to the Cook County clerk's office in Chicago with the information I had and they responded that they could find no one with that name.

This was well before online databases or even genealogical websites, so everything was conducted by regular USPS mail, and that was slow. In fact, the answer was so discouraging that I gave up for a number of years.

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Citation: Ancestry.com, Missouri Synod, U.S., Lutheran Church records, 1851-1972 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., record for Alfred Emil Petersen 24 March 1894, Saint Martini Lutheran Church [Chicago IL], 1891-1922 Baptisms, accessed 21 January 2024.

Then in 2004, when I became aware of Ancestry.com, I tried again, looking for that elusive surname, but no luck then either. The one thing that set me on the right track was posting to a Genealogy.net bulletin board, and that led me to a lady who was also searching for Alva's family. Only, as we discovered, his name wasn't Alva at birth, nor was his surname MacLaughlan. A mutual cousin set us on the right track: his parents names, Hans and Catherine Petersen, and his many siblings (eleven in all, every one of them called Petersen). No wonder I'd had trouble locating him!

Our mutual cousin had his name inscribed in the family bible and she gave us a copy. The birthdate matches. She had photos of my grandfather with his siblings and his mother. She had stories about Alva wanting to change his ancestral identity. It seemed an open and shut case.

But I still dreamed about having an official document with Alva/Alfred's birth and baptism information. Primary resources are always best if you can get them, such as some official documentation affirming an event. This is firsthand knowledge proving that an event took place. Anything else (even a family bible inscription) is technically hearsay or secondhand knowledge, although such documents can be helpful in leading you in the right direction.

At this time Chicago didn't require birth certificates, although families could register a birth with Cook County if they wanted. The Petersens did not register their Chicago-born children with Cook County, but they did with their chosen parish, Saint Martini Lutheran Church. A verifiable church record is thus primary information, and that's what we've got, finally, after all these years of searching. Thanks to my cousin from my maternal side, who alerted me to this collection, and thanks to Ancestry.com for putting it online!

21 January 2024 | Email your comment.

A newly available online database yields results

The Missouri Synod, U.S., Lutheran Church records have been available for decades via repositories such as the Concordia Historical Institute, but those records have not been available online nor were they easily searchable. Finding a relevant record required contacting the Institute and requesting a lookup, which may or may not have yielded results depending on the workload of the Institute.

But Ancestry.com has recently acquired the database, fully searchable, and that's a plus. It helps to know that these records are not necessarily only available for events that took place in Missouri. Any Lutheran church that belonged to the Synod could have records in this database. It's worth a try to see what you can find.

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Citation: Ancestry.com, Missouri Synod, U.S., Lutheran Church records, 1851-1972 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., record for William Schulz and Ella Gohr 20 June 1909, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church [Chicago IL], 1884-1952 Marriages, accessed 9 January 2024.

In our case a cousin who is also researching Gohr surnames ran across this record, which records the marriage between William Schultz and Ella Gohr. Ella is our direct ancestor, one of the daughters of the late Wilhelm and Laura Gohr of Chicago. This record gives us information we didn't have previously.

The record gives William's father's name (Karl, deceased), his exact birthdate and place of birth, as well as Ella's birthdate and the confirmation of her late father's name. The witnesses are mostly unknown at this point although they must have some connection to the family. Sarah Schultz may be a mother or sister of the bridegroom.

For Ella the notable witness is Hertha (later Bertha) Gohr, her older sister. The church clerk also included the marriage certificate number, a helpful detail in case we want to order the license from Cook County at some point. Familysearch.org also has a record of this marriage but it's an index rather than an image. The image itself allows us to see that the entry (like all entries on this page) is partly in German, not so surprising for a church that catered to German immigrants or first-generation families.

If your ancestor was married in a Catholic church then those records won't be found here, of course. These records are strictly Lutheran (for Catholic records try the database "Birth, Marriage, & Death, Illinois, Chicago, Catholic Church Records, 1833-1925" at Familysearch.org). But if you have Lutherans in your family, this database could prove useful.

9 January 2024 | Email your comment.

Who was Aunt Lizzie?

When people started taking snapshots of family members with their own cameras it provided some interesting backdrops for the image, rather than the more stiff and formal studio shots. This family photo demonstrates it: sisters Dorothy and Mildred Glawe were photographed on a front porch in Chicago about 1922.

The Glawe family was remarkably keen to properly caption their photos in a helpful way. I'm not sure whether this was Dorothy's effort or her son Ted Maynard, who inherited the collection, but it's most welcome. Here we're told that the location is 34th Place on Aunt Lizzie's porch.

But who was Aunt Lizzie?

Answering this question requires going back through the database to find a good candidate. The aunt was probably related to the two girls, so likely a sister of their mother Anna Gohr Glawe or of their father John Glawe. What pops up when we look into it?

The Chicago Suburbanite Economist, Friday 14 Aug 1931 on page 7 provides an answer. The article tells us that John and Anna Glawe celebrated their 25th anniversary and hosted a large party. We know from census research that John Glawe had a sister, Elizabeth Wilhelmina Henriette Glawe, born in 1877 in Winnebago County, Wisconsin.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front and reverse side, collection of Anna Gohr Glawe: Dorothy and Mildred Glawe, Chicago, circa 1922, original photograph from the album of the owner, scanned in 2023, accessed 4 January 2024.

A possible clue: the Egmers. They are included in the list of party-goers as Mr. and Mrs G. Egmer of 1830 34th Place, and interestingly the anniversary couple's daughter Dorothy lived there too. So this seems a good candidate for Aunt Lizzie, assuming that Elizabeth married a man called Egmer.

And another newspaper article confirms this. Elizabeth was married to an August Egmer in Chicago in 1900, according to the Chicago Tribune for Sunday 22 Jul 1900 on page 7, which reported their marriage license application. Very helpful indeed. As a result of this discovery we can add in Elizabeth's husband and daughter to our database.

Sounds like a lovely event, and thanks to these newspaper articles we have a confirmed identification of the Egmers, how they were related to the family, and Aunt Lizzie's identify revealed.

4 January 2024 | Email your comment.

Family history in a box

For the first time I have access to a photo archive belonging to a late cousin from my mother's side of the family. His widow kindly packaged up the images and documents and sent them on to me for processing, and there's a lot of processing involved!

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Citation: Digital reproduction of photographs, from the collection of Anna Gohr Glawe, Chicago, 1900-1970, original photographs from the album of the owner, scanned in 2023, accessed 30 December 2023.

I've been going through the collection and scanning each image, but now moving on to proper archiving, using ph-neutral glassine envelopes for proper storage, and checking to make sure that the dates and captions are correct. Remarkably whoever identified these photos has done a wonderful job.

The original owner, my grandmother's sister Anna Gohr Glawe, inscribed most of the earliest 20th century photos in her own handwriting. Her daughter Dorothy Glawe Maynard took over this detailed task over the years, and her son may have contributed. It makes my job a lot easier. In rare cases where there's a discrepancy I can use Ancestry.com to double-check surname spellings and approximate eras for the photos.

What a difference compared to other collections I've dealt with, where the owner assumed that she or some other family member would always know the identity of the photographic subject. That was probably the norm at the turn of the last century and we can't fault anyone for their assumptions. But without reliable IDs it makes sorting through family photos a lot more like an archaeological dig. This task is a pleasure!

30 December, 2023 | Email your comment.

Photographers: finding clues in the details

John Walter Glawe, born in 1881 in Neenah, Wisconsin, spent most of his life in Chicago, where he married one of the eldest Gohr girls, Anna, who was born in 1882 in Chicago. This nice portrait was produced in Chicago about 1900 when he was twenty...at least that's the best estimate we can give this portrait based on the apparent age of the subject and the career of the photographer who produced it.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Anna Gohr Glawe: John Walter Glawe, Chicago, circa 1900, original photograph from the album of the owner, scanned in 2023, accessed 20 November 2023.

The studio was Esmoer Studios at 3452 Halsted in Chicago. According to the online directory "Chicago Photographers 1847 through 1900, as listed in Chicago City Directories" Lawrie P. Esmoer was active only in the year 1900 on Shields Street, although we find newspaper advertisements for the studio offering discounted photo prints through 1912. This logo shows the studio at the Halsted address with an impressive silver-embossed emblem on the cardboard frame. That's the address where he was listed in the 1906 Chicago city directory.

What made John Glawe's family choose Esmoer Studios? It could have been convenient pricing, or possibly the fact that Mr. Esmoer was an imigrant, like John's father Johann Glawe, who was born in Anklam, Pomerania in 1847. Was Esmoer from there too?

Interestingly not! Lawrie Esmoer was born Lars Peter Nielsen in Præstø District, Magleby Parish in 1867, with the extra surname "Esmår" noted in the baptism record. His parents were listed as Nielsen, not Esmår, which was likely added later to distinguish Lars Peter Nielsen from all the other young boys born with the same name in that parish. When Lars emigrated in 1890, he changed Lars to Lawrie and Esmår to Esmoer.

We don't normally get to see an image of the photographer himself, but in this case we're lucky. Lawrie probably took this self-portrait himself, and he looks suitably determined and professional. But while photography was an easy way for an immigrant of artistic sensibility to support himself, it may not have been sufficient to support an entire family.

Lawrie established a business in Omaha, Nebraska in 1895 but by 1898 he married Maude Patey in Chicago, with whom he had six children. He was still listed as a photographer in the 1910 census but by the 1920 census he had relocated to Indiana where he was variously listed as a farmer or a security guard. He died there in 1947, probably unaware that his earlier portraits were part of a multitude of family archives, just like the Glawes.'

20 December, 2023 | Email your comment.

Building the tree: more clues about the Kramp family

To fill out the Kramp family tree we have to apply some of the same research plans used in our previous hunt. It's like working on a puzzle sideways. Nothing exists to give us a comprehensive map of all the children of George Kramp and his wife Dorothea Gohl. If they were born after 1799 we're in luck. The Groß Tuchen books show us Christian, born in 1800 and Carl Ludwig, who was born in 1807. How about other children?

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Citation: Digital images, Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecine (Staatsarchiv Stettin), baptism for Ernst Albert Kramp, 13 July 1816 in Klein Massowitz, https://www.szczecin.ap.gov.pl/media/arch/65/147/0/09/5884/65_147_0_09_5884_0045.jpg and https://www.szczecin.ap.gov.pl/media/arch/65/147/0/09/5884/65_147_0_09_5884_0046.jpg, accessed 7 December 2023.

Well, we know about the one in the record above. George Kramp's son Paul was married to Dorothea Gohl in 1815 and their first child was born in 1816, Ernst Albert. Pieces of the family puzzle fall into place: godparents include Martin Kramp, "brother of the father" and Martin Ernst Gohl, "brother of the mother." This is much appreciated: one brother for each side of the family.

The third godparent is Dorothea Trabant, daughter of the property owner Michael Trabant. The Trabant family shows up regularly (as do the Kramp family on their registries). The Trabants were either relatives from some point in antiquity or business associates, it's hard to say. In 1853 Michael Trabant's daughter Emilie Pauline would marry Paul's son Friedrich...but that liaison would be in the future.

In any case we know that Martin Kramp was a brother of Paul, one born presumably before 1800. Can we narrow this down?

Possibly. A Martin Kramp, married to a Dorothea Grahlin and with two sons of his own (Traugott and Carl Ludwig) died in 1823, age 32 years, four months, twenty-one days, which puts his birthdate at August 15, 1790. That's reasonable. If Paul (as we suspect) was born about 1787 and was George and Anna Christina's first-born, Martin could easily have followed about three years later. And if Martin was Paul's brother, as this baptism record says, he was definitely George's son. Do we have the right Martin's death record to properly calculate is birthdate? All we can do is hope we do.

7 December, 2023 | Email your comment.

Finding clues in unexpected places

Normally it's customary to focus on records that reveal details about your own family, but sometimes clues are hidden in the neighbor's entry.

That's the case here. We know who Friedrich Kramp's parents are now, thanks to the discovery of his 1824 baptism certificate, but now we'd like to move a genration earlier. However in the Groß Tuchen parish that's not always easy. Records before 1800 may exist somewhere but they're not online and it's not clear where (if anywhere) they could be accessed. Some records are simply not in existence anymore due to fires, floods, or losses of other kinds.

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Citation: Digital images, Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecine (Staatsarchiv Stettin), baptism for Carl Christoph Meisner, 1 November 1808 in Klein Massowitz, https://www.szczecin.ap.gov.pl/media/arch/65/147/0/09/5885/65_147_0_09_5885_0133.jpg and https://www.szczecin.ap.gov.pl/media/arch/65/147/0/09/5885/65_147_0_09_5885_0134.jpg, accessed 1 December 2023.

Carl Christoph Meisner was the son of Friedrich Meisner and his wife Chatarina Jantz, with three godparents listed as was customary for this parish. Paul Kramp was one of them. He was not yet married. In this region it was common to include a godparent who had reached the age of eighteen and who had some connection to the family, such as a relative or associate, or someone who was of good standing in the community. Paul was at least eighteen and likely older, since this was not his first time acting as a godparent (his first appearance was in 1805). But this inscription is special.

It lists Paul as the "altester Sohn des Eigenthümer Georg Kramp," the eldest son of the property owner George Kramp. So George Kramp had some important standing in the community and by association so did his son Paul.

Best of all, we have a direct indication of who Paul's father was. There are no census records for Groß Tuchen, and for Paul no other records (including any death record, which is entirely missing) indicating his father's name. This is it!

We know that George Kramp the property owner (referred to this way because there were other George Kramps of other professions in the area) was married to an Anna Christina Dummerin. They were still baptizing children during the first two decades of the 1800s. Anna Christina may have been Paul's mother, unless she was a second wife of George, but we have no way to know. Paul was born about 1787 and without a baptism record we can't verify his mother. But at least we know his father now, and that moves us back another generation.

1 December, 2023 | Email your comment.

Groß Tuchen: a new landscape

This search required diving into a new realm because the Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecine (Staatsarchiv Stettin) doesn't offer indexes or search opportunities the way more popular genealogy sites have, such as Ancestry.com. Here you're on your own, and the only clues you may have are the names of the people your looking for and their relevant dates.

That's the case with Friederich Kramp, who was know for years (by me at least) only through his daughter Emilie's marriage record, and then via his own death record in 1878 in Klein Massowitz. But there are some church books online that include records for folks from this region and all it takes is the resolve to sit down and peruse them page by page.

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Citation: Digital images, Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecine (Staatsarchiv Stettin), baptism for Friedrich Heinrich Gottlieb Kramp, 12 November 1824 in Klein Massowitz, https://www.szczecin.ap.gov.pl/media/arch/65/147/0/09/5884/65_147_0_09_5884_0135 and https://www.szczecin.ap.gov.pl/media/arch/65/147/0/09/5884/65_147_0_09_5884_0136.jpg, accessed 25 November 2023.

It's right where it should be, though it's not easy to read. The books in this parish have each record written across the open pages straddling the middle binding, so the first part of the record is on the left while the continuation is on the right.

It's a nice informative entry. For the first time we have Friedrich's parents' names, Paul Kramp and his wife Dorothea (spelled "Dorath" here, the clerk's quirky rendition) Gohl, with a set of godparents: Gottlieb Sander, Gottlieb Pysall, and Anna Louisa Nehler. Godparents are often family members so it's worth remembering those names for future searches. We may run into them again.

Now we have a starting point for moving back in time. If Paul Kramp and Dorothea Gohl registered Friederich in Groß Tuchen, maybe they did so for other children. Moving back and forth through the records should give us a clue about how many children they had and when they married.

25 November, 2023 | Email your comment.

Eyes on the prize

This lady is Laurette Albertine Henriette Kramp who was born in 1856 in Klein Massowitz, Pomerania. I never saw her face before. I didn’t even know that this photo existed. She’s my maternal great-grandmother who came to Chicago in 1881 to marry her fiancé Wilhelm Gohr, who had already made the crossing. Laura (as she was called) had eight children before she died in 1893 from complications of childbirth. Her latest baby, Elsa, had died six days earlier.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Anna Gohr Glawe: Laura Kramp Gohr, Chicago, circa 1885, original photograph from the album of the owner, scanned in 2023, accessed 18 November 2023.

My grandmother had no photo of her mother. None of my other relatives had one. But earlier this year I was looking around for a cousin of mine who was also Laura’s great-grandchild. He had just died a few days before I went looking for him. So I emailed his widow via his online obituary to express my condolences and to offer any information I could about his family connections.

It took her awhile to respond but finally she did, telling me that I was the only relative to reach out to her and she was very grateful. She asked whether I wanted the family collection of photos and documents. I said yes (of course!) and she eventually packed them all up in a big box and mailed them to me. Got it last week.

I daydreamed that there might be a photo of Laura (maybe of Wilhelm too), at least some interesting photos of their children from the early 1900s. Well, I got lucky. Nothing of Wilhelm, but this photo was tucked into a pile of other family photos, clearly labeled “My Mom Laura Gohr” on the reverse side by Laura’s oldest daughter Anna, my grandmother’s older sister.

It’s damaged and faded, has marks from the use of cellophane tape and other discoloration, but it’s a treasure for sure. I estimate that it was taken about 1885, hard to tell because there aren’t many hair or clothing details, but I think that’s about right.

I feel like I won the lottery.

Now -- inspired by this photo -- I'm pivoting from Nordfriesland and reorienting myself to do some research on Laura's ancestry. I have the names of her parents and siblings but nothing beforehand. So that's the next research plan.

18 November, 2023 | Email your comment.

Read the fine print

Looking at this death record for Sissel Ebsen I was so excited by the primary details (her parents' names and her age) that I failed to pay attention to another important detail. It's where her parents were from that mattered, not just their identities.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/p/475e0e1333// : 12 November 2023), 1752 death record for Sissel Ebsen, path: All Archives / Schleswig-Holstein / Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Norddeutschland / Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland / Deezbüll / Bestattungen 1721-1763 Image 155 via https://www.archion.de/, accessed 12 November 2023.

It's interesting enough, and certainly noteworthy, that Sissel (a version of the name Cicilia) was 73 years old when she died, which helps us calculate her close-enough baptism date of 24 August 1679 (and you can calculate dates for your own ancestors as long as you have their exact age via http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/birthday.html). Getting back to the seventeenth century is always a treat, especially in Nordfriesland parishes where early church books can be missing or damaged.

But I failed to notice that Sissel's parents were from an entirely different parish: not Deezbüll where Sissel's life events were registered during her married life, but a town called Wimmersbüll near Lügum (today Süderlügum). That meant that her parents would have had their own life events recorded there.

Sissel's parents' death records document their death dates but not their exact ages. We have to estimate when they were born based on Sissel's birth, usually about 20-30 years before the birth of their first child. And there may have been children born earlier than Sissel, we just don't know.

So for our purposes, assuming that Sissel was their first child, we assign a tentative birth date to Ebbe of about 1640 and to Dorothea (who is listed in her death record not by her name but as "Ebbe Petersens uxor," Ebbe Petern's wife) about 1645. Like many records from this era, ancestral patronyms are sometimes missing. Dorothea could be the daughter of a man called Ebbe (same name as her husband's) or the Ebsen patronym may be used her to identify her as her husband's wife, rather like a modern married surname. This isn't clear.

Early records like these can be cryptic, also often leave out the mother's name in a baptism record -- someone obviously thought the person who carried the child for nine months didn't need to be identified! So the Lügum parish records identify a few other children of Ebbe Petersen but not who the mother was, we assume Dorothea.

A child called Peter died in 1686, a daughter Marina was born that same year, and another Peter was born in 1690, all identified as the offspring of Ebbe Petersen. These children would have carried the patronym Ebsen after their father's first name, so if we wanted to research them further that's what we should look for, not Petersen. All we know from Ebbe is that his father was called Peter [Patronym], and we won't find him in these records. Anything earlier than 1684 just isn't going to be there. But we can be grateful for what we have. The mid-1600s is a pretty tenuous time for Nordfriesland records. The fact that these exist at all is something of a wonderful event.

12 November, 2023 | Email your comment.

History in a paragraph

When you get lucky like this, give a moment of thanks to the parish clerks who assembled a handlful of facts such as this one. Did they know future generations would be reading their church books or were they more like the Egyptian priests who considered their Pyramid Texts to be sacred writings only for the eyes of the gods?

We're fortunate. Going back in time from the 1822 birth of Elise Christina Momsen in the parish of Deezbüll, Nordfriesland, there's a wealth of material to explore. Elise didn't even know her father -- he died when she was an infant. But the richness of these archives never fails to astonish.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/p/92d0b00f1d/ : 6 November 2023), 1786 death record for Ebe Nissen, path: All Archives / Schleswig-Holstein / Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Norddeutschland / Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland / Deezbüll / Bestattungen 1764-1804 Image 191 via https://www.archion.de/, accessed 6 November 2023.

It's a complete family history all packed up and ready to go: Ebe's name, his town of origin (Christian-Albrechts-Koog), parents' names. his late wife's name, his son's name and son's wife's name too (plus their children!), his second and third wives' names and where they were from (nearby Niebüll) and his exact age in years, months, and days so you can work out when he was born.

Ebe was born in January 1709, according to that calculation, and although we can't find him in the baptism records for Deezbüll, he does show up in the confirmation records in 1726 at the exact right age for his birth in 1709...wherever that may have been probably in an adjacent parish.

Thanks to a handy pointer from someone on a German genealogy mail list we know that the old parish at Christian-Albrects-Koog was closed for ninety years due to flooding and new land-reclamation plans for the region, so parishioners were directed to other town archives such as Dagebüll and Emmelsbüll. Ebe's parents seem to have chosen Deezbüll for their records, although some poking around may reveal more family history details if we're lucky.

6 November, 2023 | Email your comment.

A long-lost family connection phones home

Our Chicago family included some cousins whose connections go back to a pair of sisters, Augusta Caroline Kramp (1854-1938) and Laura (Laurette Albertine Henriette) Kramp (1856-1893). The sisters emigrated in 1881, Augusta with her two children joining her husband Carl August Hasse (1832-1903), who was already in Chicago, and Laura was traveling to marry her fiancé Wilhelm Gohr (1857-1905), who had come over with Carl earlier that year.

Buried in my mother's photo album was this image of her sister, Lolus Bruns, then Lorraine, and their cosuin Loretta Murphy, standing near the family front steps on Winchester Avenue in Chicago. Loretta, I suspect, was named for her grandmother's sister Laura. It's clear evidence that the family kept in close contact with the children of Augusta Kramp Hasse, as well as Augusta. But this image and a few others of Loretta are the only photographic evidence we have of that connection.

Recently a DNA autosomal match put me in touch with another descendant of this family and I'm hoping that it leads to more family stories and photos.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Bertha Bruns Gohr, from left to right: Lolus Bruns, Lorraine Bruns, Loretta Murphy Mayhan, ca. 1942, original photograph from the album of the owner, scanned in 2015, accessed 24 October 2023.

It's an interesting family the more I look into it, with roots in and around Kreis Bütow in what was formerly Pomerania. Augusta was the oldest child of Friedrich Kramp and Emilie Pauline Trabant of Massowitz. Two of her children were born in Hygendorf, sometimes spelled Hyendorff, now called Udorpie in Poland. The other two were born in Chicago.

Loretta, pictured above, was the daughter of Emma B. Hasse, who married Irish immigrant Owen Patrick Murphy in 1909. But Emma's other siblings included Laura Hasse (1875-1903), who married George Charles Harder; Emil Albert Richard (1879-1961), who never married; and Ewald (Edward) (1890-1972), who married Elizabeth Blekeley. Our DNA match is with the family of Ewald.

How much of our family history our new cousin knows is still uncertain. On the Kramp side (a surname perhaps derived from a local village called Krampe) we have our earliest known fellow, Friedrich Kramp, who was born in 1824. On the Hasse side, Carl Hasse's father was Martin Wilhelm Hasse, born about 1803. We don't have photos of any of these folks, of course, but we do have baptism and marriage records for a lot of them, and I'm hoping that our newly-discovered cousin is eager to know more. At least some of the fun of genealogy is sharing.

24 October, 2023 | Email your comment.

Tracking a marriage

For some time I've been puzzled about a Petersen cousin, Elizabeth, who was born Wilhelmina Elizabeth Petersen in 1891 in Omaha, Nebraska but who shows up in the 1930 federal census, with her father Louis and mother Marie. But here she's called Elizabeth Miller and listed as married, although no husband appears with her. Elizabeth was an elevator operator in a public building, while her father Louis (on the previous page), formerly a saloon keeper, was a laborer doing odd jobs. It was still prohibition after all.

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Citation: "1930 U.S. Census, Omaha City, Douglas County, Nebraska, Population Schedule, Enumeration District No. 28-6, Dwelling Number 366, Family Number 372, Louis Petersen; digital image, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/, accessed 19 October 2023.

But who was Elizabeth's husband? Nebraska doesn't have cross-referenced marriage records or indexes online from this period, so for some time I was at a loss. The census records the person's age at marriage, so we know she was 35 years old, putting her marriage at 1925 or 1926. But she's elusive in the 1940 census after both her parents had died, and there are no likely death records for Elizabeth Miller in Nebraska that match the details we know about.

Here's where newspapers can be helpful. Sometimes if you're lucky you'll find an obituary. Not this time...but the Omaha Morning World Herald did have a marriage record for Elizabeth.

The newspaper carried applications for marriage licenses in the 1920s. Not all newspapers publish this information, but when they do it can be your only source of information. The May 11, 1926 issue of the Morning World Herald included an entry for Edward X. Miller, about whom we know nothing, and his bride Elizabeth W. Petersen. They're both over 21, but the 1930 census for Elizabeth Miller suggest that this is our Elizabeth. The ages match.

But she didn't remain Elizabeth Miller. A Find-A-Grave entry for her parents includes Elizabeth, this time as Elizabeth Stevens, married to a Walter C. Stevens. Can we find out when she married Walter? The Morning World herald comes to our rescue again.

The June 16, 1936 issue indicated that Walter and Elizabeth had applied for a marriage license, although here Walter is referred to as Walter S. Stevens (census records seem to indicate that the middle initial was 'C'). The age is correct for Elizabeth and the groom's name corresponds to the Find-A-Grave record. Elizabeth and Walter were married a month before her mother, Marie Cavalin Petersen, died.

Neither of Elizabeth's marriages included children. The brief obituary included with the Find-A-Grave entry suggest that Elizabeth was survived by cousins, none of whom are named. But that completes the book on the family of Louis Petersen of Omaha, his wife Marie Cavalin, and daughter Elizabeth. It's nice to have closure.

19 October, 2023 | Email your comment.

Saloon stories

Two of our Petersens made an appearance in the 1913 Omaha city directory, and this indicates an unexpected connection between them. Unexpected because Walter, the son of Andrew Petersen and Karen Marie Johansen Petersen, was born in Chicago and brought up in Kenosha, Wisconsin where his family had settled. Why was he in Omaha?

These entries show that Walter was living with his uncle Louis Petersen, who owned a saloon at 2024 Cuming Street, and shared living arrangements with Louis' family as well. Walter, just twenty-one years old, was working as a bartender. To appear in this directory Walter was probably already living in Omaha by 1912, when information was gathered for the following year.

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Citation: "U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995 for Louis Peterson, Nebraska, Omaha, 1913, Omaha, Nebraska, City Directory, 1913," directoru=y entries for Louis Peterson and Walt Peterson, via Ancestrylibrary.com https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/, accessed 12 October 2023.

What was Walter doing in Omaha? It was a gathering point for several other uncles, including Alfred, Peter (in nearby Mason City), and Hans, all of whom worked as farmers or laborers in the area and raised families there. Perhaps it was a place to learn a viable trade. When Walter left several years later to return home to Kenosha, where he married Celestia Bray and raises a family, he still listed his occupation as bartender on his WWI Registration Card, working for an Oscar August Petersen (Swedish and no relation but a friendly name nonetheless).

Walter didn't remain a bartender for very long, perhaps because of prohibition. By the 1920s he was a knitter in a textile factory and eventually a laborer in an automobile manufacturer, probably more lucrative forms of employment. But it's interesting that Omaha remained an alluring destination for our Petersen family even when they had settled in other regions of the USA.

12 October, 2023 | Email your comment.

Elusive clues in unexpected places

It's a decade since I tried to find out a definitive birth year for the oldest known patriarch of our Müller clan, Johann Michael Müller. We know he was married in 1765 in St. Matthäus Parish, Kriegsfeld, but that record doesn't identify his parents or his age. We don't know the bride's parents or age either. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that this was a marriage between a Catholic (groom) and a Lutheran (bride). Or perhaps it simply wasn't part of the record-keeping protocol. We know that Michael was from Flörsheim am Main and the bride from Wendelsheim, but that's it.

If we can't find anyone's birth year or parents' names it's hard to work back to a previous generation. And that's the case here. This couple had six children between 1766-1781 and then Michael remarried in 1784, presumably after Juliana Margarethe Schmitt had died. That marriage, to Sophia Lenz, doesn't tell us the groom's vital statistics either except to confirm that he was a venator, a forester, so we know we have the right fellow. But no dice on his origins.

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Citation: Zivilstandsregister, Eheverkündigungen, Heiratsbelege 1801-1806," marriage record for Frederic Müller and Susanne Catherine Werner, 3 January 1805, Hochspeyer, via Familysearch https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSZR-XS4X-J?cat=255694, accessed 2 October 2023.

Remarkably Michael's age shows up on his son Frederick's 1805 marriage, a place I hadn't thought to look for it -- because why would it be there? But someone must have thought that the gentleman, now a forest guard in Kriegsfeld, was esteemed enough to have his age mentioned: seventy-six years old.

The groom's mother is of course deceased and the record reflects this. The bride's parents are mentioned, her father Charles Werner listed as a chief guard of the forest at nearby Fischbach, but no age for him is given. We can live with this. It's Michael we've been researching, and this information helps.

It might not get us where we want to go. Ten years ago I received a friendly note from an academic researcher who is familiar with the records of Flörsheim am Main and he reported that he could find no people who matched our Müller ancestors there. This might mean the records are missing or that Michael and his family were from Flörsheim but not born there. Already a cursory search for a Johann Michael Müller born in 1729 turns up nothing, not even for a presumed brother Henricus Jacobus Müller, also from that town, who was a godparent to one of Michael's children.

But we have something more than a clue that may help us locate Michael in adjacent parishes. Even more, it suggests that looking for information outside the box -- in records not otherwise presumed to hold vital information -- may yield unexpected and worthwhile results.

2 October, 2023 | Email your comment.

Famous Jathos

I've been asked whether our Jatho clan of Charleston, South Carolina is related to the famous aviator Karl Jatho (1873-1933), who may have actually flown in a vehicle prior to the American Wright Brothers. The sticking point seems to be the definition of flight: it has to be "sustained" or consisting of a prescribed number of minutes, not just a hop-up-and-down.

Was Karl's flight sustained in 1903? That's up for debate. And we can't prove that he's part of our Jatho clan anyway. Although he was born in Dransfeld, the same parish where our G.W. Jatho was born in 1824, the records online don't go back far enough to prove a connection, alas. Maybe some day.

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Citation: Digital image online from the publication by Leber, Christoffer, (2022), 5 Conflicting Narratives of Blasphemy, Heresy and Religious Reform: The Jatho Affair in Wilhelmine Germany, 10.1515/9783110713091-007, via researchgate.net, accessed 27 September 2023.

But we are related to another famous Jatho, Carl Wilhelm Jatho, if that's of any comfort. Born in 1851 in Kassel, Carl Wilhelm was the son of Pastor Jacob Ludwig Victor Oscar Jatho and his wife Auguste Katharine Louise Klingelhofer and like his father became a Lutheran pastor. Carl was the grandson of Johann Georg Jatho (1785-1829) and the great-grandson of Ulrich Wilhelm Jatho (1738-1833) and his wife Marie Madeleine Keppel. That's a familiar set of names. Our G.W. Jatho, the watchmaker from Dransfeld, Kassel, and later Charleston, was the grandson of Ulrich and Madeleine.

Like his own father Cal Wilhelm Jatho became a Lutheran pastor but with a twist. His personal belief, originally fairly orthodox in nature, became more radical over time as he studied the classics and philosophy, attempting to reconcile modern thought with the nature of Lutheranism. His sermons evolved, tinged with with a soupçon of pantheism. His emphasis on individual development of religious consciousness and the subjective feeling detached from church institutions were not universally embraced by the Lutheran community as a whole, although the congregations of Cologne in Germany appear to have practiced his theories.

Jatho was removed from his pastoral office in 1911 although he remained popular in Cologne and continued to preach and hold bible studies, albeit without a pulpit. He died in 1913, much mourned by his followers.

There's a hint that his cousin (and our ancestor) G.W Jatho was also of an independent religious spirit. After leaving Kassel in 1848 during a time of political upheaval, G.W. settled as a watchmaker and jeweler in Charleston, where he appeared to remain unaffiliated with any local church. His marriage to Elise Schuchmann Jatho in 1853 (performed discretely out of state in nearby Kentucky near some Schuchmann relatives) followed the birth of their first son Philip in 1852. None of G.W.'s and Elise's other children appear to have been baptized at all, at least not until after G.W.'s death in 1870. After that event Elise hauled her progeny to St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church on King Street in Charleston where there was a mass baptism of all her children, from 21-year-old Philip on down to little Carl Julius, age seven.

We have no idea whether G.W. knew anything about his famous cousin or followed his independent spirit, but it's definitely a possibility. And if you want a famous ancestor, Pastor Carl Wilhelm Jatho is your man.

27 September, 2023 | Email your comment.

Family trees from the 1570s

Hard to tell precisely what's going on but it looks like the beginnings of a family history page from the 1570s.

There are Groß Bieberau records available from this era via archion.de that cover standard categories such as baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death or burial. But this is the first time I've seen what appears to be a page-by-page attempt to list families in the parish. And one of them includes our ancestor.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (http://www.archion.de/p/e8d0fd8157/ : 20 September 2023), genealogy page for the family of Philip Funck and his wife Margareth, path: Hessen-Nassau: Zentralarchiv der Evang. Kirche > Dekanat Reinheim > Groß-Bieberau > Taufregister 1576-1679 Image 10 via https://www.archion.de/, accessed 20 September 2023.

This page was created in 1576! If I'm reading it right Philip Funck and Margareth have four children: Peter, Anna, Elv[a?], and Margareth, plus their children's spouses.

Daughter Anna Funck was married to Hans Schuchmann in 1576 and they had a son in 1579 who was also called Hans, so these folks are our ancestors too. Also included: Peter; Elv[a?] who also lived in Bieberau and was apparently married twice, once to Matthea Ludslavu [?] and then Jacob Mangbach; and Margareth married to Christophel Diekmans in the nearby town of Zimmern.

Son Peter has his own entry, married to a Margareth with children apparently too young to be married and likely still at home: Anna, Margareta, Philip, and Martinus. But the proximity to his parents' record suggests that they lived in a family unit in Bieberau near his parents.

The collection isn't comprehensive, of course, and the condition of the pages should help us to understand why. There were probably other pages in this collection that succumbed to dry or wet rot, vermin, or fire, we just don't know. It's remarkable that these few pages have survived at all. Even more remarkable: the interest in family history is clearly not a recent one!

20 September, 2023 | Email your comment.

A Melchers discovery

People are becoming very generous about sharing photos of family members. Someone associated with the Melchers family of Charleston, South Carolina uploaded this image of Marie Emelia "Mame" or "Mamie" Melchers to Find-A-Grave. We're grateful for this. Otherwise we'd have no photo of her, and she is part of the family.

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Citation: Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/39865316/marie-emelia-messervy: accessed 10 September 2023), memorial page for Marie Emelia “Mamie” Melchers Messervy (22 Aug 1881–20 Feb 1975), Find a Grave Memorial ID 39865316, citing Bethany Cemetery, Charleston, Charleston County, South Carolina, USA; Maintained by Jessica Claxton (contributor 48465659).

Her parents were Theodore Melchers and Helena Müller Melchers. Helena was the eldest child of Rev. Ludwig Müller and Caroline Laurent Müller, so Mamie was their granddaughter. Theodore was a German immigrant who, with his brothers, managed grocery stores in Charleston. Out of seven children, Mamie was Theodore's and Helena's youngest child, born in 1881.

This portrait probably dates from about 1896-1898 if we consider the voluminous sleeves of the young lady, much in fashion around that time. She married William Hummel Messervy on January 6, 1904 in a ceremony performed by her uncle, the Rev. W.A.C. Müller and attended by her Atlanta cousin Maud Müller (later Nehemias). William and Mamie had six children, including a pair of twins.

10 September, 2023 | Email your comment.

A second bride for Lorenz Petersen

Back in the day it was common for a widower to marry again after his wife had died, especially if he was an older gentleman. That was the case with Lorenz Peter Petersen, whose first wife Margarethe "Magretta" Petersen had died in March 1882, and at the age of fifty-seven married Eliza Hamberge in Fillmore County, Nebraska in October 1882.

This record exists as an index only at FamilySearch.org in the collection "Nebraska Marriages 1855-1995," and for that we're grateful. But in cases where it's possible to find the original or original transcription, it's worth trying to see the handwritten document itself.

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Citation: Fillmore County, Nebraska, marriage registration number 621 (1882), Petersen-Hamberge, certificate created and signed 10 October 1882 by B.F. Shickley, IT3, p. 227-621, items 2-4, photoscan obtained from Deputy Clerk Carol Hoarty, Fillmore County Nebraska County Clerk's Office https://fillmorecountyne.gov/webpages/clerk/clerk.html, accessed 24 August 2023.

Why is it important to search for the original or original transcription? There may be more information on the image file than you'll find on the index of the document (which in the case of this document exists in three different index entries, thanks to the perspicacity of the FamilySearch folks). With this marriage it's worth a closer look.

I've tried this before and it worked out so I thought I'd call the Fillmore County Clerk's office and see whether they could pull up the image file...and to my surprise, they did, just by searching the bride's and groom's surnames and year of the marriage. In person it would have cost twenty-five cents. Over the phone with a credit card payment it was two dollars, but still a bargain.

Lorenz Petersen is listed in the upper half as Lawrence P. Petersen (he may have anglicized his name or the original clerk may have assumed it) while the bride is Eliza Hamberge. The minister's certification at the bottom of the form lists Lorenz Petersen and Eliza Hamburg (is that the correct spelling of her surname or is this an error? Its not clear).

The parents of the groom are listed correctly as we know from his 1825 baptism entry in the church books of Burkal Parish in Denmark (though the FamilySearch transcription misreads Jürgensen as Ferguson). Eliza's parents are transcribed as Joseph Hamberge and Marguerita Cromley (the reading isn't clear, it could be Cramler or some other surname).

None of the parents were listed as witnesses to the marriage. Witnesses are listed as Mrs. Rosa Shadel [sic], wife of the Presbyterian minister Rev. Jacob Schadel, and Mrs. Anna Wirel. Other than the wife of the minister, whose connection to the couple we can derive from her husband's involvement, we don't know what connection Anna Wirel might have had, if any. The handwritten document helpfully tells us that the ceremony took place in the house of the bridegroom.

Questions arise. Were the parents of the bride no longer living? We know that Lorenz' parents were living in Fillmore County at this time, according to the State of Nebraska 1885 census (helpful to have) and we also know from that same source that that Eliza's origins were listed there as Baden -- it would have been nice to have an actual town. Had Eliza been married before? She was two years older than the groom. Likely not, since her surname was still the same as her parents, but's it's hard to be sure if she resumed her original name for some reason.

Lorenz had a son, Hans, also living in Fillmore County, and several nephews in the area. None of them were witnesses to the marriage, interestingly. We also know that every other official religious event in Lorenz' life occurred in the Lutheran church. A Presbyterian minister is a bit of a surprise. Was there some family resistance to the marriage? It's not possible to tell but there could have been something afloat.

We also know, courtesy of a news item from the Hebron Journal newspaper in 1889, than things weren't smooth sailing for Lorenz and Eliza. Financial difficulties loomed for Lorenz, a farmer, and the couple ended up owing over one thousand dollars to two fellow citizens in Thayer County, Nebraska, which was a lot of money in those days. We also know that Lorenz, Eliza, his son Hans and Hans' family all relocated to Chicago, Illinois some time in 1889, perhaps as a result of these financial reversals. Lorenz worked as a house painter in Chicago and died in 1891, still married to Eliza. We know a lot about Lorenz' son Hans and his family though. You can read about their life here.

24 August, 2023 | Email your comment.

Two Laurents, both alike in dignity

Can you believe that there were two fellows in Philadelphia called Emil Laurent, both born in 1866, both married to a lady called Anna, but who were surprisingly not the same person?

It's easy to get confused when names, however rare, appear to be the same. I would dearly love to have this photo be my Emil Laurent, who was born to Frederick C. Laurent and Marianna Demme, but it's not.

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Citation: Find A Grave (http://www.findagrave.com : accessed 10 August 2023), memorial page 58315091, Emil Laurent (1866–1942), created by "Marianne"; citing Circle Hill Cemetery, Punxsutawney, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, USA, accessed 10 August 2023.

First way we know there's something funny: The photo was processed at the L. Schmidt gallery in Marchienne au Pont, Belgium. Sometimes our family members have sent their children back to the old country for whatever reason (musical training, religious education, and so on), but in this case our Laurent family has nothing to do with Belgium. Their ancestral origins are in Zweibrücken, Rheinland-Pfalz and Alsace. But our Emil was born in Philadelphia, not in Belgium, according to the census records.

Another issue: our Emil was married to Anna, but Anna Florence Pearson Watson. The Find-A-Grave entry for the other email shows that his wife was Anna Nameche. The family children were also different. Thus: this is another Emil Laurent.

This Emil was a manager of a glass factory, while our Emil Laurent was one of F. Laurent & Sons, a confectioners business on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Different wives, different children, different professions!

Our Emil Laurent was actually profiled in the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 7, 1897 when he was running for local office. Only thirty years old he was representing Glenolden Borough in Philadelphia and was clearly identified as a member of the Chestnut Street business.

A newspaper line drawing of him accompanies the article so we have a vague ide of what he looked like. So far, other than his aunt Caroline Laurent Müller of Charleston, South Carolina, he's the only Laurent whose visage we can see. That's better than nothing. But it's worth remembering that it's very easy to end up on the wrong road as we research. Take your time, examine the facts, and make sure it all adds up to what makes sense.

10 August, 2023 | Email your comment.

An obituary clue

I've run across obituaries for my great-grandmother's sister before, but this one gave me pause. In addition to her surviving children, Augusta's sister was also listed -- and not Laura Kramp Hasse, my great-grandmother, who died in Chicago in 1893. This is Ida Kelle...a new name. Who was she?

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Citation: The Chicago Daily News, 25 Feb 1938, obituaries, “HASSE - Augusta A. Hasse”; digital images, Newspapers.com, (https://www.newspapers.com/) accessed 31 July 2023.

Luckily I've had some luck finding family members in Klein Massowitz, Kreis Bütow, Pomerania where the family was born. My database tells me that there was an Alwine Ida Kramp, born in 1877, the last child of Richard Kramp and Emilie Trabant. This is likely our Ida.

Augusta and her sister Laurette/Laura emigrated to Chicago in 1881. Augusta was already married to Carl Hasse, while Laurette was joining her fiance Wilhelm Gohr, who had emigrated to Chicago earlier that year. But according to emigration records Ida didn't come over until 1912, still unmarried, to join her sister Augusta.

Ida married Frederick Kelle, also from Germany (not known what part) in Chicago in 1916, where they lived together until Ida's death in 1948. They had no children but were likely part of the extended Kramp/Hasse/Gohr family circle in Chicago.

31 July, 2023 | Email your comment.

Hans Petersen: one in a million

Maybe there weren't exactly a million fellows called Hans Petersen in the United States, but there were a lot, and particularly a good handful of them in Nebraska.

But we're looking for a particular family constellation here: Hans, a wife called Christina, and two children, Peter and Lina. What do you know? Here they are in Thayer County -- same place where Hans' parents, siblings, and cousins live!

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Citation: “Nebraska, State Census Collection, 1860-1885," database with images, 1885, Thayer and Valley, Ancestry Library (https://www.ancestrylibrary.com), entry for Hans Petersen and family; provided in association with National Archives and Records Administration, accessed 18 July 2023.

Landing on this record was somewhat circuitous. I first found Christina and her children on a passenger manifest for October 1883, but Hans wasn't with them. In cases like this it's common for the father to emigrate first and set up a home for the rest of his family, and in this situation that's exactly what happened: Hans emigrated in March 1883.

It's no surprise that he would have settled first where his parents were living. His cousin (also called Hans Petersen) came over in 1872, and Hans' younger siblings and parents in 1878. They were all in Thayer County, Nebraska by the 1885 state census, a handy document to have since the 1890 census is missing. Not all states offered their own census records, but luckily Nebraska did.

Where Hans and his family went after this time is a new topic to pursue.It appears that son Peter married at least twice, but research is still ongoing. No trace of Hans, Christina, or Lina has been found after 1885, but hopefully something will turn up in the future.

Why is this an important discovery? It helps us verify that the five men in this photo at right are indeed the five Petersen brothers, sons of Peter Hansen Petersen and Elise Christina Momsen, and that they all emigrated to the United States. Hans wasn't just here for a flying visit, nor did the other four brothers make it back to Nordfriesland for a family reunion. The simplest, most direct explanation is the best one. The five got together, probably somewhere in Omaha, where most of them lived by the end of the nineteenth century, for this portrait.

The back row shows Peter Hansen Petersen the younger (born in 1860), Hans Peter Petersen (1854), while the seated brothers are (from left) Andrew, Louis, and Alfred. Andrew had already relocated to Kenosha, Wisconsin after his marriage in 1889. The other brothers all remained in Nebraska, as far as we know. At least we have three of the four remaining brothers documented there well into the twentieth century. Their sister, Catharina, who married their first cousin (also called Hans Petersen), had moved to Chicago around 1890. Since this was a brothers' portrait we assume that Catharina wasn't able to join the rest of the family.

Next project: find out how long Hans lived, and what happened to his wife and children.

18 July, 2023 | Email your comment.

The second Matilda

It wasn't unusual for a child to be named after a deceased sibling in German and Danish families. It happened multiple times with our Petersens of Nordfriesland. That's the case in this record.

The first child of Georg Petersen and his wife Christiane Gÿldenzoph was Mathilde Botrea Petersen, born in 1867 and died at age three in 1870. It's not clear where the name Mathilde came from. None of the godparents were named Mathilde, and the child's grandparents didn't have that name in their ancestry. But it appears to have been a sentimental name when the couple's second daughter was born in 1873.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (http://www.archion.de/p/e8d0fd8157/ : 2 July 2023), baptism of Mathilde Petrea Christina Petersen 1 November 1873, path: Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Schleswig-Flensburg > Flensburg-St.Johannis > Taufen 1869-1887 Image 82 via https://www.archion.de/, accessed 2 July 2023.

This time the child is Mathilde Petrea Christine, Petrea probably in honor of someone called Peter, Christine for the godfather, perhaps. But except for Christine these names don't appear in the list of godparents.

Interestingly one of the godparents is Cecilia Petersen of Jundewandt, just over the border into Denmark in the parish of Burkal. Cecilia was Georg's older sister, born in 1830, so it's nice to have confirmation that she was still alive in 1873. We know nothing about her otherwise. The second godparent is Anna, no surname listed, from Flensburg-St. Nikolai parish; her connection to the family is unknown. The third is a Christian Christiansen from a village that looks like Medelby in Nordfriesland, where lots of our Petersens were born and raised.

Mathilde ended up in Sandusky County, Ohio, with her parents, where she married Andrew Bechtold in 1899. This helped us locate her, Andrew, and her father George in the 1900 census. George died in 1901, according to the Sandusky Star-Journal. Andrew and Matilda had one daughter, Alverna, before divorcing before 1910. Both Alverna and her mother ended up in Worland, Wyoming, where Matilda's brother Gustav had resettled.

But there's an unanswered question. The obituary mentions that George was survived by three daughters and one son -- presumably George's wife Christiane had died earlier. We can account for one son, Gustav, and two daughters, Matilda and her younger sister Anna Catharina Christina, who had married Jan Martin Eschels, who also lived in Sandusky County. Who was the third daughter who came to America?

DNA matches helped us find this family in Ohio and Wyoming. Perhaps another match will lead us to the missing Petersen daughter.

2 July, 2023 | Email your comment.

A clue within a marriage

Sometimes inverting a search brings the results you'd been looking for with a straightforward approach.

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Citation: Ancestrylibrary.com, State of Ohio, Affidavit for Marriage License, No. 34 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014,, accessed 22 June 2023.

I'd been beating my head against a wall looking for a death record for Georg Petersen, my great-great-grandparents' younger brother. I assumed that he died in Flensburg, where he was married, had children, and worked. But scrolling page by page through the Flensburg church books at Archion wasn't getting me anywhere. First of all, there are at least three different parishes in Flensburg where the record could be. Secondly, none of the records are indexed. You have to search record by record. And you still might not find anything. Georg might haev relocated to another parish with his family. I'd never know, if that was the case.

I couldn't find anything searching for Georg Petersen so I decided to try a search using just his wife's name, no location, just Christiana Gÿldenzoph (or Güldenzoph) who was born in 1839.

Ancestry Library politely ignored the birth year and gave me a link to a record in Sandusky County, Ohio, where a young lady indicated her parents names on her affidavit for a marriage license in 1899. She was marrying Andrew Bechtold. Her parents were listed as August Petersen and Christiane Güldenzoph. That's pretty close! Her brother was Gustav, close to August. Sometimes folks get things mixed up on official documents, especially when a wedding is involved.

So how is this record revealing anything new about our Petersens? Easy -- it suggests that Georg and his wife had a daughter called Matilda. Which they did...but the one I knew about died in 1870 at age three in Flensburg and never emigrated. Was there perhaps a second Matilda?

There was, and thanks to the bride indicating her birthdate I was able to find her baptism record in Flensburg, which confirmed her parents' names: Georg Petersen and Christiane Botilla Gÿldenzoph.

The 1900 U.S. federal census revealed Andrew Bechtold and his wife Mathilda living with Matilda's father George. So that's the key! George was the third Petersen brother to emigrate to the USA. We don't yet know what happened to George's wife Christiane. Did she die in Flensburg before he came over, or in Ohio where a record has not yet revealed it? More to explore, clearly.

22 June, 2023 | Email your comment.

A chatty death record

There's so much information in this death record that it feels like a special gift. It really depends on the protocols of the parish. Sometimes you get just a line of details -- a name, age of deceased, and date. In other circumstances, like this one, you get a story.

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Citation: Danish National Archives (Arkivalieronline), Tønder Sogn, Kontraministerialbog, Døde mænd og kinder 1788 - Døde mænd og kinder 1847, death of Jürgen Lorenzen 1 Jul 1793, image 40/383, Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen (National Archives, Copenhagen, (https://www.sa.dk/ao-soegesider/en/billedviser?epid=22045410#455265,81457742) accessed 8 June 2023.

For context, Jürgen Lorenzen is the grandfather of Ellen Jürgensen who married Hans Peter Petersen in 1822 and established a rich line of Petersen children from 1822 through 1839 in Nordfriesland. Jürgen's name could be inferred from his son's name, Lorenz Jürgensen (father of Ellen Jürgensen if you're keeping score); by convention it makes sense that Lorenz' father must have been named Jürgen. Luckily for us his father's name was also specified in Lorenz' 1799 marriage record. So was his mother, Anna Jeppes[datter]. So we had some clues prior to finding this document.

But here in the 1793 death record we have:

• The date of death (July 1) and date of burial (July 4)
• Jürgen's occupation ("Arbeitsmann," laborer)
• Jürgen's parents' names, Lorenz Jacobsen and his wife Catharina (no name) and their village of origin. Perbüll (now Perbøl), Denmark
• Jürgen's age: 65 years, 9 months!
• Jürgen's wife's name, Anna, and her parents' names: Jepe Nilsen and his wife Anna of Jolderup
• The names of Jürgen's living children: Lorenz, Anna, [Anna] Catharina, and Jacob.

Where do we go from here? The most tempting direction is to find Jürgen's baptism in October 1727, but if he was from Perbüll like his parents, that town in the parish of Bjolderup started keeping records in 1740 and we won't find a baptism that early. He may have been registered in another parish nearby, such as Burkal or Tønder, worth checking out.

We may also want to look for a marriage record for Jürgen's parents around 1760, approximately when their first son Lorenz was born. But that too requires some sleuthing. Where did it take place? In Jolderup (the bride's parish) or some other local parish? It's worth exploring to see how far back we can go.

Nevertheless this is an excellent starting point to fill in the blanks in our family research.

8 June, 2023 | Email your comment.

Names don't change...until they do

Genealogist Jennifer Mendelsohn has a video presentation that neatly debunks the persistent myth of name changes at Ellis Island. You've heard it. Your ancestor came to America with one name and when being processed at the famous emigration station in New York he or she emerged with a new "Americanized" name.

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Citation: Jennifer Mendelsohn, "No Names Were Changed at Ellis Island: Debunking a Persistent Myth," Rootstech presentation via FamilySearch, September 27, 2021, available online at https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/session/no-names-were-changed-at-ellis-island-debunking-a-persistent-myth, accessed 21 May 2023.

It didn't really happen. In our case it looks like it did, in a way. The Petersen family from Leck, Schleswig-Holstein, left Hamburg on an indirect passage bound for Liverpool, England. One child is correctly listed on this manifest as Ludwig Petersen, one of twin boys born to Peter Hansen Petersen and his wife Elise Christina Momsen. He and his brother Andreas are listed correctly as ten years old. But when the family arrived in New York at Castle Garden, the precursor of Ellis Island, mysteriously Ludwig had become Ludorinetti, now age nine!

As Mendelsohn notes in the video presentation, immigration inspectors had to check family names agains the departure manifest from the point of departure. The names had to match. This was a requirement of the immigration process. So how did this happen to little Ludwig?

Well, the surname stayed the same, Petersen. Where did Ludorinetti come from? Possibly a misreading of the child's first name from some intermediate document, or maybe a joke originating with Ludwig himself. What's clear is that his name remained Ludwig, though sometimes ludicrously misspelled, as in the 1880 census for Fillmore County, Nebraska, where the family settled. Here Ludwig comes out as "Rodewig." Orthography was an unpredictable science until the early twentieth century when it became de rigueur to have spelling correctly written in documents of all kinds.

Nothing says that an imigrant couldn't change his or her name after settling in the new world. Ludwig was the name he used as a teenager and young adult, but in the family he was also known by the name Louis. His nephew was named Louis after him.

But Ludorinetti vanished after its one appearance on the New York ship manifest, probably forgotten by the whole family and left as a curious footnote to the now-debunked myth about name change.

21 May, 2023 | Email your comment.

A brief betrothal

In Nordfriesland (and perhaps other regions) a public betrothal preceded a marriage, requiring a public declaration of the couple's intent to marry. That's what this record from Karlum records.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (http://www.archion.de/p/833be0f4a9/ : 7 May 2023), betrothal of Thomas Lorenzen and Margarethe Jensen 8 Oct 1837, path: Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland > Karlum > Aufgebote-Verlobungen 1763-1873 Image 57 via Archion.de.accessed 7 May 2023.

Normally a marriage would follow, also to be duly recorded in the Karlum church books. But for whatever reason that didn't happen. A child was born to this couple, Paul Christian Lorenzen, who was baptised on 25 April 1838, but no marriage is found. The betrothal was a legal document, however, and it remained in place until 1846, when the document was annulled.

Thomas presumably went on his way and Margarethe Jensen remained with her parents, stepfather Chresten Hansen and mother Catharina Maria Nissen along with her son Paul Christian. They're enumerated in the 1840 census in Karlum.

In 1848 Margarethe married Lorenz Peter Petersen, son of Hans Peter Petersen and Ellen Jürgensen. They had three children together: a stillborn son in 1848, Hans Peter in 1850, and Christian Hansen in 1852. Christian died in 1858 but Hans, along with his parents, emigrated to Belle Prairie, Nebraska in 1872, becoming successful farmers. Hans eventually married his first cousin Catharina Petersen when she and her family came to Nebraska in 1878.

We don't yet know what became of Margarethe's older son Paul Christian. It would be nice to complete the puzzle someday.

7 May, 2023 | Email your comment.

Petersen by marriage

The nice thing about Schleswig-Holstein records is the plethora of information that may be included. It depends on the parish, of course, but Flensburg records are very chatty, and in the case of Eduard Petersen's widow we have some family updates.

I'll admit to using Ancestrylibrary.com (Ancestry.com may work for you) to research clues for this family. In both the case of Eduard's and Maria's death records it worked: Ancestry has Flensburg death index cards and those can provide a date or date range for further research in Archion. Use helper records wherever you can.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (http://www.archion.de/p/5b3771e8cc/ : 30 April 2023), death of Maria Catharina Rotz Petersen 31 March 1909, path: Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Schleswig-Flensburg > Flensburg-St.Marien > Bestattungen 1907-1913 Image 112 via Archion.de.accessed 30 April 2023.

This record gives us a plethora of details: Maria's full name, per parents' names, her birthdate and birth place, updated names for her children including their married names (where relevant) and their ages. The only thing we don't see here is who her husband was. We know she was a widow and from other records we know she was married to Eduard Petersen, so all in all it's a nice collection of information to add into our database.

One thing to note: her elder daughter Elena was married to an Asmus Christian Clausen in 1888 (Eduard's death record confirms Elena's married name in 1892), but here in 1909 Elena is married to a person called Koschke, who we'll have to look up to see what we can find.

A second daughter, Maria Catharina, is married to a fellow called Kempfer. Heinrich, the only son, doesn't have a married name, of course, but there are other resources to find out whom he married and where he lived. More to come!

April 30, 2023 | Email your comment.

The elusive Eduard Petersen

Among the many children of Hans Peter Petersen and Elle Jürgensen was Eduard, their youngest, born in 1839 in Weesby, Nordfriesland. Until now we didn't know whether he lived a long life or emigrated to America, or just what happened. Archion comes through again with its excellent collection of Nordfriesland records.

Flensburg seemed to be an attractive city for the younger Petersens. Eduard's older brother Georg lived there along with his wife and children, and so far as we can tell Eduard did too. The Flensburg death index card for him lists Eduard as a tonarbeiter, a clay worker. He was 53 years old at his death.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (http://www.archion.de/p/8ba9b973e1/ : 24 April 2023), death of Eduard Petersen 29 July 1892, path: Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Schleswig-Flensburg > Flensburg-St.Marien > Bestattungen 1881-1899 Image 246 via Archion.de.accessed 24 April 2023.

The record does give us some detailed information that we didn't have before this. His wife is listed as Maria Rotz and his surviving children are listed as Elena Maria married to a Clausen, Maria Catharina, and Heinrich Carl.

We don't yet know when he and Maria were married, but we may find out with the records in Flensburg or close by. It probably depends on where Maria was born because the parish selected was usually the bride's, but it's worth casting a net further afield in case tradition doesn't hold in this case.

April 24, 2023 | Email your comment.

A life ended too soon

Peter Hansen Petersen and Elise Christina Momsen had eleven children from 1844 through 1867, nine boys and two girls. At least four of the brothers died fairly young, from age 8 to age 47.

This was the couple's fourth child and third son, Christian Nicolai. We'd been able to find records of his marriage in 1874 to Ingeborg Catharina Jensen, as well as the births of their four children. But this death record explains why there were no more children and no emigration for Christian or his wife. Christian died in 1886 at the age of thirty-six, very young for that time.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (http://www.archion.de/p/14fad2eca5/ : 18 April 2023), death of Christian Nicolai Petersen 9 September 1886, path: Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland > Leck > Bestattungen 1879-1961 Image 42 via Archion.de.accessed 18 April 2023.

Christian and Ingeborg had four children during their marriage and at least one of them, Lina Christina Petersen, actually did emigrate on her own, not to Nebraska where so many other Petersen siblings ended up, but to Spokane, Washington, where she married a Max Carl Passler from Limbach, Bavaria. It's not yet known what happened to her mother and brothers, who may or may not have journeyed to America. More research will be needed to explore what happened to the family. It's a process and it seems it never ends.

Lina and her husband Max had three children in Spokane: Amalie "Mollie" Passler, Max Junior, and Margaret. It would be interesting to see whether any of them come our way via a web search and help us fill in the blanks about their own family history.

April 18, 2023 | Email your comment.

A picture of you

This image has remained unidentified for years and may never be definitively determined. But with the help of a Facebook page dedicated to helping us understand the date and context of a photo, we're a little closer to a theory.

This image comes from the collection of Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen, who rarely inscribed her photos because she probably assumed she'd always know who they were. We don't, of course, but she may not have anticipated the interest that future generations might have in her collection. It's likely a Petersen photo...but which Petersen?

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Cathie Meyer, unidentified Petersen youth, original image undated and without photo studio imprint, cabinet card; original copy scanned in 2005, Chicago, Illinois.

The Facebook group "Genealogy CLUES- Dating Old Photographs" has been helpful in narrowing down the timeframe for this photo to the late 1890s, possibly even 1900-1902 based on the young man's collar, tie, and dress. His hairstyle is unusual for any timeframe, however. In fact, in the entire pantheon of Petersen families for whom we have pictures, there's only one fellow who has a similar look and hairstyle.

It's a spikey almost long crew-cut style that was unusual for the time, but the man on the right side of this photo had it as well, and we know who he is: Peter Edlef "Alfred" Petersen, one of the five Petersen brothers who emigrated to Nebraska from Nordfriesland in the late 1870s. The man on the left is Alfred's brother Ludwig, later Louis. The rounder face and soft hairstyle was common to the other four brothers, but Alfred's look was distinct. It resembles the young unidentified man very strongly.

If the young fellow can be dated to the late 1890s or early 1900s, there's only one candidate who this could be. Alfred had a son, Henry Peter Petersen, who was born in Hebron, Nebraska in 1885. If this is his image, he was about fifteen or sixteen. The formality of the photo suggests that it's a confirmation portrait -- the Petersens were big on confirmations.

We have photos of Catherine's own children, one of whom is the right age for this photo, but none of them look at all like this young man. Their faces are more round, their hairstyles dark and soft. We also have photos of Alfred's brother's family and none of them are old enough to match the age of this teenager. It also doesn't look like any of the relatives who remained in Nordfriesland.

Dare we give it a tentative identification of Henry, Alfred's son? It's tempting to do so, and it makes the most sense to me unless something more compelling explains who it is.

April 12, 2023 | Email your comment.

The Burmeisters of Sillerup

When I first saw this image in Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen's photo collection I had no identity for this couple. As a placeholder I called this photo "Danish Couple" because there was literally no information about them, not a caption or date or anything to suggest who they were.

In fact, Catherine's copy of this photo was slightly damaged with a prominent fingerprint on the left side of the emulsion and veering toward a reddish color where, predictably, Catherine's red-colored cardboard frame likely damaged the print. A second cabinet card, like its twin manufactured in Kenosha by the Henry W. Reith photography studio, emerged from the photo collection of another Petersen relative in Omaha, Nebraska, where Catherine's brothers lived. This version had a faint pencil notation indicating that it was Fritz and Helen Burmeister who had stayed in the "old country" and died there.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Donald Leu, Carl Friedrich (Fritz) Heinrich Burmeister and his wife Helena Petersen Burmeister, original image created in Nordfriesland and copied at the Henry W. Reith studio in Kenosha, Wisconsin circa 1885; original copy scanned and digitally enhanced by Topaz Photo AI version 2023.

The copy process likely took place in Kenosha because Catherine's brother Andrew Petersen lived there, and clearly he shared a copy with his sister in Chicago and his brothers in Omaha. The date on the Omaha version may be off by a few years. I suspect that this was actually take around the time of Fritz and Helena's marriage in Leck, Nordfriesland in 1874. The clothing style and Helena's hair fashion suggest it, but it could equally be from the later part of that decade. What's remarkable is that it turned up in two different family collections, and that the Omaha print had the all-important identifying caption.

Lately, thanks to our Nordfriesland cousin Mario Petersen, who is a direct descendant of Helena, we know a lot more about this peaceful-looking couple. After Fritz and Helena married in 1874 they ran a guest house in the town of Sillerup near Lindewitt -- in fact there's a photo of the guest house itself and Helena dressed in a hostess uniform ready to serve their customers.

What we didn't have was any concluding information about this couple, whether they lived anywhere else and when they died. We knew that Helena was a godmother to her granddaughter, also named Helena Marie Petersen, who was born in 1896 to Matthias Petersen (the elder Helena's son) and his wife Esther Louise Moller Petersen. That gave a statring point to researching the burial records in the parish of Leck, where all the primary events of their lives were documented. So starting from 1896 I searched through the records via Archion.de, which has excellent digital copies of every birth, marriage, and death in Leck for this time period.

It's a deliberate process. These records aren't indexed so it's essential to go through them page by page to find what you need. But the handwriting is clear and methodical, so that's a plus. I found Fritz' death record first in 1902, just after his fiftieth birthday. The clerk transposed his two middle names (close enough), he's listed as married, his profession is "Gastwirt" or guest house manager, and he's fifty years old. That's what we needed to know. Fritz had a brother, Adolf Burmeister, who lived in the region too, having relocated from their home village of Dodow in Camin-Wittenberg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. We don't know what happened to Adolf, but that's a separate research issue.

What about Helena? Working onward through the burial records resulted in her death in 1922 at the age of 73 -- 74, it's listed here, although the clerk may have been rounding his numbers up. She's listed as Helena Burmeister, no birth surname (usually the records indicated "geboren [surname]" when the clerk was being more informative), and is listed as a widow. She had no profession in this record so it's likely that she was living in retirement with her son Matthias, although the lack of census records for this region at this time make it difficult to confirm.

We know from ship manifests that Catherine Petersen and her second husband Thomas Mikkelsen visited Nordfriesland via Copenhagen in 1914 because we have a passenger list showing their return from the trip. It makes sense that Catherine would have wanted to visit her remaining brothers in Schleswig, the ones who never emigrated, and Thomas probably had relatives of his own in Ladelund, his birthplace. Catherine probably also visited Helena while on this trip, but we have no identifiable photos of such a reunion. Perhaps they'll turn up someday in someone's collection.

April 5, 2023 | Email your comment.

More about Teke/Teken/Deecke

When you examine the list of Teke/Teken/Deecken births from the 1700s in Visbeck, there's really only one candidate for the elusive Maria Gertrud, and that's the one in the image above, baptised on 23 April 1751. If she's the bride who married Joann Alardus Grave in 1781 and needed the dispensation to do so, one of our questions has been answered...but not all of them, alas.

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Citation: Imaged at Matricula Online (https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/deutschland/vechta/visbek-st-vitus/KB02_01/?pg=30 : 31 March 2023), baptism for Maria Gertrud Deecken, path: Startpage Deutschland Vechta, r.k. Offizialatsarchiv Visbek, St. Vitus Taufen | KB02_01 Image TA_030 via https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/ accessed 31 March 2023.

One of my favorite genealogists once said, speaking of documents prior to the 1900s, "Othography didn't exist --forget it." He was pretty much right! "Accurate" spelling simply wasn't a part of the mix. Clerks did the best they could to identify people based on the pronunciation of their names. In German, "t" and "d" might be pronounced the same, which probably explains the transcribed variations of the Teke/Teken/Deecken surname. That and the fact that women's names had the "-en" suffix tacked on to indicate the feminine ending of the name, which often became a part of the male version of the surname too.

So the father of Maria Gertud was Herman Heinrich Deeke, or Deeken, or Deecken...not much of a variation, actually. The mother of Herman Heinrich's children, Herman's wife, is pretty consistently spelled Anna Elisabeth Averbecke. An oddity: when this couple married on 26 Nov 1748 there were no witnesses to the marriage. Both were from Visbeck. Either they really had no witnesses or the clerk failed to list them, for whatever reason. That's a bother. We could have used the clues about those witnesses to draw more conclusions about who their relatives might have been.

As it is, from the godparents that are listed for their five children, it's a mix of Averbecke relatives (expected), people married to Deecke spouses (again, expected), or apparently unrelated folks such as Reineke, Grote, and Muckerheyde. If we dig deeper we might find a connection there as well. Then again, sometimes baptisms honored people who were not related to the child but who were associated with the parents in other ways. It's a puzzle that sometimes defies a clear solution.

We're dealing with a lot of "ifs" then, and that may be the best we can do. If this is the correct Maria Gertrud and if her father was Herman Heinrich Deecke, then possibly Herman was born 2 Feb 1723 to Johan Henrich Deke (another spelling change) and Geseke Dreß, with godparents for this child being Herman Deke and Marga Gert. Dreß, whose connection to the family is as yet unknown.

So far this doesn't tell us how Maria Gertrud Teke and Joann Alardus Grave were related to the point where they required a dispensation to marry. Was the close relationship on the Averbecke side? If so, that's not clear either. It's frustrating that the Visbeck parish priest knew about it and didn't leave us the details. But they probably never imagined that people almost three hundred years later would be trying to figure it all out.

March 31, 2023 | Email your comment.

The mysterious Miss Teken

If there was ever a controversy about a marriage, this is surely a prize-winner. When Joan Alardus Grave and Maria Gertrudis Teken married in 1781, the parish clerks and everyone else in it probably knew a dispensation would be required. The question is why was this required and who this conundrum involved.

Dispensations weren't that unusual in Visbeck. It was a smallish community and after a time nearly everyone was related to each other in some way. The local Catholic priests were more invested in making sure that whatever relationship the bride and groom had, it was distant enough not to be a problem. Here it appears that the couple had a fourth degree of consanguinity, most likely meaning that they shared an ancestor, maybe a great-great-grandparent, maybe a closer relative.

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Citation: Imaged at Matricula Online (https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/deutschland/vechta/visbek-st-vitus/KB04_01/?pg=10 : 25 March 2023), marriage dispensation record for Joan Alardus Grave and Maria Gertrudis Teken, path: Startpage Deutschland Vechta, r.k. Offizialatsarchiv Visbek, St. Vitus Trauungen | KB04_01 Image TR_056 via https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/ accessed 25 March 2023.

The problem is that we don't know what relative they shared, and for Maria Gertrud the church records are not revealing their secret. Clearly the clerks knew. The dispensation doesn't spell out who in their background was at issue. We can actually trace Joan (Joannes) Alardus Grave's ancestry back a few more generations, but not Maria Gertrud's. It appears that she's one of those elusive characters whose baptism and death records can't be found, despite relatives and ancestors waltzing in and out of the picture at stated intervals. We have the marriage record and the births of their five children. We have Joan Alardus' death record. But that doesn't help us find Maria Gertrudis.

One complicating factor: the spelling of her surname goes through transformations. Teken seems to be the exception. That's the way it's spelled in this marriage record, and her relative's surname appears that way too. But in earlier and later records it appears as Deeke, Decke, Decken, even Teckman. I made a list of everyone with that surname and its variants from 1739 through 1765, the likely timeframe for her birth (considering that she wasn't likely to have married younger than fifteen years old). The infant's name is first, then the parents, then the godparents, which may or may not reveal a connection clue. All spellings and abbreviations are original.

• 1739 Mar 18 Catharina Margaretha to Gerhard Henrich Deeke and Maria Free: Anna Margaretha Free and Wilkinus Deeke
• 1740 May 19 Maria to Johan Deke and Catharina Borgers: Johan Henrich Deke and Maria Borgers
• 1742 May 10 Catharina Maria to Gerhard Henrich Deecken and Maria Angela Meyer: Maria Nordtman and Johan Henrich Meiners
• 1748 Nov 26 Herman Heinrich Deeke to Johan Henrich Deke and Geseke Dreß: Herman Deke and Marga Gert. Dreß
• 1749 Gesina Maria to Herman Henrich Deecke and Anna Elis. Averbeke: Anna Marg. Deeke and Caspar Reineke
• 1750 Feb 15 Anna Catharina to Johan Decke and Marg. Maria Meyer: An. Cat. Deeken from Holtrup and J.H. Meyer
• 1749 Oct 3 Gesina Maria to Herman Henrich Deeke and Anna Elis. Averbecke: Anna Marg. Deeke and Caspar Reineke [Caspar was married to Maria Gertrud Averbecke]
• 1751 Apr 23 Maria Gertrud to Herman Heinrich Deeken and Elisabeth Averbecke: Maria Gertr. Averbecke and Gerd Heinrich Grote
• 1754 Jan 27 Johann Henrich Deeke to Herman Henrich Deeke and Elisabeth Averbecke: Johann Poelman (married to a Maria Deeke) and Gesina Averbecke
• 1756 Aug 9 Maria Elisabeth to Herman Henrich Deeke and Marg. [sic] Elisabeth Averbecke: Maria Deeken and Herman Muckerheyde
• 1757 May 15 Joan Bernard to Joan Deeke and Marg. Maria Meyer: Bernard Albers and A.C. Pulsfoert u. Meyer
• 1758 Mar 9 Twins: Herm. Henr. and Joes. Gerh. to Hermannus Henricus Deeke and Elisabeth Averbecke: 1. Henricus Siever c. [condictus = known as] Averbecke and Marg. El. Grote 2. Wilkinus Deeke and Catharina Averbecke
• 1764 Nov 24 Maria Gertr. to Joann Deecke and Marg. Maria Meyer: Maria Gertrud Meyer, Berendt Dobbeler
• 1765 Apr 14 Maria Cath. to Herm Henrich Deecke and Anna Maria Ostendorff: Cath. Gertr. Ostendorff, Joann Henr. Grothe
• 1765 Oct 15 Joann Gerdt to Gerdt Henrich Deeken and Maria Zumdorff: Joann Buschelmann, Maria Gertr. Deeken
• 1766 Oct 25 Anna Maria to Joann Henrich Deecke and Maria Ostendorff: A.M. Timmermann c. Grothe, J.H. Schillmoller

There's only one Maria Gertrud born in 1751, but there's no way to know whether that's her from this information. The constellations of surnames don't show up in the marriage record except for one, Schillemöller, probably Johann Henrich here, Fridericus in the marriage record. Other than that, Averbeck surnames abound. But none of them in the list above have any concordance to the marriage record, so none of them tell us about the birth/baptism of Maria Gertrud.

Where do we go from here? That's a next step.

March 25, 2023 | Email your comment.

Found! Right where she ought to be...in Oythe

A little detail such as the lady's town of origin would have made this search a lot easier, but I didn't have that information. None of Maria Pulsfort's available documents -- birth of her first child in 1817 or death in 1846 -- mentioned where she'd bee born. And because I didn't have any clue about that, I couldn't find her marriage either, since it's common that women were married in their own home parish.

Next step: I figured that Maria had to have been born in the region. People didn't stray far from their home territories as a rule, especially unmarried girls. And this lady had four first names. How hard was that going to be?

The Matricula Online database has a plethora of parishes and I figured that if all else failed I could just go through each one and look at the exact date where her baptism was supposed to have been recorded. After all, I had her death record from 1846 and that included her exact age: 53 years, five months, ten days. There are some helpful calculators online, my favorited being the Tombstone Birthday Calculator. So her birth/baptism date ought to be February 8, 1793 or thereabout. She wasn't in Visbeck so she had to be in one of the surrounding parishes.

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Citation: Imaged at Matricula Online (https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/deutschland/vechta/oythe-st-marien/KB02_01/?pg=64 : 15 March 2023), death and burial record for Maria Anna Ludovica Catharina Pulsfort, path: Startpage Deutschland Vechta, r.k. Offizialatsarchiv Oythe, St. Marien Taufen | KB02_01 Image TA_066 via https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/ accessed 15 March 2023.

I got through about twenty parishes up through those starting with "L" but then got discouraged. No indexes exist for these records, but wasn't there a better way? Maybe someone else had looked her up elsewhere. Ancestry? Nothing there. How about Geneanet?

Geneanet offers free and subscription options for searching records that other researchers have put online, mostly from their own trees. That can be a dangerous route if the researcher's information isn't well sourced, but there might just be enough for a clue. I decided to look for Maria by her full name, but nothing was there. Then I decided to look for Bernd Pulsfort, who had been a godparent at her first child's baptism in 1817 in Visbeck. Who was Bernd? A brother or father of the mother? No matter, something did come up: there was a Bernard Pulsfort born before 1799 in Oythe.

Oythe! It was a parish just a few kilometers from Visbeck, could be an option. So I looked for a Maria Pulsfort born around February 8, 1793...and there she was, right on the dot for her correct baptism date. The Geneanet entry didn't have exactly what I wanted but what it did have was enough of a clue to help me find Maria.

And now that I knew Maria's parish, I could search around for her marriage, which should be within a few years of the birth of her child Maria Elisabeth Grave in 1817. Sure enough, there was the marriage in 1816, also in Oythe as expected, to Johann Heinrich Grave. This marriage record confirmed Maria's parents' names, clarified her father's occupation (a tenant farmer on an Oythe estate). Not surprisingly Bernd Pulsfort was a witness to the marriage -- almost certainly a brother of the bride -- and a Johann Heinrich Fernhorn, about whom we know nothing.

Maria's baptism record also points out the use of an alternative surname in the family. Maria's mother is identified in the baptism record from 1793 as Maria Elisabeth Altehoff, whereas in the marriage record from 1816 she's Maria Elisabeth Lüttman. A brief foray through the Oythe baptism records reveals that the daughter Maria was the last (or one of the last) children born to this couple and that the parents used an alternate surname of Altehoff.

Maria's father is listed as "Pulsfort sive Altenhoff" or "Pulsfort disctus Altehoff", called Altehoff, probably taking the name of the farm estate where he worked. Maria's mother was born Lüttman but also used Altehoff has her surname in the baptism records of some of her children. This made it easier for the parish officials to identify the person in question, for instance if there were too many other families called Pulsfort. You knew you had the right one this way.

Now it should be possible to work our way back to see whether we can identify the origins of Maria's parents.

March 15, 2023 | Email your comment.

On the hunt for an elusive multi-named lady

When I found Maria Elisabeth Grave's baptism record, I was happy to see her parents' names listed so clearly. This was something we'd lacked in the records she left in the United States. Not one other record -- marriage, death, emigration, naturalization -- mentioned who her parents were, so this line was more or less quiescent until the Matricula Online records helped us clear the mist from the past.

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Citation: Imaged at Matricula Online (https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/deutschland/vechta/visbek-st-vitus/KB10/?pg=31 : 10 March 2023), death and burial record for Maria Anna Ludovica Catharina Pulsfort, path: Startpage Deutschland Vechta, r.k. Offizialatsarchiv Visbek, St. Vitus Beerdigungen | KB10 Image B_030 via https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/ accessed 10 March 2023.

Pulsfort is not a common name in the region. There are a handful of Pulsfort surnames in the Vechta region as early as the seventeenth century. There's a 1652 marriage of a Willhelmus Pulsfort in Vechta St Georg. Is this fellow related to the Maria Pulsfort who married Joannes Hinrich Grave sometime around 1817? We don't know, mainly because our Maria Pulsfort is an elusive lady. We don't know where she married (marriages usually occurred in the bride's parish) so we can't follow her family back in time.

Nor was Maria Anna Ludovica Catharina Pulsfort born in her current partsh of Visbeck. The exact age of 53 years, 5 months, 10 days is extremely useful, but looking back at the records for 1793, where her birth ought to be, she's not in Visbeck. Neither is she in a handful of other close local villages. Where's she hiding? With all those names she ought to be prominent.

There's a clue in the birth/baptism record for her presumed firstborn daughter. A Bernd Pulsfort is one of the godparents to the child born in 1817. Is this the child's grandfather or uncle? Good questions, but at the moment we don't know. He's not identified according to his village of origin.

There are Pulsfort families in neighboring villages such as Dinklage and Emsteck. The research plan could involve a systematic review of every parish in Vechta to see whether we can locate Maria in and around the year 1793, give or take a few years on either side -- remembering that clerks made mistakes and could have miscalculated her age at death. It'll take some time but eventually we hope to find her birth and discover more about her own ancestral line.

March 10, 2023 | Email your comment.

Brick wall: gone with the wind

Finding a new online database is always an exciting prospect, and this is no exception. Recently someone on an email mail list I subscribe to mentioned Matricula Online, a compendium of various Catholic records. Why had I never paid attention to this before? No one knows...but this time I sat up straight and took notice.

I have only a few ancestral lines that involve Catholic records, and one of those regions is represented by a Matricula Online collection: Vechta in the region of Oldenburg. Here I have a plethora of folks who have surnames such as Bruns and (as I used to believe) Grewe. Turns out Bruns was right, more or less, but Grewe is actually Grave, and they're pronounced almost identically. No wonder our emigrant family in Cincinnati had trouble figuring out what it was.

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Citation: Imaged at Matricula Online (https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/deutschland/vechta/visbek-st-vitus/KB05/?pg=38 : 7 March 2023), baptism of Maria Elisabet Grave, path: Startpage Deutschland Vechta, r.k. Offizialatsarchiv Visbek, St. Vitus Taufen | KB05 Image TA_037 via https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/.accessed 7 March 2023.

The name in the past was spelled Grawe on Mary Elisabeth's daughter Mary Robben’s death certificate in Cincinnati, spelled Graweba on her son George H. Bruns’ 1916 death certificate in Chicago, and in the Cincinnati Freie Presse her maiden name was listed as Grewe, as well as Greve in her son Augustus Bruns’ marriage record from Cincinnati. Who could make sense of it?

We also had the birth and baptism date wrong, somehow reported as November 27, 1817. The year was right but the date was a month off. Looking at the 1900 U.S. federal census we can see that Mary Elisabeth reported her birth month to be December 1817. And that's what her baptism record confirms, as shown in the image above.

For the first time after nineteen years of searching we have her parents' names, Joannes Hinrich Grave and Marie Elisabet Pulsfort, with godparents listed as Berndt Pulsfort and Marie Elisabet Doht. The first is likely a close relative (mother's father or brother, perhaps?) but no clue about Elisabet Doht. More research is needed to find out.

And that's something we can look forward to performing! The records for St. Vitus Parish in Visbek go back to 1651, so there's a lot to explore once we get started. What's really remarkable is how -- if you wait long enough -- the resources online often reveal secrets that have been hidden for decades. All that's required is patience.

March 7, 2023 | Email your comment.

The ephemeral Barbara Hartkorn

Anytime you find records that are more than one hundred years old you're bound to encounter issues with reliability. It's not necessarily the fault of the people in charge. Mistakes are made, transcriptions are misspelled, clerks are distracted. It happens.

The image above is particularly extraordinary. If you have surnames such as Jatho, Schuckmann or Schuchmann, Dressel, or Künzel/Kientzle, you descend from this family. The very existence of this document is a miracle. Considering what can happen to old church books -- lost portions, damaged pages, total destruction -- having a document that details our ancestor from the time of Shakespeare's birth is a wonder. Only the clerk appears to have mis-transcribed the child's name.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (http://www.archion.de/p/896416b465/ : 3 March 2023), baptism of Barbara [sic]/Maria Hartkorn 8 February 1562, path: Browse > Württemberg: Landeskirchliches Archiv Stuttgart > Dekanat Tübingen > Remmingsheim > Mischbuch 1558-1719 Band 1 Image 7 via Archion.de.accessed 3 March 2023.

From other records in this collection we know that there were two if not more men called Martin Kientzle, one of them (perhaps this one) the son of a mayor of the local village of Nellingsheim. We don't have this one's marriage record, which would have taken place within a few years of this baptismal event. Martin was probably born around 1535-1540, his wife Barbara around the same time. Their child listed here is Barbara, same name as the mother, baptised February 8, 1562. A year later this same couple had a son, Johannes. Those are the only two children we can find for this couple.

The trouble is that Barbara never turns up again. She didn't marry in the parish of Remmingsheim, she didn't show up as a godparent to anyone's children, and she doesn't appear in the list of deaths for Remminsgheim. She disappears.

But a Maria, daughter of Hans Hartkorn, does appear in 1589 as the bride of Martin Kientzle of Nellingsheim. Martin and Maria have eight children from 1590 through 1606. A Martin Kientzle's death is recorded in 1612 in Remmingsheim -- might be the one married to Maria or might be an older one married to Anna Trüberin. Maria's death is recorded on January 19, 1633. If you calculate her birth year from her age, listed here as 70 years old, it works out perfectly to 1562, the year where the ephemeral Barbara Hartkorn's baptism is recorded.

Clearly Hans Hartkorn and his wife Barbara didn't have twins in 1562 or both names would have been indicated. Maria couldn't have been born in 1561 because the records don't indicate any such birth. Neither is one recorded from 1559-1560. And in 1563 the son Johannes was born. From 1563 onward there's no record of a child Maria being born to Hans and Barbara Hartkorn. In fact no further children of this couple are recorded.

The pages for these years appear to be intact with no apparent interruption in sequence. The only likely scenario: the clerk wrote down the wrong name in 1562, accidentally indicating the mother's name as the infant's name. Maria Hartkorn's presence is established. There appears to be no Barbara except for this questionable entry in a church book almost five hundred years old. And no one went back to correct the record or make an explanatory notation suggesting what may have happened.

Conducting a reasonably exhaustive search for alternatives is our only option, and turning to Occam's Razor, the most likely explanation is a clerical error. No one will ever tell us for certain. This makes the most sense, and sometimes the most sense is the best we can do.

March 3, 2023 | Email your comment.

Afternoon in the garden

There's some uncertainty about the identity of this lady. My Mikkelsen cousin has it identified as Anna Sofia Mikkelsen Jensen, who was born in 1876 in Ladelund, Nordfriesland to Thomas Mikkelsen and his wife Helene Sievertsen. But there are elements that suggest this could be someone else. We just don't know who.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Rosemary Douglas Alewine, Anna Sofia Mikkelsen Jensen, Chicago, Illinois about 1925; original copy scanned and digitally enhanced by Topaz Photo AI version 2023.

Anna came to America originally in 1887 with her mother and siblings to join Thomas, who had emigrated to Chicago. Something happened, we don't know what, and Helene and the children returned to Ladelund. One by one, as the children were older and could travel, they returned to Chicago to be with their father. Anna came back to Chicago in 1892. She was only sixteen but decided to marry a fellow immigrant, Neils Jensen, that same year. She and Niels raised four children in Chicago.

The thing with Annie's photos: she always was pictured wearing wire-rimmed glasses. We can't find a portrait where she didn't wear glasses...except for this photo above. She may actually be holding them in her right hand as she relaxes in the garden on this warm afternoon.

In terms of age, this woman in the garden also looks older than someone would look who was born in 1876, and her style of dress looks more common for the era from about 1910-1920. But this is another trap of identifying old photos. Depending on one's family genes, any person could age beyond what was common for their era, and anyone (particularly older folks) could cling to dress styles that they'd grown used to in younger days. This might be the case with Annie. Was it taken in 1920, 1925, or even 1930? We can only guess.

And we can be fairly certain that this photo was taken in Chicago. The pillow to Annie's right has a bit of embroidery on it in English, perhaps done by one of her daughters, Marie or Alma.

We'll continue to explore options to successfully date identify adn date this photo. It's possible that other Mikkelsen cousins may want to weigh in too.

February 25, 2023 | Email your comment.

Tiny spark

Sometimes it takes years for the obvious answer to pop up. And when it does, you wonder why it took so long.

This is a nice snapshot taken about 1910 on the front porch of the home of the Mikkelsens. Thomas is standing. His wife Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen is seated at the right. We don't know who the lady is at left wearing the remarkably intricate necklace. A neighbor, a good friend, a relative? That's typical of Catherine, who rarely marked her photos so later generations could know who was in the portrait. And that's not the point of this post.

Thomas and Catherine were old friends when they courted and married in 1906. That much is obvious. Thomas had been married twice already, once to Helena Cecilia Sievertsen of Leck, who followed him briefly to Chicago but divorced him in 1887 and went back to Schleswig; and once to a Maria Hansen, about whom we know nothing, who was born in 1842 in Germany and was probably little more than a housekeeper for Thomas until she died in 1902.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Catherine Meyer, Thomas Mikkelsen, Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen, and unknown lady, Chicago, Illinois; original copy scanned in 2006, enhanced Topaz Photo AI version 2023.

Catherine Petersen was also born in Leck in 1962 and married her first cousin Hans Petersen in Nebraska in 1878. He died in 1905 in an unfortunate drowning in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Catherine and Hans had eleven children together, six of whom were still alive in 1906. Catherine and Thomas presumably had kept in touch over time. I'd wondered whether Thomas and Hans were old pals from the old country, having grown up in neighboring villages. Thomas' first mother-in-law was a Petersen, Anna Catharina Botilla, who married Jacob Broder Sievertsen. Helena's mother was Anna, sister of Catherine's father Peter Hansen. That means that Catherine and Helena were first cousins.

There it is! That's the connection. It might not seem entirely sensible to choose a wife who was a cousin of the lady who divorced you. But maybe Helena and Catherine were as different as a night and day. Who knows what the attraction was? It seems obvious now. Of course Thomas knew Catherine. Maybe there was always a tiny spark between them ready to be nurtured into love.

These were small towns and people felt a kinship with their neighbors, even after they emigrated and resettled elsewhere. It was certainly the case that Catherine welcomed Thomas' children from his first marriage and there are plenty of photos showing their get-togethers. And Thomas must have been a friendly influence in the home they shared as a stepfather to her children. One of Catherine's sons even named his firstborn son after Thomas.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. There's always a clue about relationships in the details of our relatives' lives, and it pays to attend to them. At least now I won't be endlessly ruminating about how the romance got its start.

February 19, 2023 | Email your comment.

Four brides and their foliage

Apparently wedding bouquets were only popularly introduced in the 19th century, but I noticed a unique custom among some brides who usually had a Germanic or Scandinavian background: a strand of leaves or flowers! What did it mean?

I noticed it in some posed photos from the 19th and early 20th centuries. A strand of greenery and/or flowers appears to be draped around the back of the bride's head and around the ears and over the shoulders down the front of the bodice. Sometimes the strand appears to be just leaves, sometimes blossoms, and sometimes both.

The handsome couple in photo 1 shows a strand of leaves wending its way around the bride's veil. In photo 4 we know more about the couple, who are Catharina and Hans Petersen, both of Leck and Tinningstedt in Nordfriesland. Catharina's strand appears to include lily-like florets as part of the veil, trailing down her velveteen dress.

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Citation for image 1: Digital image from a glass negative, studio of John (Jno) Johnson of Centerville, South Dakota, circa early 1900s, Mary Jane Dunkin and August (Gus) Hartig, collection of Robin Clark at Memory Lane Photo Restoration, https://memorylanepr.com/, accessed 14 February 2023.

These brides sometimes carry bouquets as well but the flower/leaf strands appear to be unique to a style seen only in northern Europe. We know that in ancient times some cultures used strands of herbs to protect the bride against evil spirits, and ivy was a popular choice in ancient Greek ceremonies because it symbolized eternal love.

But what did it mean for these brides? Perhaps a sweet-scented addition to the dress? There were also "garland dances" where the bride and groom would be linked by a garland of flowers as they danced together. Perhaps this decorative element was a remnant of that tradition.

These brides also seem to wear a unique floral crown or cap, not a wreath per se but a floral addition woven into the top of the veil, probably made of lace. In three of the examples the bride also wears a non-white dress of pastel or deeper colored fabric. White was popularized by Queen Victoria in England when she wore a white gown for her marriage to Prince Albert. Less opulent marriages required the bride to repurpose her gown for special occasions after the wedding, and the more decorative the color, the easier it would be to clean and preserve. The brides of yore were practical.

February 14, 2023 | Email your comment.

Lina Christina Petersen and the New World

Sometimes you have a spare moment on your hands and perform a genealogical palate cleanser by looking at something other than what you're looking for. And sometimes you find a clue completely unrelated to your search but intriguing in its own right.

That's what happened here, when a completely random search for Petersens not in Nebraska resulted in a 1963 social security claim from a family called Passler for a lady called Lina Christina Passler, whose maiden name was Petersen and whose parents were Christian N. Petersen and Ingeborg Jensen and who apparently lived in Spokane, Washington.

For good measure, the deceased Mrs. Passler shared the same birthday, July 24, as our Lina Christina, although the year was off by a couple of digits. That's not unusual. People forgot or didn't know their own birth year, or had reason to pretend that it was something else. It's not enough to reject a coincidence out of hand.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/en/viewer/?no_cache=1&type=churchRegister&uid=264287 : 5 Februrary 2023), baptism of Lina Christina Petersen 12 October 1879, path: Browse > Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland > Leck > Taufen 1879-1907 Image 10 via Archion.de.accessed 5 February 2023.

Godparents of the child were interesting. They included a Hans Johnsen (or possibly Johansen originally) and Elena Petersen Burmeister, the child's paternal aunt and for whom Lina was named. But this record doesn't tell us anything -- or confirm anything -- about Lina's later peregrinations across the pond.

Our Petersens did emigrate to America but until now we know it was to Nebraska and later to Chicago and Kenosha, all in the midwest. This would be a first: a Petersen going to the West Coast. What was there?

Lina's 1906 passenger manifest shows her traveling with friends or relatives called Johnson and Petersen from regions near Leck, where Lina was born, headed to a friend's home in Almira, Washington, a Julius Johnson. Interestingly, a Julius Christian Johnson had settled in Almira and had become a prosperous banker, an attractive destination for any family looking for a start in the New World. Was Julius Johnson related to the Hans Johnson who was Lina Christina's godparent? It's very likely.

This is where autosomal DNA can clear the air. I had a match with a lady whose tree includes Lina Passler, her husband Max, and daughter Amalie. The match is distant but definitive. It's one of the useful tools that a genealogist has at his or her disposal and it can verify a connection where other documentation can only provide strong hints.

I've written to the lady with whom I match to see whether she'd like to share Petersen information. Goodness knows we have a treasure-full of documents to provide!

February 6, 2023 | Email your comment.

A family portrait: who's really who?

It's hard enough to identify photos in a collection where the photos don't have an inscription. But it's even harder when family members look alike.

For years I thought that this portrait was Alfred Petersen of Omaha and his extended family. It made sense. All the male Petersen brothers had that distinctive heavy mustache, and only a couple of the brothers had a close-cropped hairstyle. Alfred did, and so did his brother Peter. But when you compare the ages of some of the folks in this picture with documents about Alfred, there's something off.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Catherine Meyer, Peter Hansen Petersen and family members, Omaha, Nebraska circa 1936; original copy scanned in 2005, enhanced Topaz Photo AI version 2023.

It's true that Alfred (born Peter Edlef) Petersen and his family lived in Omaha after he emigrated from Nordfriesland in 1878 and spent a few years in Hebron, Thayer County, but he lived most of his life in Omaha, where his children were born, married to Mary Thomsen until her death in 1893, then possibly (or not) married to his former housekeeper Hannah Andersen.

His obituary in the August 26, 1933 issue of the Omaha World-Herald doesn't mention Hannah as one of his survivors, but it does mention his sister, Catherine Mikkelsen of Chicago, brother Peter Hansen Petersen of Mason City, son Henry, daughters Ann Davis and Elizabeth Hoffmann, as well as eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren -- a considerable legacy. But if Alfred died in 1933, he can't be in this photograph. The youngest children's ages give us a clue. And if so, that man with the mustache must be a different brother.

Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen in the flowered dress at the left of the photo is actually standing next to Peter Hansen Petersen, Alfred's brother, along with Alfred's family. From left we have Peter Hansen Petersen, Catherine Mikkelsen, in the back wearing a white shirt and tie probably John Hoffmann, Elisabeth's son, then Elizabeth, in front of her Cathie Breetske (Catherine's granddaughter), Ann Petersen Davis, Albert Hoffmann in front next to Cathie (another of Elizabeth's sons), Hannah Andersen, and Walter Breetzke, husband of the photographer Florence Mikkelsen Breetzke.

This is the best we can do. Dating the photo is easier because we know that Cathie was born in 1928 and Albert Hoffmann in 1922. She looks eight years old, he looks fourteen. If that's the case, we have a date for the photo of 1936, when Catherine and her Chicago relatives decided to visit her Omaha family.

There are other photos from this visit, although none with any other unidentified family members. So this date and place seem reasonable in a case where we only have circumstantial details to help us tell who's who in family snapshots.

February 1, 2023 | Email your comment.

A deadly storm

Genealogy sometimes reveals the sadder side of life. The excerpt above can be read in full here. It's the first time I've ever seen a death record for two people on the same day who perished in the same calamity.

Jens Sørensen and his friend Jens Bakkensen Jensen apparently went out fishing on the sea when a storm blew in that wrought havoc with their plans. The notation at the end of each entry is almost identical: "On June 3rd [1840] he sailed out for fishing, and he died the same day at sea because of severe stormy weather. His body was not found."

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Citation: Kirkebøger, Ribe Amt, Oksby Sogn, Døde Maend 1837-1847, Opslag 4, Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archives https://www.sa.dk/ao-soegesider) accessed 28 Jan 2023.

Jens Sørensen was the son of Søren Jørgensen and Inger Jensdatter, born in Sielborg (now Sjaelborg), Hostrup, Ribe in 1770. He was the older brother of Barbara Sørensdatter who married Peter Hansen and began a line of Petersen ancestors in our family. Jens was married too, at least twice according to the 1801 Danish census, with a second wife, Mette Simonsdatter, who was ten years older than he was.

The family included a foster daughter, Inger Madsdatter, who lived with him at least long enough to be confirmed in 1815. That's pretty much all we know about Jens except that he was also a soldier for a time and mostly a day laborer.

Tragedy was lurking around the corner for Jens' sister as well. Barbara Sørensdatter married Peter Hansen, a tailor, in 1797 and their son Hans Peter Petersen was born a month after their marriage. They had one more son, the poetically named Adam Lauzen Lange Petersen, in 1806. Adam never married. Hans married Ellen Jürgensen from Jundewandt in 1822 and his line flourished, although curiously none of his daughters were named after his mother.

Almost two years after Jens' untimely death, Barbara died in May 1842 at the side of a road north of Varde and was found by a Mr. Windfeldt. Permission was sought from the county to bury Barbara, who had lived her last few years in an alms house with several other women. We can't imagine what was going on, why neither of her sons were able to take her in. Was she mentally ill or otherwise unable to live with them? Adam was a farm laborer who never owned his own property, so that may explain it somewhat. Why Hans and his wife Ellen couldn't accommodate Barbara is another issue unexplained by the records. Some family tragedies remain unsaid and unknowable.

January 28, 2023 | Email your comment.

Burmeister's Gasthof

Our cousin in Germany had a note on his tree for Elena Maria Petersen who married Fritz Burmeister and at first it was puzzling: "Eltern hatten eine Gastwirtschaft in Sülerup bei Lindewitt," it said.

I wasn't sure whether this meant that Elena's parents had a guest house in the town of Sülerup (now Sillerup) near Lindwitt in Schleswig-Holstein, or that she and her husband did. Turns out it was the latter. As this postcard clearly shows, the place was called "Burmeister's Gasthof" and it was, indeed, located in Sillerup. So Elena and Fritz were hoteliers!

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side of a postcard, auctioned and sold at https://www.akpool. co.uk, Postcard Sillerup Lindewitt in Schleswig Holstein, Thomsen's Geschäftshaus, Burmeister's Gasthof, Mathiesen, accessed 23 Jan 2023.

This was an occupation I hadn't considered for the couple. Most of her family members were laborers, cottage farmers, or in the case of her father and grandfather, glaziers. But this was a new one for the family.

Another cousin has provided a photo of Elena herself in her hostess uniform at work in the Gasthof, so undoubtedly it's true. She and her husband Fritz ran Burmeister's, and it was popular enough at the time to be advertised on a postcard from the region.

Elena and Fritz acted as godparents to several of her siblings' children when they were born in and around Leck, but I noticed that she didn't appear there after about 1885. Maybe the place to look for her in the parish records is near Sillerup? It may be in the Lindewitt parish, located about ten miles southeast of Leck. Worth a look in any case.

Did any of Elena's family work here? we haven't heard about it. Her son Matthias Peter Petersen, so we're told, worked with his brother-in-law Nikolas Möller in Friedrichskoog, and they were responsible for the development of the Kaiser Wilhelm Koog, an area of reclaimed land situated along the North Sea coast in the district of Dithmarschen in Schleswig-Holstein. So more than likely Elena and Fritz worked in their Gasthof themselves in what was then (as now) a picturesque part of the country.

January 23, 2023 | Email your comment.

Andreas Ludwig Petersen: a mystery solved

A couple days ago I had a hunch and followed it through. Turns out that I was on the right road.

I've known about these twin boys for a long time: Andreas and Ludwig Petersen, the last two boys born to Peter Hansen Petersen and his wife Elise Momsen in January 1867. But I also found that there was an older brother, Andreas Ludwig Petersen, born to the same couple in 1852. What happened to him?

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/en/viewer/?no_cache=1&type=churchRegister&uid=274624 : 19 January 2023), baptism of Andreas and Ludwig Petersen, path: Browse > Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland > Leck > Taufen 1855-1878 Image 87 via Archion.de.accessed 19 Jan 2023.

It's customary in German and Danish families (maybe in other cultures as well) to name children after an ancestor, but not to repeat names within the same family at the same time. Mostly this custom was observed in the records I'm familiar with, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps this was a clue: maybe it explained why I couldn't find a confirmation or marriage record for the older Andreas Ludwig. Did he die early?

If so, it would have to have occurred during a narrow frame of time. Andreas Ludwig was listed as part of his family in the 1860 Danish Census, which also included Nordfriesland and their town of Leck, part of Denmark at the time. The twins were born in January 1867. So if there was a death, it occurred between 1860 and 1867 in any of the towns where the Petersens were known to live. That means Medelby, Karlum, and Leck.

I tried Karlum first. No trace of a death record there during those years. How about Leck, where the family also lived in the 1860s? I scrolled through 1860-1867 page by page and was not very surprised to find exactly what I was looking for. Less than a year before the twins were born was the record for Andreas Ludwig Petersen, who had died at age 13 in 1866.

This explains a lot. It also confirms that Andreas Ludwig never had a chance to grow to manhood and travel to the United States with his family in 1878. Nor could a mysterious photo, labeled by our Nebraska cousins as "Andrew and Mathilda Petersen," be attributed to him -- he never married. This must be someone otherwise connected to our family of Petersens, maybe cousins, maybe friends.

It's always sad to come across evidence of a family tragedy, however distant. Parents and siblings grieved just the same as we might if it had happened to us. But it does give a bit of closure to an otherwise curious part of our ancestors' past.

January 19, 2023 | Email your comment.

Eighteen years in search of a marriage

We knew about her and we knew about him. Two different Petersen families had this photo in their collection, one family in Omaha, one in Chicago. Another family member probably had a copy in Kenosha where these copies were made, according to the cardboard frame: Henry W. Reith Studios. An online list of Wisconsin photography studios places his years of operation from 1893-1904.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Donald Leu, Omaha, Nebraska: labelled "Helena + Fritz Burmaster, Alfred Petersen's sister + husband"; original copy scanned in 2014, enhanced for clarity by Topaz Photo AI program 2023.

The inscription on the reverse identifies the couple as the sister and brother-in-law of Alfred Petersen of Omaha: "Helena and Fritz Burmaster". It also indicates that the couple "stayed and died in the old country" and dates the photo to 1885. Their clothing styles confirm the date, more or less.

If they never left Schleswig-Holstein, what kind of life did they have there? Those stories didn't migrate with Helena's brothers, alas. But parish records in and around the town of Leck tell a tale. I've been searching for their records for eighteen years. I hired an intrepid researcher to find family records in the archives at Kiel, and he did a bang-up job. But there was only so much he could do with available funds and when the money ran out we had to terminate the search.

Little did I know when I subscribed to Archion late last year that these records would be part of the online collection. It's been a welcome flood of information since then. At first I searched in vain for Helena and her husband Fritz. Before I found them, I ran across an unexpected record: a baptism record for Helena's child, Matthias Peter in 1872, who was born in December 1871. She wasn't married at the time. The record states that the father was alleged to be Matthias Tÿchsen from the nearby farm village of Boverstedfeld, just four or five kilometers from Leck. Godparents to the child were Helena's father Peter Hansen Petersen and her cousins Hans Peter Petersen and Maria Sievertsen.

But this didn't solve the mystery of Helena's marriage to her husband Fritz. When did that happen?

Remarkably it was pretty soon afterwards. Click to enlarge the image (it's part 1 only, there's a part 2 which I'll upload if you want to see it). Elena Maria (as she was always referred to in the parish records of Leck, not Helene as we know her) married Carl Friedrich Heinrich Burmeister [not Burmaster] just two years later in 1874. The marriage record is remarkably chatty, partly because Fritz (as he was called) was born miles away in a small village called Dudow in the principality of Wittenburg, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. What he was doing in Leck is anyone's guess, but at least the marriage gives us the groom's correct and full name, his parents' names, his birth and baptism date, confirmation date, and a plethora of other information telling us about the groom's past.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/en/viewer/?no_cache=1&type=churchRegister&uid=274624 : 15 January 2023), marriage of Carl Friedrich Heinrich Burmeister and Elena Maria Petersen, path: Browse > Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland > Leck > Trauungen 1873-1899 images 11 and 12 via Archion.de, accessed 15 Jan 2023.

For Elena Maria, she's referred to as a Madchen (because she hadn't yet been married), daughter of Peter Hansen Petersen and Elise Momsen, correct birth and baptism date, confirmation, vaccination, and all the other details required by the parish in Leck. No mention of Elena Maria's child Matthias Peter Petersen, who retained her surname rather than his father's, Tÿchsen. Did Elena and Fritz raise him together? Did the happy couple have children of their own?

The answer to the first question may be obvious, because the records indicate that Matthias grew up, married, and had children of his own, whoever and wherever he was raised.

Whether Elena and Fritz had their own chidlren? We'll need to do some more exploring to find out. Maybe some of our "orphaned" photos of little children -- those without an inscription or indication who they might have been -- will be identified in time.

January 15, 2023 | Email your comment.

A DNA mystery starring Georg Petersen

I have an autosomal DNA match to a lady who has this tree on her page. The only possible connection that I can see would be the person she lists as George Petersen, born in 1839.

I have one of those, a Georg Petersen, son of Hans Peter Petersen and Ellen Jürgensen, but he was born in 1837, not 1839. Oh well, maybe her calculations are off (mine are verified by several sources so I know we're all right there). A few years here and there can't be too big an impediment in history this old. It's worth exploring.

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Citation: Public Member Trees, database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 11 January 2023), “Cottey Family Tree” managed by ewhitson08, profile for Barbara Payne, undocumented data.

A few days ago, coincidentally, I ran across a marriage record for my own Georg Petersen via Archion.de and a baptism record for their son Martin. That led to the baptism of a second child, Anna Catharina Christine, from 1875. I checked the exact baptism date for the child in Barbara Payne's tree: it matches to my Georg's child, 11 January 1875. The mother's surname is unusual and I noted it at the time: Gÿldenzoph. The tree doesn't have this surname but the details match the mother: Christiane Bothilde, who was born 1839 in North Kiesum, Schleswig-Holstein.

So this explains the match. Georg Petersen is indeed our common ancestor.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/en/viewer/?no_cache=1&type=churchRegister&uid=274624 : 12 January 2023), baptism of Anna Catharina Petersen, path: Browse > Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Schleswig-Flensburg > Flensburg-St.Johannis > Taufen 1869-1887 image 104 via Archion.de, accessed 11 Jan 2023.

What we know about Georg: he was the penultimate child of Hans Peter Petersem a glazier in the area near Weesby, Schleswig-Holstein, and his wife Ellen Jürgensen from Jundewandt just over the border in Denmark. Hans and Ellen had nine children. Only two of them, the eldest brothers Peter and Lorenz, emigrated to the United States. Georg and his wife Christine did not. But their daughter did.

Anna Catharina Petersen married Jan Martin Eschels in Erie, Ohio, according to the collection Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993 via Ancestrylibrrary.com, so she must have emigrated shortly before that time. Jan became John in the U.S., so look for him with that name. Except for a brief foray into Louisiana, where their first son was born, John and Anna settled in Sandusky, Ohio. John died in 1947, Anna in 1957.

If you have connections to this Petersen family, don't forget to research the Eschels surname when looking for descendants.

January 12, 2023 | Email your comment.

Not related? A Michelsen investigation

When I started looking into this particular conundrum I knew there was very little likelihood that harpsichordist Rafael Puyana and I were related. As it turns out, we're not, but that's not the end of the story. Click the image to enlarge it.

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Citation: Ancestry.com. Denmark, Church Records, 1812-1924 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc, 2019, Rigsarkivet; Danmark; Kontraministerialbog; Reference: 8027680591, Denmark, Church Records, 1812-1924 for Carl Michelsen, Odense Amt, Odense Mosaiske Menighed, 1814-1896.

In Danish genealogy (in fact, in almost any genealogy) having the same surname isn't proof of anything. What surprised me was reading in his liner notes on the back of a harpsichord album that his full name was actually Rafael Puyana Michelsen. Michelsen! We have some of those, spelled alternatively Michelsen or Mikkelsen (same name either way). In my family it was a patronym adopted as a surname by my step-great-grandfather's family. Thomas Mikkelsen (born 1850 in Schleswig-Holstein) was the son of Niels Michelsen, who was himself the son of Caspar Michelsen. And just to spice the mix, some of Caspar's children from his second marriage were called Casparsen, showing that the patronym/surname custom wasn't yet cast in stone.

The spelling of Rafael's second surname with the sen tag suggested a Danish connection, and the Colombian custom of including a child's parental names in father/mother order suggested that Rafael's mother was the Michelsen, part of an immigrant family from Denmark to Bogota sometime in the 19th century. But interestingly none of his LPs, nor his online obituaries, mention anything about parents, just that he started playing piano when he was six years old.

Where to turn in such a situation? To Ancestry.com, which might have some information on the family somewhere.

Plugging in "Rafael Puyana" as a name brought up this passenger manifest from 1940, where eight year old Rafael's parents and sisters are named. Ernesto was a merchant, traveling from Bogota to New York to his brother David Carrera (not sure where that name came from, but let's not worry about it right now). Rafael's mother was Alicia...Michelsen? At least that was her family's surname at some point, and she passed it on to her son Rafael.

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Citation: Ancestry.com. New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010, year: 1940; arrival: New York, New York, USA; Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Line: 11; Page Number: 186.

Some kind soul has assembled a family tree at Geni which you can use with caution since it isn't sourced, but it may give some clues. And it does! Alicia was born Alicia Michelsen Mantilla in 1892, daughter of Ernesto Michelsen Uribe. Her grandfather was Karl Michelsen Koppel, whose confirmation record is at the top of this post.

Whoever put this tree together uses the Hispanic custom of listing the person's paternal and then maternal surnames, even if this wasn't the Danish custom. But it's helpful. It tells us that Carl Michelsen was the son of a Michelsen and a mother Koppel. That leads to the record in Nÿborg, Denmark, where we find out that Carl's father was Isaac Michelsen and his mother Rosine Koppel. In fact, Carl's fifteen-and-a-half year old sister Helene were confirmed on the same day, same parents. But there's an interesting detail in the confirmation place. It was a Jewish congregation...in Denmark!

Specifically it was the Odense Mosaiske Menighed, the Odense Jewish congregation. In 1814 the Danish government decreed that Jews in Denmark were to have the same civil rights as other Danish citizens. As a result, Jewish congregations shared their parish records with the government, which included them in the general Danish archives. Lucky for us!

While we know that our Michelsen clan of Ladelund was Lutheran and Rafael's maternal ancestry was not, this information certainly lights up an otherwise hidden part of Puyana's ancestry. Did he know about this part of his family story before he died in 2013? Possibly not, but we know it now. And while you're contemplating this discovery, feel free to listen to Rafael Puyana in action playing Padre Antonio Soler's "Fandango." This is the LP that lists Rafael's name as Puyana Michelsen!

January 8, 2023 | Email your comment.

As long as we're in a marriage-record mood....

For marriage records this is probably as early as we're going to find in and around Leck, Schleswig-Holstein. Click the image to enlarge it.

We have other marriages from other regions of Germany that were earlier, e.g. our Schuchmann clan of Hausen and Reinheim, where marriages are recorded as early as 1576 (Hans Schuchmann and Anna Funck, for instance). In Leck in Nordfriesland (Schleswig-Holstein today) available records are not quite as old, but that's what makes this one interesting: its antiquity for the region.

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/en/viewer/?no_cache=1&type=churchRegister&uid=274624 : 29 December 2022), Jens Peters marriage to Hanna Pauls, 2 June 1740, path: Browse > Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Nordfriesland > Leck > Trauungen 1740-1763 image 88.

This is a marriage for Jens Peters[en] and Hanna Pauls[en]. Later on in Leck and in neighboring villages marriage records became very chatty, with the bride's and groom's dates of birth, confirmation, vaccination record (yes, really, children in this region were vaccinated for smallpox starting in the 1820s), parents' names, certificates of celibacy in some cases (though how this could be confirmed I can't imagine, or maybe I don't want to imagine), and witnesses.

Here not even the marital couple's entire names are spelled out. They're using patronyms at this point anyway so we're expected to understand that Hanna was either known as Paulsen or Paulsdatter, and of course that indicated that her father's name was Paul [patronym]. Same with Jens, his father's name was Peter, so he's Jens Petersen. Their son will be Jensen...but we're getting ahead of ourselves here -- all in good time.

Later on, around 1822, the king of Denmark (who was nominally ruler over this area) decided that it would be easier to keep track of people if they had an actual surname, so he decreed that folks should pick one and stick with it. But at this point that wasn't the case.

Jens and Hanna had two witnesses to their marriage, which was common at the time: Claus Hansen and Malcke Jürgens[en]. It's probably a female name, e.g. Malka, although rare in these records it does occur. The marriage occurred on June 2, 1740 and all the participants, witnesses included, were from Leck, a town so close to the Danish border that you could walk there.

Ten years later this couple (we assume it's the right couple, the mother's name isn't mentioned) had a child, Paul Christian, baptised on the 20th Sunday after Trinity, which works out to 28 October 1750. Godparents are three here: Hartke Hansen, Joh. [Johann] Henkel, and Ane Dorthe Schildts, all of Leck.

Paul Christian Jensen, a cottage farmer, grew up in the area and had a late marriage (he was sixty-five!) in 1815 to Catharina Maria Nissen, with whom he had a daughter, Margarethe, who was born in 1816. We know "Magretta" well. We even have her phtoograph. She was the wife of Lorenz Peter Petersen, and with their son Hans they emigrated to Nebraska in 1872.

January 3, 2023 | Email your comment.

A Gohr marriage in Chicago

When you think about it, this marriage took place only six years after the Great Chicago Fire. Had it taken place prior to that, we might not have the record to review.

Why is it important to have this record? Albert Gohr, it appears, is a relative of our Gohr family, or so an autosomal DNA match indicates. He was born in 1855 in the town of Zetzenow, near Nippoglense where our other Gohr ancestors were from, and emigrated to America in 1874. Another Albert Gohr, some ten years older, had emigrated to Chicago and married theer as well in 1874. We now know that the Alberts were cousins.

Was the younger Gohr joining a cousin whom he knew to be there? It seems likely. Both Albert Gohrs must have known about each other, although the younger Albert Gohr and his bride Wilhelmine Stenke moved to Kimball, Jackson Township, Minnesota and established their home base there, whereas the other Albert Gohr (1844-1989) remained in Chicago with his wife Wilhelmine Paulina Möwes and family.

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Citation: "Illinois, Cook County Marriages, 1871-1968", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:N78Y-B5S : 24 December 2022, Albert Gohr and Wilhelmina Stinke, 26 Mar 1876; image obtained from Familysearch.org look-up service online.

The younger Albert's wife's maiden name was transcribed variously as Stinke, Stenke, and even Steinke, so that should be considered when doing a search on these folks. Does the actual marriage record give us any further information about the couple, perhaps by examining witnesses to the marriage? It appears that this is the case.

The first thing to track down was the parish affiliation of the officiant, if possible. Rudolph Lange. One of the nice folks from the Facebook Chicago Genealogy page provided a selection of Chicago directories from 1875, which is helpful because Rudolph lange was only in the Chicago area from 1872-1878. This comes from the Chicago Ancestors website. Rudolph Lange was at Emanuel Church on Brown Street at the corner of Taylor. It was a German-language congregation, which makes sense for the Gohrs, who would have felt comfortable in that environment.

Are the parish records of Emmanuel Church available online? They are: in this format as a PDF collection. Image #108 will show us the actual marriage record, including the witnesses. While those names don't tell us ow the two Alberts are related, they do show a Theodor Nagel, Johann Gohr, and Maria Stinke.

We can assume that Johann Gohr is a brother or cousin of Albert. Maria Stinke is probably a sister of the bride. Who is Theodor Nagel? Find-A-Grave tells us that Theodor was married to Wilhelmine's sister Caroline Stenke. As a bonus, this page gives Wilhelmine's parents' names too.

So we have more connections to pursue!

December 30, 2022 | Email your comment.

An engagement party

It doesn't look very festive, but nevertheless it was a cause for capturing on film. George Petersen, the fellow with the fancy watch and chain, had just become engaged to Agnes Majoros, the serious young lady holding her sister-in-law-to-be's hand. The family gathered on a day in 1917 to commemorate the occasion -- not all of the family, but every one who could be rounded up.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Catherine Meyer, George Petersen, Agnes Majoros and family, Chicago, Illinois; original copy scanned in 2006, enhanced Topaz Photo AI version 2022.

George Petersen was the penultimate son of Hans and Catherine Petersen, born in 1897 in Chicago. Hans had died in 1905 and George's mother remarried Thomas Mikkelsen in 1906 so this is a mixed conglomeration of folks.

George's younger brother Clarence Petersen is at left, then George, his mother Catherine nearly hidden behind George, then George's fiancee Agnes Majoros, a tall and rather confused lady behind her whom we can't identify, Florence Mikkelsen, George's half-sister holding Agnes' hand, and Mary Majoros at the right, Agnes' mother.

The Majoros clan already had a daughter in the family. Annie Majoros married Catherine's and Hans' eldest son Louis in 1900, so Agnes was the second Majoros girl to be welcomed into the Petersen/Mikkelsen clan.

The unidentified tall lady appears in this snapshot too. Catherine is at left, the lady in the middle, and Mary Majoros on the right, apparently taken the same day outside Catherine's home on Loomis Street in Chicago. She must be someone related to the happy couple, but who?

It would be so nice if people labelled their photos on the back, but Catherine must have assumed that she'd always know who everyone was, or that she'd always be around to answer questions if anyone asked. A lot of guess-work has gone into curating Catherine's photograph collection as a result.

The marriage between George and Agnes took place on September 7, 1917 in Maywood near Chicago and produced two daughters, Violet Catherine Laverne (1919-2001) and Georgia Christine (1933-2003). We don't have any photos of the wedding itself, so this will have to do...a snapshot that sparks questions as well as answers.

December 23, 2022 | Email your comment.

A missing child is found

It's not strictly true that this child was missing. I knew that he existed, first-born son of my great-great-grandparents Peter Hansen Petersen and Elise Christina Momsen. But prior to this record I could only see Hans Peter Petersen in the Danish census records. In 1845 he was listed as a one-year-old child in the newlywed couple's home. By the 1860 census he was gone.

What I was missing was his actual baptism record and any indication of what happened to him in the meantime. I assumed that he had died at some point but I had no evidence. On a whim I decided to take advantage of Archion's holiday priicing and bought myself a year's subscription. What a surprise: their home village of Medelby in Schleswig-Holstein was part of the archive!

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Citation: Imaged at Archion (https://www.archion.de/en/viewer/?no_cache=1&type=churchRegister&uid=274624 : 18 December 2022), path: Browse > Norddeutschland: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Kirchenkreis Schleswig-Flensburg > Medelby > Bestattungen 1847-1898 > image 83 of 162.

The record above (click the image to enlarge it) shows the child's birth and baptism dates. I know it's the right family because the parents are properly identified by name as well as by place, as are the family members who act as Taufpaten, or godparents. It's always exciting to see who was selected because usually (especially with the first child) these are recognizable close family members. That's the case here.

Hans was born on September 17, 1844 and baptized a few weeks later in October. His godparents were his paternal grandfather and namesake, Hans Peter Petersen, his paternal uncle Lorenz Petersen, and his maternal aunt, Christina Momsen. That paints a nice picture of the family unit as it was in 1844.

But the pathway to discovering this record was a sad one. I first found Hans' death record from 1853 (see the image at left and click to enlarge). He was eight years and four months old. No cause of death was given. But the parents are named, so we know we have the right child.

Just a year later there was a new Hans Peter Petersen in the family, born in June 1854, the sixth child of an eventual eleven. No doubt the name was chosen once again to commemorate the deceased firstborn child as well as (perhaps by this time) the also deceased grandfather. This Hans grew to adulthood and made it to Nebraska to join the rest of his immigrant family, where he no doubt encountered a first cousin with the same name: Hans Peter Petersen, son of his uncle Lorenz Petersen.

My cousin Albert Esser reminds us eloquently: "All of us who are still alive today are lucky. We're the champions of evolution. We’ve been in it since the beginning of all lives. We should not forget this and treat our fellow human beings and our world a little more humbly."

We're so lucky to find out -- and record -- the history of our ancestors, even those who were almost lost to time.

December 18, 2022 | Email your comment.

Kebschull mysteries

In the area around Kreis Stolp in what was once Pomerania there are a plethora of Kebschull families, one of which shows a match with my autosomal DNA test. People who submit autosomal tests via Ancestry.com aren't always enthusiastic about contacting people with whom they match, or (on the other side of the coin) responding to queries from people who match their line. It's one of the hazards of participating in these testing services. You can't get your hopes up. You may have to research the old-fashioned way: moving from one generation back to the next, using available online records.

This family pictured at right may be part of our Kebschull clan, or they may not be. The easy way to tell would be convincing one of their descendents to take a test. The harder way is tracing back from their submitted tree...if there is one. Pictured are Gustav Kebschull, his wife Adeline Misch Kebschull, and their children. Gustav was born Gustav Gottlieb Eduard, 28 Feb 1858 in Wundichow. His parents were Friedrich Kebschull and Henriette Friederike Staschke.

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Citation: Autosomal DNA test, database, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com/ : accessed 15 December 2022), using the "DNA Matches" option to query for Kebschull; results from this dynamic database require the private passcode and kit number of this individual.

But so far Gustav and his family don't show up as matches in my autosomal results. A different Kebschull family does, however, and it's reliably traceable back to a Kebschull who definitely married into our family.

The DNA match that is presented in this tree involves William Kebschull, born 01 May 1897 in Wundichow, and who died 29 Oct 1964 in St Joseph, Berrien, Michigan, USA, emigrating 1923. William was married to Auguste Marie Zordel and they had a family in St. Joseph, Michigan.

From the records that we can see, William is apparently the descendant of Ernestine Charlotte Lübeck, an illegitimate daughter born 1825 to Carl Kebschull (1803-1877) and Friederike Henriette Lübeck (1803-1853). This couple married in 1835 and legitimized Ernestine Charlotte. Ernestine Charlotte married Friedrich Wilhelm Kebschull (1823-1906), son of Johann Jakob Kebschull (1790-1866) and Ephrosine Meyer (1791-1867), all in Klein Nossin. This deviates from the online tree presented from our matching test-taker, but this may be the result of incomplete research on her part. It's the Lübeck line that provides the link to me. Ernestine Charlotte was the niece of my great-great grandmother Emilie Louise Lübeck (1814-1890). That solves that conundrum.

But what about Gustav and his family? At the moment none of my research suggests a confirmed connection. But there are so many Kebschull families in this region -- and so many of them who married into the Lübeck clan -- that we may see something definitive at some point. "It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop," said Confucius. Perhape he knew something about genealogy too.

December 15, 2022 | Email your comment.

Out of the mist

Technology is a wonderful thing. It can help us see into the far reaches of space (thanks, James Webb Space Telescope!) as well as view the past with renewed eyes. This example shows us what a software package can do to improve an old photo in our collection. Click either photo to see an enlargement.

The identity of this lady is unknown, unfortunately. She was part of Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen's collection and was one of the more damaged examples. This cabinet card was probably a copy of an original, perhaps showing one of Catherine's relatives or friends from Schleswig. It was produced at Schneider Studios at 2222 State Street in Chicago. Peter Schneider ran a studio at that location from 1894-1900, as we know from this Internet resource (see page 132 for details).

The original photo shows a lady in her early fifties, a widow in black if her dress is any indication, with a sartorial style dating this fashion to the mid-1890s. Catherine had a habit of encasing her favorite photos in a red cardboard frame, which under the duress of time bled into the print. This happened regularly to photos in her collection. The original has also suffered from some sort of fog over the image. However, by applying a software package that cleans up old photos, we can have a fresh look at the Unknown Lady.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Catherine Meyer, unknown lady, ca. 1895, Scheider Studios, Chicago, Illinois; original copy scanned in 2006, enhanced Topaz Photo AI version 2022.

The Topaz Photo AI program cleans up "noise" consisting of scratches and dust on the original image plus applying a facial improvement aLgorithm to the photo. The result includes the program's interpretation of some original tinting, present in the depths of the image. As a result, the eyes appear to be hazel/blue and the hair blonde, details we couldn't see in the original. We can also now see details of the elaborate embroidery on the shoulders of the dress, and a botanical diamond pin or brooch at her collar, something that was completely hidden in the shadows of the original print.

Nothing new has been added. Closed eyes are not opened (something that some modern photo software can actually accomplish!) nor are elements or people added to the enhanced photo. But like modern recording and film engineers who can pull previously-unseen details out of existing but flawed source material (e.g. the Beatles' "Get Back" video restoration by Peter Jackson), this software package can help us see what was likely there when the photo was new.

And the more details we can see for ourselves, the better possibility of someday identifying this lady based on other photos in Catherine's collection. We can hope, anyway!

December 10, 2022 | Email your comment.

Thinking of linking

Sometimes you can't find genealogical records that prove a relationship. We can guess that a name like Gohr, from the region Kreis Stolp in what was once Pomerania and is now Poland, had some related Gohrs. It makes sense. But without complete local records, how do we prove it?

That's where DNA comes in, specifically autosomal DNA. Today's tests can help link families with the same surname even if we can't plot a records-based ancestry. In this particular region there are entire villages where documentation is either tenuous or non-existent. All we can know is what DNA tests tell us...and this test tells us that an ancestor of Lyle Jones, Albert Wilhelm J. Gohr, was a relative of my ancestors Albert and Wilhelm Gohr.

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Citation: Public Member Trees, database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 6 December 2022), Lyle Jones family tree by Lyle Jones, profile for Albert Wilhelm J. Gohr (1855-1924, d. Kimball Twp., Jackson County, Minnesota) undocumented data updated 2019.

More interestingly, another researcher and I who both have Gohr families in our tree match with Mr. Jones too. That confirms a link between us as well, one that we may not be able to prove any other way.

Our Gohr ancestors came to Chicago, Illinois in the 1870s and early 1880s. We don't have photos of the oldest Gohrs, alas, just a trail of documents from the region and this one photo of Paul Conrad Gohr (son of Albert Julius Reinhold Gohr and Wilhelmine Paulina Mews) and Paul's bride Franziska Schmude on their wedding day in 1906.

All three immigrant Gohrs -- Albert Julius Reinhold (1844-1895), Albert Wilhelm (1855-1924), and Wilhelm Robert Otto (1857-1905) -- were married in Chicago. The elder Albert and his younger brother Wilhelm remained there and worked as laborers for the rest of their lives. Albert Wilhelm traveled to Kimball Township in Jackson County, Minnesota and farmed, establishing a family there.

We know that Albert's parents were Wilhelm Gohr and Caroline Jaffke, who remained in Kreis Stolp, so it would seem. But the local records from the villages of Prebendow and Zetzenow are missing or destroyed. Does Mr. Jones know anything more about his Gohr ancestry than is posted online? We hope to find out.

December 6, 2022 | Email your comment.

Erin go Bragh

Usually I don't get to work with English/Irish/Scottish records but my uncle Walter is an exception. Walter Miller Ronchitti, born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1914 and married to Marie MacLaughlan in 1941 in Chicago (pictured at left), dropped his second surname and used Miller exclusively. This made it hard to search for him or his family until my cousin told me about his original name. It was Ronchetti or Ronchetti, more or less. There were a number of spelling variations, some based on the pronunciation of the surname, and that made it tricky to research.

Walter's emigration records when he was fourteen years old show him with the Ronchitti surname. Sometime before his marriage he decided to streamline his identity and became known as Walter Milller. However his earlier family bounced around from Manchester to Liverpool to Dublin to Glasgow, and the name was variously spelled. Even more entertaining are the other Ronchetti people who show up all over England in the nineteenth century, from Devon, Cornwall, London, Lancashire, and Yorkshire. Are they related? It's hard to tell.

Occupations don't give us any clues. Italy must have been the country of origin for members of this family if you go back far enough. Many of the London-based folks were manufacturers of scientific instruments like barometers and thermometers. One was a jeweler and watchmaker. But Walter's ancestors were craftsmen of a different sort. The earliest ancestor we've found for Walter was his great-great-grandfather, Joseph "Ranketty" as it was spelled, who was a master carver and gilder (gold-worker). Joseph was born about 1780 in Dublin, married Maria Rogers in 1813, and, among other offspring, had a son Joseph in October 1823.

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Citation: Ancestrylibrary.com. Ireland, Select Catholic Birth and Baptism Registers, 1763-1917 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014, for Joseph Ranketty, 1 October 1823. Original data: Celtic Catholic Registers, digitized images, Dublin, Ireland: E-Celtic, Limited, accessed 3 December 2022

Joseph Junior married Mary Ann Preston in 1946 in Manchester, England, and the publication of the marriage banns helps us identify this Joseph as ours, despite the existence of others with the same name (including a thermometer maker in Dublin). The banns clearly identify our Joseph as a carriage-maker whose father was a carver and gilder.

The family seemed to spend time in both Dublin (where at least one of their children was born) and Liverpool, where Joseph Junior died at the age of 87 in 1910. A son, William, born in Lincolnshire in 1851, was listed as a sea cook in the English census records. Helpfully, his own son William, born in Glasgow, listed his father as a sea cook and was himself a millwright. It was in Glasgow that Walter Miller Ronchitte was born in 1914. It's unclear where the middle name Miller was from, perhaps from Walter's grandmother Barbara who appears both as Barbara Miller and Barbara Wallace. Perhaps someday we'll find out more about Barbara.

December 3, 2022 | Email your comment.

Baby Olga and her legacy

DNA testing is very popular these days, particularly autosomal, which can match cousins to each other, both distant and close. Autosomal tests can match DNA segments in a way that helps us connect to people we might otherwise not know. That's the case here. This record at right indicated the death of Olga Wilhelmnina Gohr, age three months, in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Her mother was Minna Wilhelmina Gohr but no father is listed.

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Citation: Ancestrylibrary.com, Berlin, Germany, Deaths, 1874-1955 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014. Original data: Sterberegister der Berliner Standesämter 1874-1955 digital images, Landesarchiv, Berlin, Deutschland, accessed 27 Nov 2022.

My own autosomal test suggested a 4th-6th cousin connection to a lady whose public tree had only twelve people listed, one of them Baby Olga, who lived and died in 1911. Presumably the private version of the tree lists Olga's mother, but the hint of illegitimacy may have made the tree owner a bit shy about sharing documentation. I'm not shy, however. Knowing that Gohr is a surname from my own tree, I plugged in Minna Wilhelmina Gohr into the wonderfully helpful search engine at https://pomorskie.indeksy.net/ and up popped a record. Click the image below to see the entire page up close.

This seemed like a really exciting connection at first. Minna's father was Ferdinand Gohr -- new fellow? A clue to the elusive Wilhelm Heinrich Gohr, whose birth and death date can't be found? Nope, we have Ferdinand already. He's Wilhelm Heinrich's son, born in 1846, and in this record married to Therese Quetschke. How do we know this is likely the son? Because Ferdinand's mother, the widow Emilie Lübeck Gohr, is a godparent, and although she was 65 years old in this record (and perhaps too old to be a really effective godparent should the need ever arise) it indicates a close family connection to the new infant, Minna.

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Citation: Budow Parish (Budowo-Budow), "Arckiwum Panstwowe w Koszalinie" Baptisms, 1879, Geborne und Getaufte 1865-1895, GenBaza/GenBaza/AP_Słupsk-27/Budowo_276-Budow/Parafia Budowo/1865-1895 U/185.jpg, image 185 [186] birth number 64, Minna Wilhelmina Gohr, Geburt 23 April 1879/Tag der Taufe 4 May 1879; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,480246,186: accessed 27 Nov 2022).

It also explains the new autosomal DNA match. Baby Olga didn't live long enough to grow up and leave descendants, and none of Minna's numerous illegitimate children did either, from what I can tell, but if one of Minna's siblings did provide traceable descendants, that's likely the connection here.

Minna had at least three sisters whose children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren may have provided the link. In any case, my link to Ferdinand Gohr's family isn't the least bit surprising. Our DNA reflects it, and now our documentation does too. Perhaps at some point I'll hear back from this new cousin and we can compare notes.

November 27, 2022 | Email your comment.

A restored monument

Margarethe "Magretta" Petersen was able to spend just ten years in her new country before she died in 1882 at the age of 66. Her husband Lorenz Petersen and son Hans lived in Belle Prairie, Nebraska where they owned a farm -- a prosperous one too, according to census records.

The region was sparsely populated, mostly with immigrants from other German and Scandinavian countries, all taking advantage of the free land that Nebraska gave out to encourage incoming populations. When Magretta died her family was part of the St. John's Lutheran Church congregation in the tiny town of Ohiowa. That's where the cemetery was located that became Magretta's sinal resting place.

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Citation: Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/119247716/margaretta-peterson: accessed 20 November 2022), memorial page for Margaretta Peterson (1816–3 Oct 1882), Find a Grave Memorial ID 119247716, citing Saint Johns Lutheran Church Cemetery South, Ohiowa, Fillmore County, Nebraska, USA; Maintained by Ruth Ellen Bartels (contributor 47315485).

Over the years time (and climate, probably) were cruel to the headstones in the cemetery. Magretta's was at some point knocked off its marble pedestal, as you can see in Darlene Most's photo from about twenty years ago.

Thankfully someone has recently repaired it, as you can see from Karody Robbins' newer image. The headstone is back on its pedestal again and the lower inscription is now readable: "Selig sind die, die in dem Herrn sterben," in English "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord."

We're grateful to Karody for uploading this photo to Find-A-Grave. It's a reminder too that we should be revisiting Find-A-Grave sites to see whether any updates have been made to relevant pages for our ancestors. There may be surprises in store.

November 20, 2022 | Email your comment.

Two sisters, two marriages

Two Petersen brother in Nebraska pooled their funds to bring over two sisters from Falkerslev parish in Sjaelland, Denmark in the late 1880s. How did they find out about these marriageable ladies? Not known! Perhaps the local Lutheran church kept a list of potential brides for church members.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Catherine Meyer, Andrew Petersen and Karen Marie Johansen, ca. 1889, Loomis studio, Chicago, Illinois; original copy scanned in August 2005 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes.

Anna Kirstine Johansen (born in 1859) and her sister Karen Marie Johansen (born in 1870) emigrated to America around 1887. Anna married Peter Hansen Petersen (see the posting below) that year in Friend, Nebraska and Karen married Peter's younger brother, Andrew, in York County, Nebraska two years later. The latter bride was just nineteen. You can view the happy couple in their engagement photo at right.

Karen was the last child of her parents, who were married in 1852 in Maribo Amt, Aastrup Sogn, Denmark. How do we know? We're lucky enough to have Karen's exact birth/baptism date, which allowed us to locate her baptism record in Danish records as well as her parents' marriage record. But more interestingly it also revealed a curious naming convention in her family.

Her mother was Kristin Maren Nielsen and her father was Johan Carl Semelin. Local conventions apparently persuaded the parents to use patronyms for all their children. The male children were Johansen, the female children Johansen or Johansdatter. But why not Semelin, their father's actual surname as it was recorded in his 1818 baptism record above?

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Citation: Danmark Kirkebøger, 1484-1941, database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G94W-X7CR?cc=2078555&wc=M5K4-161%3A357518001%2C359966001%2C360199801%2C360210501 : 10 November 2022), Maribo > Falster Nørre > Maglebrænde > 13 (1811-1835) Fødte, Konfirmerede, Trolovelse, Viede, Døde, Register > image 77 of 131; Rigsarkivet, København (The Danish National Archives), Copenhagen.

Some areas of Denmark still clung to the patronymic naming conventions that had been in place for hundreds of years prior to the births in this family, but some families, for unknown reasons, used an actual surname. It's possible that this surname had some sort of presence in the community that encouraged Johan Carl to use it for himself -- interestingly his father was also Johan Carl Semelin, born in 1789. In the citation at right you can click on the link to view the elder Johan Carl Semelin's marriage record to Dorothe Mortensdatter in 1816.

Perhaps the family name originated elsewhere and it distinguished them from the locals; there's some indication that the family name may have come from Sweden. In any case it's a bonus for researchers looking for traces of Johan Carl in the Danish records. He's easy to find and he's everywhere. He married at least twice, while his father married three times. And all nine of his children are easy to look up with the use of that surname.

November 10, 2022 | Email your comment.

Petersens in Nebraska: a new photo

When the family of Peter Hansen Petersen emigrated to the United States in 1878, they chose Nebraska as their new home. It wasn't merely a random choice. Nebraska had a generous land give-away program at the time for determined homesteaders. And the family already had a couple of relatives living there: cousins Lorentz Petersen and his son Hans, who had begun a prosperous farm in 1872.

Peter Hansen Petersen the younger, his father's namesake, married Anna Christina Johansen from Falster, Sjaelland, Denmark and established his own farm in Fillmore and York Counties in Nebraska. Until now we've only seen photos of this couple in their older age, but thanks to a cousin who has shared an earlier image on his Ancestry.com website we can have a look at the couple's growing family circa 1897. It's interesting to note that Anna Christina's sister Karen Marie Johansen married a younger Petersen brother, Andrew, and they established a home in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

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Citation: Public Member Trees, database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 29 October 2022), “Peter Hans Petersen (Pedersen)” family tree by Thomas Petersen, profile for Peter Hansen Petersen (1860-1945, d. Mason City, Nebraska) undocumented photo shared by Tina Petersen and updated March 2016.

The children are Helena (wearing a ribbon in her hair), Charles next to Helena, Katherine or Ada (unsure which one standing next to her mother Anna), Christian in front of Anna, and Peter on his father's lap. Other children (Anna, Elizabeth, and Alfred) were yet to be born.

The parents named their children after close relatives. Helena was named for her father's sister Helene Petersen Burmaster, who remained in Schleswig. Charles was named for his maternal grandfather. If Katherine is the next child, she was named for her aunt Catherine Petersen, Peter's younger sister (if this is Ada, we don't know where that name originated). Christian Nicolai was named for his father's older brother who also remained in Schleswig. And Peter shared a name with his father and paternal grandfather. Everyone, it appears, was well commemorated.

The photo is a cabinet card without a studio imprint, so we don't know where it was taken, but it was likely produced in Omaha where other family members lived. Peter looks a lot like his other brothers, most of whom emigrated to Nebraska and sported similar hairstyles and moustaches.

October 30, 2022 | Email your comment.

Three cousins

Sometimes there's no family documentation on how various branches are in contact. We may not know without some form of evidence, and it may not be written down: no family letters, no trees, no stories.

In this case, how do we prove that sisters from the old country, both of whom emigrated to Chicago, had family members who knew about each other down through the generations? The answer lies in a photograph. But we didn't know for sure that the descendants knew about each other until we proved who was in the photo and how they were related...if they were related.

In this case, it was a cold day in winter 1943 when three stylish ladies met at the Bruns home at 4235 Winchester Avenue in Chicago. The ladies are bundled up for the weather although apparently not willing to dispense with open-toed shoes. Fashion comes first!

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Bertha Bruns Gohr, from the top: Lorraine Bruns, Lolus Bruns, Loretta Murphy Mayhan, ca. 1943, original photograph from the album of the owner, scanned in 2015.

Research tells us that the ladies are second cousins from an interesting line, and we had to do some research to tell us how they were connected. Here's what we found: their grandmothers were sisters. Augusta Kramp Hasse, born in 1854 in Klein Massowitz, Pomerania, and Laurette Albertine Henriette Kramp, her younger sister born in 1856. Both Augusta and Laurette (or Laura as she was known in Chicago) emigrated in 1881, Augusta with two of her children to join her husband Carl Hasse, who was already in Chicago, and Laura to marry her fiancé Wilhelm Gohr, an emigrant from Nippoglense, Kreis Stolp, Pomerania, who had already arrived with Carl Hasse. It appears that other members of the Kramp family remained in Massowitz.

Wilhelm and Laura had eight children in Chicago. Laura died in 1893 of puerperal fever along with her infant daughter Elsa. Carl and Augusta had four children, two born in Germany and two in Chicago. Carl died in 1903. But it's clear that both sides of the family, the Gohrs and the Hasse clans, were close.

Loretta was born in 1909, the daughter of Augusta's daughter Emma and her husband Owen Patrick Murphy. As far as we know Loretta was the only child of the couple. Lorraine and Lolus were the daughters of George Bruns and Bertha Gohr Bruns, granddaughters of Laura Kramp Gohr. While they never had a chance to know her, the sisters did grow up around Augusta, who lived with her children in Chicago until 1938 when she died at the age of 83.

Loretta was a part of their families even after Lorraine and Lolus relocated to Southern California in the 1940s. Loretta had married Joe Mayhan, a native of Wenona, Illinois, in 1939. They had no children. However the photograph serves as documentation that the family connection was maintained over the decades.

October 17, 2022 | Email your comment.

Two weddings?

It's a little surprising that Joseph Bruns and Elizabeth Bruns are listed with the same surname in this 1844 emigration record. Headed for Baltimore and ultimately for Cincinnati, where a large German populace awaited them, the assumption is that they were already married.

But were they?

Both are listed on this manifest as originating in Knetsen, Germany, probably Großknetsen near both of their home towns (both from Oldenburg, Joseph from Deindrup, Elizabeth from an unknown village in Oldenburg). However, upon arriving in Cincinnati, they appear in the Old St, Mary's Catholic Church registry as an unmarried couple, Heinrich Joseph Bruns and Maria Elizabeth Grewe or Grawe (her surname could be spelled both ways depending on the clerk's predilections). This marriage took place on October 24, 1844 with Clemens Dodt and Wilhelmina Diess or Dietz as witnesses. It's the second entry in the image below.

Find My Past transcribed the bride's name erroneously as Leraude but with sufficient magnification you can read that it's Grawe or Grewe. Other helpful information, such as the bride's and groom's parents names, ages, or town of origin, are missing. These are cryptic records. Maybe a more complete one exists in the depths of Old St. Mary's Church. In any case, the sames are the ones we're looking for, and what remains is some sensible explanation of why this couple appears to be marrying twice.

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Citation: Cincinnati Roman Catholic Parish Marriages, Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church, page 40 via FindMyPast, database and digital images, (https://search.findmypast.com/record?id=US%2FCINCINNATI%2FD1%2FB04%2FOLDSTMARY-13THCLAY%2FMAR%2F1842-1845%2F00040&parentid=US%2FCINC%2FCATH%2FPR%2FMAR%2F0002050%2FG9: accessed 02 Oct 2022).

There are a few possibilities. Perhaps they weren't really married on the ship manifest but were just listed that way, either for expediency or due to a deliberate subterfuge on the part of the couple. But we know that clerks in U.S. ports were obligated to scrutinize immigration documents to match them up with the passenger -- the urban legend about names changing at Ellis Island (which didn't yet exist) or any other port was simply untrue. Elizabeth Bruns had to have documents identifying her by that name when she arrived.

Were Joseph and Elisabeth married in Großknetsen, perhaps in a civil ceremony for some reason? Were they of different religions, thus necessitating a civil marriage? We don't have any marriage record for them from Oldenburg, so this may have been the best explanation for Elizabeth's identity as Bruns rather than Grewe on the ship manifest. The Cincinnati marriage may have been the first option for this couple to have a proper church wedding. All we can do is speculate. There are no available notations explaining the issue.

October 02, 2022 | Email your comment.

Back to the past

A cousin kindly sent this death record from 1849 for our mutual ancestor, which you can click to enlarge for easier reading. Yes, it lists her name as Ernestine Lübeck born (geb. = geboren) Reddel, but there's a good reason for interpreting this as the death record for Christina Lübeck, born Reddel, the matriarch of this clan.

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Citation: Lupow Parish (Łupawa-Lupow), "Arckiwum Panstwowe w Koszalinie" Deaths, 1849, Verstorbenen und Beerdigten: 1831-1870, GenBaza/AP_Koszalin-26/Łupawa-Lupow/Łupawa_ew-Lupow/04_1831-1870/_068.jpg, image 68 death number 33, Ernestine [sic] Lübeck born Reddel, 27 April 1849; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,314992,69: accessed 20 Sep 2022).

First of all the lady is listed as a widow (Wittwe). There was an Ernestine Lübeck in the family background, but Ernestine was Christina's daughter, which we know from other records, such as Ernestine's death record.

Furthermore in 1849 Ernestine was married to Christian Fruggel and was not a widow. Ernestine was born in 1801 and thus was not 70 years old, as the record indicated.

Taking those facts into consideration, what we seem to have here is Ernestine's mother, Christina Reddel Lübeck, whose age would have fit the record much more comfortably and whose birth surname was indeed Reddel. But wait, there's more!

These records from Lupow, the parish nearest Ruhleben where the death took place, were very detailed when the deceased had living children, as Christina did at the time of her death. The record lists the children we know she had, in German: "9 [Kinder] mit ihr verstorbenen Mann Michael Lübeck - Ernestine, Friederike. August, Caroline, Mathilde, Emilie, Ludowike, Ferdinand und Juliane." So this part of the death record confirms that it's the mother, Christina, and not her daughter Ernestina whose death is transcribed here.

But hold on -- Christina was the widow of Christoph Lübeck who died a few years before she did. Another error? Who is Michael? Was Michael another clerical mistake for Christina's late husband Christoph? If so, where did the name Michael come from...perhaps from Christina's past?

That's a theory worth following up.

Everywhere that we see Christoph Lübeck's name in these records, whether he's listed as Taufpate (godparent) to a relative's child or as the father of any of his children in their much-later death records, he's listed as Christoph, sometimes Christoff, never as Michael. But Michael somehow crept in here.

In my experience, there's a good chance that the name Michael didn't appear at random. It was a mistake, of course, but it may well have some connection to Christina's family, perhaps when she was born.

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Citation: Lupow Parish (Łupawa-Lupow), "Arckiwum Panstwowe w Koszalinie" Akta Parafii ewangelickiej w Lupowie, pow. Słupsk, Księga metrykalna, Chrzty, śluby, zgony, 1743-1786, GenBaza/AP_Koszalin-26/Łupawa-Lupow/Łupawa_ew-Lupow/01_1743-1786_/_050.jpg, image 51 birth number 17, Christina Reddel, 27 November 1778; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,60037,51: accessed 23 Sep 2022).

Luckily for us we know exactly when she was born because this death record tells us: in April 1849 Christina was 70 years and 5 months old at her death. This gives us a pretty good target for locating her birth record, if it still exists. If it does, it may be in the Lupow records around November 1778.

So here's what we're looking for: a child called Christina who was born around November 1778 in or near Lupow whose father's surname was Reddel, first name unknown but could be Michael, and a mother whose name is entirely unknown to us.

Remarkably, such a record exists. You can click it to see it better.

The early Lupow records are hard to read but we can just make out for 1778: 27 9br [an early form of writing November in the 17th and 18th centuries, see this explanation for details], "ist Michael [partially obscured by the binding] Reddel's und Dorothea Gowitzschen Tochter Christina getauft" -- 27 November 1778 Michael Reddel's and Dorothea Gowitzschen'[s] daughter is baptised." Taufpaten (godparents) are Hans Georg Jawke, Hewig Maria Bjike, and Dor. [Dorothea] Jawke.

In several ways this seems to fit our theory. The birthdate/baptism date is bang-on accurate for a woman who died at exactly 70 years and 5 months old in 1849. It accounts for the name Michael in Christina's death record -- the clerk mistranscribed her father's name for her husband's -- and it suggests that the mother's name Dorothea made its way down the family line to one of Ernestine's daughters, Christina's granddaughter Ernestina Dorothea, who was born in 1832.

It's still a tenuous theory -- there's only so much we can do to prove it absolutely using available records from the region. But it's a strong possibility that this is Christina Reddel's baptism record and if correct it moves us back to a new and earlier generation.

September 23, 2022 | Email your comment.

A naming mystery cleared up?

Okay, I've changed my mind. We talked about Ludowike Lübeck Kebschull being mislabeled as Albertine in her 1879 death record and how this was likely a problem borne from the clerk's misunderstanding of the deceased's name vs. the informant's, i.e. her son-in-law Albert.

But this record suggests otherwise. It's from the parish of Lupow in the town of Neu Jugelow. Christian Greinke and his wife Mathilde Ottile Ulricke Lübeck (whose name is mangled here it's worth noting) have a new daughter, Caroline Albertine, who was baptised in 1835. One of the godparents or Taufpaten was an Albertine Lübeck.

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Citation: Lupow Parish (Łupawa-Lupow), "Arckiwum Panstwowe w Koszalinie" Baptisms, 1835, Geborene und Getaufte: 1831-1869, GenBaza/AP_Koszalin-26/Łupawa-Lupow/Łupawa_ew-Lupow/03_1831-1869/_025.jpg, image 26 baptism number 63, Caroline Albertine Greinke, 15 May 1835; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,314993,26: accessed 20 Sep 2022).

If we understand this record correctly the child was the niece of Ludowike Albertine Lübeck, the mother's sister. Ludowike, born in 1817, was the younger sister of Mathilde. While I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the parish, to me it seems most likely that the Albertine listed as a Taufpate was a close relative of the child.

This is also the earliest time in these records that I've seen Ludowike listed as Albertine -- there may be others, and it's worth a perusal of other baptisms to see what we can uncover. Nevertheless, it suggests to me that Albertine was actually one of Ludowike's names and that her death record name wasn't a mistake, but rather one of the names by which the family knew her.

The other two Taufpaten were family at least in one case: Ernestine Lübeck, another sister, and we can assume that Michael Greinke was a close relative of the child's father.

But it does cast a new light on Ludowike Albertine, assuming that this is her full name. We're unlikely to know -- her baptism record from 1817 is missing from the church books. But it's a strong argument, I think, for Ludowike and Albertine being the same person, and for us to list her with both names in our database.

September 20, 2022 | Email your comment.

For sale: an exceptional opportunity

It was a beautiful house with all the modern conveniences, and it was for sale shortly after the death of Julius Stohlmann, a German immigrant in New York who made a nice living for himself and his family, selling religious books to those seeking enlightenment. Click these images to enlarge them.

A Rockland County historian and preservationist forwarded this postcard. The front has a nice photo of the opulent establishment in New City, Rockland County, New York. How does it fit into our history?

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Citation: Digital image of a postcard, front and reverse, "Estate of Julius E. Stohlmann," real estate sale of a home owned by the late Julius Stohlmann, Rockland County Historical Society, New York, issued circa 1910, accessed 8 Sep 2022.

Julius Eduard Stohlmann was born in 1821 in Kleinbremen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kreis Minden-Lübbecke. His parents were Friedrich Christian Stohlmann and Auguste Mariane Gritznerin. At least two Stohlmann brothers, Julius and his older brother Charles (Carl F.E.) Stohlmann, emigrated to the USA in 1834. Charles was a Lutheran pastor at the Brooklyn St. Matthew's church on Walker Street. Julius was a publisher of German religious books.

Julius' wife was Louisa Laurent, who emigrated to America in 1847. Louisa's sister, Caroline Laurent, was already in Brooklyn, the wife of pastor Ludwig Müller. Ludwig's and Caroline's first child, Helene, was born in Brooklyn and was baptized by Rev. Charles Stohlmann at St. Matthew's, and this was likely the avenue for an introduction between Louisa and Julius. They were married in New York in 1853 and had eight children together.

Louisa, Julius, and their family remained in New York while Louisa's sister Caroline Müller and her husband Ludwig established themselves in Charleston, South Carolina, where Ludwig was a pastor at the southern location of St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church for fifty years. Julius Stohlmann died in 1910, Louisa in 1915. Their magnificent house exists only in history.

September 8, 2022 | Email your comment.

Who is Albertine?

A group of us who research in the Kreis Stolp area have been building a family tree for the children of Christoph Lübeck and Christina Reddel. From a start with three daughters we now have nine verified offspring of this couple.

One of the puzzles of this family is a death record from 1879 detailing the death of an Albertine Kebschull, widow of William Friedrich Kebschull -- click the image at right to see an enlargement.

The details of the record verify that she was the daughter of Christoph and Christina, born in Rostock near Gaffert, and the informant was (as we know) Albert Köplin, her son-in-law.

But why is she called Albertine? We know that she was born in 1817 (her age at her death agrees with this), and the only daughter born to Christoph and Christina in that year was Ludowike. We know Ludowike's history very well. She had two children before her marriage to Wilhelm Kebschull and five children after that. Albert Köplin was married to her daughter Hulda. Ludowike appears in numerous baptism records for her siblings and relatives in the area, always as Ludowike Lübeck or Ludowike Kebschull -- never as Albertine.

So what's the deal? Was her middle name Albertine? We don't have her baptism record from 1817. They're missing from the archive and will likely never be found.

Did she change her name at one point? That was unlikely. People didn't tend to change their names in this region at this time and there was no legal document trail to chart such a change.

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Citation: Büdow Parish (Budowo, Słupsku), "Arckiwum Panstwowe, Słupsku, Budowo Parafia" Deaths, 1879, Sterbe- Neben-Register im Jahr 1879, GenBaza/AP_Słupsk-27/Budowo_276-Budow/0018_1879_zg/_27_0276_0_18_0018.jpg image 19 death number 34, Albertine Kebschull, 4 May 1879; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,365453,19: accessed 29 Aug 2022).

Was it a mistake by the parish priest or clerk? Oddly, that's the most likely explanation. Every other piece of evidence identifies this lady as Ludowike Lübeck Kebschull, widow of Wilhelm Kebschull and mother of many. Maybe the clerk heard the name of the informant, Albert, and assumed the name of the deceased was Albertine.

There are times when the document itself can be trusted up to a point. But mistaken entries by the man generating the document must be considered when nothing else makes sense. And in the case of this particular death, we have to assume that Ludowike is the correct name of the deceased.

August 29, 2022 | Email your comment.

Gohr-Lübeck: First child

Johanne Ludewika Henriette Gohr didn't have a long life, just a year as a matter of fact. But she was the first child of Wilhelm Heinrich Gohr of Nippoglense and his wife Emilie Lübeck, born in the town of Nakel in 1838 and registered in the parish of Gross Nossin. Her birth record includes a number of clues about her family and it's worth perusing those clues to see what we can discover. Click the images at left and below right to see the records in detail.

These records from Gross Nossin are found in an online database housed in what is now Poland, the Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecinie. Not everything can be found in Ancestry.com, although their collection of Eastern Prussian Provinces German records, such as these from the former region of Pomerania, is growing.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of an online civil registry, page 0083 and 0084, Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecinie, Gross Nossin [Nożyno, pow. sł.] 1840-1850 und 1832 bis 1844, https://www.szczecin.ap.gov.pl/, accessed August 20, 2022.

What does this record tell us? First, ponder what we're missing. Wilhelm Heinrich Gohr, the father, doesn't show up in these records until this one in 1838. We don't know who his parents were, what year he was born, or when and where he was married to Emilie Lübeck. This child being the first to show up in the records for this era, and the fact that she's the legitimate offspring of Wilhelm and Emilie, we can assume they were married within a year or two of 1838 when this child was born, but that's as much as we're likely to know. The note in the database tells us "Die Kirchenbücher bis 1831 sind verbrannt" -- The church books up to 1831 have been burned. Not deliberately, of course, but an unfortunate accident.

We're more fortunate with records for the mother, Emilie Lübeck. We have her 1890 death record so we know that her parents were Christoff Lübeck and Christina Reddel. Due to some diligent research with some cousins also investigating this region, we know that Emilie had five sisters and two brothers, many of whom show up as godparents to the children born to this couple.

For instance, in this case Emilie's unmarried sister Ludowike Lübeck is one of the Taufpaten or godparents. So is a man called Carl Gohr -- a brother or other relative of the father? We have yet to figure out who is Henriette Koschnick, married to a fellow called Bedenke, but this is likely a close relative as well.

In each case when we run across a baptism record like this we're likely to find peripheral clues. Almost every birth in this region has two or three godparents and they're almost always related to the parents in some way. Through those connections we can build a case for relationships: prove the existence of a parent still alive, a brother or sister in the region, or even how many children the parents have already had. Notations such as "3rd daughter of 6 daughters" left helpfully by the parish clerk or priest is an example of this -- we know we're missing family members and we can start looking for them.

It's all part of a puzzle, and if you like genealogical puzzles, this database is the place to be.

August 20, 2022 | Email your comment.

160 years young

She hardly looks a day past fourteen!

And that's true because Catharina Maria Petersen was about fourteen years old here. She was born August 10, 1862 in Leckfeld, a suburb of the town of Leck, in northern Schleswig-Holstein.

When she was born her town still belonged to Denmark, although by 1920 it was German territory. Catharina was long gone by then but she retained the dual identity of her homeland, speaking German when she wanted to be discrete and speaking Danish when she wanted to be even more private.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, reverse and front side, collection of Catherine Meyer, Catharina Maria Petersen, ca. 1876, H.P. Petersen studio, Niebüll, Schleswig-Holstein; original copy scanned in August 2005 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes, great-granddaughter of the portrait subject.

It was common in those days to have a commemorative portrait done of the confirmation subject, almost always in a studio because home cameras didn't really exist yet. Because of the long exposure necessary the subject couldn't smile or risk any movement, which would blur the product. So Catharina, second daughter of Peter Hansen Petersen and Elise Momsen Petersen, had to keep perfectly still for the phootgrapher.

This portrait studio was located in Niebüll, a town close to Leck. You can find out more about the H.P. Petersen studio here. Was the photographer a relative of the family? Not necessarily. Petersen was one of the most common surnames in Schleswig, so the best answer is...could be, or maybe not.

The reverse of the image shows the identity of the studio. Catharina trimmed the cabinet card at some point to fit it into a frame so the bottom inscription is missing. In full it says "Die Platte bleibt zum Nechsbestellen aufbewahrt" or "The record is kept for future orders." A nice business practice! In this case, though, the family brought the photo with them to Nebraska when they emigrated in 1878.

It's remarkable that the photos lasted this long, but cabinet cards were fairly robust. We're particularly lucky to have a scan of this one to mark a rite of passage in the life of a young lady who brought her collection with her to Nebraska and later to Chicago, where her photos reside today.

August 10, 2022 | Email your comment.

An 1857 marriage...and an answer to a riddle

If it seems as though I'm obsessed lately with records from Genbaza, the repository for Pomeranian records, it's true. A happy conflagration of free time and free availability of these records has made some aspects of our ancestry in Kreis Büdow and Kreis Stolp explosive. We're finding out all kinds of connections to the past.

If you want to see the whole page, click the image above.

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Citation: Büdow Parish (Budowo, Słupsku), "Arckiwum Panstwowe, Słupsku, Budowo Parafia" Małżeństw [Marriages], 1857, Aufgebotene und Getraute im Jahr 1857, image 39 marriage number 3, Johann August Kebschull and Ernestine Dorothea Fruggel, 23 Jan 1857; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,480244,39: accessed 27 July 2022).

The principle reason for this flurry of research: my autosomal DNA test matched with a couple of people called Kebschull. This is a surname otherwise unknown in our family, although there are a plethora of Kebschulls in the Kreis Stolp region where our Gohr, Kramp, Lübeck, and Trabant ancestors lived. It seems logical that there would be a connection through a marriage of something similar.

Naturally the DNA match folks don't answer messages at Ancestry.com (a curious situation but one that's very common) so the only way forward to solve the riddle is to plunge into researching the local records via Genbaza. It requires a fair amount of resolve. A working knowledge of genealogical German is necessary. Familiarity with as bit of Polish (the database now resides in Poland) is helpful. So what do we find?

Working back from some American Kebschulls was a starting point but it appeared to be a dead end, resulting in a path back to a Carl Kebschull and Friederike Lübecke...enticing but no direct connection to our Lübeck family in Röstock near Gaffert. However, there does seem to be a connection to Christoph Lübeck and his wife Christina Reddel, who are the earliest ancestral line that we know of in this region.

Their daughter Emilie Louise Lübeck, born in 1814, married Wilhelm Heinrich Gohr in 1853. Emilie had two sisters, Ernestine (born 1801) and Juliane (born 1822). There were probably more siblings too, but we don't know about them yet.

Ernestine married a Christian Friedrich Fruggel around 1820. One of her daughters, Ernestine Dorothea Fruggel, married Johann August Kebschull in 1857. Their marriage record is at the top of this post. The record doesn't list August's parents' names, alas, but we did find six children born to this couple. It's a good bet that the DNA match comes from the descendants of this Kebschull connection. And it's entirely possible that we'll find some further matches in the near future. Stay tuned!

July 27, 2022 | Email your comment.

Friedrich Kramp, 1824-1878

Miroslav Bronakowski has put together a helpful genealogical search index for a variety of parishes and districts in the former region of Pomerania. It's good news for anyone who has ancestors in this region because it will lead to to Genbaza, otherwise known as https://metryki.genbaza.pl/, the database that has preserved vital record registers of the Pomeranian region. Click the image at left to see an enlargement.

Although these parishes are now in current-day Poland they were originally a part of Germany, and the records are in German as well, with mostly wonderfully legible handwriting.

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Citation: Pomeiskie Parish (Klein Pomeiskie, Słupsku), "Arckiwum Panstwowe, Słupsku, Gross Pomeiskie (Pomysk Kielki)" Zgony [Deaths], 1878, Pomysk Wielki/Pomeiskie, image 8, Friedrich Kramp, 28 Feb 1878; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,61293,8 : accessed 20 July 2022).

The index result will summarize the person you're searching for: name, spouse if relevant, birthplace and residence if known, age, and scan category. It also references the page number in the registry book so you can find it accurately.

In this case, we've found the death record for Friedrich Kramp, husband of Emilie Pauline Trabant and father of at least ten children in and around Klein Massowitz and Klein Pomeiske. This record helps us determine his accurate birth date (28 September 1824), though not his parents' names, alas. Because of missing years in the records we may never know their names.

We already have his widow's death record from this same database (1887), so Genbaza is helping us fill in the details of the Kramp family who remained in Pomerania and didn't emigrate to America. So far we know that two older daughters, Auguste and Laurette, came to Chicago via Baltimore in 1881. Are there any others? We may yet discover them!

July 20, 2022 | Email your comment.

Lawrence Petersen, 1915-1928

It was a short life, and until today I didn't know why.

Lawrence Petersen was born in Chicago a year before his father's death. Peter Heinrich Petersen was married to Martha Krohn in Chicago, where they had six children. Peter and Martha seemed to have been very close to Peter's mother, Catherine Petersen Mikkelsen, because even after the widowed Martha moved to Milwaukee, where her sister lived, Catherine traveled to see them regularly. Catherine's photo collection is a big clue here. She collected photos of the family growing up over the years, and they sent her regular updates about how they were progressing. At left is Lawrence, about 1928, likely taken in his neighborhood on Odell Street in Milwaukee.

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Citation: "Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Pilgrim's Rest Cemetery, Interment Records, 1880-1979," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:2:WMMF-R2PZ : 9 July 2022), entry for Lawrence Petersen, 1928.

Lawrence, the eldest son, was named after Peter Peteren's great-grandfather, Lorenz Petersen. Lorenz, his wife Magretta, and son Hans emigrated to Nebraska in 1872 and established a prosperous farm there. Lorenz and Hans eventually moved to Chicago, where Lorenz died in 1891. His memory was still fresh in his grandson's mind when Lawrence was born in 1915. Alas, Peter died a year later of nephritis, and Martha Krohn Petersen was left with five children to bring up, with another son on the way.

I wish we knew more about Lawrence, who succumbed to pneumonia in 1928. He's buried in the same cemetery, Pilgrim's Rest, in Milwaukee where his grandfather Hans is buried, with a curiously ephemeral grave marker. Perhaps one of his surviving siblings or his siblings' decendants put it there as a temporary memorial.

July 9, 2022 | Email your comment.

More from Genbaza

From what I understand we very nearly lost access to this invaluable database. It was due to shut down a few months ago due to the increased cost and effort necessary to keep it online. But it was rescued by a group of volunteers and moved to a new server, where its records remain online and accessible to all.

You can read the original entry here or you can click the image at right to see the enlargement.

In the parish of Pomeiskie, one Richard Kramp reported the death of his widowed mother, Emilie Trabant Kramp, on December 31, 1887. As with so many of these records, earlier entries are lost, so we particularly cherish the wealth of information in this entry.

A brief digression for orientation, as needed: Richard Kramp was one of at least eight children of Friedrich Kramp, who died before this entry was recorded, and Emilie Pauline Trabant. Richard's sister, Laurette (Laura) Kramp, my great-grandmother, emigrated to the United States in 1881 with her older sister Augusta Kramp Hasse, who both settled in Chicago where Augusta's husband Carl Hasse and Laura's fiancé Wilhelm Gohr had emigrated earlier that year.

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Citation: Pomeiskie Parish (Klein Pomeiskie, Słupsku), "Arckiwum Panstwowe, Słupsku, Gross Pomeiskie (Pomysk Kielki)" Zgony [Deaths], 1887, Klein Pomeiskie, image 37, Emilie Trabant Kramp, 31 Dec 1887; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,463842,37 : accessed 18 June 2022).

The record states that Emilie was born in Massowitz but lived in the outskirts of Klein Pomsiskie at the time of her death. Helpfully, we're give her exact age: 51 years, three months, two days. Using an online birthdate calculator this gives her exact birthdate: September 29, 1936. This fits nicely with her age at the time of her marriage in 1853, a document that we do have, fortunately.

Her late husband was Friedrich Kramp, and she was the daughter of Carl Trabant and his wife, Henriette Knuth. Richard even signed the bottom of the document to verify his presence as informant; note that his handwriting is different from the parish clerk's hand.

This is another record that we're lucky to have!

June 19, 2022 | Email your comment.

Diving into the archives

Some very intrepid folks have assembled a free website including records from what was once Pomerania but is now Poland. If you have ancestors from the Kreis Stolp region of northern Germany, this is the database for you.

This death record has a plethora of information for us because our ancestors from this region were influenced by Polish as well as German administration, although the records themselves are in German.

First some orientation: the informant was Albert Pommeranz, the son-in-law of Emilie Louise Lübeck Gohr. Emilie was married to Wilhelm Heinrich Gohr, a farmer in Nippoglense, Kreis Stolp, and was the mother of Albert's wife Hulda Alwine Blandina Gohr. Emilie was also the mother of Hulda's brother Wilhelm Robert Otto Gohr (born in 1857), who emigrated to Chicago via Baltimore in 1881 and married fellow immigrant Laurette (Laura) Kramp in one of the German/Polish churches in Chicago.

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Citation: Büdow Parish (Nippoglense, Kreis Büdow), "Arckiwum Panstwowe, Słupsku, Gress Pomeiskie (Pomysk Kielki)" Zgony [Deaths], 1890, Nippoglense, image 37, Emilie Lübeck Gohr, 12 Dec 1890; imaged in Metryki Genbaza PL, database and digital images, (https://metryki.genbaza.pl/genbaza,detail,463842,37 : accessed 04 June 2022).

Emilie, born in September 1814, died on December 12, 1890. You can see the full-sized record itself at this link. You can also click the image above left to see an enlargement.

The record says that Emilie was born in Rostock near Gaffert, a village so small that today it no longer exists. It also lists her parents: the administrator or manager (probably of a local farm) Christoph Lübeck and his wife Christina Reddel. This is very helpful information! Church and civil records for this area of what's now Poland are few and far between dues to archives being destroyed, abandoned, or lost, so the more details we can read on these records the better off we are.

Unfortunately we'll likely never find Emilie's marriage record to Wilhelm Gohr, and certainly not her birth or baptism record. The existing records from Büdow, where Nippoglense was located, start in 1874 and end in 1919. So our best efforts will include looking at death record like this one that may mention the deceased's parents' names and a little bit about occupations where available.

June 4, 2022 | Email your comment.

More Gohrs

Another fortunate circumstance! Albert Gohr and his wife Franciska (Frances) had children in Chicago, and we're fortunate that one of their descendants uploaded a photo of two of them.

In fact, this helps us fill in the family line. Albert was born in 1907, Valeira in 1910. We can confirm this by looking up Cook County birth records for the children, but someone called D. Godfrey has already uploaded some family information to his Ancestry.com tree.

Generally it's not sufficient to cite non-official documentation in genealogical research, but as long as you back it up with other corroborating evidence, you've got some good clues at your fingertips.

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Citation: “Public Member Trees,” database, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com/ : accessed 24 May 2022), Godfrey/McNeilly family tree by D. Godfrey, profile for Alfred Richard Gohr Krause (1907-1974, d. Elgin, Kane, Illinois), documented data.

It's curious that Alfred's surname is listed as "Krause" in this family tree, which was never part of his name according to official documents (census, military, vital records, etc.) Apparently his mother Frances was remarried after her husband's death to a man called Krause. Perhaps the family thought that Alfred took on his mother's new surname. That doesn't appear to be correct from available evidence.

What about Albert's sister Valeira? She married a Fred Ledebuhr on April 29, 1931, so there's the answer to that question in our previous post. In fact, we can correct it. Fred's mother would have been called Ledebuhr, not Gohr. So the identification on the reverse side of the Gohr wedding photo in the previous post should have read "Valeira's parents."

Valeira and Fred Ledebuhr moved to California at some point where she died in 1983 in the city of Garden Grove.

May 24, 2022 | Email your comment.

A plethora of Albert Gohrs

Of course we only want one. And for a long time he was difficult to connect to our family.

We know that our great-grandfather Wilhelm Otto Robert Gohr had an older brother, born in 1844 as Albert Julius Reinhold Gohr, according to the Kreis Büdow church books in what was then Pomerania. At least eleven children were born to Wilhelm Heinrich Gohr and Emilie Lübeck, Albert being the fourth child born to the couple, Wilhelm Otto Robert the eleventh. The photo at left shows one of Albert's sons, Paul Conrad F. Gohr, born in 1882 in Chicago, at his marriage to Franciska (Frances) Ida Schmude in 1906.

It looked likely that Albert (who emigrated in 1872) and Wilhelm (who emigrated in 1881) were likely related. Both ended up in Chicago, and both lived in apartments next to each other on South Wood Street (3832 and 3830, respectively.)

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Citation: U.S. City Directory of Chicago, Illinois, 1888, p. 663, image 337; digital image, Ancestrylibrary.com (https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/: accessed 12 May 2022).

But until an autosomal DNA test provided a "cousin" link with an individual descended from Albert, we didn't have absolute proof that Albert and Wilhelm were brothers. We do now! Albert married a Wilhelmina Pauline Mews (or Maos, Moes, Mavs, Mewes, or Meves as it's spelled in a variety of Cook County documents). Albert himself played around with his age, showing up with an 1844 birth year in some Chicago documents, 1854 in others. This didn't make it any easier to pin him down. There were other Albert Gohrs in Chicago too, at least three. So sifting through clues was essential to verify which one was our Albert.

So far as I know none of the other eleven siblings emigrated to the United States, although it's possible that some connection will turn up in the future. As it is, it's nice to have a photo of Paul and Frances Gohr, supplied by an H.R. Ledebuhr and labelled on the reverse "Mom and Dad Gohr Fred's mother's parents?" (we'll have to look up Fred's mother now). We have no photos of Wilhelm or his wife Laura, both of whom died in Chicago before 1906. So this image is as close as we'll get to our earliest Gohr family.

May 12, 2022 | Email your comment.

The Luther Beene mystery

According to Alva Elwood MacLaughlan's voter registration information in 1950 he lived at 1309 N. Michigan Avenue in Pasadena, California. But according to the 1950 census, he did not.

Instead, the head of household was Luther G. Beene and his wife Alma. They had several lodgers but none of them was named MacLaughlan.

To make things more complicated, Luther Beene, who was born in Texas in 1883, had been in the Los Angeles area since the 1920s. He lived at various addresses in Southern California, including the location given in his 1948 voter registration: 816 E. Washington Avenue in El Monte. But wonder of wonders: Alva had also lived at 816 E. Washington, El Monte in the very same year.

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Citation: 1950 U.S. census, Los Angeles County, California, population schedule, Pasadena, enumeration district (ED) 68-45, sheet 7, serial number of dwelling unit 76, Luther G. Beene; database with images, National Archives and Records Administration (https://1950census.archives.gov/: accessed 30 April 2022) via Ancestrylibrary.com.

This is a curious situation. Knowing Alva's propensity to live at multiple addresses when he lived in Chicago, and knowing that he didn't change this habit after moving to the Los Angeles area, all I could imagine, at first, was that Luther Beene was a pseudonym for Alva MacLaughlan.

But no, Luther Garrett Beene was a real person married to Alma Viola Patterson, also from Texas. So did he and Alva know each other? Or was it just a coincidence that they happened to live in the same multi-residential building in the Pasadena area?

Census records and voter registrations can't answer that question. I can't find any evidence of Luther and Alma in Alva's family orbit, no photos or references connecting the two of them. But it's a very odd circumstance, and particularly aggravating when Alva is missing not only in the 1950 census but in the 1940 census too, when he still lived in Chicago.

Maybe some folks weren't meant to be found. Alva was certainly one of those elusive fellow.

May 1, 2022 | Email your comment.

A winsome foursome

This was the only photo in my mother's collection of a fellow we couldn't identify for the longest time. It was labelled (thankfully!) but merely said "Dorothy, Ted, Mildred and Jeanette." No location, but we're supposed to know by context that this is near Joliet, Illinois where at least some of these folks lived. Mildred and Jeanette Glawe were regularly in touch with their West Coast relatives throughout their lives and presumably that's where this photo originated.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Lorraine Bruns MacLaughlan, Dorothy Maynard and her son Ted with her sisters Jeanette and Mildred Glawe, ca. 1962, Joliet, Illinois; original copy scanned in April 2018.

With the 1950 census so newly available I decided to try a search at the NARA archives. Glawe is a reasonably unusual name, short enough for the AI machine indexing to digest without too much confusion. And it worked: up popped John W. Glawe, his wife Anna [Gohr] Glawe, their two middle-aged unmarried daughters Jeanette and Mildred...and a grandson!

No sign of the other daughter, Dorothy, in this entry, but because Jeanette and Mildred never married, we have to assume that Theodore Zelies is the son of their missing daughter, who had married in 1949 a fellow called Andrew B. Maynard in Michigan.

Jeanette and Mildred were referred to often in the family but not Dorothy or her son Ted, who was clearly a Navy man based on his dress whites in this snapshot. Perhaps Dorothy and her new husband were busy with their own lives in Sparta, Michigan where they settled, eventually with Dorothy's son Ted, who assumed the name Maynard. We have no clue who Mr. Zelies was or what became of him, but a clue to his actual name remained with his son for a time courtesy of this new census record.

Alas, Ted recently passed on. A brief obituary is now online. It's clear he was very proud of his Navy career. We hope to connect with his family at some point to further honor his memory.

April 17, 2022 | Email your comment.

Missing in action

It's not even a week old and the new census is giving me fits.

Tom and Lorraine MacLaughlan were living in their new marital home in the Los Angeles suburb of Rosemead, California, pictured at left. We even have the address, courtesy of a couple of carefully-saved typewritten envelopes from family members in March 1949: 1622 S. Brookline Avenue, Rosemead, California. No zip codes back then!

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, front side, collection of Lorraine Bruns MacLaughlan, Thomas MacLaughlan and Lorraine Bruns MacLaughlan, ca. 1947, Rosemead, California; original copy scanned in April 2018 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes.

The house is still standing today in all its Spanish-architectural glory, although the address was changed in the early nineteen-fifties when the streets were renumbered in that neighborhood. It's now 3856 South Brookline, although either address works when you plug it into Ancestry's ED address finder tool online.

Tom, his parents and siblings were never located in the 1940 U.S. federal census in Chicago, where they were then living, so I had high hopes for finding them in the 1950 census, not just because I had the address but because of a hint that Tom's parents, Alva and Marie MacLaughlan, might have been living with them during the 1949-1950 time period.

But no luck! Going through all the images for this enumeration district merely revealed that while the odd-numbered addresses on Brookline Avenue were indeed included in the 1950 census, the even-numbered side was not, or apparently was not. Because this census has not yet been properly indexed by humans, but rather by an artificial intelligence machine indexer, any attempts at searching for the surname MacLaughlan turn up nothing substantive. If the even-numbered houses from the 1620-1630 addresses have been included in the 1950 census somwehere, they must be in hiding.

A look through surrounding ED pages also turns up nothing related to that address. We'll have to wait for summer 2022 (when it's rumored that a more accurate search feature will be available) to see whether we can find Tom and Lorraine and/or his parents. Otherwise they may get the award for the most elusive characters in two subsequent census decades!

April 9, 2022 | Email your comment.

New census!

George Jatho, born in Charleston, South Carolina, moved to Chicago with his mother and siblings in 1910 when there were great upheavals in his family situation. His widowed mother taught music, the kids grew up, and by 1950 George was the proprietor of a cigar shop at Union Station, a busy place. We have a nice photo of George at his workplace, but with the arrival of the 1950 census we can see exactly how he was enumerated.

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Citation: 1950 U.S. census, Cook County, Illinois, population schedule, Chicago, enumeration district (ED) 103-1735, sheet 26, serial number of dwelling unit 288, George W. Jatho [indexed as "Vatho George w"]; database with images, National Archives and Records Administration (https://1950census.archives.gov/: accessed 1 April 2022).

Currently census pages are indexed by what's referred to as "Marchine Learning (AI) Extracted Names," hence the mispelling noted in the citation. We're lucky to find this record at all. Most of the indexing is far more hit-and-miss than this example and until summer 2022, when indexing is rumored to debut for the big sites like Ancestry and Familysearch, you'll have to search page by page using enumeration districts.

ED searches can be a pain. Enumerators didn't always (if ever!) enumerate neighborhoods in a predictable, contiguous manner. One street may appear in two or three different EDs and you have to peruse them all if you hope to get anywhere.

One handy tool is the Ancestry district map finder for locating enumeration districts by address. I've used it and find it pretty helpful, even in cases where street addresses were renumbered several years later. It won't necessarily help if the enumerator skipped some households, either by accident or design, and it won't do much in cases where people were not home to answer questions -- which seems like a lot of families in the 1950 census! Nevertheless you can get a jump-start on searches in 1950 while waiting for indexing to be more readily and reliably available.

April 2, 2022 | Email your comment.

The captivating little bride

It was a quiet but lovely wedding, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune of April 12, 1885. The bridegroom was Edmond Dantes Jatho, the penultimate son of the late G.W. Jatho and his wife, Elise Schuckmann Jatho, of Charleston. The bride was Edith Craven Ripley, daughter of Philip Ripley, a well-known journalist in New York, and his ex-wife Ella A. Browne Ripley Rodgers of New Orleans.

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Citation: Marriage notice of Edmond D. Jatho and Edith C. Ripley, The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), Sunday April 19, 1885, p. 12; image copy, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : downloaded 5 April 2022).

Edmond's business connections clearly took him far afield to New Orleans. Edith's mother was a New Orleans native. The city seemed the right place for the nuptials, although it appears from a more detailed commentary in the April 12 edition of the paper that none of Edmond's Charleston family was able to attend.

Edith's father, Philip Ripley, was famous as an editor and journalist, born in Connecticut with roots as far back as the Pilgrims, although intriguingly he was disowned by his father Philip Senior.

Edmond's late father was a jeweler and watchmaker who emigrated from Hesse-Kassel, Germany in 1848 and established a business in Charleston SC.

Edmond and Edith were married long enough to have three daughters and a son, Norwood, who was born in 1887 in Charleston but spent most of his life in New Orleans. Two of the daughters, Annie Laurie and Penelope, died in infancy but Lorraine grew up with her family in New Orleans.

Curiously, Edmond and Edit separated around 1894 or so. There's no evidence of a divorce, which was an expensive proposition in those days even if the local laws allowed it to happen. Edith may have become a "grass widow," an unmarried woman who passed as a widow. She married Robert Macmurdo in 1895 in New Orleans and expanded her family, while Edmond returned to Charleston and ended up in Chicago, where he prospered as a procurement officer for the U.S. Army. He died in 1910 and was buried at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston. Edith Macmurdo died in 1931 in New Orleans.

March 11, 2022 | Email your comment.

Turn it over

The photo's the thing, but if you have an original cabinet card from the nineteenth century it's worth looking at the reverse side to see where, and by whom, the photo was taken.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, reverse and front side, collection of Catherine Meyer, Margarethe "Magretta" Jensen Petersen, ca. 1872, Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein; original copy scanned in August 2006 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes, great-great-granddaughter of the portrait subject.

Although there's no inscription on the cabinet card (or carte de visite) we're fairly confident that the portrait can be identified as Magretta due to its inclusion in her daughter-in-law's collection, the apparent age of the lady (Magretta was born in 1816), and Magretta's remarkable resemblance to her grandson, who was born in 1916. We also know that Flensburg was the nearest large town in northern Schleswig, where Magretta and her family lived before emigrating to Nebraska in 1872.

The F. Brandt portrait studio was fairly well known in the area. Christian Friedrich Brandt's career is highlighted in this Danish-language website, where you'll see identical imprints on the reverse of some of the other images from the studio. Circumstantial evidence is sometimes all we have to identify a photo.

Another photo from our collection comes from New Orleans. The reverse is rich with information, including several inscriptions in various tones of ink, suggesting that the notes were made at different times. The photo comes from the studio of Charles T. Yenni at 631 Canal Street. The pre-printed information advertises that the Yenni Studio produced "portraits in crayon and pastel" (e.g. hand-tinted). The first handwritten notation says "July 7, 1896," which we know from other sources (personal verification from the Gadpaille/Jatho family plus WWI registration card) is correct for the birthdate of Edgar Courtney Gadpaille, the subject of this photo, who was almost four years old in this portrait.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, reverse and front side, collection of Edgar Jatho, Edgar Courtney Gadpaille, ca. 1900, New Orleans, Louisiana; original copy scanned in February 2008 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes.

A more personal inscription: "For Aunt Ella with love and kisses, 20.4.1900, New Orleans LA, U.S.A." Aunt Ella was Edgar's aunt, Ella Garsia [Garcia], his mother Evadne Gadpaille's elder sister. The more peculiar note appears to be a list at the bottom of the reverse side of the photo, which appears to be names or places unrelated to the photo.

Edgar, left, was part of the Gadpaille/Jatho family of New Orleans, the youngest child of Joseph Charles Gadpaille of New York and Evadne Adelaide Garsia/Garcia of Jamaica. Joseph and Evadne lived in New Orleans and Edgar was born there in 1896. He and his wife Violet C. Gadpaille had at least one son, Warren Joseph Gadpaille. All are buried at Greenwood Cemetery in new Orleans.

A photo further afield was taken at the G. Linder studio, which had two locations, one in Warsaw and one in Brześć Litewski "wprost ogrodu miejskiego," handy directions that translate as "straight to the city garden." The Linder studio was known for providing portraits on cabinet cards in the late nineteenth century, and this would appear to be an example of their work.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, reverse and front side, collection of Daniel Levenson, unknown gentleman in a top hat and coat, ca. 1894, Poland; original copy scanned in 2022 by Daniel Levenson.

The trouble is: we don't know who the elegant man on the front of this photo might be!

The top-hatted gentleman, possibly in his early to mid-thirties, is elegantly dressed in a stylish coat. The reverse of the photo bears only one notation, "1894," which may (or may not) be the date of the photo. Men's fashions didn't change quite as dramatically as women's fashions at the time, making it challenging to accurately date the year it was taken, but his style is consistent with the era 1890-1905.

The location where the photo was taken is also puzzling. Family members don't have any known connection to these areas of Poland, although the photo's subject could have traveled there for business or pleasure from Kovno, Lithuania, where the family was based.

We may never be able to solve this mystery, but it's possible that other family members will provide information at some point in the future. In any case, it's certainly yet another photographic treasure!

March 4, 2022 | Email your comment.

The wedding party

Here from 1808, a happy conglomeration of witnesses to a wedding: George Jatho and Elizabeth Koppen, the groom and bride; her parents (Johanne Elisabeth Koppen signs nervously, or perhaps she was unused to penmanship), and the groom's father Ulrich Wilhelm Jatho, my 4x-great-grandfather. Ulrich's late wife, Marie Magdalena Keppelin, died in 1795 and is represented in the text of the marriage record but was not around to sign the document.

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Citation: "Deutschland, ausgewählte evangelische Kirchenbücher 1500-1971," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPJ6-7BTM : 16 February 2022), Ulrich Wilhelm Jatho in entry for Johann George Jatho, 18 Sep 1808; images digitized and records extracted by Ancestry; citing Marriage, Kassel, Kassel, Kassel, Hessen, Deutschland, Cassel u. Stkr, German Lutheran Collection, various parishes, Germany.

Nicolaus Koppen also signed the document: a brother or half-brother of the bride? August Gustav Augener and Melchior Heidt: the text suggests that they're associates of the bride's father. Johann Georg Rudolph is identified in the marriage document (if I'm reading this right) as a 59-year-old "father" of the bride. Could he actually be her grandfather? Or was he her true father and Georg Peter Koppen was her stepfather?

Georg the bridegroom was the older brother of Georg Heinrich Jatho (my 3rd-great-grandfather) who was eighteen at the time of this marriage and thus not of age to affix his name to a legal document like this one.

George and Elizabeth had a son who was a pastor, Jacob Ludwig Victor Otto Jatho (sometimes known as Ludwig Jacob Victor Otto, so look under both names). Ulrich's two grandsons, sons of Jacob etc., were also pastors, one particularly famous, Carl Wilhelm Jatho. Carl was something of a religious revolutionary and was eventually removed from office for suggesting that an individual could decide his/her own religious belief rather than have the state or church dictate it. Nevertheless there's a boulevard in Cologne named after him.

February 19, 2022 | Email your comment.

DNA doesn't lie (usually)

Autosomal DNA testing is a very different service from Y-DNA (male) or mt-DNA (female) DNA ancestry. It can be complicated but the simplest way to explain it is that it tests a different portion of the DNA strand and predicts how closely you may be related to cousins, close or distant.

I didn't think it would serve much purpose when I ordered a test through Ancestry.com. I had a good paper trail already. What was I likely to find out? But the test was on sale and I decided to take the plunge.

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Citation: “Public Member Trees,” database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 7 February 2022), “Albert Gohr,” family tree by Erich Ledebuhr, profile for Albert Gohr (1844-1895, d. Cook County, Illinois) undocumented data.

The thing about autosomal testing is that it's most likely to show you cousins in current chronology, not so much back in time unless a family tree is associated with their test. Even then, how accurate is their tree? We have to evaluate that using traditional documented information.

In this case we have some prior evidence. We know that Wilhelm Gohr, my great-grandfather, had an older brother Albert, who was born in 1844. For Wilhelm's 1881 marriage to Laura Kramp we know that an Albert Gohr was a witness to the marriage. He's recorded in the registry. We also know that Wilhelm and Albert lived right next door to each other in the Chicago voter registration rolls for 1892: Wilhelm at 3830 Wood Street, Albert at 3832 Wood Street.

Complicating this situation is the fact that Albert Gohr (who emigrated in 1872 and in married Wilhelmina Paulina Möwes or Mews in 1874) started using an alternate birth year, 1854 instead of 1844, on official records. This isn't surprising. My experience is that people who get creative about their birth years usually do so in increments of five to ten years. Albert's real birth year (1844) is exactly ten years off his later reported birth year.

That's enough to make a good researcher hesitate: did we have the right Albert Gohr after all? How could we prove a relationship between Albert and Wilhelm, other than circumstantial evidence?

That's where autosomal DNA helps. The match between Erich Ledebuhr's tree (which includes Albert Gohr and Paulina Mews) and mine is strongly suggested by a match at 1% shared DNA: 33 cM across 2 segments, strong enough for a fourth to sixth cousin, which is exactly what we would expect from descendants of these two men. So we know that Albert and Wilhelm were related and likely brothers.

Why the families didn't keep in closer touch (the lack of exchanged family photos suggest a certain distance) is a mystery to be solved another day!

February 7, 2022 | Email your comment.

Seeing double?

So am I and they're not even twins!

Myrtle Petersen at left is with her husband Harvey Doerr. At right is Evelyn Petersen with her husband Horton Leverenz, a double wedding in Milwaukee on June 15, 1935. Myrtle was the older sister by two years.

There were actually twins in this family. Peter Heinrich Petersen and his wife Martha Krohn Petersen had twin daughters Margaret and Myrtle in 1911. But Margaret, or Marge as she was known, married Arthur Lehrmann in 1930 in a single ceremony.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of two photographs, collection of Catherine Meyer, Myrtle H. Petersen and Evelyn Anna Maria Petersen, June 15, 1935, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; original copy scanned in August 2006 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes.

So that left Myrtle and Evelyn (born in 1913) to arrange their own double wedding. The details are meticulous. The wedding dresses, veils, and headpieces are identical. So is the studio background. The bouquets include the same types of flowers even if they're slightly differently arranged: calla lilies, roses, ferns, and gypsophila or baby's breath. Even the bridegrooms' boutonnières are the same.

By all accounts both ladies had long and happy marriages: Myrtle's 53 years, Evelyn's 54 years. Although their father Peter Petersen died in 1916 well before their marriages, their mother and stepfather Herbert Allen were a regular presence in their lives and the lives of their children, as you'll see from visiting pictures in our photo gallery.

January 19, 2022 | Email your comment.

Norwood Jatho: Hiding in plain sight

What surprised me about this photo was that not one of my Jatho relations have come across it before now. Not even his New Orleans relatives have any photos of Norwood Jatho Senior, who was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1887 and spent most of his life in and around New Orleans, Louisiana and Biloxi, Mississippi. He's pictured here, about 1922, with two of his sons, Norwood Junior (born 1919) and Kenneth Hodges (born 1921). The photo looks to be a family snapshot, but we don't know the location where it was taken.

There were, in fact, other Jatho families in Victoria, Texas, where this image is housed. The big question is: how did they procure this photo? Did Norwood send it? Did they photograph him on a visit or did the family of Adam Jatho exchange photos through the mail?

What it suggests is that the Jatho family of Victoria, Texas thought that there was some connection to the Jatho family of New Orleans, other than the obvious one of sharing a surname. It's a rare enough surname so that this theory makes sense, but with the facts we have access to it can't be proven.

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Citation: "Victoria College/University of Houston-Victoria Library," image in online database, Victoria  Regional History Center (https://digitalcollections.uhv.edu/digital/collection/p16791coll2/id/2057/rec/4 : accessed 11 January 2022), digital copy of a photograph of Norwood Jatho Senior and his sons Norwood Junior and Kenneth Hodges, 1922, image 8399A.jpg.

We know that Adam Jatho and his parents, Johann and Elise Müller Jatho, came to the Texas port of Indianola, Calhoun County, in 1845. Adam was a cabinet maker and a musician. He married a Galveston lady, Ida Sophia Hensholdt, and they established a family presence in Victoria. The Victoria Regional History Center has a nice collection of photos from this family.

It would help us if we could find the connection, if there is one, between the two families. One is to trace the origins of Adam's parents in Germany. The most detailed suggestion of Adam's birthplace is Hesse-Kassel from his Texas death record...not precise enough for us to find out whether our Jathos and the Texas Jathos shared a birthplace. If we could find a male descendant of the Texas Jathos we could employ a Y-DNA test and compare it to a member of our family who was tested some time ago.

This photo, surprising though it may be, certainly opens up new avenues of exploration for us!

January 11, 2022 | Email your comment.

Four greats is pretty great

As it usually happens I was searching for something else and stumbled upon a few clues that led me to this death record. It's my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Claudius Franciscus Vuillemin, and it gives us an entirely new area to explore in the eastern region of France.

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Citation: "Deutschland Tote und Beerdigungen, 1582-1958", image in online database, FamilySearch  (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JQQY-2J5 : accessed 4 January 2022), death record for Claudius Franciscus Vuillemin, 1853, in Kirchenbuch, Tote 1812-1927, Film #008110031, image 224.

I had run across him as Franz Villmin or Willemin, the father of my great-great-great-grandmother Philippina Jungblut, sometimes spelled Jungblutin as was common in records of women's surnames. But I never found a marriage record between Philippina's parents, Franz and Magdalena Jungblut. In fact my notes from reading the microfilm many years ago specifically indicate that no father is mentioned in the record. Did I misread it? I've just ordered a copy so I can see whether I missed something the first time around. [Note: I did not misread it, no father is mentioned.]

I'd hesitated to list Franz as anything more than a stepfather to Philippina, but subsequent records suggest that there was, in fact, a marriage at some point. One such mention is in the 1873 marriage of Philippina's nephew, Karl Theodor Laurent, where you get not only the parents' of the bride and groom but the grandparent of both! Here Franz and Magdalena are mentioned with Magdalena labeled as Franz' "Ehefrau," his wife.

Another clue is in Philippina's daughter's baptism record from 1822 for Philippina Caroline Laurent, which includes the name of her mother as Philippina Willemin, not Philippina Jungblutin. Franz Willemin is even one of the godparents at the baptism.

In Franz' death record at the top, his status as a widower seems clear. The record presumes that there was a marriage, so it may just be that I misread Philippina's baptism record or the marriage between Franz and Magdalena is hiding somewhere.

These three records seem promising, so I added Franz with his full name into the database: Claudius Franciscus Vuillemin, born in Crançot, Jura, France, which is very near Switzerland and nearly three hundred miles from Zweibrücken, where Franz spent most of his life. We also have the full name of his wife, listed in Latinate form as Evae Magdalenae Jungblut, which should make her easier to find in the records.

Next task is to find some evidence of their marriage. It's got to be somewhere....

January 4, 2022 | Email your comment.

Finding Minnie

My maternal grandmother occasionally talked about her older sister Minnie, but not very often. Bertha Gohr had five sisters who lived, plus one brother. Four sisters married when they grew up, but not Minnie, and not their brother Rudolph.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, collection of Bertha Gohr Bruns; Anna Glawe, Minnie Gohr, Bertha Bruns, Margaret (Alma) Meyers, July 1941, Chicago, Illinois; original copy scanned in 2007 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes, granddaughter of Bertha Bruns.

As I started to explore records for Minnie and her brother Rudolph I realized that, while Rudolph lived alternately with his sisters and worked as a printer, Minnie lived with her family only in the 1910 census, and from 1920 onward was an inmate at the Northern Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane at Elgin, Illinois. She was occasionally in the company of her sisters when they organized an outing, and she's shown here, second from left, in this family snapshot from 1941.

Naturally if she had been mentally disturbed it was probably not a topic that my grandmother would have introduced, but I wasn't sure that this was the actual diagnosis. Minnie was born in 1882 and was a twin to her sister Anna, who went on to marry John Walter Glawe and produced a series of daughters. No one mentioned any mental issues with Minnie. So why was she institutionalized for most of her life?

Minnie was born Wilhelmina according to her Chicago birth certificate, so I searched for her under that name. Sure enough, the 1900 U.S. federal census has her listed under that name, this time in the town of Jacksonville, Morgan County, Illinois as an inmate at the Illinois Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb. The institution housed educable hard-of-hearing students throughout the state at no cost to their families.

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Citation: Digital image, 1900 United States Federal Census [database on-line], Provo, UT, USA: Ancestrylibrary.com; Year: 1900; Census Place: Jacksonville, Morgan, Illinois; Page: 3; Enumeration District: 0141; FHL microfilm: 1240331.

The census record clearly states that Wilhelmina was born in June 1882, which matches the month and year we have for her, that she was 18 years old, could read and write English but could not speak, clearly because she could not hear.

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Citation: Digital photograpph, "Illinois Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, Class of 1885," Chronicling Illinois, accessed December 28, 2021, http://alplm-cdi.com/chroniclingillinois/items/show/26831.

The institute documented photos of their graduating classes, as shown in the 1885 image shown below and online. It would be a wonderful discovery to find out whether Minnie's graduating class also documented her graduation. We have only one photo of Minnie from 1941 and it would be interesting to see her as a young woman, although the likelihood of a photograph surviving from 1900, when Minnie would have graduated, is slim.

She was able to work as a dressmaker in the early 1900s, the 1910 census suggests, while living with her mother's relatives, the Hasse/Murphy family, in Chicago. But perhaps they determined that it would be easier to have Minnie live at Elgin. At least we now have a better understanding of her circumstances as she transitioned to adulthood in Chicago.

December 28, 2021 | Email your comment.

Eyes wide shut

One of the things you learn as an archivist is how to cite a document or image under discussion. A number of concerns exist: is the document original or is it a copy? Is it in its original condition or has it been displayed in another medium, such as a website? Who owns it? And has it been altered or enhanced in any way?

The last point may be one of the most important ones to consider. Modern software makes it easy to colorize a black-and-white photograph, or overlay a sepia tint, or take out a background image that detracts from the person in the foreground. You can even open someone's eyes if they're closed -- see the example above. Photoshop has a tool that will do just that.

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Citation: Digital reproduction of a photograph, collection of Catherine Meyer, Alva Elwood Maclaughlan and Marie Jatho MacLaughlan, ca. 1932, Chicago, Illinois; original copy scanned in August 2006 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes, granddaughter of Alva and Marie.

But should you do it? If you're preparing a photo for private use, maybe framed for your mantelpiece, it may be acceptable. But for an online archive or digital collection, don't do it unless you have a point to prove, e.g. if you want to contrast the difference between unaltered and altered photos for educational purposes.

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Citation: Digitally altered image of a photograph, collection of Catherine Meyer, Alva Elwood Maclaughlan and Marie Jatho MacLaughlan, ca. 1932, Chicago, Illinois; original copy scanned in August 2006 by D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes, granddaughter of Alva and Marie, and altered December 2021 for purposes of illustration.

As our cousin Albert Esser advises, there's nothing more honest than old photos. The photo of Alva and Marie on the left shows the photo in its original format. Marie's eyes are closed. Maybe there's a reason for it. Perhaps she was expressing an emotion, weariness, distress about something...maybe about the young man in the background striking a petulant pose. Perhaps she just blinked at an inopportune moment and the camera caught it. But this is the real picture, and your audience should know it.

In Photoshop Elements I've used the "Open Closed Eyes" tool to borrow Marie's eyes from another photo of Marie, where her eyes are open, and apply them to this image. It works from a technology standpoint but it's not the original photo, and your citation should express this clearly. The website for the MLA Handbook Style Center shows how to accomplish this and gives an example where you might expect to see it used.

Altered photographs are nothing new. In the former Soviet Union it was standard practice in the 1940s to doctor photos to remove the image of someone who had fallen out of favor with the regime. With modern tools it's become even easier to create fake images to promote one cause or another. But as a historian it's important to adhere to the truth that the photograph is telling. Technology is not always a blessing!

December 11, 2021 | Email your comment.

An elusive address

This is a snapshot I've had in the collection for some time: Tom MacLaughlan and his younger sister Dolores, posed somewhere in front of a house. You can see the house number above the door, but otherwise there's no clue about the location. Was this pre-World War II before Tom was drafted? If so it was in Chicago. Dolores, born in 1929, could be anywhere from thirteen to eighteen, so that doesn't help us narrow it down. in fact, her youthful visage makes it more difficult to pinpoint the date.

We know that after the war Tom, Dolores, and his parents relocated to Southern California. Older sister Marie was married in 1941 and stayed with her husband Walter Miller in Chicago for a time, then relocated to Omaha, Nebraska (where, if she'd only known it, a passel of her Petersen relatives lived). Alva MacLaughlan Jr., married to Doris Rohde, also remained in Chicago before venturing south to Florida later that decade. But what clue do we have to tell us whether this was after the MacLaughlans moved to the Los Angeles area, or before?

Alva MacLaughlan Senior had a propensity for moving around Chicago every few years, for reasons unknown. His voter registration record shows us all his addresses between 1936 through 1942. But none of them have the number 415. Same with his available directory entries in Southern California where he moved in 1946, when he lived in Alhambra, Glendora, and a handful of other communities -- lots of addresses but not the one we're looking for.

But I had a hunch: there was one more place to look. Tom married in 1947 in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb. Didn't grown children often live with their parents until they married? What if the marriage license indicated a completely new address?

That worked! Tom's address at the time of his marriage was 415 South 4th Avenue in the small town of Puente, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles in the bucolic San Gabriel Valley. So the tiny clapboard home where Tom and Dolores posed was in California...and we have a verified location and approximate date for it, 1946-1947.

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Citation: "California, County Marriages, 1850-1952," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K8KN-BK1 : 6 December 2021), Thomas William Maclaughlan and Lorraine Marie Bruns, 03 Aug 1947; citing Los Angeles, California, United States, county courthouses, California; FHL microfilm 2,115,960.

True to form, Alva had moved to a different location a couple years later when daughter Dolores was married. She gave her parents' home address on her license as 816 Washington Ave., El Monte. It's true that just after WWII it was tough to find permanent housing in Southern California, but Alva was an old hand at trading spaces.

We often turn to census or directory entries to trace our ancestral addresses, but this is a reminder that other resources work nicely too: voter registrations, vital records, even newspaper social notes. It's worth tracking them down for a picture of our relatives' peregrinations.

December 6, 2021 | Email your comment.

An American Gretna Green

In England, Gretna Green was the go-to place to get married if you were under 21 years of age or if you didn't have your parents' consent, due to the Marriage Act of 1754. Just over the Scottish border, Greta Green welcomed couples looking to circumvent the policy.

There were some American cities that acted as safe harbors in similar circumstances. Lake County, Indiana was one region where Chicago folks could go to get a quick marriage.

So, apparently, was Council Bluffs, just four and a half miles from Omaha, Nebraska. Here Omaha residents Louis Petersen and his bride Marie (Mamie) Cavilin could marry without parental displeasure, or whatever it was preventing them from marrying in peace at home.

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Citation: Iowa, U.S., Marriage Records, 1880-1951 for Lewis Peterson [Louis Petersen], 1891, 363 (Polk - Wright), database with images, Ancestry Library (https://www.ancestrylibrary.com: accessed 29 November 2021, Iowa Department of Public Health; Des Moines, Iowa; Series Title: Iowa Marriage Records, 1880–1922; Record Type: Marriage.

This is a good lesson for researchers too. No record could be found in Nebraska for Louis Petersen (correct spelling) and his wife Marie, who showed up regularly in census records but never in the annals of Nebraska marriages. Naturally, because as we know now, they weren't married in Nebraska, even if that was the logical marriage place. But open up the search to all states instead of focusing on Nebraska and Iowa pops up.

You have to be creative in your search too, such as recognizing that Lewis Peterson is an expected alternate spelling of Louis Petersen, and that Mamie was a nickname for Marie. But his father's name is right, and we also get a clue to Mamie's father's and mother's names, which will aid in future searches.

We also had a little help from clues left in a birth record in Omaha that gave us Marie's maiden name and made it far easier to find the marriage record. Louis and Marie had a daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in 1891. Searching for her rather than her parents (a father called Louis Petersen, a mother called Marie with no surname) brought up a record in the database for "Wilhelmina Elizabeth Peterson in the U.S., Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Swedish American Church Records, 1800-1947." Marie was Swedish according to the available census records, so that's a likely tip. And looking at the birth record gives us more clues.

There were two births recorded together in this registry but one is out of sequence. Effie Evangelina Cavalin was born in September 1892 but Wilhelmina Elizabeth Petersen was born in April 1891 (those with their calculators handy will note that Elizabeth was born before her parents' marriage). But the two births are grouped together because each parental group acted as godparents to the other family: Carl J. Cavalin and his wife for Elizabeth, Louis Petersen and his wife for Effie.

The simplest reason for the reciprocal sponsorship was a relationship between the two families. That was typical for the time. So if we assume that Carl J. Cavalin was related somehow to Louis' wife Marie Petersen, we should find evidence of it somewhere. And we do! A quick search for a marriage somewhere in the U.S. between a Louis Petersen and a Marie Cavalin leads us to the Iowa marriage.

It's a convoluted path but this time it just happened to result in a great discovery...and a relief. We've been looking for Marie's original surname periodically over the past sixteen years. Now we know!

November 29, 2021 | Email your comment.

Find-A-Grave is your friend.

Well, maybe not your best friend, but it's an awfully useful tool. Thanks to Find-A-Grave participant Saratoga and Jim Ravencraft for this series of photos.

Some years ago when I was trying to unravel the story of All Our Jathos in Charleston, South Carolina I had to fly there and traipse around Magnolia Cemetery to find the Jatho plot. Now that diligent volunteers are stepping in, things are much more easily found.

Elise Jatho's headstone is fairly accurate and tells us that she was the "relict" (widow) of George W. Jatho, who was buried (for whatever reason) across the state in Greenwood, South Carolina. The family was living there at the time. Perhaps it was too expensive to bring the patriarch back to Charleston where the family had their primary residence.

It was also the first major death in the family, occurring in 1870, and it would have been expedient to plan for a local burial, which was arranged by G.W. Senior's Mason brethren.

At some point, after the family moved back to Charleston, a "perpetual care" plot was established at Magnolia, one of the two cemeteries favored by the German Lutheran community in town. Perpetual care was a financial arrangement that allowed for future family burials in the same spacious plot, here located under a restful oak tree and surrounded by beautiful azaleas (you can see an image of the Jatho plot in the slide show that rotates on our home page).

Perpetual care was also an insurance program of sorts, allowing the cemetery to hire groundskeepers to keep things tidy for all patrons. It's a mandatory program today but was not required during the time of the Jatho burials.

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Citation: Find A Grave ("https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/120613606/g-w-jatho : accessed 12 November 2021), memorial page 120613606, Georg Wilhelm Jatho (1824-1870), created by Jim Ravencraft; citing Greenwood Cemetery, Greenwood, Greenwood County, South Carolina, USA.

Using information on a Find-A-Grave page is helpful for genealogists but must still be cross-checked with other sources of information. The volunteer Saratoga isn't a family member who's related to these Jathos, and as a result he or she doesn't have complete information on the burials. There are actually more children and even grandchildren of Elise Jatho buried here. One son, Carl Julius Jatho, died in 1929 in Bartow County, Florida and is not represented here (we're still looking for him!). Another son, William George Jatho, is buried across the street in Bethany Cemetery with his in-laws, the Rev. Louis Müller and wife Caroline Laurent Müller.

November 12, 2021 | Email your comment.