Checking, Just in Case

 

When following the trail of genealogical crumbs left in books published years ago, I'm not above considering such leads, but I still make sure to check out the details, just in case. Yesterday, when we reviewed published accounts of Lyman Jackson's twelfth child, Susannah Samantha, there were some details that simply cried out for verification—and updates.

Among those details in the 1909 Horace Mortimer Jackson publication, The Family History of Michael Jackson, was information on the man Susannah married after her first husband, Henry Kennedy, had died. The book noted that Susannah then married someone named William Robinson. Checking to confirm that detail via documentation, it turns out that name was a close approximation, but not entirely correct. Susannah's second husband was actually recorded as John Robson.

While it is unlikely that Susannah, at age fifty one, would have had any further children in this second marriage, the lesson is well-taken: no matter the assertion, double-check with documentation.

There were other details about Susannah's history in the Jackson genealogy book that I want to double-check. For instance, the book stated, concerning Susannah's son Byron, that though he was married, his wife's name was unknown and that "their whereabouts are unknown." Furthermore, according to this account, they had a son named after his father, who was supposedly "killed in the earthquake at Santa Rosa, California, in 1906." 

Conveniently, I'm situated not far from Santa Rosa and, having personally known people who lived through a more recent earthquake in that same city, I'm aware that such a report could be quite possible, despite a much better known earthquake in another city nearby grabbing the majority of headlines in 1906. These are details which we can now verify digitally in many cases—a research step I intend to take, if for nothing other than to confirm or amend this published story.

Following the lines of the children can help confirm the entire family's story, not only in Susannah's case, but also regarding the instance of her sister Lucy, the youngest of all the thirteen Jackson children of Lyman and Deidama. Especially in Lucy's case, as we'll see tomorrow, I'll need some guidance from actual documentation, wherever it can be found.

With a "y" or an "i"

 

Those of us who have been researching our family's history for any time have realized how casually spelling has been treated over the centuries. While today's generations may be quite particular about whether everyone spells their given name with a "y" or an "i," clerks in past centuries spelled a surname as they saw fit, not necessarily as the subject of the document preferred.

Thus, when I first began researching my fourth great-grandfather, I discovered that the Georgia record keepers in Glynn County chose to spell his surname as Tyson. That was in 1820, but even the time-faded page made clear that Job's surname was Tyson.

Since then, compiling the few documents I could find on that ancestor revealed that his name might also be spelled Tison, as was shown in records of the long and drawn out settlement of Job's estate. By that point, though, I had already posted articles about my research of this family using the keyword prompted by my first discovery—spelling the surname as Tyson—so that set my path on the blog. But for research? Every step became a double approach, looking for each of two spellings—or inserting the handy wildcard symbol when using search engines which offered that option.

Once having set my mind to being open to such spelling variations, perhaps I chose a more liberal path than I should have followed, for when I finally found a record tying my Job Tison to his supposed roots in Pitt County, North Carolina, I just figured the record for "Joab" Tyson in the 1790 census would simply be one more example of my spelling predicament. I assumed this was someone's best attempt at phonetic spelling of a less common given name.

Having thought this over, once I decided to work on Job's puzzle for this month's Twelve Most Wanted, I realized a possible error. While people today might assume that Joab could be an alternate and phonetic variation on the name Job, its biblical source shows us that those were two different names with different pronunciations. Job, the name of the long-suffering ancient man of the Old Testament, was a name pronounced with a long "o" sound, not a short "o" for the word referring to one's work or career. The name Joab, another biblical name, was actually pronounced with two syllables, Jo - ab.

Yes, I already knew that. I just got caught up in the spelling conundrum and made an assumption. Of course the biblical characters Job and Joab were two separate individuals with different names. But that was then, and now I was working on records from the eighteenth century.

That realization now had me left with not one document at all which could connect Job Tison to North Carolina. Perhaps, I thought, a detour down a different document trail might lead me to a more helpful vantage point for finding Job's origin, whether it was in North Carolina or elsewhere. I decided to take a second look at the friends, associates, and neighbors for my Tison family in Glynn County, Georgia, to see whether any clues could be found to point the way backwards in time for this Tison family.

You Can't Have Just One

 

I learned a long time ago that when it comes to documenting family relationships, you can't rely on just one document to confirm ancestral connections. In looking at the Prussian death record for Catharina Cichocki, I was reminded of how many times I've seen mistaken reports of the deceased person's parents' names—especially that of the mother's maiden name. When it comes to confirming relationships through documentation, it helps to look twice.

Finding Catharina's 1887 death record, now held at the Polish archival collection at Żerków (see scan number nine), I saw that her maiden name was Gramlewicz, and that her father's name was Andreas Gramlewicz. After providing that information, the record stated that her mother was also named Catharina, with the surname Zakrzewicz.

Wait, I thought: didn't I have records with differing assertions for that mother's maiden name? Perhaps my second great-grandmother Elżbieta and Katarzyna were not full siblings, after all. I went back to the other record I had for the supposed sisters' parents: the 1810 marriage record for Andreas and Catharina. Sure enough, there in that record, the bride's maiden name was given as Nowicka. Not Zakrzewicz. 

Of course, I thought, perhaps Andreas had been married twice. Since daughter Catharina was born about ten years before Elżbieta, perhaps Catharina's mother had subsequently died and Andreas married a second Catharina, surnamed Zakrzewicz. It was a possible scenario.

And yet, when I looked for documents on another Gramlewicz sibling—Apolonia, baptized in 1820—her record, too, indicated the mother's name as Catharina "de Nowickie." (Ironically, Apolonia's godfather was listed as a Zakrzewicz, and years later, she ended up marrying someone else with that surname, Paweł Zakrzewicz.)

Checking for younger brother Piotr Paweł, his baptismal record, despite using the Polish form of the participants' names, also noted his mother to be Katarzyna Nowicka.

Looking at Elżbieta's own death record didn't help matters. While I claim no expertise in reading old German handwriting, I can clearly see that her father was listed as Andreas Gramlewicz. Included in that record was mention of Elżbieta's husband, listed as "Matheus" Laskowski, and her son, Anton. No mention that I can find in the verbiage indicates the identity of her mother.

From all this, we can see that Elżbieta's older and younger siblings were mentioned in records identifying their mother as Catharina or Katarzyna Nowicka—the same woman identified in Andreas' own marriage record. Perhaps I'll never learn why Elżbieta's own death record doesn't appear to include mention of her mother's maiden name—at least, as best I can tell with limited knowledge of old German script.

Perhaps, considering the DNA matches I've found who descended from Elżbieta's presumed sister Katarzyna, it would help to examine the expected range of centiMorgans for a full-parent relationship versus a half-sibling situation. It's probably time to go looking for other Gramlewicz descendants in my DNA matches again. 

Proving Rose is Rose

 

It's no wonder there are three different identities for Anastasia Zegarska's daughter Rosalia Puchała on the FamilySearch.org universal tree. Just locating all the records I've placed on Anastasia's timeline, mostly showing her relationship to and residence with her daughter, shows me that both Anastasia and Rosalia went by different identities at different times.

Take their names. In Poland, they were known as Anastasia and Rosalia. In America, they became Anna and Rose. Besides the changes in their married names, however, there were some other details that didn't seem quite right. For instance, consider the marriage certificate for Rose's second marriage in New York City. Though I can see, by following a cluster of documents concerning Rose and her mother, that I was trailing the same woman, I need a way to demonstrate that Rose was Rose was Rose. I need to compose a proof argument for these women's identities.

Let's take a look at that 1915 marriage record in Brooklyn, New York, as searchable through the Historical Vital Records Project via the website of the New York City Municipal Archives.

First, we learn the full name of the groom, George Washington Kober, and discover that, although this was his first marriage, he was already forty three years of age. Named after his father, the groom's mother was listed as Pauline Hutton. He was born in the borough of Manhattan.

Rose, on the other hand, had previously been married, then divorced. Her name on the license was listed as Rose Miller, though I still have no idea what the first husband's given name was, nor when that first marriage ceremony was conducted or ended. Her age was given as forty, which would yield a year of birth as 1875, not far from the September 1872 baptismal record I have for her from Schwarzwald.

From that point, the details veer toward the unexpected. Though I did note in yesterday's timeline that Anastasia Zegarska's married name was sometimes recorded as Anna Krauss (or spelling variations), I had never found any document I could ascertain tied the right Anna with the right Mr. Krauss. Yet on her daughter's marriage record, Rose gives her maiden name as Krauss, not Puchała as we'd expect it to be.

The possible gift that comes with this confusion is that her "father" was listed as Julius Krauss on this Kober-Miller marriage record. Admittedly, on the next line, Rose's mother was entered as Anna Zegar, not Zegarska, and even the entry of the maiden name Krauss was on a line only meant to be completed in the case of the bride being a widow, not a divorcee. But amidst these unexpected entries, perhaps we can extrapolate a few search terms which might help us, in turn, figure out a bit more about Anna, herself.

Granted, some of this involves speculation, but I have noticed that children who refer to a step-father as their "real" father often had that man enter their life at an early age. This might guide us in our search for widow Anna Puchała's second marriage. And of course, since this marriage license gives us our first glimpse of Anna's husband's given name, we now can search for someone named Julius Krauss, a most helpful balancing act when faced with multiple spelling variations of the common surname Krauss.

Then, too, if Rose considered her maiden name to be Krauss, perhaps that is the name under which she entered this country, helping to narrow the search for her appearance as well as Anna's in passenger records.

The main point, once having located such records, is to use them all together to tie up the three identities for Rose in the FamilySearch tree into one person, telling the whole of Rose's story under one heading. One document alone could never tell the whole of a story such as hers. 

Documenting Anna and her Daughter

 

Now, as I'm turning back to create a timeline of name changes for both Anastasia Zegarska and her daughter Rosalia, I'm reminded of how thankful I am to be able to access online versions of such documents. The fact that I can, despite being on a business trip far from home this past week, pull up virtual copies of hundred-year-old records from New York City for both Anna and her daughter is all thanks to the efforts of one nonprofit organization called Reclaim the Records.

If you have been following their ten-plus year saga—yes, Reclaim the Records received some of the first fruits of their labor from the city almost exactly ten years ago, on October 14, 2015—you know there have been several updates, as well as setbacks. But eventually, they won.

And so did we: with several ways to access government records concerning our ancestors living in New York City.

The other day, in my new ongoing collaboration with another Zegarski researcher, I noticed this cousin mention accessing these historical vital records via a New York City website. Sure enough, I could jump right on that latest research goal to harvest the details from the digital copies of marriage and death records for my New York City ancestors. Sure, I could wait until I got home and pull out the paper copies I had paid for—but this is now, and I didn't want to wait to start the review. Patience, apparently, is no longer a virtue for an online research project.

With that, I'm beginning to construct that name-change timeline for both Anastasia and Rosalia—or, as they were known in New York, Anna and Rose. And all the while, I'm appreciating some intrepid attorneys back in the Big Apple who wouldn't take "No!" for an answer.

Can't Push Forward, Can't Move Backward

 

When it comes to my Puchała line, I guess I've got to admit I'm stuck. I can't move that line backwards one more generation from my second great-grandfather Jan Puchała, and it sure looks like I can't even push forward in time to discover anything more about his son Thomas, my great-grandfather.

Stuck: I hate to admit it. Worse yet, I can't find any explanation for what became of Thomas Puchała. He simply seems to have disappeared. Thomas' wife Anastasia Zegarska traveled with her two surviving children, eventually ending up in that vast entry point for countless immigrants, New York City—but she certainly didn't appear to arrive under that same married name.

When Anastasia arrived in New York, the first appearance I can find for her is a woman with a different married name. That name was so different that it seemed to stump the local enumerator for the 1910 census, who simply wrote it as "Annie Kusfkr."

Whatever Anastasia's name had become, it was clear that it was a different married name, certainly not any variation on Puchała. It wasn't until I followed a long and winding trail for her daughter—now going by the shortened given name Rose—who had also apparently married by 1910.

From married names "Muller" to Kober to Hassinger I followed Rose. Somewhere in the middle of that chase, when Rose was still married to George Kober and Anastasia was "widowed" and living with them, one devastating morning Rose found that unusual married name blurting out from her trembling lips when she called for help after discovering that her mother had taken her own life. Whatever that name was from the 1910 census, I found it—or at least a closer approximation—in Anastasia's death certificate, even though the accompanying news report from her residence in Queens borough in New York City identified her as Anna Kraus.

One thing was clear, though, from tracing Anastasia from her maiden name to Puchała, to Krauss, and to  Kusharvski: something must have happened to Thomas Puchała long before Anastasia took her two children, Rosalia and Teodor, aboard a boat sailing for America. That record will still be on my research list for a long time, I suspect.

In the meantime, there is much more that can be done on this extended Puchała line. For one thing, I have the aggravation of cleaning up resources and plugging them into the universal tree at FamilySearch.org, complete with proof arguments to explain the convoluted story of what's been found. Rose, in her own several permutations, has appeared in at least two other family tree identities, though in none of them does she show any descendants of her own. Anastasia, as well, could use some explanation, at least for the missing marriage records, wherever those events occurred.

In addition to that, since one goal this month was to examine my paternal grandfather's patriline, that calls for seeking DNA matches who connect to that line. The difficulty is in finding the connections to those descendants who still remain in Poland—or even those who may have emigrated, but now have descendants in other European countries. The DNA may reveal some clues, but the documentation, once again, will be key—if I can find it.

While we're stuck in this tight loop, searching for missing documentation, I'll take some time to examine what can be found through DNA tests, especially at the one resource for the most international test results: MyHeritage.com. 

A Pause to Count

The last couple months have been rough on genealogical research results. Battling Covid for one month, then dealing with the dismay over access to Polish records this month, admittedly I haven't made much progress. But it's time for that biweekly tally. Regardless of the excuses, it's time to take the pause to count the progress.

In the past two weeks, that Polish challenge has yielded forty one new relatives entered on my family tree. It's been a hard-won minor victory, though truth be told, those were mainly descendants added to the immigrant lines I've already discovered. Some of them were added, thanks to connection to DNA matches I've already known about. But hey, progress is progress. I now have 40,300 people on my side of the family tree.

Granted, the past two weeks included a few days from the previous month's goal, when I was trying to do penance for not finding anything further on those Flannery ancestors back in County Tipperary, Ireland. Mostly, that work was again focused on DNA matches who descend from immigrant Flannery and Tully descendants from my father-in-law's tree. The 139 new individuals added to that tree push the total count for my in-laws' tree to 41,813.

I suspect the next two weeks will progress about as slowly as the results for today's report. I'll be back to that research question about my father's patriline. I'm mostly jumping between my tree, posted on Ancestry.com, and Prussian records digitized at FamilySearch.org, to slowly—painfully slowly—push my way back in time with actual documents. If not for speed in progress, at least it's encouraging to focus on the thoroughness of results. Finding documents for this family's previous generations has been rewarding in its own way. 

Indirect Indicators

 

In the case of a young bride dying so soon after the birth of her second child, not much can be found to record her life's story—not, at least, for those living in the early 1840s in Perry County, Ohio. To find anything more on Lidia Miller, wife of William Gordon, it may be necessary to rely on indirect indicators of her family and infer from those details what would likely be Lidia's life story.

Lidia Miller was my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. One of the few actual signs of her existence is the faded record of her marriage to William Gordon on April 24, 1838, in Perry County. Though she did have two sons who survived her, not much can be found concerning those children's early years; I have yet to find baptismal records, for instance. The brief life of the second-born son, William, can be found in his 1841 memorial headstone where he was laid to rest at Holy Trinity Cemetery in Somerset. There, the faded engraving indicated the infant lived one month and died on February 25. Even the note etched on the stone, naming his parents, seems to blur out Lidia's name, though the child's father's name—also William—can clearly be seen.

From there, the details dim further. Firstborn son Adam spent his earliest years living with his widowed paternal grandmother—where he can clearly be seen listed in her household for the 1850 census. We need to fast-forward to the 1900 census to see where Adam stated that, while his dad was born in Pennsylvania, his mother was an Ohio native.

Adam can also be found in his by-then deceased paternal grandfather's 1849 will. This grandfather, also named William Gordon, had seen to it that provision be made not only for the many grown children from his two marriages, but specifically for his orphaned young grandson in the sixth item in his final testament, also naming Adam's father.

As for any other signs of Adam's mother, we need to jump to the seventy ninth year of his own life to see one last mention of Lidia's name. On Adam's March 5, 1918, death certificate, his son Simon reported that Adam's mother was named "Lida" Miller.

So Lidia was remembered, at least by family. But where else was she documented? And can we find anyone else from her own Miller family? That's the question I'll have to grapple with this month. I want to find something more than mere indirect indicators of her existence.

Searching for False Positives

 

Family trees can do mysterious things to the identity of our ancestors. Perhaps an ancestor has acquired a false identity, as I'm beginning to wonder about my second great-grandfather, whom I had always known to be Alexander Boothe. According to some vocal—and experienced—researchers from my own earlier days as a neophyte genealogist, that ancestor's name was supposedly William Alexander Boothe.

I, on the other hand, was not able to locate any documents asserting that detail—but what did I know, having just started out on this family history adventure? Now, in retrospect, I feel it is time to go back and do some testing for false positives. In other words, can I replicate any sign that the man's name actually was William? Or, moving even further, can I find any signs that the Alexander I thought I found in Virginia actually remained in Virginia, while I assumed the man I found in Tennessee was one and the same as the Alexander found ten years prior in Virginia?

If I find any indication that there were others with that name in the same location, it would help to know—and to steer me clear of selecting the wrong person by the same name. Let's see what we can find, based on the assertions made by other researchers over the past few decades.

First of all, let's examine the claim that the man's name was William Alexander Boothe, and that in 1832, he married a woman named Mary Smith in Franklin County, Virginia. Can we find the couple in that same county eight years later in the 1840 census? If I've found the right couple, their household of nine individuals in 1840 included one man over forty years of age, along with an adult woman in the same age bracket, plus three boys and four girls (two of whom were fifteen or older). Granted, there is no way to determine from that information whether each of them was a child of that William, but I'm beginning to feel some doubt creep in that this was my second great-grandfather's first marriage. Unless some devastating disease wiped out all my Alexander's children except for his son Quinton—born in October of 1838—that census scenario doesn't seem likely.

Were there any other possible candidates for William Boothe in the 1840 census in Virginia? I took a look. There were multiple Booth and Boothe entries in that state in 1840, but none that looked promising.

What about fast-forwarding to 1850? I first looked for the William and Mary Booth whom we had found in the 1840 census in Franklin County. If that were my Booth ancestor, I'd expect the bereaved widower to not show up in Virginia, since by then I had traced him to Tennessee with his two sons. But here was William, still in Franklin County, with his wife Mary and three children of ages reasonable for a couple married in 1832. This obviously wasn't the "William" who left with his two sons for Tennessee.

Just in case there was another Alexander who also was left behind in Virginia, I tried looking for some indications that I had followed the wrong "ancestor." While I was fairly confident that the Alexander I found at the bottom of the census page in Nansemond County in 1840 was the right one, I looked for someone else by that same name in Virginia.

First, I checked the listing for all Booth heads of household in Nansemond County in 1840—there was none besides our Alexander. Then, I checked to see if, by some odd chance, there already was another Alexander Boothe in Washington County, Tennessee, back in 1840—no one. Back to Virginia I went, to assure myself that my Alexander hadn't remained there while I thought I had traced him to Tennessee. For the 1850 census in Virginia, there was one Alexander Booth of about the right age, but he was living with a younger woman named Louisa, and neither of his two sons were listed in that household.

At this point, I'm gaining confidence that my Alexander Boothe was just that—Alexander, not William Alexander. And while I only have documentation affirming that he was born in Virginia—not, specifically designating a location within that state—thanks to other records, we do have some reports about the possibility of his birth in Nansemond County. To find that, however, requires us to look not in the direction of his earliest years, but beyond the other side of his life, after Alexander Boothe's own death.

A Mayflower Detour

 

For my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors to research in 2025, the month of February has had one solitary focus: find Delaney Townsend's parents. More than that: find them documented in records, either in her native South Carolina, or in Florida, where she and apparent relatives moved well before 1840. Let's just say I've been riveted to that goal for the entire month—until this weekend, that is.

Weekends are good for setting aside tasks and taking a break, and that is exactly what happened. I'm about to take a detour to research some Mayflower connections. With a text from across the country, my niece informed me that she thinks it is a go for us to apply for membership in the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.

For quite some time, I've known that our family should be eligible to apply. The crux of the matter, however, is whether we can come up with adequate documentation to prove our line of descent from John Aldrich and Priscilla Mullins. The sticking point comes when my fifth great-grandfather William Tilson moved from Massachusetts to the southwestern region of colonial Virginia. While there are some tax records and transcriptions of old land records still accessible, there is precious little else that can be found on this family until the line resurfaces in northeastern Tennessee at the beginning of the 1800s.

In a development which would make any genealogist glad to hear, my niece decided to take the initiative to explore what could be done about that paperwork stalemate. She reached out to the Historian in her state's chapter of the Society, with initial paperwork in hand, having gleaned the names and dates from my tree, to see whether this representative thought our application might work. The key was whether anyone else from this line had already presented acceptable research.

Thankfully, there was one applicant from nearly ten years ago who had submitted documentation on this line. I suspect it was a specific third cousin—only genealogists would know these connections—with whom I had been in contact years ago, who I knew had also applied to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Now, bit by bit, we're forming a multi-generational team to complete our applications. While it will be great to finally be able to complete the process and add our line to the official record, what is even more encouraging is to see the next generation becoming fascinated with all the family stories which years ago had beguiled me into taking a closer look at my family's history.

Checking Who's in the Neighborhood

 

In the effort to piece together the story of Delaney Townsend, my third great-grandmother from South Carolina who spent her adult life in Florida, I couldn't help but notice a record just one page over from Madison County's authorization to solemnize Delaney's marriage to Andrew J. Charles. The next record, dated only two weeks after the March 8, 1841, record for the Townsend/Charles marriage, was for someone named Benjamin Townsend.

Checking the census for Madison County nine years afterwards, Benjamin Townsend and his wife Jane showed up with four children all under the age of ten. More to my point, though, was the entry for Benjamin's place of birth: South Carolina, same as my Delaney Townsend.

It was tempting to assume that Benjamin and Delaney might be brother and sister, but I restrained myself. After all, South Carolina was a state which, at the time, encompassed a population of over six hundred thousand people. There were plenty of chances for this to be a coincidence that the two families shared a surname.

However, I couldn't help myself: I ended up checking the Madison County results for that 1850 census, looking for any more Townsend entries. There were several Townsends who gave their place of birth as South Carolina. Besides Benjamin, there were Allen and Sarah Townsend, and Samuel and Edia Townsend. Siblings? Cousins? Kinfolk?

I poked around Madison County a bit more. Looking at Find A Grave, I checked burial records in Madison County for Townsends. While many of the entries were likely for children of the couples I just named, there was one memorial for Allen Townsend. That entry included a photograph of the memorial headstone, specifying exactly where in South Carolina to look: Marlboro County. Could that have been the case for the other Townsends in Madison County, Florida?

The F.A.N. Club theory has proven successful in tracing other brick wall ancestors, and is particularly calling my name right now to look for family, associates, or neighbors who might have made that same trip from Marlboro County, South Carolina, to Madison County, Florida. It may be time to see whether all these Townsends have relatives in common, whether siblings, cousins, or more distant connections.

The fact that they all originated in South Carolina but decided to show up in the same location in then-territorial Florida is calling me to look for further clues. After all, remember I'm on the hunt to find documentation of the connection to South Carolina for my third great-grandmother Delaney. Though others assert the connection, I have yet to find anyone who has provided the evidence for the relationships.

A Life's Trajectory, Backwards

 

In looking at the First Families applications we've received in our local genealogical society, I often wonder what drew these immigrant families from far and wide to settle in our county. One applicant to our program wished to pursue his patriline back to England. His great-grandfather had settled in California with his parents by 1875, according to his naturalization records. And yet, as I explored the other side of his family—also settlers in our county—I discovered that their trail to San Joaquin County followed a different route.

Annie Caroline Sprengler, long before she met her husband in our county, was born in Utah—or perhaps Colorado, depending on which census record is consulted. Despite the unclear location of Anna's 1860 arrival, her younger sister Katherine was born six years later in California. The family was moving westward. But what brought them to any of these places? What was Anna Sprengler's life trajectory?

To determine this, of course, requires us to follow a person's life story backwards in time, step by step from the date at which we encountered them—usually, for our ancestors, through an obituary or death record—to their earliest record of existence. In Anna's case, uncovering her family's origin required tracing the pathway that brought her parents to the western reaches of the United States.

The Sprengler family was resident in San Joaquin County long before our First Families current cut-off century date of 1924. Anna and her siblings were fully catalogued in the 1880 census while living in O'Neal Township in what now includes the city of Stockton. Her father Valentine, by then fifty two years of age, was listed as a farmer from Bavaria.

Bavaria, however, far predated the time of this census report. Before arriving at any information on that location, there were several events to consider. That 1880 census reported an overview of the family's travels. Eldest child Theodore was born in Illinois while John was born in Iowa. It was this census which recorded Anna's own birth as being in Colorado, before her sister's 1873 birth in California.

It was their father Valentine's own entry in California's 1866 Great Register of voters which helped point us further eastward. According to the note there, Valentine was naturalized on March 30, 1860, in Fayette County, Iowa. 

This, of course, calls into question the report that his daughter Anna was born in either Colorado or Utah in July of that same year.

More records materialized to trace the Sprengler family's progress westward. A land record in 1859, drawn up in Dubuque, Iowa, for Valentine Sprengler "of DuPage County, Illinois," gave the precise location of his purchase of eighty acres in Iowa. This occurred only a few years after his 1854 marriage, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to German immigrant Anna Caroline Koerth.

The beauty of this marriage document was its thoroughness of detail. From that document, we discover Valentine's parents' names—Adam Sprengler and Kunigunde Kressin—and the place of his own birth. While the handwritten entry in Valentine's marriage record looks like his place of birth was "Obferbaum," a quick check of the Meyers Gazetteer provides the slight correction to Opferbaum, a location designated (in German) as "a district of the municipality of Bergtheim in the Lower Franconian district of Würzburg" in Bavaria. 

From Opferbaum in Bavaria to the German port of Bremen to sail to New York City in 1852, then continuing the route to Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa is all laid out by documentation. From that point to California by 1866 is less clear, but it's my guess that Valentine's wife Anna made the trip westward while carrying her namesake daughter. And it's certainly obvious that the entire Sprengler family made it to our county in plenty of time to be considered as one of our Pioneer Families. 

Hunting the Blue ThruLines Icon

 

Something unexpected popped up when I went to tabulate my biweekly progress on my family trees on Ancestry. After I noted progress on my own family's tree—it's been a slow slog, but I did add forty three Polish names on my father's side this time—I turned to my in-laws' tree. Before I could check the results on that separate family tree, though, a message popped up.

"Select an ancestor in your tree who has the blue ThruLines icon. We'll show you their descendants who may be connected to you through DNA, and help you add them to your tree."

Being susceptible to Bright Shiny Objects of the Genealogical Kind, I immediately left off progress on my planned task—noting the 38,622 names in my own tree now—and veered off the research path to check this out. Why I didn't see this notice when I first began the day's work on Ancestry.com, I can't say; maybe this was the split second it made its appearance. After all, as I checked it out, I noticed a sign indicating this was a "beta" version, so it's likely not something that every subscriber will find right away.

Since the promise of this beta test appeared on my in-laws' tree, I decided to go hunting for a blue ThruLines icon there. Pulling up the pedigree chart, I noticed every single name in the first five generations had a blue ThruLines icon attached to it. I selected my mother-in-law's great-grandfather Michael Metzger for my trial run, and clicked on his name in the pedigree chart.

Clicking on Michael's name brought up the usual profile pop-up box, with the added invitation on the bottom of the box to "add DNA matches descending from Michael." I clicked on that, which opened up a side bar instructing me to "Select a DNA match from Michael's descendants." Below that heading appeared a listing of descendants under subheadings labeled with Michael's own children's names.

I looked through the list, which had several names of DNA matches. The list was long, but hey, Michael had plenty of descendants. I had already added thirty two of those descendants to my tree, but this notice showed me that I had at least ten more to go.

From that point, I perused the list of those ten unattached Metzger matches and noticed one whose surname matched several others I already have in that tree. The next step would have been to select that DNA cousin by clicking a radio button next to her name, then clicking the blue button on the bottom of the side bar labeled, "View Connection."

Well, I pointed and clicked, but nothing happened. That is where I realized this might be an option that came to me hot off the press, so to speak. Right away, a survey popped up, and I completed it. By the time I was done, I couldn't help but go back and test my luck on another trial.

This time, I went to my own parents' tree to see if I had the same beta option there. Thankfully, I did, and my trial run on my own mother's line worked just fine. I selected my third great-grandfather James Davis, for whom I have already added nine DNA cousins and evidently have another three to go. Selecting one of those three gave me a readout on that side bar showing that cousin's line of descent.

At that point, I could select the option, "review person," which seems to allow addition of a few details before adding that name to my tree—but I am too cautious to just add someone based on any company's suggestion. I need to check out the details myself—especially including documentation—so I didn't opt for that route on the decision tree.

Instead, I clicked on the second option, which is a less obvious choice. Looking at the potential match's box in the line of descent, there is a label on the bottom right, "view match." That selection brought me to the same landing page where I would have arrived, had I gone through the usual ThruLines process before this beta test. That way, I can see a brief outline of the match's tree, and can click through to view this person's own tree on Ancestry.

Furthermore, I can open two tabs on my laptop and toggle back and forth between the match's parents (or pertinent grandparents) listed and those same names in my own family tree. I can properly enter any missing generations in my own tree, complete with documentation—several documents, in fact—to bring my tree down to the generation in question to create the right space for that entry.

I realize that seems to be a redundant approach after having been gifted with this streamlined detour by Ancestry's new beta offering. And maybe that approach will work for some people. It's just that I've learned my lesson about running into messes by copying information from others' trees—but seem to keep forgetting that lesson when newer Bright Shiny Objects of the Genealogical Kind make their irresistible appearance.

So, beta test? Sure. It seems like a great idea. I'll use it to get to the shortcut and avoid having to hunt for the ThruLines tab every time I think I'm on to something. But once I arrive at a match's drop-down menu, I'll revert to the tried and true approach that's worked for me in the past. 

Born at Sea?

 

Lacking actual documentation, there is no easier way to get a snapshot of where a migrating family wandered over the decades than to look at census reports for their children's places of birth. That, at least, helped me estimate the date of arrival of the Polish immigrant family of a man once known as Lorenz Laskowski.

Younger brother of my great-grandfather Antoni Laskowski, Lorenz was apparently the first of the three remaining Laskowski siblings to actually sail for America. The reason I can figure this, despite three different dates given for the family's immigration in various census records, is owing to the birth of Lorenz's two eldest children. Joseph, the eldest, was born in Żerków in 1885. The family's next child, however, was Harriet, who according to census records was born at sea in 1886. What better clue could a researcher hope for than that?

Tracing the migration dates of Lorenz Laskowski from tiny Żerków to bustling New York City was not all that easy. Mostly, it was complicated by the not unpredictable adaptation of his name to Lawrence Laskoski sometime after his arrival in America. As of yet, I haven't found any record of naturalization—with a search using both forms of his name—despite his claim on the 1900 census that he had at least begun the process.

That, however, is not a concern for me, seeing how the same census gave his date of arrival in this country to be 1884—supposedly followed a year later by his wife Anna and his daughter Harriet, who in the same document was said to have been born at sea in September of 1886. Do the math here, folks. Those numbers can't be telling the right story.

But finding any verification by cross-checking Harriet's own paper trail proves challenging. After locating that 1900 census detail about her birth in September of 1886, the next record I can find is her November 1915 New York State Affidavit for License to Marry John Joseph Loughlin. Her name is clearly shown as Harriet R. Laskoska, following the Polish custom of changing surname endings to the letter "a" for women, and reporting her parents to be Lawrence and Anna, with the mother's maiden name spelled— incredibly—as it should be: Blaszczynska.

And yet, after that point, all records for the Loughlin couple show John's wife to be named Henrietta—even in the few cases where her maiden name of Laskoska was also included. Did John Loughlin suddenly remarry another woman with the same maiden name before the 1920 census was taken? I find no such marriage record, nor any record of Harriet dying or divorcing him before that date. Perhaps that is a mystery for another day—a tempting rabbit trail, though not part of our research goal for this month—but strangely, I have three different DNA matches (at two different companies, no less) who descend from this mystery Henrietta.

I'd say we are observing yet another of those undocumented name changes which my paternal ancestors seem quite adept at pulling off. Unfortunately, even if that is so, I still am lacking any documentation on when Harriet was actually born, and riding on that detail—key to this month's inquiry—when Lorenz and Anna and their fledgling family decided to leave Żerków and seek their fortune in a land said to have streets paved in gold. Or, at least, a place with less sickness and death than the home they left behind. 

Rescuing Disappearing Generations

 

A horrible thought struck me this past week while tying together the names which belong in my father's family tree: by doing this work, I am essentially rescuing names from what would otherwise be disappearing generations. For those of us whose parents or grandparents came to this country feeling less than welcome upon their arrival, I can understand why they might have wished to conceal their family background: it helped them get ahead—or at least avoid more discrimination—by acting like someone whom they weren't. 

What they've left for us, however, is a blank slate when it should have been a pedigree filled with names from faraway places. And it is our job now, with the tools we have, to recreate those ancestral stories—the stories which should have been, but weren't presented to us as part of our heritage.

This month, as I work on my goal of discovering more about Franziska Olejniczak, my second great-grandmother, I want to counter-balance that secrecy by putting her family's names out there in as many places as possible. I've been jumping from tree to tree, in the several websites where I've posted information on my family, to ensure that she and her family are represented, despite the difficulty in finding documentation.

It's been slow going. Since today is the time for my biweekly count, I realized that these two weeks straddle my goal last month—focused on my father-in-law's family—and this month's quest for my own father's roots. Still, a gain of thirty six new family names is not that bad. My family tree stands at 38,457 with that small advance.

Yes, there were some additions to my father-in-law's tree, as well, coming in at the tail end of the previous month. Forty four new names in my in-laws' tree grows their tree to 36,843 documented individuals.

I am fairly certain the growth spurt from earlier this year will come to a near halt with the difficulty of researching my Polish ancestry, but it will keep moving forward, nonetheless. As we tackle the collateral lines of the Olejniczak family next week, we will hopefully make some gains right then—and explore online resources in Poland which can help move progress further.

No matter how progress seems to bog down during this month, the main goal is to keep focused on the bigger picture: rescuing the names and dates of family members who would otherwise be lost to time. If it sounds like I am on a mission, that is indeed so. There are currently gaps in records from some countries. There are some problems with access through distance or difficulties with languages. But it is still possible to at least do something. And that is what I intend to do.

Sure, Make a List — But Check it Twice

 

If we draw up a list of the facts we've gleaned from Theresa Blaising Stevens' death record, we'll have the following:

• Father: Blasing, unknown first name
• Mother: Mary Hirshberg
• Birth: Lorraine

If, however, at that point we simply dust off our hands with a resounding and victorious "There!" we may simply open ourselves up to being misled down the path of genealogical discovery. We've made our list, alright, and we are ready to move on, but before we do, we need to check that list twice.

I'm a huge fan of seeking more than one document to confirm each detail about an ancestor's life. In the case of Theresa, our quest to find her roots will be expedited if we look for additional records. And that is exactly what I did: check for Theresa in multiple documents. Not only did I check a census record from her early years of marriage—the 1900 census gave her place of origin as Germany, and her arrival in the United States at about one year of age—but also located possible records from her childhood home in Indiana.

There, in the earliest census record in which I can find the "Blasing" family—the 1870 census enumeration for New Haven in Allen County, Indiana—Theresa was listed as an immigrant from France. Her age was given as two years. And her mother's name, encouragingly enough, was Mary, just as Theresa's own death record, decades later, indicated.

All well and good, until we seek further information. Eventually, a 1907 obituary for a "well known pioneer woman" who died in New Haven confirmed that Theresa's mother was indeed born in France—in Lorraine, as it turns out. That discovery pointed me to a death certificate for "Mary Anna" Blaising, which in turn gives us the chance to view the possible names of Mary's parents.

Spoiler alert: if you were thinking this death certificate would confirm the details on Mary's maiden name that we saw in Theresa's own death record, go back to re-read yesterday's post. Or here, I'll save you the time: names provided for death certificates by informants are often given under the stress of grief over loss and can sometimes include mistaken details.

So, Mary's maiden name, as given by the informant for her own death certificate? According to her son August, at whose New Haven home Mary had died, Mary's maiden name might have been something like Herschbeck. But I can't tell for sure; the handwriting, while clear, actually looked like it said "Herochbeck." Either way, it certainly wasn't Hirshberg, as had been given by the subsequent generation when Theresa herself had passed in 1947.

Added bonus: that lingering doubt about troubled memories calls the provision of Mary's mother's name into question, as well. Perhaps it was Mary Ann Becker, as her son August reported it. Or not. There's only one thing left for us to do: check that list of gleaned facts not just twice, but maybe three times. Or more.     

Do You Know Something I Don't Know?

 

The last few weeks have been rather rough. After promptly getting sick at home following a conference in Houston—where, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, we had a downpour every day—I hardly had enough energy to drive myself into town to run errands. No matter; before my trip, I had unexpectedly spotted a black widow slithering under the driver seat of my car, and I was in no rush to commandeer the buggy thing until long after I had bug-bombed it. In the meantime, my daughter kindly chauffeured me to meetings and appointments while I recuperated.

Around here, with the arrival of August, school is back in session, and that isn't just the case for the kids. Our city's active seniors' lifelong learning organizations are hosting their own back-to-class sessions, and as their genealogy instructor, I was scheduled to attend one organization's social event at a local college on Friday. True, I had just spent a week enjoying rides in air conditioned comfort in my daughter's vehicle (while awaiting the demise of said black widow), but I was a bit taken back by my daughter's constant questioning, "Are you sure you don't want me to drive you to the meeting?" What I should have asked her was, "Do you know something I don't know?"

For some reason, my husband was also keenly aware of my meeting at the college. He walked into the lecture hall where our social gathering was being held just minutes after I received a surprise award for being volunteer of the year. I may catch on to things slowly, but at that point, it dawned on me I wasn't far off track in wondering why everyone was so particular about my meeting plans for the day.

Now that I'm pulling up records for my biweekly count, it occurred to me that that question—"Do you know something I don't know?"—is a useful question for all of us while we puzzle over our family tree. As I continue exchanging research discoveries with a newly-found Flannery researcher, I send her a copy of a family keepsake and realize I may be the only one in possession of such documentation. I knew something she didn't know, but now that I've shared it, she knows, too.

Sometime in the past two weeks while adding 131 more names to my in-laws' 36,284-person family tree, I uploaded an obituary from Newspapers.com which happened to mention the possible name of someone else's birth mother. That someone spotted that posted obituary and reached out to ask if I had any more information. Unfortunately, the connection stretched beyond the third cousin level and thus was no one I knew personally—you know me: bushy trees for DNA testing—but if I had, it would have been an answer I could have shared which that adoptee didn't otherwise know.

Someone out there does know, of course, no matter what the question might be. In the aggregate, the information assembled on multiple genealogy sites provides a multitude of searching people with answers, but in the end, there are still several questions left unanswered. However, in boxes passed down to us from grandparents or maiden aunts or bachelor uncles, or tucked in attics or even written on the backs of furniture or—yes! incredibly!—plastered within the walls of our homes may be the answers we thought we'd never find.

Or, to put it more specifically, someone else might be unearthing the answer to our questions...except that they don't yet realize that they know something we don't know. The challenge is how to connect the answers with the seekers.  

When the Calculations are Slightly Off

 

I have an ongoing tiff with the ThruLines gang at Ancestry. Yes, I'm quite sure that "gang" is really a collection of computers hazarding guesses about family relationships based on majority rule—the more trees that say so, the truer it must be, right?—but let's call it my little lovers' quarrel, nonetheless. The point being: no matter how much I appreciate the ThruLines tool, those calculations are slightly off. And it bugs me.

I decided to get over my petulant ways and go back to review the ThruLines matches for my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandparents, William and Elizabeth Ijams. Last time I visited that neck of the Ancestry woods, they had assured me that my husband had fifty six DNA matches linked to William Ijams as a common ancestor, and fifty eight attributed to William's wife Elizabeth. Only problem was: when I open up the report for either William or Elizabeth, there are matches attributed to "children" of the couple whom I somehow haven't been able to identify as their children, despite serious searching through documentation.

In other words, I didn't think those names belonged in that branch of our family tree.

After reconsideration, I decided to take a closer look. After all, I have missed entire branches of that tree before—and mended my ways specifically because of what the DNA test told me.

What I saw, when I examined those possible names a bit more closely, was that the lines of descent offered up by ThruLines calculations sometimes contained names that I did have in my mother-in-law's tree. Only problem was that I had those names in different places, For instance, one DNA match had Richard Daniel Ijams listed as son of William and Elizabeth, when he really was son of a different William: the original couple's own son by the same name.

I can see how someone could make such a mistake. Seeing the same name in two separate generations can happen in a lot of cases—a father naming his son after himself—but there are other contributing factors that may come into play, as well. In this case, the senior William had specifically mentioned Richard in his will, but he also noted that Richard was his grandson, son of his own son, William. Perhaps because the will was transcribed in such a way as to separate the word "grand" from the word "son," someone may have missed that fact and entered it into an online tree incorrectly—but was that mistake replicated so many times as to fool the algorithm into thinking it was correct to skip an entire generation?

I decided to go back to all those DNA matches which ThruLines had misattributed to the wrong ancestor, and rework the suggested tree from the most recent descendant I could find in my tree. After all, I've spent years building out the collateral lines in this family; at some point all that work is going to pay off. 

In this case, it is. I'm updating and making the connections—hopefully outlining the right path to the most recent common ancestor for the record. Perhaps at some point, the genealogy tide will turn and those busy tree-copiers will pick up my lead and replicate the right Richard Daniel Ijams in their own trees. Give us time—and some convincing documentation—and we'll outnumber 'em.

Vanish

 

"A nightmare is facing us...they'll all vanish."

The other day, I was talking with a friend about the latest genealogical mystery book she was reading. I happened to have a copy of another book by the same author and wondered if she had already read it, or would like to borrow my copy.

"Oh, no," she replied. "I download all my books on Kindle and read them electronically." For her, paper was out. Too much clutter.

True, she had told me in the past about wondering what to do with all her family memorabilia. Her son had long since showed her the way to shed "things" and live a simpler, less cluttered life. It sounded so organized. So freeing.

That, however, happened to be a conversation we had after the latest storm had wiped out not only my power source, but my access to Internet service—for three days. What does one do in such instances, given a moratorium on paper products in one's household? She admitted that she could only continue reading as long as her device's battery charge held out. Then what?

Perhaps in that same aftermath, a social media re-posting by Public History Ph.D. candidate Michael W. McCormick couldn't help but catch my eye. His entry on not-Twitter led back to a February 15 article in The Guardian written by Jessica Traynor.

Commenting on "the fragility of social and national memory," in Ireland, the article—"Power Grab: the Hidden Costs of Ireland's Datacentre Boom"—began simply enough. Coupling the author's recent visit to one of the many datacentres developing all around Dublin with a brief review of Irish history—namely, the Four Courts explosion which obliterated hundreds of years of Irish historical records—journalist Jessica Traynor interspersed multiple concerns about the thrust to replace "tangible records" solely by digitized copies.

The author cited Catriona Crowe, the former head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland, in looking ahead to such a possibility of digitized-only storage. She deplored "a fantasy of technological stability" and foresaw "a black hole opening in history" not only when tangible documents are replaced by storage in the cloud, but when even programs themselves become obsolete. Those tools we now take for granted, like spreadsheets, email systems, or word processing programs, will someday become obsolete, programs that can't even be read anymore. "They'll all vanish," Crowe predicts about government records. "A nightmare is facing us."

Such a warning may be well heeded in Ireland, if it awakens the memory of the country's past history. "Ireland is no exception to the rule that what we remember and what we forget are always contingent upon the power structures and hierarchies that shape our contemporary moment," concludes Jessica Traynor in her article's closing statements. But the same is true for those of us who live in countries other than Ireland. In the United States, a policy update nearly a year ago established new regulations on digitizing federal records. Many states also are following suit. 

While the National Archives recognizes that "sometimes source records have intrinsic value and the very paper itself is a physical object that needs to be preserved as part of our nation's history," there is policy currently in place for digitizing records, then discarding the original documents. 

Recalling Jessica Traynor's conclusion about those Irish records preserved only through the fragile thread of electronic resources—that history stored in the cloud is "intangible, vulnerable to exploitation, and degrading over time"—hopefully, our government has made provision for continuing to ensure that those updated versions of our nation's records will still be readable despite ever-changing technology. After all, those records not only contain the stories of the historic figures of our nation's past. Those documents preserve our own families' stories, as well.

Tree Trauma

 

How many times when you find a family tree online which contains your mystery ancestor do you race to see where that researcher found the secret stash of tell-all documents—only to discover a very obvious case of mistaken identity? That's likely happened to all of us, for I can't count the number of times I've spotted comments about the disappointment of realizing such mistakes.

No sense in lapsing into tree trauma over this unfortunate situation, though. Anyone who knows how to research our own family history can certainly put those same skills to work in evaluating the quality of another researcher's work.

That's the kind of viewpoint I carry with me into the pages of century-old genealogy books, and it can work just as well when evaluating the work of fellow subscribers to today's online services like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage, too. Any genealogy service which allows us to pull up documents equips us with the tools we need to make such evaluations for ourselves.

Finding verification in documents may be key, but once we find the document to inspect, actually looking at the document, rather than relying solely on the transcription, can go so much farther in helping confirm or reject another researcher's family history assertions. No document showing in the tree you're viewing? Run the specific point in the tree through a search process for yourself—even on another person's tree, you can do that at Ancestry, sometimes with eye-opening revelations on trees which had no previous verification.

There are, of course, the inevitable situations which seem to slip through the research cracks. A birth and death which happened in between two census years, for instance, can make it seem like nothing serious happened in the family at all that decade, simply because we didn't know to look elsewhere for any signs of tragedy.

Sometimes, a part of a family's history might be known only to those who lived through that particular family's circumstances at the time. Yesterday, reader—and blogger, too—Miss Merry commented on how her grandfather was raised by his grandmother after his parents both died young, and yet the census enumerators recorded their relationship wrong, thus becoming the likely source of misinformation in other  trees online connected to her grandfather's family. She commented, "I know the true story as a direct descendant." But would a distant cousin have realized the problem?

Though we sometimes complain about scrambled information on some family trees posted online, I've realized what Miss Merry mentioned provides us with some guidance. Yes, people can get information wrong on their own family tree—but it is usually concerning more distant relationships. If I'm in doubt concerning a tree at, say, Ancestry.com, I'll click on the view that lets me see the pedigree leading to the "home" person. If the relative in question is a fairly close family member, I'm more likely to trust a subscriber's assertion on that tree than, say, a claim about a fifth or sixth cousin.

Even better yet, some online subscribers are not only adding documentation to their tree from records accessible through services such as Ancestry.com, but adding documents from their own family's personal collections. I've seen photos of entries from old family Bibles, or inscriptions from backs of old family photographs. In one instance I ran across this past week in working on my Carter DNA matches, one man explained the source of confusion in his line. Posting a copy of his father's obituary, he explained that after his dad divorced his mom, he married another woman by the same name. Of course, those who didn't know those details might have thought that the second woman was the son's mother, but she wasn't. By his sharing the document plus his comment—and because he was so closely involved in that aspect of his family's history—it helped guide other researchers away from mistaken assumptions.

Face it, whether we are using century-old genealogy books as our guide, or trying to make sense of our family history from trees posted online in this current decade, we're going to find mistakes. Always go into this research process with eyes wide open.  Anyone can make mistakes, even governmental record-keepers. Avoid tree trauma: do your own follow-up by seeking out documentation to confirm and double check any assertions made by other researchers, no matter who they are or where they shared their family tree.