<p>And the DAR library at Headquarters (1776 D Street) is a wonderful resource if you’re visiting DC.</p>
<p>I take my friends as I find them. I have met many lovely women through the DAR, and I’ve met some condescending superior know-it-alls too. Just like in real life. And on CC (but not on this thread).</p>
<p>Think it’s the National Parks Svc that keeps all the civil war campaign records. Ellis Island has the ship manifests. And the problem with original documents depends on the family mobility, place, etc. Eg births/married/death could be registered in the current parish/city, town they migrated from- we (dh) have this issue. Mother’s name can be missing or wrong. Fun! One gg aunt’s own husband noted her birthplace wrong on her death cert.</p>
<p>DH doesn’t have far to go to find the skeletons in his closet. When his father passed away from cancer several years ago (having had several siblings also have cancer), DH’s mother confessed that the three oldest children (including him as the 3rd) were all from different fathers! We knew about the oldest, but…wow. She was pregnant with #2 when they first met…and DH was a “fling” after they were married…and she says that neither man every knew…the “real” dad moved away and DH didn’t know. Although it is somewhat of a relief to know that he doesn’t have the line of apparent cancer-prone genes, he really has no idea who his father was, other than he was from Texas. He recently had surgery for a strange hand ailment that the doctor says is hereditary…and originated with the Vikings. OK then, there we go!</p>
<p>From my side, I am blessed to have a niece and a cousin who are WAY into geneology, so my relatives (both sides) have been traced back to England in the early 1700’s. Not much drama except that the spelling of my father’s last name was changed sometime in the 1800’s, reportedly to disassociate from a horse-thief relative. I am thrilled to have someone who’s been to multiple states traipsing through cemeteries and into county records so I don’t have to!</p>
<p>I find it interesting that of our last seven presidents, two of them were sworn in with different names than they were born with. All our families have lots of complexity. Human nature doesn’t change much over the centuries when you really get down to it.</p>
<p>I’ve spent a bit of time using ancestry.com and Cyndi’s list. One conclusion I’ve drawn: that forces we might regard as “historical” are rather powerful shapers of people’s lives. In terms of the arrival of immigrants to the U.S., our Dutch ancestors showed up just when you’d expect, and ditto for the Swedish, Irish and German parts of the family. The English immigrants started arriving relatively early, but a second wave arrived just a year or two before Napoleon’s final defeat. </p>
<p>Another conclusion: I am probably <em>not</em> related to Old King Cole, Aeneas, or Anchises, regardless of what One World Tree thinks.</p>
<p>I had the fortune to have a post discovered by an ancient lady/very distant rel who linked me with a barely younger guy who had been putting things together for 20 years. We (the families, not us, per se) were each other’s missing links. I could give him most from gggf down, we had fun looking together for some lost folks (found them and living desc) and he supplied info about gggm’s ancestors. He was a cranky old guy. A very cool experience. He was in Canada.</p>
<p>I am always amazed by how generous with their time and how helpful other genealogists are. I’ve received no end of assistance from people I’ve never met. </p>
<p>My most interesting find: I had always heard that my grandfather received an MBE, but I’d never met him or in fact most of that side of the family. I didn’t know where to go to find out anything. Believe it or not, there is no list of recipients online. So finally I just sent a letter to “office of The Queen” (I didn’t know how else to address it !) at “St. James’s Palace”. I had to try, but assumed that would be the last I heard of it. But lo and behold, a couple of weeks later I got in the mail a letter from the Queen’s office thanking me for my letter, and confirmed that indeed my grandfather had been awarded an MBE, and told me the year and in what general capacity. I was so impressed that they took the trouble to respond.</p>
<p>Genealogy has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve done. I was always interested from a young age, but never pursued it until mid-30’s. I feel so lucky my ggrandfather kept seemingly ever paper he ever touched. He owned a business and had a secretary and lots of carbon paper! He had been the recipient of family paperwork and kept copious journals.</p>
<p>My parents inherited a sideboard when my grandma died. I don’t think anyone had unpacked it since her parents got it–original land grant deeds/ Civil War documents/Postmaster appts, etc. I had lived with my grandparents for 3 years in college…right with all this stuff and a closet more full. Arggggg. One of my biggest regrets…my grandma would have been happy to discuss…I never asked.</p>
<p>It’s a whole lot easier to trace rich ancestors than poor ones. I have both! They live in one place longer and leave a lot more paperwork and land records. </p>
<p>Two things that may be applicable to others: if your ancestors lived in a rural area, the weekly newspapers often had correspondents who wrote of happenings, ~1875-1925. State library archives often have these available for use free on microfiche. They are a gold mine of the lives and times and mentioned my folks numerous times.</p>
<p>From NARA one can request military service records for a nominal fee. So much info-there was a whole lot of gov’t paperwork back then for survivor/disability benefits too!</p>
<p>On my mother’s side, one distant relative retired early in life and spent the next five years building a family tree, all two hundred pages. What he discovered was a propensity for certain types of cancer in both men and women. This led to many of the other relatives to get tested for the BRCA-2 gene which is linked to breast/ovarian cancer and act accordingly. Without his research people wouldn’t have known how common it was and he possibly saved multiple lives. And the tree while only 200 years worth can be handed down to future generations…</p>
<p>Sryrstress, many small or rural communities also did town histories starting just before the 1876 Centennial or when those towns hit their own 100th- and WPA recorded many tales of oldest residents. Through these, we found all sorts of info. Incl that every generation back to mid 1800s has played violin.</p>
<p>I have done extensive research and actually bumped into a second cousin online on Ancestry.com. He did a post that he was researching the XYZ family from such-and-such location; I was doing the same thing and contacted him; and as it turned out, my paternal grandfather and his maternal grandmother were brother and sister, who emigrated over here together at the ages of 17 and 19 after their parents had died, and promptly had a feud and never spoke to one another again.</p>
<p>I also researched my maternal line going back to the 1600’s. My maternal grandmother was older than my grandfather, just by a few months; I found that all of the women in her line, without exception, were older than their husbands, going all the way back!</p>
<p>I researched my Jewish (Polish/Russian) side using Jewishgen and researched my Catholic (German) side using a private researcher from Bavaria. The German records were, as one might expect, perfect and the only thing that stopped me from going back before the 1600’s was the amount of money I was willing to spend on this endeavor.</p>
<p>I was always amazed that my G G grandmother left Scotland with her husband and 5 kids and sailed for Australia. They stayed there a few years, had a couple more kids and then sailed to Canada losing one child on the way. I would love to know what possess them to move 1/2 way around the world twice.</p>
<p>Our slight family mystery story has to do with Peter Stuyvesant. My great aunt had Stuyvesant as her middle name and supposedly a society gave her parents $100 for doing this. I can’t figure out if we are some how related to Peter or what society would have done this, but my great aunt insisted this was true.</p>
<p>It is not restricted to males, but patrilineal ancestry through the Y chromosome can only be done for males, although females can find that out if their fathers or brothers do it (matrilineal ancestry through mitochondrial DNA can be done for everyone).</p>
<p>However, there is the slight possibility of secrets being revealed. For example, suppose a father and son (or two brothers) find that they have different Y chromosomes.</p>
<p>Zoosermom, I’ve been doing genealogical research for friends – and, more recently, friends of my son – for years, and would be happy to do some for you when things are a little less busy for me at work. I find doing research for others to be a great deal of fun, and obviously a great deal easier than it was 20+ years ago, before the Internet, when everything involved either going to libraries and archives in person (and then scrolling through endless microfilm reels), or writing away to distant archives and waiting months for responses. Some of which can still be necessary, but obviously much less so given how much information is online. (I almost never rely on family trees compiled by other people, unless those people are themselves reputable genealogists who relied on primary sources, since people’s family trees are often filled with mistakes – I’ve seen family trees online with information about my family that was very obviously lifted from work I did myself years ago and distributed to relatives, but contains major substantive transcription errors.)</p>
<p>I was interested in my family history from the time I was a child, and was fortunate in my early teens to be able to interview several elderly relatives and obtain information that saved me a great deal of time later on. I think my interest started with the fact that one of the few things my grandparents were able to take with them when they were finally able to escape Berlin and come to the USA via Lisbon in June 1941 (a few months before Jews were entirely prohibited from leaving and the deportations began), was a suitcase filled with old family photographs dating back as far as 1859; I used to spend hours with my mother talking about the photos and learning about the people in them. Fortunately, she wrote down all the names she knew for me on the backs of the photos; I only wish I could remember which people were the subjects of the stories she told me – as in, which ancestor of mine was supposedly born in the outhouse behind the family home in Sulzburg (a village in the Schwarzwald where my maternal grandmother was born and her family had lived since about 1710), and fell down the hole and had to be rescued? Which ancestor was known in the family as “the Juggler” because he tried to throw an oil lamp at his wife but succeeded only in burning himself as he juggled it? In my maternal grandfather’s family in Pomerania, why exactly were there so many first cousin (and even double first cousin) marriages for several generations up to the late 19th century – so much so, I’ve since figured out, that several of my grandfather’s first cousins had only 6 different great-great-grandparents rather than the 16 one would normally have? </p>
<p>And so on. I guess I’ll never know for most of it, although it’s clear both that first cousin marriages among Jews were fairly common once upon a time in small town Prussia (even if not usually to that extent), and that there were no more of them after the family all moved to Berlin in the 1870’s. </p>
<p>After I was in my teens, I did nothing further for many years, and picked it up again shortly after my son was born in 1990 – initially to try to put together everything I already had (including having translations done of my mother’s letters to her parents during the five years she spent in London after leaving Germany in December 1938 on the Kindertransport), and to find out as much additional information as I could about her life, and her family in Germany before the Holocaust, in order to allow my son to have as complete a picture as possible of her, since she died in 1975 after a car accident we were in, and he would never know her in person. </p>
<p>Also a little bit, I think, as my own very minor contribution to restoring, symbolically, what was destroyed – my mother’s family, which had almost certainly been in roughly the same geographical locations for at least 1,000 years until the 1930’s, when they were all either murdered or fled. Obviously, many of the graves and cemeteries have been destroyed over the centuries (some comparatively recently, of course), so, without being overly sentimental, I do like to think of each name I find and speak out loud – many of them names that haven’t been spoken out loud or even thought of for 100 or 200 years or more, including names of family members who died as babies or children – as the symbolic equivalent of lighting a candle for them and saying kaddish for them.</p>
<p>And things grew from there, and I ended up researching both sides of my family, both collaterally (calling distant cousins in my father’s generation all over the USA, something that obviously I could no longer do, since I think every person I spoke to is dead by now, other than my father himself), and also backwards as far back as I could, mostly in European records. (The first ancestors of mine to immigrate to the USA didn’t get here until 1883, although one of my great-grandmothers had an older sister who arrived in 1879; the rest of my immediate ancestors arrived in 1888, 1941, and 1943.) It’s not always so easy to do genealogical research for European Jews, who largely did not have hereditary surnames prior to the early 19th century, and for whom birth, marriage, and death records were generally not kept by the authorities before then, although there is – generally speaking – more information available for some of the German states and for Alsace in France than there is for Poland and Lithuania, out of the four areas from which my family came. </p>
<p>So I’ve had to rely on a variety of other kinds of records, most of which existed only because the different German states liked to keep very close track of their Jews, in order to be able to impose special taxes and otherwise exploit them financially by charging them for almost everything one could imagine, from giving them privileges to live in particular places, to buying property, to getting married. (It’s not easy to learn to decipher 18th and 19th century sometimes-sloppy old-fashioned German handwriting, or 19th century Polish handwriting, but it’s often necessary. I even ended up having a couple of articles I wrote based on such records published in Jewish genealogical journals, back in the day.) </p>
<p>In the end, after more than 20 years, I’m happy to say that in addition to knowing about lots of collateral relatives (I don’t usually go further afield than trying to find the descendants of my great-grandparents’ siblings), I now know the names, approximate birth and death dates, and birth and death places (plus varying amounts of additional information) for all 62 of my direct ancestors back to my great-great-great-grandparents (the oldest of whom was born about 1758), and at least the names of another 137 direct ancestors (not counting duplicates) going back another 9 generations. (All of them Jews, as far back as I’ve gone!) I was perhaps most surprised to learn that one of my ancestors, an 8x great-grandparent named Marcus [Mordechai] son of Moyses, was the head of one of the 50 Jewish families who were expelled from Vienna in 1670 along with the rest of the Jews there, and were invited by the Great Elector in 1671 to live in Brandenburg-Prussia (not out of the goodness of his heart but for economic reasons; remember that the depredations of the Thirty Years’ War weren’t that far in the past), thereby becoming the founders of the modern-day Berlin Jewish community. The oldest direct ancestor whose name I know was a man named Joseph, a Jewish physican 14 generations back from me. He was born about 1540, probably in Alsace or northwest Switzerland, and died in Allschwill (near Basel) in 1610. He lived in Allschwill beginning in 1567, and practiced medicine there under the protection of Bishops Melchior de Lichtenfels and Jacques-Christophe Blarer de Wartensee (such names!); the latter exempted him on May 10, 1590 from 12 florins annual Schützgeld [protection money], and granted him permission on Aug. 28, 1596 to remain in Allschwill for life with his family and to practice medicine in the area, under the Bishop’s “haute protection.” (This kind of information about Jews can sometimes be found in general archival and notarial records from the 16th century and even earlier, in some locations.)</p>
<p>But the person I was able to find a trace of that I was perhaps the happiest about was someone much more recent, whom I’d been curious to find out about since I was a child but didn’t finally track down until about a year or two ago. My mother’s paternal grandfather, Adolf M. – a group photo taken of him in Stolp, Pomerania in 1859, when he was 5, along with three younger siblings and his parents, my great-great-grandparents, hangs on my wall – was one of 7 children, whose names, in a litany taught to me as a small child by my mother, as she was taught by her father, as he was taught by his father, were always recited as “Adolf, Ida, Gustav, Gerson, Rosalia, Klara, and Max.” All of them moved with the family to Berlin in the 1870’s and stayed there for the rest of their lives, except for Max M., the youngest, born in 1863, who was described to me as the “black sheep” (I don’t know the reason); he never married, and apparently left for America in the 1890’s, and was basically never heard from again. Many years ago, I found his ship passenger list, showing that he arrived in NYC on May 1, 1896 from Hamburg. After that, it seemed that he was swallowed up by the Earth. Even though the family name was extremely unusual (it survives in the world only as my middle name), there seemed to be no trace of him in any subsequent census records, city directories, phone books, marriage records, or death records, in New York City or elsewhere. I began to think that he had either died shortly after his arrival, or had changed his name. But then, a couple of years ago, I was putting various family names (and names of friends’ families) into an online index to a database of old New York newspapers that included many years of the Brooklyn Eagle. One of those names was “M-----,” and lo and behold, a result came up for Max M----- himself: a front page Brooklyn Eagle article from 1934, entitled “Jobless Man Wins $8,000 for Hurts,” which read as follows:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So there he was, after all those years. Not really “without a relative in the world,” but so he probably thought. It seems that this scion of a bourgeois Jewish family in Berlin, which was at least reasonably prosperous by the 1890’s, was essentially a transient for a great deal of the time after he came to the USA, at least from about 1915 forward. Because I then started finding a few more traces of him in federal and New York census records beginning in 1915 [there were New York State Censuses, in addition to the federal censuses, in 1875, 1892, 1905, 1915, and 1925], even though in each case his last name had been hopelessly mangled by the census taker, and/or by whoever transcribed the census records for the census indexes (both of which, especially the latter, are very common, and very frustrating problems, especially, perhaps, for people with unfamiliar non-Anglo Saxon names!] I had to get very creative with the indexes to find him, but he did show up a few times – each time as a roomer, boarder, or lodger (there’s a difference?) living in various places on the Lower East Side. His occupation each time was either “Bird Peddler” or “Bird and Candy Peddler.” </p>
<p>And when the 1940 census came out last April, I found him again, still alive, and still living as a lodger on the Lower East Side, this time retired from peddling. I still don’t know where he was or what he was doing from 1896-1915, and I don’t know exactly how much longer he lived (he does not appear in the available NYC death indexes, which go up to 1948, either under his name or anything similar), but it really strikes me that just a year later, in June 1941, his nephew, my grandfather Ernst M—, Max’s first relative to immigrate from Germany in 45 years, arrived in New York City from Lisbon with my grandmother, and took up residence in Washington Heights – coincidentally, on the very same block where I now live, in a building across the street that still exists. (Even more coincidentally, after my grandfather died in 1974, his widow, not my grandmother but his third wife, moved from 238th Street, where they had been living, back to Washington Heights, and rented an apartment, still using my grandfather’s name for her phone listing, that was not only in the same building where I now live, but on the same floor. Not the same apartment, thank God; that would be just too creepy!) Anyway, it’s entirely possible that when my grandfather arrived in New York, his long-lost Uncle Max, who had left Berlin when my grandfather was 2 years old, was still alive somewhere in the very same city, on the Lower East Side. But I’m sure he wasn’t in the phone book, and for however much longer he lived, they were unaware of each other’s existence. But at least I found him.</p>
<p>DonnaL, truly a ‘mitzvah’ you’ve done. One funny thing about the censuses. The old time immigrants were often suspicious of any government worker so they often lied about their ages ( or simply forgot or didn’t know). It 's funny how they were 32 years old in 1910 but only 40 years old when the next census was taken 10 years later. And then they aged only another 8 or 9 years for the subsequent census. When a few of them died, we could only estimate their age as anywhere between 90-100 depending on which record you used, census, marriage certificate or immigration record where they always made themselves younger to ensure acceptance into the US.</p>
<p>I have the name Keller in my family tree -and the 1910 census reported it as Killer, which led me off track for a while.</p>
<p>In the Ellis Island records, when my gfather and his sister came over, both if their names were recorded with the female suffix “–cka” whereas my gfather should have been recorded with the male suffix “–cki.” That led me astray as well til I figured it out. </p>
<p>And please don’t ever repeat the canard “our family’s name was changed at Ellis Island by a xenophobic official who wanted to turn Szchleprkidcski into Sloan”! Names were not changed at Ellis Island and this drives amateur genealogists nuts!</p>
<p>Great luck when I discovered the census taker in the neighborhood was a gg uncle. Finally got some good family info from that. We also found, depending on where, if they couldn’t find a good respondant at home, someone else might report family details, guess an age or name spelling. </p>
<p>There can be “bingo” moments after searching so long. Once I just kept reading Census records- and, lo, the missing family lived a few doors down from other relatives (and, yes, spelled wrong.)</p>