A Lindflur-ry of information: Finding the Dauchs

My 4x great-grandfather was Nicolas Dauch. Before this week, this is what I could have told you with certainty about him: he was born in Wurzburg, Bavaria about 1797, departed Le Havre, France in 1845 aboard the Leila and arrived in New York City on Sept. 22, 1845 with his wife, Eva Margarethe Hoerner, and his children Thomas, 19; Andreas, 16; and Marie, 9 (his daughter-in-law (future or current, not sure) Barbara Brand, 25, and grandson or step-grandson, Johann, 2, were also aboard that ship).

The Dauch family and Barbara Brand aboard the Leila, arriving in New York Sept. 22, 1845 (Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.)

After Sept. 22, 1845, Nicolas got swallowed up by history. The end.

Or so I thought…

Now, years ago, I discovered an Ancestry family tree created by a gentleman from Germany who was descended from the same Dauchs as myself, and he had dates for births and deaths, he had parents and grandparents for Nicolas and his wife, Eva, and he had places that Dauchs and Hoerners called home near Wurzburg - specifically Reichenberg, Lindflur, and Albertshausen. But there were no citations. I had no clue where this gentleman got these names, dates, and places, and there was not a single other person who had this information on their trees. I wrote it all down in an unofficial tree, not to be shared publicly…everything was so specific I wondered, how could it have not come from somewhere legitimate, but without the evidence to back that up, I couldn’t in good faith put it out there for others. For now, the Nicolas Dauch would remain one of my few German dead ends.

Lesson Number One

Citations are important - it allows you, as someone using another person’s information, to know that it is legitimate, and it allows others, who are using you as a source, to know that your information can be trusted.

So recently I’ve been using the German genealogy website Archion.de - it is a pay site but a literal treasure trove of vital records and a must-visit for anyone with German ancestry. Unfortunately, it doesn’t cover all of Germany, as I had to recently tell a disappointed client, but like every other online resource, more documentation gets added every day. A year ago, Wurzburg was not one of its holdings…a week ago, it suddenly was.

Lesson Number Two

Never give up. Always circle around. If a record isn’t online or available today, it might be tomorrow. It might be next year. Move on to another line and then come back again to your brick wall.

The Wurzburg holdings included both Lindflur and Albertshausen - Reichenberg is still not in the mix, though I’m hopeful eventually it will be - and while it took me a while to learn that a lot of the Lindflur records were actually in the Albertshausen books, suddenly, I had my sources for the names, dates, and places I had so long ago seen in that German gentleman’s tree. Nicolas’ parents were in fact Johannes Dauch and Margarete Barbara Kempf. Eva’s parents were in fact Johann Wilhelm Hoerner and Appollonia Kempf (and yes, Margarete and Appollonia were in fact sisters). I could in good faith go back to, and share, my 7x great-grandparents Michael Horn and Anna Christina Pfeiffer, who were married in Albertshausen in 1739. I could in good faith go back to, and share, my 8x great-grandfather Matthias Keller, who died in Albertshausen on August 14, 1742.

Protestant church in Lindflur, Bavaria (By Tilman2007 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27977696)

Church in Albertshausen, Reichenberg, Bavaria (Photo credit: http://www.markt-reichenberg.de/albertshausen)

And there it was, the man who started it all, on a page all his own - the birth record for Nickolaus Dauch, born July 8, 1797 in Lindflur, Wurzburg, Bavaria to Johannes Dauch and Margarete Barbara Kempf.

Nickolaus Dauch born July 8, 1797 in Lindflur to Johannes Dauch and Margaretha Barbara Kempf. From Archion.de, Bayern: Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evang.-Luth. Kirche > Dekanat Würzburg > Albertshausen > Taufen; Trauungen; Bestattungen 1770-1809 image 105

He remains a ghost from September 22, 1845 onward - I don’t know what happened to him after his arrival in New York. He may have disappeared into the ether once he got here. But he came from somewhere, and I now know where that somewhere is.

Welcome to the family tree, Dauchs!

Websites I used in this research:
Archion.de
Ancestry.com

100 Years of Armistice

Today is the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, what in the United States we now know as Veterans Day. The first Armistice Day celebration marked the one-year anniversary of the end of the first World War.

From the New York Tribune, November 11, 1919 (image courtesy of www.fultonhistory.com)

100 years ago on this day, in a message to the nation, President Woodrow Wilson wrote of the end of this devastating global conflict:

“Out of this victory there arose new possibilities of political freedom and economic concert. The war showed us the strength of great nations acting together for high purposes, and the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men.

To us in America the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service, and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of nations.”

President Woodrow Wilson’s “Messages to the Nation,” New York Tribune, November 11, 1919 (from www.fultonhistory.com)

Thank you to all the veterans, past and present, for your sacrifices for all the freedoms we enjoy. Thank you also to the families of veterans, for all of your sacrifices—your time away from your loves ones ensures my time with my loved ones.

Do you have any veterans in your family tree? I talk about my Civil War veteran and my grandfather, a World War II veteran, all the time. I don’t have anyone who fought in the first World War..but these are the World War I draft registrations for my great-grandfather, Timothy Cronin, and great-great grandfather, Rudolph Stutzmann.

Websites I used in this research:
Ancestry.com
Fultonhistory.com

A Rose by any other name...could still be a Gorry

In my last blog post, I talked about adding branches to my Gorry line through the discovery of Thomas Gorry, a a previously-unknown cousin. I had determined that he was DEFINITELY related to me, though at what “cousin” point, I’m still not sure. But in his will filings, of which my 3rd great-aunt Hannah Gorry was the executor, a “cousin” Rose Gorry was listed…and I did not have a Rose Gorry in my family tree. Or did I? If Thomas was a new cousin, then could Rose be a new cousin, too?

Based on Rose’s address in Thomas’ will filing, I found a Rose Gorry - sometimes listed Rosa, sometimes listed Rosanna or Rosanne, living with her aunt Mary Cavanaugh in Manhattan between 1880-1930. Searching through some poorly indexed records, I found Rose in 1870 living with her father, Patrick Gorry, another name I had never heard before, her mother, Ann Flynn Gorry (marriage records on FindMyPast confirm that the Mary Cavanaugh Rose lived with for many years was her mother’s sister), and a man, Michael Flynn, who was probably her maternal uncle.

I also found her in 1880 - her father Patrick was dead, but she was living with her mother Ann and her younger brother James (ding ding ding - a common Gorry family name!)….in the same tenement, 537 11th Street in New York City, and TWO FAMILIES DOWN from my 3rd great-grandparents, James and Mary (Corr) Gorry and their children Michael, Mamie, James, and the aforementioned Hannah. I had seen Ann, Rose, and James (who would died unmarried in 1892) on that same census page, which I had saved to my family tree, time and time again. I had often thought to myself - “Two Gorry families living in the same building and listed so close to each other? They MUST be related!” but I could never put two and two together, so I forgot about them. Until Rose turned up in cousin Thomas’ will filing.

The evidence seemed to be pointing to this Gorry branch as part of my own Gorry tree - could I find any more corroborating evidence to support this thesis? So I went back to where it all began - FindMyPast’s New York Roman Catholic Archdiocesan marriage record database… Patrick Gorry and Ann Flynn were married on May 4, 1856 in St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue. Their witnesses were Philip Tuite and Mary Gorry. Mary Gorry was my 4th great-aunt, sister to my 3rd great-grandfather James Gorry, and Philip Tuite was her husband. So there was definitely another connection to my family.

Was Patrick a brother to Mary and James, et al? He seems to have been born about 1820, which would put him in a similar age range to Mary, born about 1826 and James, born about 1834. So again, I would venture to say that they are definitely relatives - Patrick and children James and Rose - just a question about how exactly.

Rose Gorry died, unmarried, on November 22, 1943. And thus goes the Gorry family tree. I added the Thomas Gorry branch, only for it to end, and the Patrick Gorry branch, only for it to end. There will be no live cousins to be found in those areas, anyone who could possibly answer my questions and fill in the gaps. But family is family, and I’m still happy to be able to put them (somewhere) on my family tree.

Websites I used in this research:
Ancestry.com
FindMyPast.com
FamilySearch.org

HIre a Genealogist

How to Hire a Genealogist

Can’t I just save money by researching my family history myself?

A genealogist brings their expertise to the table. Professional genealogists have spent years refining their skills by researching their own family tree as well as their clients’ family histories. They usually know exactly where to go if you get stuck trying to uncover your family’s past. If you hit a brick wall, a genealogist can help!

A Professional Genealogist Knows Where to Look if You Get Stuck Trying to Find Ancestors.

Geography also plays a factor. Many, many records are not cataloged online. If you live in California and are trying to find a record on Great Grandma Harriett in Brooklyn, NY, it can be too expensive to travel. Hiring a genealogist in New York can get the records you need and save you money. While living in New York, a client hired me to locate their relative’s headstone in a cemetery in Staten Island since they lived out of state. When I got to the cemetery, I had a little trouble finding it. The front office pointed me to the area where the headstone was supposed to be, but, I couldn’t find it. It turns out, the location was documented incorrectly. I was able to locate their ancestor’s resting place through a bit of detective work. I got a picture of the headstone and informed the front office of the error which they happily fixed! Oh yeah, I slipped on some ice (it was the dead of winter) and banged my knee (occupational hazard), but, I was okay. So you don’t have to worry about getting injured either. :)

You need patience and time. You don’t have to learn to be a genealogist. Most genealogists love doing this. If you don’t have the patience, you might not find what you’re looking for.. If a genealogist gets stuck, they have resources they can go to. Sometimes genealogists consult with other genealogists.

Genealogists Know How to Decipher Handwriting in Old Records.

Websites like ancestry.com can aid you in your search and you can potentially find documents backing up your family history, but, you can still hit a brick wall. Furthermore, Ancestry’s leaf recommendations aren’t always accurate and you could very well be researching someone else’s family.

Then of course, there are freelancing websites like Fiverr.com. They have low pricing, but, genealogists and many other professionals like graphic designers, video editors, etc don’t last on this site because Fiverr takes a whopping 20% commission. Plus, the freelancer with the lowest price often gets the most work. This creates high turnover making it hard to know who to trust on this site.

Hire a Professional Genealogist

If you’re not keen on uncovering your family tree yourself, but, still want to find out more about your past, a genealogist can help. Charges range from $40 to $00 per hour for fees to do research. Plus, you may have to pay for records, travel costs. For the Staten Island example I gave above, I had to cross the Verrazano Bridge in order to get the info my client hired me to do.

Please also know that hiring a professional genealogist does not mean you will get guaranteed results! Some countries, cultures, do not document and often many documents have been discarded over time.

Even if a genealogist cannot find the ancestor you’re looking for, you should get a report listing all the searches done and resources that were used to find your ancestor.

If you want help finding your ancestors, contact me with any info you have. You can also get started with your order today. This is my passion and I would love to help!

A tree grows in Brooklyn: discovering the Gorry family tree is not as sparse as I once thought

My Gorry family line is notoriously narrow and sparse. My grandfather and his brother had nine kids between them and more than 20 grandkids, but when you consider that their father was of four kids but the only one to grow to adulthood, and that their grandfather, James Gorry, was one of four kids but the only one who had children…well, 20 descendants 5 generations in is kind of sad and pathetic, if I do say so myself.

So, in the beginning of my genealogy research, I knew of my 3x great-grandfather, James Gorry, who immigrated to New York from County Meath, Ireland, as a son of Cornelius Gorry, who died in Kells, County Meath, Ireland in 1897. I knew nothing of any siblings, so my Gorry tree was very narrow indeed - think Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree scrawny for a visual. Over the years, though, my research connected me to a cousin descended from James’ brother Charles Gorry, who ended up in the Manchester area of Lancashire, England, a cousin descended from James’ sister Catherine Gorry McNamee, who remained in Ireland, and a cousin descended from Mary Gorry Tuite, a sister who also ended up in New York. My tree was starting to look not quite as sad, but those discoveries were more than a few years ago, and since I couldn’t get any back further from Cornelius, I thought well, that was the extent of my Gorry tree.

I’ve been in this business too long to have possibly thought that was true. There is always—ALWAYS—something new to discover.

The past couple of years, FindMyPast has been adding marriage and baptismal record indexes to their website from the New York Archdiocese, and this past week, images for those marriage records went online en masse. I had already gotten the dates I needed for my Gorrys, most of who lived in Manhattan though they eventually ended up in Brooklyn, so why bother looking at the images, too, right? Wrong.

Lesson #1: Always look at the images.

Never trust that a name has been transcribed correctly. Never trust that all the information in the record has been transcribed to the index. Key information was waiting for me in those images that literally unlocked a flood of new relatives and it all came down to the names of the WITNESSES on the marriage records.

So, let me start all over again recapping my tree. I looked up the marriage record for my 3rd great-grandparents, James Gorry and Mary Corr, who were married in St. Mary’s on Grand Street on June 28, 1855 and whose witnesses were Philip Wright and Rosana McNulty, who I do not know. But I thought to myself, hey, let me look up James’ sister Mary and Mary Corr’s brothers, Philip and Thomas, who were also married in Catholic churches in Manhattan at that time.

Lesson #2: Don’t just search forward and backward. Search SIDEWAYS.

Your director ancestor may not have the pertinent information to break open a brick wall, but their siblings might. Lo and behold, when I looked up Philip Corr, who married Bridget Carney on February 20, 1849, one of his witnesses was Thomas Gorry.

Thomas Gorry? Who was he??

Now, Gorry is not a common last name. So for my 3rd great-grandmother’s brother to have a marriage witness with the same last name as my 3rd great-grandfather, I’m thinking, there’s got to be a connection! So I looked up the name Thomas Gorry in the marriage index and found one married to a Mary Connolly on February 18, 1849 whose witness was, you guessed it, Phillip Corr. Now that I knew this Thomas was married to a Mary, I looked him up on Ancestry.com in census records, through which I discovered that Thomas and Mary had two children - a son Michael, who died young, and a son Thomas, who never married. I still had no way of connecting these Thomas Gorrys to my Gorrys, though…till I looked up Thomas Jr.’s death record on FamilySearch. He died April 11, 1918 at 53 Franklin Street in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.

Hold up now. My great-grandfather, Elmer Gorry, grew up at 53 Franklin Street in Brooklyn. He’s living there in 1915 with his Uncle Michael Gorry, Aunt Mamie Gorry, and Aunt Hannah Gorry, and he’s living there with them in 1920. Which means Thomas Gorry Jr. died in the house they all lived in, while they were living there. They were all there together. So they were at least physically connected to each other, if not biologically.

But the search wasn’t over (it never is!)—I found a will for Thomas Gorry Jr., in which Hannah Gorry, my 3rd great aunt, is named the executor and sole heir. And in it, Thomas calls her “cousin.” Cousin! And not only that, but Hannah names other living relatives of his in the documentation—we have “cousin” Ellen McQuade, a daughter of Mary Gorry Tuite; and “cousin” Bernard Tuite, a son of Mary Gorry Tuite; and “cousin” Anna Walker, a daughter of Mary Gorry Tuite; and “cousin” Rose Gorey, a—wait, what? Who is this??; and “cousin” Mary Gorry, who is my 3x great-aunt Mamie; and "cousin” Hannah Gorry, my 3x great-aunt. So they were cousins. The Thomas Gorrys ARE related to me!!

I only made this discovery, literally, yesterday, so the facts are still being unearthed. I don’t know exactly how they’re related. Certain people are referred to as “cousin” in the administration of his will, but does that actually mean 1st cousin, or something more distant? Thomas Sr. is in the census as being born around 1815—which would make him almost 40 years older than Charles Gorry and Catherine Gorry McNamee, if they were siblings. Is it possible Thomas Sr. was a brother of Cornelius instead, and the uncle to James, Mary, Charles and Catherine? Or is his age misrepresented in the census records and he was actually born closer to the late 1820s-1830s? I don’t have any of those answers yet, but my search has only just begun.

So even though Thomas Sr’s children had no children (typical Gorrys!), even though their branch is short, it’s a new one of my tree…somewhere, at some generation. Discovering Thomas’ connection to Philip Corr, and then his son Thomas’ connection to 53 Franklin and Hannah Gorry was shocking and thrilling… this is why I do this. In fact, perhaps Thomas and Philip’s connection is how my James Gorry, related to Thomas, and my Mary Corr, related to Philip, actually met. And as it goes, this is not the end…because Thomas Jr. has a “cousin” Rose Gorey listed in the administration of his will and WHO THE HECK IS SHE???

To be continued…

Websites I used in this research:
Ancestry.com
FindMyPast
FamilySearch

75th anniversary of D-Day and remembering my World War II veterans

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy, that pivotal and devastating day in World War II history. Any time there are moments of military commemoration, I always think of my veteran ancestors, and so today, my thoughts naturally turn to my grandfather, Dick Raynor, and his brother, Bob, who both served in World War II.

Clifford “Dick” Raynor and Monroe “Bob” Raynor both enlisted in the military in 1943 - my grandfather in the Navy and my great-uncle in the Army. They ended up on opposite sides of the Allied front - my grandfather in the Pacific Theater and Uncle Bob in Europe. Today, I think of where they both were when they got word that the Allied troops had successfully landed in France - according to the obituary for my great-great grandfather, Joseph Raynor, in January 1944 Uncle Bob was with the tank corps in Camp Polk, Louisiana and Grandpa was in Newport, Rhode Island. By May 1944, Grandpa was learning how to be a radio technician at the U.S. Navy Electronics Training Program at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. I wonder what they thought as they heard about what their fellow soldiers were doing. Uncle Bob was, I think, with a tank company in the 9th Armored Division, which landed in Normandy in September of 1944. So while he was not there on this fateful day, I can only imagine what the landscape looked like only three months later, or what it was like to stand on the ground that had so recently soaked up so much blood.

Like so many young men of that generation, like the men who fought on D-Day, who were wounded, killed, or survived, my grandfather and great-uncle made the sacrifice to defend American freedom and world freedom. My great-uncle was on the battlefields of Germany - my grandfather was lucky enough to never see battle but provided important support to soldiers who did. He was also lucky to never have had to be a part of the invasion of Japan, as had been part of the plan.

In retrospect, they couldn’t have known that D-Day was the beginning of the end, but they might have felt the tide of war shifting in the Allies’ favor and they certainly knew the meaning of the sacrifice made by all who fought on this day. 75 years on, almost all those veterans are gone, leaving it to us to remember and pass on these stories of bravery and sacrifice to future generations.

Why history matters: my family and the Thirty Years' War

I love history. I have always been fascinated by the journeys of people and civilizations, it was always one of my favorite subjects in school, and I think it's a large part of why I love researching family trees.

History matters - in life in general, but especially to family historians. You need to be able to put your family into the greater context - maybe not of the world, maybe not of the human race, but into the context of when and where they lived. People don't just get born, get married, have kids, and die - they live their lives in between those dates, and the choices they make regarding their lives are influenced by what's going on in the world around them.

I was recently struck again by this assertion as I've been delving into my Stutzmann line - my oh so very staunchly German line that turns out to not be oh so very German. My 4x great grandfather, Peter Stutzmann, was born in Grossbockenheim, Germany in 1812. He was German - but his paternal line was Swiss. His wife, my 4x great grandmother, was Luise Charlotte Schlick - she was born in Grossbockenheim in 1819. Her mother was Ottilia Elisabetha D'Huy, They were both German, but Ottilia's paternal line was French Huguenot. Both my 4x great grandparents were born in Grossbockenheim. Both of their families lived there for generations before them. Both of them had ancestors who came from another place - Switzerland and France. Both of their families immigrated to the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany due to the same reason: the Thirty Years War.

The Thirty Years' War was fought across Europe between 1618-1648 and was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in human history, resulting in the death of almost 8 million people due to not only military conflict but from violence, famine and disease. It began as a religious war between Catholics and Protestants, although it ended up becoming a war between states and leaders in power, and the Palatinate was smack-dab in the middle of it, the meeting point between invading Catholic forces and defending Protestant armies. In fact, part of the war is known as the Palatinate campaign, between 1620-1622. Caught in the middle were the everyday people who lived in the area, as the war devastated the German landscape around the Rhine River region, and whole towns were wiped out. In fact, the Dhuy family, who had moved to Germany to escape religious persecution in France, probably fled back to France and Amsterdam due to the war, as they are found in Amsterdam in 1636. When the war ended, German rulers were desperate to rebuild, and so they invited foreigners in to live: if you help rebuild, regrow, and repopulate this area, you can live here.

My Swiss Stutzmans, living in a poor Swiss economy, desperate for a way to support themselves and their families, probably came to the region lured by the promise of land and work. My French Dhuys were probably lured not only by the promise of land but by the promise once again of a Protestant safe haven. From two different areas of Europe, drawn by two different dreams, they ended up in the same place, the Duys there by the 1650s and the Stutzmanns by the 1680s. If not for the terrible consequences of the Thirty Years' War on the German population and landscape, my Stutzmans might have stayed in Switzerland, or followed other branches of their family to Alsace, France. My Dhuys might have stayed in Amsterdam, or hopped over to a closer Protestant safe haven - England. And my ancestors might have never met. As it was, they both ended up in Germany, in a tiny village in the Rhineland-Palatinate called Grossbockenheim, where generations later a Stutzmann descendant, Peter, met and married a Dhuy descendant, Charlotte, and started a family, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Family history. ;)

I, by no means, do justice to the history of the Thirty Years' War here. For more information, you can visit the Wikipedia entry here. For even more information, please find a book, a more academic website or person who has studied the history of that war.

And now for something completely different - meeting my French ancestors

That's right. French. French/Belgian to be more exact - Brench, if you will. My ancestry gets more and more interesting every day.

So I've been looking into my Stutzmann family tree lately, trying to determine if they were part of the more well-known Swiss Stutzman family and as it turns out, they are. Which made me think about one of my connecting Stutzmann lines, the D'huy family. My 5x great- grandmother was Ottilia Elisabetha D'huy, born in Grossbockenheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany in 1779. Her father, Johannes Dhuy, was born in Grossbockenheim. His father, Johann Nicolai D'huy, was born in Munsterappel, about 37 km northwest but still in the Rhineland-Palatinate. HIS father, Johann Simon Dhui, was born in Kriegsfeld in the Rhineland-Palatinate, 6 km south-east of Munsterappel. This brings us back to the late 1600s - so this line, the D'huy/Dhuy/Dhui family, is pretty deeply established German. Simon is my 8x great-grandfather. But the name, D'Huy, has never rung German to me. It's always sounded, well...French. 

Kriegsfeld, Germany

But I couldn't get past Simon and I actually only recently discovered he was born in Kriegsfeld, but that was an important discovery, because when I did a Google search for D'huy and Kriegsfeld, I turned up a ton of research, including a book, on the Duy family, who settled in Kriegsfeld and ended up being German but who were actually Huguenots and/or Walloons from, you guessed it, France.

Quelle surprise!

Kriegsfeld, Germany

Hanau, Germany

The family actually goes back in Germany - Kriegsfeld and before that, Hanau - two more generations, but the Duy family, or Douay, or Douai, actually hails from a tiny village in the north of France called St. Python, or St. Pithon, only about 25 km from the border with Belgium.

Hanau, Germany

Saint-Python, France

I think it wasn't always considered a part of France, that the border shifted during those years to make St. Pithon a part of Belgian or even Dutch territory (Walloons were French-speaking Belgians), but apparently the Duys became Protestant during the Protestant Reformation (Huguenots were French Protestants). During this time, France remained a Catholic stronghold and the Huguenots were terribly persecuted - in fact, thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered in France during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre on August 24, 1572. Germany, however, became a safe haven for Protestants and so that's probably part of the reason my Duys left France and ended up in Hanau, Germany. Again, I'm not going to go into all the details - the book I found, very well researched and documented, lays it out much better than I ever could, but I'll link to it below if you're interested in finding out more. My Dhuys fled back to Amsterdam in the mid-1600s as the Thirty Years' War flared among the German states and kingdoms, and when they returned, they ended up in Kriegsfeld for a couple of generations. It appears they were still in the path of French military incursions, though, the family moved further away from the French border, settling in Grossbockenheim.

Family history research is such a deep, complex, interesting journey - you think you know your heritage, because that's where your family lived for hundreds of years, so long that the culture and language and traditions of that place DO become your heritage, but it turns out, your family came from somewhere else - we think of America as being a land of immigrants, but we forget that other countries have immigrants and refugees, too, who become a part of their cultural and historical landscape.

In any case, trust your gut when it comes to your tree. There was never anything German about my D'Huy family name, but they lived in Germany for so long I couldn't find any proof that they WEREN'T German. Sometimes the proof just isn't there, even after an exhaustive search. But sometimes, if you keep plugging away, you find your instincts were right, and you find exactly what you never knew you were looking for. Surprises, anticipated or not, happen all the time when researching your heritage! 

Do you have a story about discovering your family came from somewhere different than you expected? Do you have questions about my journey or how to go about solving your own puzzle? Leave me a comment below!

Websites I used in this research:
Ancestry.com
Archion.de
Duey Family History - The Wolfenberger Family Association (this is a Word document book)

The Dos & Don'ts of Family History Research

• Do keep track of your sources – one day you’ll wonder how you know your 3x great-grandmother’s baptismal date but you won’t know how to find it to check who her sponsors were or what church it happened in.

• Don’t copy someone else’s work, especially if they haven’t documented any sources. Tons of erroneous info is passed along the Internet – don’t fall for it or pass it along!

• Do double check someone else’s sources – they might not have copied all the relevant or interesting information or they might have read a transcription wrong.

• Don’t trust the transcription – names are spelled wrong all the time and, again, while a transcription might list a name, a date, and parents’ names, the actual record might include a parent’s occupation, sponsors’ names, an address, and other useful information.

• Do use primary and secondary sources whenever possible – if you have a transcription, try to find the actual record. If you’re using a compiled family history, try to find the actual sources they used. The more times information is copied, the further away you get from the actual primary and secondary information, the more chance there is for errors to be made and passed along.

• Don’t keep your discoveries to yourself – we trace our family trees for our families, so if a distant cousin reaches out to you and needs help, share your work with them. You might never have met them and they might be your fourth cousin five times removed but, hey, they’re family!

• Do take breaks – family history research is mentally and emotionally exhausting, and especially when we’re constantly hitting our heads against a brick wall, it can be easy to want to call it quits. Sometimes it can be good to walk away for a month, a week, a day, an hour, to clear our minds, and come back to our research with fresh eyes.

• Don’t get discouraged – genealogy is hard. Records aren’t available. Handwriting is impossible to read. Government agencies take forever to send you the marriage record you need to find out your great-grandfather’s parents and place of birth. Some of these problems will never be resolved, such as records that have been destroyed, so there’s no use in getting upset over that; everything else might require just a little patience.

• Do learn a new language – I don’t mean become fluent in Russian or Dutch. I mean, whatever countries your family originated in, whatever languages they spoke, learn to recognize the important genealogical words in that language – born, baptized, married, died, buried, parents, godparents, from (where they lived), etc. You might not be able to glean all the details of an entry but if you’re looking through an 18th century German church book, I guarantee it’ll be in German and if you know these key words, they will absolutely begin to pop out at you and you will be able to take advantage of what might be an invaluable family record.

• Do keep a cheat sheet handy – keep a list of those words nearby. And if the region used a different alphabet than you’re used to, keep a cheat sheet of those letters and symbols, too. I do a ton of German heritage research and they used four different standard alphabets depending on the place and time period; my cheat sheet is always right next to my computer.

• Don't just use Ancestry - Ancestry.com is an amazing resource and the Internet has made family history research more accessible to more people...but it's not the be all and end all. Visit an archive! Take a walk in a cemetery! Spend time in a library! Go to a local genealogy conference and meet other researchers in person!

• Don’t forget about history – it’s important to put our families into context. Maybe the entirety of world history is too overwhelming to cover and not quite relevant to our families, but if you can put an ancestor in a time and place, finding out more about what was going on in that time and place can help you understand things such as what a person’s occupation might have been, why a family might have emigrated out of an area, what a person’s religion might have been, whether or not someone might have served in the military, why a mother had five children all die young in a two year period, and so on.

• Do look at other branches of your family tree – it’s tempting to just focus on our direct lines, but following sibling branches is extremely helpful in connecting to cousins, close or distant, which in and of itself can be rewarding discoveries but which also sometimes yield a wealth of family history information that you might never have known about but that got passed down to them. Also, if you’ve been hitting your head against brick walls, sometimes the information you’re looking for – a birth place, a parent’s name – that is missing on your direct ancestor’s documents can be found on the documents for one of their siblings, effectively opening up that dead end.

• Don’t think you’re ever finished – a genealogist’s work is never done; nor do we want it to be! I have been doing this on and off for 25 years and while there have been lulls in discovery, I am still uncovering people and places and information that are new and exciting and opening up branches of my tree I never dreamed about.

• Do get out there as soon as you’re done read this and start or keep digging!

• Don’t wait!

• Do send me an email if you have any questions or need help! :)

Learning about my family tree branch from...Switzerland????

Compared to all the family trees I've worked on over the years for clients, I find my own tree...well, just a little mundane. I am English, German, Irish and just a tad Danish, which has always been the "exotic" part of my heritage, and on top of that, most of the English side was already mapped out before I was even born...what's the fun in that???

Lately, I've been doing a lot of digging on my German lines. One of my better established ones has been the Stutzmanns, my grandmother's family, which I've reliably traced back to the Rhineland region of Bavaria, to a village called Grossbockenheim, and a nearby village of Asselheim before that. I used microfilmed copies of, for the most part, primary German records to do that, but every time I did a Google search, another wide-reaching research net I like to throw out every now and then, my results for Stutzmanns always came back Swiss. Not only Swiss, but Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonite...a well-documented Amish progenitor was Christian Stutzman along with his wife Barbara Hochstedler/Hochstetler - if you ever saw the Katey Sagal episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, she is descended from them. So I always wondered if there was a connection between my Stutzmanns and the Swiss Stutzmanns, but all my own research only led me further back into Germany.

And then....I got a DNA match through AncestryDNA with a descendant of Christian Stutzman. But since I couldn't get my Stutzmanns back to his Stutzmans, I couldn't prove that THAT was the line we were connected through. I even wrote about it on this blog...and then this past week, that post got a comment from someone who said to check a Swiss Amish association website because the Stutzmanns emigrated from Switzerland to Germany in the early 1700s. Well, that's nice that he assumed there was a connection, but my German roots were very deep - my Stutzmanns were German. But since I've been on a German research kick, I decided to take another look at my research. Yup, I could get my Stutzmanns back to a Johannes Stuzmann, whose son Peter was married in Asselheim in 1731. Peter died there in 1780 with an estimated birth year, according to his death record, of 1712, which would make Johannes' estimated birth year about 1685. But though I knew Peter was married in Asselheim in 1731, I didn't know where he was born in the early 1700s, and I didn't know where his father Johannes was born in the late 1600s....COULD they have NOT been born in Germany? When I was searching through German records, I couldn't get any further back than Johannes.

I went back to my AncestryDNA results and did a surname search through my matches (my research may sometimes seem all over the place, but there is a method to my madness!), and found TWO more connections who were descendants of Christian Stutzman. That seemed more compelling than one match that, indeed, Stuzman(n) was where we were connected. So I did a Google search for Stutzmann and Asselheim and came across a blog post over at DNAeXplained - Genetic Genealogy, where the author is loosely related to the Pennsylvania Amish/Menonnite Stutzmans...and my Peter, baptized Johann Peter Stutzmann, is there! Except his father is listed as Johann Christian Stutzmann, not Johannes Stutzmann. But it's the village where MY Stutzmanns lived, until at least the 1770s on my branch and the 1840s on ancillary branches. And on this blog post, which is extremely well documented, as well as all the documentation I've come across, I've only seen children in the early 1700s born in Asselheim to either Johannes or Johann Christian Stutzman(n), both with a wife named Maria Margaretha...and I've only found records pertaining to the one Johann Peter. Well, it's interesting because this particular blog post is about the author trying to clear up a mystery surrounding a female ancestor whose name keeps changing, making it hard to find her and pin her down. On the page, it refers to Johannes being the same person as Johann Christian, who went by both names. The post links to a thoroughly researched history of the Stutzmann family that also states Johannes and Johann Christian are the same person. I cannot independently confirm this information, but all the circumstantial evidence points to this being true...and my gut is saying that the place of Asselheim, the name and dates for Peter, double-checking for myself much of the sourced information on the page, my personal knowledge of other ancestors who went by various, unconnected names willy-nilly, and the DNA connections all point to this Stutzmann family being MY Stutzmann family...and They. Are. From. Switzerland!!!

I fell in love with Switzerland the very first time I went there - I thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever been. And I still feel that way. I wanted to move there some day...and maybe now I know why my spirit felt at rest and happy every time I was there! Anyway, specifically, the Stutzman family hails from Erlenbach im Simmental, Bern Canton, Switzerland, not far from Geneva and Bern.

Erlenbach im Simmental

Erlenbach im Simmental

I won't go into all the history here, as both DNAeXplained and the Stutzmann book linked in that post do it much more thoroughly than I ever could, but apparently there were Stutzmann branches that ended up in Alsace, France; others ended up in Germany for many generations, including my branch that moved to Asselheim and then Grossbockenheim, and while my branch wouldn't join their cousins in America for another 120 years, one of the German branches, including my 1st cousin 9x removed, Johann Jacob Stutzmann, embraced the Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren faiths and moved to Pennsylvania, a state in which I now live, a place I was partially drawn to by the large German culture and population. I found out today that my 1st cousin 9x removed, Johann Jacob Stutzman, briefly owned property in a tiny place in now-Berks County called Maxatawny, along the Saucony Creek, now located in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. I didn't have to double-check that information, because I spent the last year driving through Maxatawny every day on the way to pick up my daughter at her pre-school in Kutztown, where on nice days, she and her teacher and classmates would take walks along the Saucony Creek.

Saucony Creek, near Kutztown, PA

That's right. Almost 300 years after the fact, my daughter walked along the same waterway her cousin did. I've always felt very deeply rooted to my family, which is why I was sad to move last year from the place my English ancestors had settled and lived in for over 360 years...only to find myself ending up living in a place touched centuries ago by another branch of my family. Amazing.

Amazing to be following in my family's footsteps. Amazing to finally put a decades long mystery to rest as to whether or not my Stutzmanns were related to the Swiss Stutzmans. And amazing to find out that a huge chunk of my tree that I thought was just "boring" German (I jest - my spirit is German and I love my German heritage) started out as "exotic" Swiss!

Websites I used in this research:
Ancestry.com
DNAeXplained - Genetic Genealogy
Archion.de
Ex Libris Rosetta - The Peter Stutzman Family Story

Riddle me this: an Irish/British genetic genealogy question

Family history-wise, my father is half Irish and half German. All his paternal ancestors trace back to Ireland. All his maternal ancestors trace back to Germany. This is documented - I have done the legwork, and I know for a fact where all his immigrant ancestors originally hailed from, and it's either an Irish county or a German state. So explain to me, then, how my father is more than a quarter British, DNA-wise?

This is my father's genetic break-down according to AncestryDNA. As you can see, they differentiate between Irish and British. Irish is considered Irish/Scottish/Welsh, and British is considered English/Scottish/Welsh. There is the Scottish and Welsh overlap between the two, but no overlap between the Irish and English. Scandinavia I assume is from some kind of genetic influence via my father's Irish family or northern German family. But 28% British is no small chunk of change - not that we inherit DNA evenly from all our ancestors, but that's the equivalent of one full grandparent! 

I do have one theory I'm working on - my father's last name, Gorry, which we've traced back to the Kells vicinity of County Meath, Ireland, shows up a LOT in British records - England, Australia, TONS of Scottish Gorrys, and in particular, A LOT in the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man, as I've learned, is it's own sovereignty, but is considered British - it sits in the English Channel, about even with Cumbria, one of the northernmost parts of England, to the east, is just south of Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland, and is about even with County Louth in Ireland on the west. County Meath is right below County Louth, also situated on that coast. I had always thought maybe at some point some Gorrys from Ireland, some of my Gorrys, had traveled east and ended up populating the Isle of Man...but what if the migration wasn't west to east, from Ireland to Great Britain, but from east to west, and the Gorrys actually have BRITISH origins, ending up in Ireland?

I would love any input from someone who has a better grasp than I do of genetic genealogy - am I reading too much into the British/Irish differentiation? Am I making up a mystery where there is none? Or does my father's DNA support SOME kind of connection between the Gorrys of County Meath and the many, many Gorry names that pop up in English, Scottish and Isle of Man records? 

Websites I used:
AncestryDNA

Stumbling upwards: how I accidentally discovered Ellen Prendergast Tormey's family

I knew about my great-great grandmother, Ellen Prendergast Tormey, but I didn't know anything about her. Based on various records I had, including my great-grandmother's birth certificate and Ellen's death certificate from Brooklyn in 1912, I knew that she had been born in Ireland around 1861, that her parents were Edward Prendergast and Ellen, no last name, that she came over about 1885, and that she married my great great grandfather, Michael Tormey, around 1887. That's it. She was a more recent Irish immigrant ancestor of mine - not a Famine immigrant, but still too early for Ellis Island. Her Irish origins were probably the most murky of all my murky Irish ancestor origins - at least for all the others, I had a county (which is still pretty useless without a specific place within the county). For Ellen, I just had "Ireland."

I had recently found a transcription of her marriage to Michael in FindMyPast's Archdiocese of New York Catholic records, but it provided no information beyond a date and place - I've been waiting for FindMyPast to upload the actual images to the database. In the meantime, I did what I always do when I'm at a roadblock - I go to a newspaper archive, in this case FultonHistory.com, and I insert random word combinations into the search field to see what comes up. My favorite search type on that website is the boolean seach, so this might be my search history for a certain day: first name within 2 of last name, last name within 5 of street name, street name and house number, last name within 15 of mother's maiden name, last name within 15 of street name in parentheses within 20 of sister's married last name. I mean, it doesn't matter how random the combination, I will try it - it's half an act of desperation, half an act of curiosity to see what I might discover.

So the other day, I did a search for Tormey within 15 of Prendergast and got an obituary for a Michael Prendergast who had died at the home of his niece, Winnie Tormey.

This was new, but intriguing. I had never heard of a Michael Prendergast before, but Winnie Tormey, his niece, had the same name as my great-grandmother's sister, and he was the right age to have been Ellen's brother. She didn't seem to be living at the address with which I always associated the family, but a quick search of marriage license applications in the newspaper, listed with the man I knew my Winnie married, she is living at the same address as the Winnie whose uncle was Michael Prendergast. I think maybe I finally found a relative of my great-great grandmother's, and not just Michael, but three living siblings who are mentioned - Ann Rotchford, Bridget Kelly, and Thomas Prendergast! And there was one huge important clue to unlocking that potential connection further: Michael Prendergast was born in County Roscommon, Ireland. Roscommon! 

Further research confirmed that Michael's father was Edward Prendergast, but his mother was a woman named Winifred Kelly. A search for Ann, Bridget and Thomas also found records for children of Edward Prendergast and Winifred Kelly. But my Ellen's mother was Ellen - could she have been a half-sibling? She was born in the middle of all these other siblings. Could I have the wrong family after all? Or could the informant on her death certificate gotten her mother's name wrong, as I've so often seen? Ellen DID have a daughter named Winifred, and many families (especially my family) have naming patterns and traditions, that Ellen could've named her daughter after her mother. A search found that Edward Prendergast and Winifred Kelly had a daughter Ellen in 1861 - the same year as my Ellen. These were not coincidences. An educated guess and my gut, which I always trust in genealogy, was telling me that Ellen's mother was not Ellen, a name that turns out to have messed up my searches for her for so many years - her parents were Edward (nicknamed Ned!) and Winifred. By doing a random newspaper search I had stumbled upon a huge breakthrough - I not only found Ellen's parents, I not only found her siblings (more than mentioned in Michael's obituary), but I found her actual date of birth and I found her birthplace and one of my Irish ancestral villages - Kiltulla, Castlerea, County Roscommon. That simple placename has broken open this family line to cousins who remained behind in Ireland, cousins who ended up in Chicago, and finding my 3x great-grandmother's name in the 1901 Irish census. My Irish family came over so long ago (even the recent ones like the Prendergasts) that I've never seen any of my ancestors listed in a 20th century Irish document. Winnie died later that same year, in 1901, but seeing her name on that piece of paper, seeing that she spoke both English and Irish, and that she was living with her son, surrounded by her grandchildren...it was an emotional moment for me. And I accidentally stumbled into all of it.

Prendergast family in Carraghs East, Roscommon in the 1901 Irish Census: my 3x great grandmother, Winnie Kelly Prendergast, is listed last.

Moral of the story: Be creative and loose when doing online searches.

Moral of the story II: NEVER take as ironclad information, especially secondhand information, that has not been backed up by another source.

Websites I used:
Old Fulton Postcards
Ancestry
FindMyPast
www.irishgenealogy.ie
National Archives of Ireland

Breakthrough: Looking for your German family in French records

My earliest German immigrant ancestors, the Reinhardts, emigrated about 1839 to New York City. My 4x great grandmother, Barbara Reinhardt was born there, although they moved to the Weehawken, New Jersey area when she was a child and most of the family ended up there. I know a lot about the Reinhardts and their time in America, but nothing from before then. I had records that my 5x great grandparents, John Reinhardt and Magdalena Engelmann, came from Bavaria. No idea where in Bavaria, and so no way to trace them further back. All of their children were born in New York, except for their oldest, John, who was born in 1838 - in France. This always stuck out as a bit of an anomaly to me, but I never really followed up on it. I recently found baptismal records for his children that clarified that he was most likely born in Le Havre, France, which is a port city, and I realized, I might finally have a lead to trace to see if I could find out more about the Reinhardts on the other side of the Atlantic. The Reinhardts, like many German families in that time period, made their way to America and other destinations via port cities in France, and some of these families temporarily settled in these seaside locations while they waited to emigrate. I don't know when the Reinhardts arrived in Le Havre, but they were there long enough for John to be born their in 1838, and I THINK they came to New York in 1839, so they were probably living in France for about a year.

Anyway, I had recently done work for a client looking up records in this same region of France, Seine-Maritime, and so I knew there were online records available to look at here: http://recherche.archivesdepartementales76.net/?id=recherche_guidee_etat_civil. It's a wonderful, extremely helpful resource, but of course - it's unindexed. Some of the databases have indexes inside of them, which helps, and there are 10 year index records you can scroll through, but you can't just type a name into the search function and pull up the page with your relative's name...you actually have to dive into the database and look for these and then look through these indexes yourself. I lucked out, big time. Pretty much every single record I had on Barbara's brother John told me he was born between 1837-1839 - a two year window is easy-peasy. In one of the 10 year indexes, I found a "Jean Eduard Reinhardt" born March 4, 1838 in Graville, France - same department as Le Havre, and just east of that city. When I pulled up the record itself, it listed his parents - "Jean Reinhardt" and "Madeleine Eingelmann," the French version of my 5x great-grandparents' names (because, obviously, the records are in French). The names matched. Their ages matched. And, lo and behold, it also stated that John and Magdalena were married April 27, 1837 in Göllheim, Bavaria - for the first time for this branch of my family, I had a place! A German village! AND a marriage record I could look for! This literally just happened today and I was so excited I had to pass it along. Now I have to plot my next moves - the records I need are not online but they ARE available to view at a Family History Center, to try to find that marriage record and then maybe their birth records and parents' names. This whole branch has opened up for me, and I guess my advice to anyone reading this is: think outside the box. My Reinhardt family is German but my breakthrough record was a French record. Be familiar with history. I knew a lot of German families passed through that way and there was a chance that John had been recorded there. Check out the other branches of your tree. I couldn't trace that line backward from my direct line, Barbara - I had to look to her brother, John, to move the line further back. I have so much luck advancing lines backward when I take siblings into consideration - don't have such a narrow focus on your direct line that you inadvertently box yourself out of making important family history discoveries. I'm riding high right now...I can't wait to get back at it. That feeling is what I wish for all of you! :)

Websites I used for this research:

 FamilySearch
Department Archives of Seine-Maritime

If you're lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough...

...maybe that's why there's no luck left over when it comes to tracing my Irish roots. I'm half Irish - half on my mom's side, and half on my dad's, and when it comes to tracing my family history roots, none are so frustrating as my Irish roots. Part of the problem is the sheer dearth of Irish records, many of which were intentionally destroyed (why? Why? WHY????) Part of the problem is that the majority of my Irish ancestors came to the United States prior to Ellis Island, when passenger list manifests and naturalization records listed their place of origin simply as "Ireland." As with many other places, you need at the very least a county, and even better, an actual parish or village that your family originated from to have any hope of tracing your Irish roots, and even then, it's a crap shoot. My Gorry and Corr lines were Famine Irish who came over in the 1840s and 1850s - I have a Gorry ancestor Irish death certificate and mentioned in Griffith's land valuation, which gives me specifics - Kells, County Meath. But I haven't been able to trace the Gorrys further than my 4x great grandfather. I actually found my Corrs in a database of Irish immigrants who had bank accounts in New York, but the village in County Cavan that's listed doesn't seem to exist. Most of my Irish came over in the mid-1880s but they're even harder to trace. One is from Cork City, another from Killashee, County Longford, another from Ballingarry, County Limerick...and on all I'm stuck about 3x and 4x great-grandparents. I guess I can't complain too much...that's earlier than a lot of people can get on certain lines. But with brick walls crumbling on many of my German, Danish and American lines, it's frustrating and sad to know that the records for my Irish ancestors just aren't there, and those brick walls will probably always stand.

My grandmother's father was off the boat Irish - in terms of generations, he's my most recent immigrant ancestor. He's my most tangible connection to Ireland, since she knew him, and I knew her. She shared a lot of interesting and helpful information about his family, the Cronins, including a lot of anecdotes about her father, but even she hit a brick wall with her father's family. Even though she knew he was baptized in Dromtarriff, County Cork, and even VISITED the church in Ireland in which he would have been baptized and the cemetery in which his family would have been buried, she still hit a dead end. At least she got a nice trip to Ireland out of it...

There is some hope, though. Ireland's Department of Culture, Heritage and Gaeltacht has put online a bunch of civil and parish records, a lot with images. If you haven't checked out their website, you absolutely should - while there are few Irish records to work with, this department is trying to make available to the public those records that DO exist...and I've found images of death and baptismal records that have been helpful in at least rounding out the picture (addresses, parent occupation).

So maybe the Irish have some luck after all. Tomorrow I will be setting a leprechaun trap with my kids, ages 5 and 2. I haven't had a lot of culture and tradition handed down to me just because most of my immigrant ancestors came so long ago, but in my family, the leprechauns exist, and it's something I share with my kids. Well into her 90s, my grandmother claimed the little people were playing tricks on her in her apartment (maybe it was BECAUSE she was in her 90s that she thought this, but it was always with a twinkle in her eye, that she was joking/not joking...) And I will always be proud of the fact that as an extremely shy young student many years ago I did not even hesitate to correct my teacher who tried to lump leprechauns in with other fairy tale creatures because I KNEW leprechauns are real - my great grandfather saw one when he was growing up in Ireland, and he told my grandmother, who told my mother, who told me, and even though the Irish are known for spinning a good yarn and telling tall tales, I know this story is REAL. We can all use a little magic in our lives, and so tomorrow my kids and I will try to trap a leprechaun, and I'll tell them how their 2x great grandfather saw one when he was a kid...when we can't go any farther back on a line, we can do what we can to keep what we DO know, including the stories, alive for future generations.

Websites used:
Ancestry.com
Irishgenealogy.ie
Find My Past

The curious case of Hannah Gorry

Like Benjamin Button, my 3x great aunt Hannah Gorry seemed to have the magical ability to age backward.

Hannah was the older sister of my great great grandfather Jimmy Gorry. Hannah and their two other siblings, Michael and Mamie, never married, and when youngest sibling Jimmy died suddenly at the age of 28, the spinster aunts and bachelor uncle, who lived together their whole lives, took in my young great-grandfather, Elmer. I imagine them all as a little eccentric, not least of which is because the one fact I've always known about Hannah is that she refused to tell anyone her age. My grandfather had an old autograph album of hers from junior high with beautiful, sweet messages from all her classmates, a glimpse into school-aged minds from the past, but we didn't know when in the past because all the dates were scratched out. Hannah's a little bit like a family historian's worst nightmare. My dad's dad told him he was pretty sure Hannah had been born during the Civil War, but I didn't have a birth certificate so I had no way of knowing. Jimmy was the youngest, born in New York in 1869, so Hannah was definitely older than that. Her obituary lists no age. So I've always relied on her presence in the census records, which has been an endless source of amusement and frustrated for me. And here's why:

In the 1870 census, Hannah is listed as being 9 years old.
In the 1900 census, Hannah should be 39 based on her age in 1870; she is listed as 33 years old.
In the 1905 NY census, Hannah should be 42 based on her age in 1870; she is listed as 32 years old.
In the 1910 census, Hannah should be 49 based on her age in 1870; she is listed as 41 years old. (At least this time around he age went up!)
In the 1915 NY census, Hannah is listed as 53 years old - this actually jives with her age in 1870.
In the 1930 census, Hannah should be 69 years old; she is listed as 50, which puts her year of birth at about 1880...making her 11 years younger than her younger brother.

So here Hollywood made this big-budget fantasy story about a man who aged backwards, and all along I had the real Benjamin Button in my family tree! In addition to showing that magic is, in fact, real, this case illustrates the unreliability of records we often take as fact. In a census, a person is providing information about themselves to the census-taker. If that person was vain like Aunt Hannah and lied about her age, how would the census-taker know? How would we, the descendants, know? A lot of times we'll see people's ages wobble between a 2-3 year range just because people weren't always certain how old they were, and that's not an attempt to trick a government worker. But Aunt Hannah is a good example of why we need to use multiple sources whenever possible to verify life facts such as date of birth. Sometimes we end up having to just make an educated guess based on the data available. Sometimes we end up getting lucky. Using Find My Past's new Archdiocese of New York baptismal records, I found Hannah's baptismal record, which lists her year of birth. Since she was an infant, this record was made contemporaneously to when she was born, so we can be pretty sure that this record is the most accurate to tell us how old Aunt Hannah really was.

I got you, Hannah! But don't worry - your secret is safe with me! ;)

Websites I used in my research:
Ancestry
Find My Past

Putting to the test Find My Past's new Archdiocese of New York marriage and baptismal records

If you move in genealogy circles, you've probably already heard that Find My Past recently added transcripts of the Archdiocese of New York's baptismal and marriage records to its databases. If you're only a family history hobbyist, here's the scoop: Find My Past has recently added baptismal and marriage records for the Archdiocese of New York. You heard it here first...or seventh. ;)

I don't use Find My Past a lot...I've found the website nominally useful for Irish and British records I'm searching for, but other than that, I haven't found anything on the website that I can't already find on Ancestry or FamilySearch. But I have some marriage records from the 1870s-1890s for Roman Catholic Irish ancestors that have been impossible to find...so I decided to give this new database a whirl. I knew my 2x great-grandparents Michael Tormey and Ellen Prendergast were married in New York; I knew it was probably around 1885. But I have never been able to find a marriage record for them. It's been beyond frustrating. I didn't expect it to be so easy to find them in this database. But there they are, married May 10, 1885 in St. Gabriel's Church in Manhattan. Unbelievable. You labor and labor to find a record and then, BOOM! It just falls in your lap.

So if you have Catholic ancestors from New York City, definitely check this out. You need a subscription but you can buy a one-month subscription or pay-as-you go credits (also, some genealogy societies, such as the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, provide access with membership). Right now, it's only the transcriptions available but I think the plan is to have images uploaded to the website soon as well. Not sure of that time frame, though I think it's in the "months" range. Also just to note - if your ancestors lived in Brooklyn or Queens, they would have lived in the Diocese of Brooklyn, so they won't be in this database. But if you've been hitting some Manhattan, Bronx, or Westchester roadblocks, you might want to check this out.

Websites used for this research:
Findmypast.com

Where there's a will...there's a glimpse into every day life: the will of Edward Haase part II

Recently I wrote about the will of my 3x great-grandfather Edward Haase, which revealed the existence of an illegitimate son. In it, he left money to the boy's mother to care for him and to provide for his schooling and upbringing. Because the money was designated for this express purpose, the boy's mother, Catherine Graham, had to provide an accounting of the money she spent on her son, and it's a really interesting glimpse into the every day life of raising (or being) an 11 year old boy in 1920...

There's the usual clothing items - a winter coat in January, a bathing suit in August. Just like now, Catherine had to take her son to the doctor, and she had to pay the bill. But the accounting reveals other interesting details about her son's life at that time - in June of 1920 he joined the Boy Scouts, and he had to buy him a uniform, a canteen, a knapsack, a knife, and all the other little knick knacks a Scout would need (any parent nowadays who has a kid in a sport or activity can relate to the long list of items you need to buy so your kid can participate!)

That August the boy went to Boy Scout camp, and he also started playing baseball. He must have spent a lot of time riding his bicycle because in September, it needed to be repaired. In June of 1921, he made his First Communion, and his mother bought him a new suit. That September, at the age of 12, Catherine enrolled him in a military boarding school in Ossining, New York. He came home for Thanksgiving, and that winter, he went ice skating. 

There's nothing extraordinary in this list of activities and items bought for them. They're all extremely ordinary. But most of us, in our day to day lives, live in the ordinary, not the extraordinary, and to see a mother and son nearly 100 years ago engaging in the ordinary day to day activities and shopping that we do today with our families, humanizes our ancestors and helps connect us to the past. 

My blog turned 10 years old this year!

This past month, on January 16, 2018, marked 10 years since I started my genealogy blog, which feels a bit surreal and yet pretty amazing. I've learned and shared so much over this past decade, but am still knee-deep in family mysteries, brick walls, and new discoveries...the journey never ends! I've met new cousins, both close and distant, and built a community with them of exchanging family tree info and just getting to know each other as well. I've gotten married, had two children, and moved to another state...I've lost loved ones, but watched as the next generation of my family has blossomed and grown. I look forward to continuing this adventure in the next decade, to see what more I learn, who else I discover, and how the practice of genealogy develops, through the use of science and technology, the release and availability of new records and databases, and the involvement of more people sharing their photos, documents and oral histories...it's an exhilarating ride to be on!

For anyone who wasn't here when I started who might be interested in how this blogging adventure began, here's a link to my very first blog post:

Becoming Nancy Drew

Where there's a will...there's important family info: the will of Edward Haase.

My 3x great grandmother, Eva Meinberg Haase, died Sept. 11, 1919. Eleven days later, her husband Edward Haase, my 3x great grandfather, wrote a will containing some interesting information, information I believe he had kept secret from his wife, since he didn't put it in writing till after she had passed. In fact, this info made me unsure that this will even belonged to MY Edward Haase till I saw my 2x great grandfather mentioned as a beneficiary and executor of the will. The secret info that was revealed? My 3x great grandfather had a second family, an illegitimate son, something I NEVER knew until I read this will. I imagine Eva never knew, and I wonder how much my 2x great grandfather, Gus Haase, knew, or if he found out when his father died just two months later on Nov. 25, 1919 that he had a 10 year old half-brother, Edward George Haase.

So in the second item in the will, Edward Sr. left $15,000 to be used for the support and education of an Edward George Haase, born January 15, 1909. The will does not explicitly say that Edward is his son, but Edward is NOT one of his any known nephews, and the only other people named as beneficiaries are his one known son, Gus, and Edward's siblings. $15,000 in 1919 is the equivalent of more than $200,000 today, and a lot of money to leave randomly to someone who just happens to have the same last name as you...In genealogy, we rely on compelling evidence to make a case. But we also rely on experience and educated guesses to carry us through until we find the evidence that proves or disproves a theory about a family member. I believe Edward the younger was my Edward's illegitimate son.

The third item of the will leaves money to a variety of people, all relatives, except for the very first person, Catharine Graham, to whom Edward leaves $5,000. Catharine Graham was also appointed the guardian of Edward the younger in terms of the inheritance Edward the elder left him. A search of census records reveals that Catharine Graham was also Edward the younger's mother.

Wills and probate records are some of my favorite sources of family history documentation - they can be RICH with details about family relationships, the financial status and physical holdings of an individual, and, as it turns out, family secrets as well.

February babies: Happy birthday to two of my grandparents

My maternal grandfather, Dick Raynor, would have been 104 years old yesterday. He was born Feb. 1, 1914. My paternal grandmother, Helen Stutzmann Gorry, would be celebrating her 86th birthday next week - she was born Feb. 10, 1932. Happy birthday to two of my grandparents, both February babies. Love and miss you both.

Dick Raynor joined the Navy in November 1943.

My grandfather on his wedding day in 1946.

Birth announcement for Helen Stutzmann in the Feb. 19, 1932 Ridgewood Times - she weighed five and a half pounds.

My grandmother as a little girl.