We all hit brick walls. It is an inevitability of researching our family trees. Some are permanent - it’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s part of the game. We will never discover everybody - eventually, we hit the end of the line, although hopefully later rather than sooner.
But some brick walls are temporary. Some require talking to a cousin you just discovered who has the photos or family Bible pages you need. Some require walking into an archive and looking at some physical books or microfilm. Some require thinking outside the box. Some require patience. Some require diligence. Some require all, or a combination of some, of these things.
Meet Charles Haase. He was my 4x great-grandfather and I actually knew a lot about him, considering when he lived and how short he lived - 1839 to 1891. I have census records. I have a Civil War pension file full of affidavits and baptismal records. I have a marriage and death record. I have correspondences with Haase cousins with other military records and their valuable lines of family oral history and traditions.
But despite all that, Charles was a brick wall for me. As much as I knew about him once he was in the United States, I knew nothing about him prior to that. I had his marriage record - it listed no parents and no specific origin in Germany. I had his death record - it listed no parents and no specific origin in Germany. He was an unmutable, undeniable brick wall. And being the stubborn genealogist that I was, I was determined to look at him from every possible angle till I could either chip away at him or say, well at least I tried everything.
I worked on Charles for weeks, for months - literally for years. Not all in a row. I moved on to other branches, I grew other parts of my tree - but I kept coming back to Charles.
I found census records that consistently said he was from Saxony. More specific than Germany, but still not particularly helpful.
I found evidence that his middle name was Gustav. Fantastic - him and about a million other German men.
Ancestry released U.S. Dutch Reformed church records and I found Charles in them for his children’s baptisms. They stated he was Saxe-Weimar…a little bit more specific, but still not helpful. I came across this record, which would end up being the key, my Rosetta Stone, if you will, to unlocking the mystery of Charles Haase, though I didn’t know it at the time:
Source Citation
The Archives of the Reformed Church in America; New Brunswick, New Jersey; Christ Church, Members, Marriages, Baptisms, 1853-1951. Accessed on Ancestry.com January 28, 2022.
Charles’ daughters, Paulina Henrietta and Magdalena, were baptized in Christ Church, Union City, New Jersey in October 1870. The handwriting is fancy and hard to read. It doesn’t help that it’s also written in old German script to boot. I could read that Karl Gustav Haas - Charles - was born in Saxe-Weimar, Deutschland (Germany) and I could see that there was a specific town name listed for the very first time ever - but I couldn’t read it. Frustrated, I gave up and moved on.
But it was there, and man, did it call to me. I had the place Charles came from within reach…and just out of reach. I’m a glutton for punishment, man - if there was any chance I could figure it out, well then, let’s give it a go until my brain explodes.
So, this was the name of the place Charles was from:
There are three words there - the last two say “Sachsen Weimar” and so the first word had to be a specific town or village within Saxe-Weimar, a grand duchy in the eastern part of the German Empire. I’m pretty good at reading Old German script but there are a lot of letters that look very similar to each other - was the second to last letter a g or a p? Maybe it was a z? Was the first letter a D or an I? Was the second letter an r? An a? A u? The only letter I knew for sure was that there was an “i” in the middle and probably an “s” at the end. I looked at a map of Saxe-Weimar. It’s a pretty big place. There was no way I was going to be able to check every single place name that had an “i” in it and possibly an “s.”
When I’m unsure about the spelling of a German place name but I can make out part of it, I go to the Meyers Gazetteer, which allows you to look up German place names by Boolean search, meaning you can substitute symbols for letters and get returns on all places with those letters and combination of substituted letters. You can also specify which region of Germany you want to focus on. It’s extremely helpful.
I did this search for months.
I searched for Duigs. I searched for Duips. I search for Drigs. I searched for Drips. I search for Daigs. I searched for Daips. I searched for Daizs, Duizs, Drizs, Druys, Drays, Driys, combinations of ai with asterisks, ri with asterisks, day in and day out.
I pored over maps of the Saxe-Weimar region for any place name that phonetically might jump out at me because maybe, the spelling was off.
I gave up, I moved on, I came back.
I had no solid evidence to move on - but a place name had popped up in my search that I couldn’t get out of my head.
Triptis.
It’s a small town in the Saale-Orla-Kreis district of modern-day Thuringia - but in the 1870s, was a part of Saxe-Weimar. It had an -rip- and it ended in an “s.” Maybe whoever had recorded those baptismal records had heard a “D” instead of a “T” when Charles said where he was from. Maybe he heard one syllable instead of two.
Maybe that first letter I had thought was a D was actually a T all along.
Whatever the case, my gut was saying I had to check it out. I had nothing else to go on - what did I have to lose?
I checked Ancestry. I checked FamilySearch. I checked Archion. Nobody had records for Triptis. Well, there ya go. I finally had a place to start looking but nothing in which to look. Sometimes that’s the way the cookie, but not the brick wall, crumbles.
I gave up and I moved on. I was working on a completely different German branch of my family tree one day and discovered that Archion, which had not previously had records for their village of origin, had added those church books. Major breakthrough on that line, woo hoo! And I thought…if they added it for one place, maybe they added it for another…say, Triptis?
They hadn’t. But it was a good reminder to me that digital records and archives are fluid - just because the record you’re looking for isn’t there yet, doesn’t mean that it’s not in the process of being added tomorrow, next week, or next year.
I discovered Charles on my tree easily 15 years ago at this point. Last month, I checked Archion again for Triptis records…and there they were. No longer just out of reach…finally within reach. It was still a long shot. For all the work I had put in, I was basically working on a hope and a prayer. I had records for Charles saying he had been born in March of 1838, so I checked for a baptism there first. Nothing. I was flooded with disappointment. What if I had been wrong? What if his birth date was wrong? By, like, a lot??? What if I was looking in the wrong time frame, the wrong town, the wrong everything?
That’s when you take a deep breath. Birth dates are often wrong. I decided to check a five year range of all names in both directions of March 1838. But I also had a document that put his birth as March 1839. So I decided to check there first. And there he was. Carl Gustav Haas, just staring right back at me. Right where he was supposed to be, right where he had been all along, waiting for me. Baptized March 1839 in Triptis, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, 9th child of Johann Carl Friedrich Haase and Johanna Carolina Bruger. I had just met my 5x great-grandparents for the very first time. I knew now Triptis was another ancestral village of mine. I had chipped away at that brick wall and gotten lucky. The search, though, was not ending - this was just the beginning.
My dad would have loved this discovery. Charles was his 3x great-grandfather and I think we both had a special place in our hearts for this Civil War-veteran haberdasher. I wish I could tell him about it, but perhaps he already knows - perhaps he was nudging things along from the other side. In any case, I have a lot of work ahead of me. These crumbled brick walls don’t research themselves.
Triptis, Germany. From Wikipedia.
The moral of the story is, there’s a time and a place to call it quits on a line of research. Some dead ends will always be dead ends. Some exhaustive research will end in disappointment. But trust your gut. If you think there’s more to the story - well, then the story’s not over till you say it’s over.
Websites I used in this research: