I am not a religious person. I don’t know what happens to us after death. I don’t know that I believe in heaven or spirits or ghosts. I am a superstitious person, though. And I do feel super connected to the dead. I speak to my ancestors. I introduce myself when I visit their graves. When I share their stories with people, I talk about them like I’ve known them my whole life, like I interact with them on a daily basis. When I hit a family history brick wall, I ask them for help. I mean, if I can’t find Great Grandma’s parents, if there’s an afterlife, she should be there with them, right? And maybe she could tell them I’m looking for them… I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a crazy person, speaking to myself when I talk to them. But there’s something – a germ of a feeling, something inside of me if not outside of me – that *feels* something.
I get very strong gut feelings when I do family history research…I’ve been doing this long enough to know the clues to look for, and the trails to follow, but there are times I need to make a leap of faith in order to prove a connection and those gut feelings are almost always right. It’s one of the reasons I’m so good at what I do. And when those gut feelings happen, I feel like it’s not always just me…sometimes it feels like I got a little outside help. When my grandmother died… from the very beginning, I asked her for help. Maybe her spirit is not out there, but maybe it is…and she was *the* family historian, so if there is a heaven or an afterlife, who better to ask to find all those lost relatives, all those ancestors hiding out in history, nowhere to be found in provable records, and give them a little nudge, nudge, nudge to break down those brick walls?
But it’s not just her. Sometimes I feel like they can see me, my ancestors – that they know who I am and what I do, that because I’m trying to find them, some of them are out there in the universe trying to help me. The nudges, the tingling, the intuition…
Well, I had one of these genealogical revelation this past week - and it was huge. And the first person I wanted to share it with, because it was a brick wall branch of his family tree, was my father, who died almost 2 months ago. And he’s not here, and every time that fact hits me I’m devastated all over again, so I cried for two days straight. And then I thought – if there is a hereafter, who might have done some pushing and prodding on the other side? Someone who loved hearing about all my family history discoveries and also knew that this particular family had been a huge, frustrating dead end for me forever?
Augusta Lindemann Stutzmann and her husband, Rudolph Stutzmann, from their 1920 US passport application.
My great-great grandmother was Augusta Lindemann Stutzmann. Her parents were Caspar Lindemann and Eva Margarethe Voigt. She was born in 1874 in Stedtlingen, Saxe-Meiningen, Germany. Her husband, Rudolph Stutzmann, was a prominent figure in German-American Brooklyn/Queens society in the early 20th century and so I knew a lot about her from the time of her immigration to America in the 1890s but almost nothing from before. From her parents’ death records, I had names of her grandparents – Caspar Lindemann and Anna Marshal, and John Voigt and Elisabeth Fries. But Stedtlingen was a teeny tiny village outside of the city of Meiningen, and there were no German records to be found for the place.
The church in Stedtlingen, Germany.
Today, there are literally just over 500 residents in Stedtlingen. Augusta’s mother Eva was born in nearby Bettenhausen, but again, small village - just over 800 residents today - and no records. And so, I could trace Augusta, my most recent immigrant ancestor in terms of immigration year to her beginnings in America, and back two generations into Germany through American records, but no further. I have a website I use that is specifically for German records and it always turned up empty for both Stedtlingen and Bettenhausen. I checked all the time. Always unsuccessful.
Till now.
I was hired to do German research and so I renewed my subscription to this website, Archion.de, just about a month after my father died. I’ve shied away from doing research on my own family tree since his passing because it’s been too painful, but I had some luck with research for this client and I had just spent 20 euros on a month-long subscription so thought I should probably use it as much as possible in that time…and I felt this mental nudging. Nothing big, no lightning bolt from the sky…but there was an internal tugging that I couldn’t ignore. And it was telling me to check Archion for Stedtlingen records. So I did. And there was nothing there.
But Bettenhausen was.
And wouldn’t you know, as if she’d been sitting there this whole time twiddling her thumbs waiting for me, Eva Margarethe Voigt was there in her 1844 birth record with her parents, who were not in fact John and Elisabeth as I thought all these years, but Michael Gottlieb Bernhard Voigt and Anna Maria Fries.
Hi, 4x great-grandparents. I’ve been searching for you for so long. It’s so nice to finally meet you.
PS Thanks, Dad. I know it was you. I miss you so much it hurts.
Websites I used in this research:
www.archion.de