A Stutzman DNA mystery

Every now and then I check my AncestryDNA account to see if I have any new DNA matches. Last night I found something interesting - my dad, whose account I'm the administrator of, had a DNA match to someone who had Stutzmans in their family tree. My dad's mother's maiden name was Stutzman(n), and I've been able to trace the family somewhat far back into Germany, but more successfully on the lines that married into the Stutzmanns, not the Stutzmann family itself.

Now, this DNA match wasn't a close one - within 4-6 generations, which could mean as far back as 8 generations, but Stutzman isn't a common name, so I decided to see if I could find a connection. This person had the Stutzman line traced back only one generation, but it was easy enough to use Ancestry to dig a little deeper. This person's family traced back to the Stutzmans of Somerset County, Pennsylvania - to the Pennsylvania Dutch. As I said, Stutzman isn't a name I come across a lot, but any time I do, it's almost always as part of the Amish and Mennonite communities in Pennsylvania, and later in Illinois and Indiana. If any of you watched the Katey Sagal episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?", she was descended from Christian Stutzman and Barbara Hochstedler, the progenitors of many of the Amish and Mennonite Stutzmans of Pennsylvania...including, the forebears of the Stutzman my dad connected to genetically.

But my Stutzmanns come from the Pfalz Rheinland region of Germany, and the Pennsylvania Stutzmans come from Bern Canton, Switzerland. My Stutzmanns were also Lutheran, not Mennonite. And then there's of course the matter of the extra "n" at the end of my Stutzmann family name. Yet, I had always wondered if there was a connection between my German Stutzmanns and the Swiss Stutzmanns, because even today if you Google Stutzmann, the people who come up are often from Switzerland. I can trace the Stutzmanns only back as far as the early 1700s (I know, I say "only", but that's not that far for my German family tree lines!) - is it possible that before they were in Germany, the family came from Switzerland? Is there a point, further back than I've been able to find yet, where the two families intersect? Or did I get so excited by seeing the Stutzman name in this tree that I got tunnel vision, and that's not even where the DNA connection is??? Could it be another line altogether??

There's still a lot I need to learn about genetic genealogy. There's still a lot I don't understand, obviously. I know there are ways to determine on what line and when people might intersect genetically, but I don't know how. I might need to spend more time on a website like The Genetic Genealogist, who often does a great job of breaking down the scientific mumbo jumbo of genetic genealogy into layman's terms. But for now, my dad's DNA connection to this Stutzman individual will remain a mystery.

Have you ever gotten a DNA connection and thought you probably knew where the connection was, but couldn't figure it out? Or found out the connection was on a completely unexpected and surprising line?

Those Places Thursday: "The Green House" restaurant in Freeport, 1915

Almost two weeks ago, I posted my great-grandfather's obituary, in which it stated that in the 1920s he had owned and operated a popular fisherman hangout, The Greenhouse restaurant, but it didn't say where it was located.

Well, relatives and readers to the rescue! I got a card in the mail last week from my Aunt Ellen, who read my blog post and sent me two photos of "The Green House"! The note stated that the photos were from her mother, whose father, Timothy Cronin, was the one who owned the restaurant. The photos are from 1915, the year my grandmother was born and the year the Cronins moved from Brooklyn to Freeport, Long Island. The restaurant, which I guess was officially called Cronin's Bay House, based on the note from my aunt, was located at the end of Bedell Street, right on the water. (For anyone not familiar with Long Island, Freeport is a waterfront village on the South Shore of Long Island famous for it's fishing industry and its waterfront restaurants, both in 1915 and today). The building is big, and it looks busy, packed with people on the porch and boats docked in the front - its very reminiscent of Freeport's Nautical Mile today, only all old-timey!

I just love these glimpses into the past, these flashes of the every day lives of our ancestors...thank you so much Aunt Ellen for sharing these with me!!

Cronin's Bay House, "The Green House" - the end of Bedell Street in Freeport, New York, 1915.

Sunday's Obituary: Timothy A. Cronin (1879-1948)

My great-grandfather, Timothy Ambrose Cronin, died June 16, 1948 at the age of 68. According to his death certificate and his obituary, he had a heart attack. Born in County Cork, Ireland, he is my most recent immigrant ancestor, generationally (he came here as a child sometime in the late 1880s - my 3rd great-grandparents Casper and Margaret Lindemann came here in 1891). I knew he worked in and owned saloons and pubs over the years, but I learned from his obituary that in the 1920s he owned a restaurant called the Greenhouse, which was "a favorite seafood restaurant of fishing parties." I'll have to do some further research to find out where exactly the Greenhouse was located. Tim Cronin was survived by his wife, Ellen (nee Casey), his daughter Mary Raynor, his son, Sergeant Daniel Cronin of the Freeport Police Department (where he worked with his friend, Timothy's son-in-law and Mary's husband, Dick Raynor), and a grandson - my uncle Cliff. He is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. Thanks to the Old Fulton Postcards website for this obit.

Timothy Ambrose Cronin obituary from the June 17, 1948 Nassau Daily Review Star. Courtesy Old Fulton Postcards.

Tuesday's Tip: if I can't find a record of my ancestor does it mean it's not there?

So, today's Tuesday genealogy tip is: think outside the box. The question is: if you can't find a record of your ancestor, does it mean it isn't there? Getting existential here...

The problems with looking for genealogy records are manifold: the record never existed, it doesn't exist anymore, it's not online, the handwriting is illegible, the transcriber made an error, the indexer made an error, your ancestor liked to use many names and many spellings, and so on and so forth. So how do we find any records of anybody?

First, do an exhaustive search before you give up and declare that the family history record is not online. And if you've given up, come back again in several months to check again, because it might have been added since you stopped looking. What does an exhaustive search look like? If you're looking for John Smith, born 1843 in New York, do NOT limit yourself to those facts!! Look for them, but also look for J. Smith, just Smith, Smythe, Smithe, born anywhere between 1840 and 1850, born in the United States, leave some facts out, use your BOOLEAN search function, where different characters (*, ?, _) substitute for letters or letter groups. So search for Sm?th* and you'll get Smith, Smythe and Smithe all in one search.

I feel like sharing this tip today because I finally found a record I had been searching for for years - the immigration record for Hulda Lindemann Wolbern, who we've been talking about in this blog recently, and my third great-grandparents (and her parents), Casper and Eva Margarethe Lindemann. Casper and Eva came to America from Germany in the late 1800s with their children Reinhold, Augusta (my 2nd-great grandmother), Hulda, Augustine (Lena), Charles, Amanda and their grandson Richard. There were many conflicting accounts of when they emigrated but couldn't find anything according to any of the dates I had. After looking for Lind*man* family members all weekend, I finally started searching for Amanda tonight. Not Amanda Lindemann. Just Amanda. I knew she was born in 1882, and I knew she was here by 1892, because she's in the 1892 New York census. So I looked for Amanda, born 1880-1884, emigrated between 1882-1892. And lo and behold, an Amanda popped up. Not Amanda with a last name - just Amanda. So I checked out the image (Tuesday's tiny genealogy tip - ALWAYS check the image, not just the index, because I have often found transcription errors in the index) and there was an Amanda, traveling with a Richard, a Carl (Charles was also known as Carl), an Augustina, a Hulda, an Eva and a head of household whose name was completely lost in a decaying crease on the page. Jackpot. All the names and ages were right. Because I knew this was them, I could make out the "Cas" in Casper and the L in Lindemann in the cracked part of the page. But because it was the head of the household whose name was lost completely, and his was the only one where the last name was written, the rest of the family members also lost their last names...so they were there, in the record, but a search for Lindemann would never turn them up. Funny how easy it was after years of being so hard.

So, these members of the family (my Augusta and her brother Reinhold apparently traveled to the U.S. separately) sailed into New York on July 2, 1891 aboard the Rotterdam, a Dutch ship, which took on passengers in Boulogne, France and Amsterdam, Netherlands. That seems to strange to me, only because all my German ancestors before this have all sailed out of German ports. I have information that Augusta Lindemann was born in Stedtlingen, in central Germany far from any ocean ports, but even though I know the family was there in the 1870s and 1880s, I don't know where they were after that fact, so maybe Amsterdam or Boulogne were the closest ports to where they were...did they spend any extended amount of time in either of these areas? Which port did they embark at? This is the way genealogy goes - answer one question, find five more questions. But I'm happy. I know very little about Casper and Eva (who also went by Margaret) and so this is one new tiny piece of their puzzles that I get to fill in!

The Lindemann family sailed into New York July 2, 1891 aboard the Rotterdam.

Death certificate for Hulda Wolbern (nee Lindemann): Death aboard the General Slocum steamboat

Oh, I am so sad. I got the death certificate for Hulda Wolbern (nee Lindemann) in the mail today. (Thank you, New York City Municipal Archives! I complained, but a 2 month wait is not too bad...) I knew this was going to be an emotional moment for me, possibly the MOST emotional moment for me as a genealogist, and I wasn't wrong. I think this is the most heartbreaking record I've ever had to look at. I'm not entirely sure why. I've dealt with records for my own family and for clients where someone died young - in their 20s, leaving behind a wife and young kids, or even a kid themselves, never getting the chance to grow up and leave behind a legacy of their own. But I think there's just something about the manner of Hulda's death, the personal family tragedy behind it and the greater New York, German-American and American tragedy behind it. Hulda's death certificate tells me not just about the circumstances surrounding her death...it represents the deaths of all the women and children who died in the General Slocum steamboat disaster June 15, 1904.

So what does this death record say and look like? It's from the Bronx, even though Hulda lived in Brooklyn. Most of the victims have Bronx death certificates because that was the borough closest to the disaster. The actual date of the certificate is June 21, 1904, because it took a few days for Hulda's body to be identified. Place of death: East River, off Port Morris (the southern tip of the Bronx, right across from Randall's Island). Character of premises (such as whether a home, hospital, etc.): Steamboat, "General Slocum". She was married, 28 years old, born in Germany and living in the U.S. and New York for 18 years (which means I can look for an immigration record from around 1886). Her father was Caspar Lindemann. Her mother, for some reason, is not listed.

The certificate was filled out by Joseph I. Berry, Bronx borough coroner, and he identified Hulda's body in the morgue. The certificate says an inquest is pending - I wonder if that's particular to Hulda or to the General Slocum victims in general, if that inquest is public information, and if I would have the heart and stomach to ever read it if I could get my hands on it...

After his examination, Mr. Berry determined that Hulda's cause of death was "asphyxia submersion." So Hulda didn't die in the fire - she drowned, as most of the victims did. She is buried in Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, as many of my German ancestors are. On the second page of the report, we see that the undertaker was R. Stutzman. Rudolph Stutzmann was my great-great grandfather. Hulda Wolbern was his wife's sister. Rudolph helped care for the remains of many of his (and therefore my) family members but I wonder if it was particularly hard caring for his sister-in-law. I wonder if it was comforting to his wife Augusta and her parents and siblings, knowing that in the end their sister and daughter was in the hands of a loving family member.

Life is not endless. It's a journey with an off ramp that everyone must take. When it happens, it's sad but it's a fact of life. I've seen hundreds of death records. Everyone gets one eventually. But when it happens, we hope it's after a long, fulfilling life and that the manner is a peaceful one. I can look at all these records somewhat objectively usually, but Hulda's record is very emotional for me - because she was a young mother, because she lost her infant son, because they both died under such tragic circumstances. I couldn't find you forever, Hulda, but I hope you know you and your little boy aren't lost anymore. I found you. You are remembered.

Marriage record from NYC Municipal Archives confirms identity of Hulda Lindemann Wolbern

This is just going to be a quick entry on this rainy morning - two months after I put in my request to the New York City Municipal Archives, I finally got one of the five records I asked for. It usually takes this long. At least this long. But I had forgotten. And I was antsy for a response. The record I got was the marriage certificate for Hulda Lindemann and Martin J. Wolbern, who were married Nov. 3, 1901 in a Brooklyn Lutheran church. It was the record I was least antsy for, as it gives me no brand new information, but it's an important document none the less because it confirms that the Hulda Wolbern who died in the General Slocum steamboat disaster in 1904 was my Hulda Lindemann. The certificate states this Hulda Lindemann was born in Germany about 1876 to Casper Lindemann and Margaret Voigt - everything that jives with what I know about Hulda's sister, my great-great grandmother Augusta Lindemann Stutzmann. One of the witnesses to the marriage was Lena Lindemann, who was another sister of Augusta's and Hulda's. So everything jives. This is my Hulda. I looked at the signatures on the back of the certificate and I got sad looking at Hulda's - seeing someone's signature makes them feel more real, like a piece of them has manged to reach through time to you. Any time you look at these signatures, you're looking at the writing of someone who is long gone, but I was struck by the notion that she maybe she was so happy that day when she was signing her name, excited about the possibilities the future held as she began her married life. Little did she know that three years later she would be dead at 28 in an awful tragic accident.  I felt a little like the ancient Greek Cassandra, who had the power of prophecy but the inability to change the future. Looking at Hulda's signature, I know what her future holds, but because it already happened, there's nothing I can do to change it. 

I'm hopeful that since I received one document this means my others are on the way. I'm bracing myself for Hulda's death certificate, which I feel will be more of an emotional experience than these records usually are for me. But I'm looking forward to the marriage application records I requested, as I'm hoping they'll shed some light on some of my Irish ancestry...

Black Sheep Sunday: 3rd great uncle John Casey stabs his wife Celena

Yikes. Talk about scandalous people in your family tree. Discovered this jewel of a relative while scouring the Fulton History newspaper archives. John Casey, born about 1863 in Longford, Ireland to Thomas Casey and Margaret McCarthy, was the brother of my great great grandfather Peter Casey. This is from the September 13, 1905 Brooklyn Daily Eagle under the headline "Held For Stabbing Wife - John Casey Also Resisted Arrest Bond Placed at $200": "John Casey, 32 years old ... was charged ... with assault in stabbing his wife, Celena Casey, in the thumb with an ice pick. He was arrested last night in the saloon at Garfield Place and Fifth Avenue by Court Officer Joseph Murray. He resisted arrest.. The couple have two children." I don't know what happened to John and Celena after this. I don't know why this happened. Had he been drinking? Was this a one-time thing? Did they have a normally tempestuous relationship? Did their children know about the incident?

From the Sept. 13, 1905 Brooklyn Daily Eagle - John Casey was arrested for stabbing his wife Celena.

Putting the puzzle pieces in place: Clifford Raynor's World War II Navy service

So I've been waiting to get some documents from the New York City Municipal Archives before I wrote another blog, but I forgot how long it takes. It's been so long since I ordered anything from them...I guess I thought since I was requesting only documents, not a search for said documents, that they would've gotten to me by now, but alas, here I am two months out, running to the mailbox every. single. day. as if I were waiting for a love letter from my crush... ::sigh:: Every day begins with hope and ends with disappointment...I live only 30 miles from the Archives. I could've gone in and found everything myself ages ago...don't tell my 3-year-old daughter. I'm always admonishing her to be patient.

And so, while we wait...

I was watching an episode of Genealogy Roadshow recently and they were looking at old Civil War muster rolls, which I have for my 4th-great grandfather Charles Haase, but I also have Navy muster rolls for my grandfather Clifford Raynor's service during World War II. Muster rolls are kind of like attendance, and were taken every couple of months, and so can kind of recreate your family member's service journey, showing exactly where he was on those muster dates. As far as I can tell, though, my grandfather's muster rolls, which are available online, don't say where the muster roll was taken, just his rank, any change in rank, and what ship he was serving on - the USS Amsterdam, which was a CL-101 Cleveland-class light cruiser.

The USS Amsterdam

I knew my grandfather served in the Pacific Theater (although not until after he had passed - if only I had known while he was alive and had also been old enough to understand what his service had meant!) but none of the details. So I had muster roll dates - Jan. 8, 1945, March 31, 1945, July 1, 1945 and so on. So I checked online. Wikipedia actually has a somewhat detailed service history for the Amsterdam - Jan. 8, 1945 the ship was commissioned at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, July 1, 1945 it left Leyte, Philippines as part of the 3rd Fleet went on the offensive with Task Force 38 to protect US planes doing airstrikes against Japan, and so on. While I knew my grandfather never saw hand-to-hand combat, as it were, the way infantry and others who fought on land did, I guess I never realized that he actually was a huge supportive part of the battles that were going on. He might not have seen combat, but he saw combat.

I decided to revisit the Fulton History newspaper archive website to look at old newspaper reports just to round out the picture a little more. My grandfather enlisted in the Navy in November of 1943 - when his grandfather, Joseph J. Raynor died in January of 1944, my grandfather was stationed in Newport, Rhode Island. in March of 1944 he was attending Wright College in Chicago, which was used by the Navy during World War II for its Electronics Training Program, which trained men to work with the radio and electronic equipment aboard naval crafts.

After training, my grandfather served as a radio technician in the Navy. While Grandpa ended up in the Pacific, his brother, Monroe was serving on the other side of the world in Germany. My grandfather was one of seven siblings; he and his brother were the only boys. I wonder how my great-grandparents felt having both their sons fighting in a world war, on both fronts...

The Raynor brothers, Bob and Dick.

Anyway, what was the point of all of this? Each record or database gives me pieces, glimpses, of my grandfather's wartime naval service - I have muster rolls, I have Google, I have websites dedicated to detailing the service of every naval craft, I have newspaper articles. Don't ever just be satisfied with what you can glean from one record - "Oh, my grandfather was in the Navy on this date, this date, and this date during the war...cool." What part of the world did he serve in? What battles was he a part of? What did he do while he was in service, what was his "everyday" job? How and when did he get involved? Always ask questions. Always dig a little deeper. Always want to find out more. I actually knew most of this info from prior research. Today I pinpointed Grandpa's exact location at each muster roll. I also learned that radio technician was a highly skilled, highly selective job, which I never knew. I have so many questions for my grandfather now about his naval wartime life! Maybe in the next life (or Grandma, if you're hanging around and can ask him and pass along the answers to me in a dream, that would be cool, too...)

 

 

Nature versus nurture: when your family is adopted...

Lately I've been working with a few clients who are either adopted themselves or who have a parent or grandparent who was adopted. Many of these people are just starting to find out more about their families through genetic genealogy, but a lot of them are still in the dark, and might always be. I've also been thinking lately about people in my own life who have a parent or grandparent who was adopted, disrupting the genetic family chain, possibly permanently.

In genealogy, we always talk about how important it is to know where we come from to understand more about who we are as people - what makes us tick, who in our families are we like, what traits did we inherit? So what does this mean for people who are not genetically part of their family? Does genealogy care about them? Should they care about genealogy?

OF COURSE!!!

Genealogy is about genetics, yes - who you got your blues eyes from, where you got your artistic talent from, what peoples handed down the genes that you carry in your body today, be it Celtic, Native American, West African, Mediterranean, Jewish, etc. But genealogy is more than that - genealogy is about FAMILY, and family can be through birth or it can be through choice. Some traits get passed down genetically, yes, but others get passed down through relationships. Tradition, inspiration and lessons are not encoded in our DNA - they're passed on in stories and through shared experiences. So even if your family tree isn't "really" your family tree, it is STILL your family tree. Maybe your family is Italian, and you are Asian, but you still inherited your Sicilian great-grandmother's meatball recipe, which you can pass on to your children; you still gained an appreciation for classical music from your grandfather; you still sing the same lullaby to your baby that your mother sang to you and her mother sang to her; you still decided to pursue a career in law because that's been your family business for over 100 years...

Genealogy is only half nature...the rest is nurture. Who we are is not just in our genes...it's how our families, how our relationships, how generations of relationships have molded us as people. Sometimes we get too caught up in the genetics, the "nature" of it all...let's not forget about the PEOPLE, and how we were, and continue to, nurture.

OMG...she was married?? Or how I confirmed the fate of Hulda Lindemann in the General Slocum disaster

My great-great grandmother was Augusta Lindemann Stutzmann. The family of her husband, Rudolph Stutzmann, is chronicled in the anthology, Schlegel's American Families of German Ancestry and in the Stutzmann family summary, they briefly address Augusta's family as well. It was here that I first learned of the General Slocum disaster, as the book says that Augusta's sister Hulda was a victim. I've written of the disaster before but just as a quick reminder, the General Slocum was a paddleboat, and on June 15, 1904, it set sail from New York City with 1,358 passengers, mostly women and children from the German-American community, most from the Lower East Side, who were out on a fun church outing. The ship caught fire and more than 1,000 of those on board died - only 321 people survived. It was the largest non-war related loss of life in the whole United States until 9/11. You can read more about it on the New York Public Library website here: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/13/great-slocum-disaster-june-15-1904

Anyway, according to Schlegel's, Hulda, who was only 28 at the time, died that day, but I couldn't find a death certificate for her anywhere. I couldn't find any proof to back up that story or find out what really happened to her. On top of that, a lot of the information in Schlegel's had proven to be inaccurate, so maybe it didn't get that fact about Hulda right? She wasn't in the 1905 census, so she probably had died before then, and in 1900 she was living with a family, the Feldhusens, as a servant. They lived on the Lower East Side, and I had found the names of the mother and the son on a list of the dead from that day - a list Hulda's name wasn't on, but I thought maybe she had accompanied the Feldhusens on the trip and was among the missing - but still, why would she not have a death certificate???

So today I went to the Genealogy Federation of Long Island conference at Bethpage Public Library. In addition to hosting various speakers and presentations, there were different vendors and genealogy organizations there set up at tables. One of these groups represented was the German Genealogy Group, which, along with the Italian Genealogy Group, has an awesome website for any New York City genealogy research, even if your family isn't German or Italian. But on the banner behind their table I noticed that it said they had a General Slocum passenger list manifest in their database. So I decided to ask if they could look for Hulda for me. A kind older gentleman whose name I didn't get but who was so helpful looked up Lindemann for me. No luck. Looked up Hulda for me. Two hits, but neither had a last name even close to Lindemann. He asked me how old she would've been. 28, I told him. Well, one of the Huldas in the list, Hulda Wolbern, had been 28. Are you sure your Hulda never married, a woman with the group asked me. I hesitated.

No, I wasn't sure.

Schegel's never listed her as being married. But I knew the Stutzmann-Lindemann family account, while an awesome place to start, was pretty inaccurate. Had I been searching for Hulda all these years under the wrong name???

Turns out that, yes, I had been. I couldn't even wait until I got home - I used my phone to go on the FamilySearch website and found a Hulda Linderman Wolbern buried in Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village who had died June 15, 1904. Linderman. Practically Lindemann. And buried in the same cemetery as my Lindemanns. This was her. I had found her. I feel so so so excited to have finally found her and at the same time, just so sad to know she died in such a terrible disaster and probably suffered a terrible death. I plan to order her marriage record and death record immediately. I'm hoping both will shed some light on where the Lindemanns came from in Germany, because that is a line that has been a huge brick wall for me for a long time. I wonder how explicit her death record will be. Or if she was one of the missing. I found another birth record on FamilySearch today - I discovered Hulda and her husband had a son, Henry, in 1903. Here was a cousin I never knew about. How sad, I told my husband, that he lost his mom when he was just one. My husband asked me if the baby had been on the ship with her, since the outing was for mothers and children. My heart sank. A death certificate search revealed that yes, one year old Henry Wolbern died that day as well. I found and lost a cousin in the space of 10 minutes, and as the mother of young children, my heart is just breaking for Hulda and her baby boy.

Let us remember all the lives that were lost that day. Let us remember all our family members, however long they've been gone - they aren't just names and dates, they were people who lived and who loved.

And thank you to the gentleman with the German Genealogy Group who helped me put this mystery to rest and for helping me find my little cousin who died that day because everybody deserves to be remembered.

An Irish blessing

Boy, there are a lot of Irish blessings out there, aren't there? It seems the Irish are always wishing good things on others. I am half Irish by way of my paternal grandfather and maternal grandfather - my great-grandfather, Timothy Ambrose Cronin, born in County Cork, Ireland in 1879 is my most recent Irish ancestor. Because he told my grandmother and my grandmother told me that he saw a leprechaun as a young lad in Ireland, I defended leprechauns as being real, not imaginary like unicorns or fairies (ok, the Irish would argue that fairies are also real, I suppose), in front of my whole class as a young girl. And I was a shy kid, but I did not want my teacher and classmates passing around wrong information.

I am not embarrassed by that moment at all. I taught my 3 year old daughter about leprechauns this week. My grandmother, who passed away almost two years ago at the age of 99, insisted until the end that leprechauns were being mischievous in her home. I believe her.

Though I often identify most with my German side, I sometimes feel very Irish. I look Irish. I inherited a bit of the Irish superstitious nature. I enjoy laughter and storytelling late into the night over a couple of pints. My daughter and son are only a quarter Irish but I hope they'll be proud of their heritage as well - I think my great-grandfather and grandmother would be happy to know that my daughter spent today wishing everyone a "Happy Patrick's Day" and looking for leprechauns. And with that, I leave you with one of many, many Irish blessings wishing you only good things in life, because even if you're not Irish by ancestry, today everybody is Irish in spirit!

A glimpse into a life lived: Obituary for Joseph J. Raynor

Obituaries are one of my favorite genealogy resources. A well-written obituary can tell you not only when and where your ancestor died (obviously), it can shed light on a spouse's maiden name, a daughter's married name, where a person was born, their parents' names, when they immigrated, what they did for a living, where they are buried, the names of all their children, the names of their grandchildren. They can clue you into someone's remarriage, what they died of, their standing in their community, if they belonged to any social, political or business organizations. A well-written obituary can tell a story, giving you a glimpse into the life your ancestor lived. Below is an obituary from The Nassau Daily Review-Star that I recently found for my great-great grandfather, Joseph J. Raynor. He died January 6, 1944 in the same house in which he was born. He spent his life working as an oyster planter and oysterman, a trade he learned from his father at a young age. It was a trade that was the heart and soul of the 19th century Long Island waterfront community in which he grew up. The obit mentions two of his grandsons who are serving in the military, as World War II is currently raging - Monroe Raynor, who was in the Army and stationed in Lousiana, who would end up serving in Europe, and Clifford Raynor, who was in the Navy and stationed in Rhode Island, who would end up serving in the Pacific Theater. Clifford was my grandfather. Anyway, if you've already looked for obits and haven't found them, look again! That's how I found this one - you might learn something new, you might not. You might end up with a smile on your face, picturing your great-great grandfather as a little boy, running after his father along the water's edge, sitting on a boat with him, living life.

Joseph J. Raynor obituary from January 6, 1944.

  

PS Just an interesting, weird note. I have two great-great grandfathers who both died on January 6, 1944 - same day, same year. Weird, right? I used to think it might be a typo, a transcription mistake, but it's not. Not a good day for my family!

Ancestry.com, why has thou forsaken me?

Sorry...the title of this post is a little dramatic, I know. I just needed to rant a little bit. I love Ancestry.com. I think it is an invaluable resource to genealogical research, providing access to millions of records, right at your fingertips, that would've been difficult to impossible to access 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 years ago...even six months ago. Ancestry helped mainstream genealogy research. I won't get into how Ancestry's opening genealogy to the general population has also muddled true, accurate research...this post is about how Ancestry.com makes it difficult to foster that interest in genealogy.

Confused yet? I was recently working with a client, and part of what I was hired to do was create an online family tree for this person on Ancestry.com. Now, as recently as a couple of years ago, this was super easy to do, even if you didn't have an Ancestry subscription. While a paid subscription is required to access 95 percent of Ancestry's website, features like its message boards and online family trees (and now AncestryDNA) were always free, and easy to use. It behooved Ancestry to make these features free and easy - if a non-subscriber created a family tree on Ancestry.com for free, and saw all the hints they got, and were able to see other users researching the same people and were able to connect with these people, it got them EXCITED about doing MORE research, serious research...research they would need an Ancestry subscription for. Well, no more. First, the landing page to Ancestry as someone without a subscription is the subscription sign-up page, instead of the homepage. I couldn't even find how to make my client a registered guest (the free version to use Ancestry). I had to google "Ancestry registered guest" which brought me to one of the FAQ pages...frustrating beyond belief. THEN, when I went to start their tree, I input one person, input his wife...and then couldn't input the father. Or the mother. And couldn't click on the person I originally input. When I refreshed the page, all my info was lost. So I input it again. Same deal. Tried something else to get to the individual's page to add some more details, and lost all my info again. 30 minutes later and my client's online tree consisted of ZERO information. I finally had to start his tree on one of my family tree programs on my computer, save it as a GEDCOM file, and then upload that GEDCOM to Ancestry. That FINALLY worked. Created and saved the tree, and 125 individuals later, found out that my client couldn't view any other trees without an invitation from the tree's owner (even PUBLIC trees - so much for being public) and without a subscription, couldn't contact a tree's owner, and therefore couldn't ask for an invitation to view his or her tree. So much for being able to connect with cousins and share information. My client was frustrated, not excited, about his family tree, and to be honest, so was I. A huge part of genealogy for me is the sharing of information, the building of a tree, the merging of trees, with the help of others.

Anyway, this incident has really made me rethink whether or not I'll continue to offer this service. In the future, I might recommend people create online family trees on a completely free website like FamilySeach - I'm not sure the community is as huge as on Ancestry, so there might not be as many other trees to look at and connect with, but at least it'll be easy to share your tree with friends and family, and to build your tree in the first place.

Here endeth the rant. It's Friday, everybody - take it easy and enjoy your weekend!

DNA connection: Peter Lafrentz

Using DNA to make family connections is really trendy in genealogy right now, and rightly so. Even though it's still somewhat in its infancy and many people (myself included) don't really understand how it works or what it really means, it does provide concrete connections to individuals who are related to us, possibly way way back on the ole' family tree and helps us to establish some kind of genealogical road map when the paper trail ends. A lot of my DNA connections (I took the autosomal test through AncestryDNA, though I also uploaded my results to FamilyTreeDNA) confirmed my descent from Jacob Raynor and Rebecca Raynor, which is both exciting and disappointing - exciting because it's always nice to confirm or reaffirm what we know or what we think we know, but disappointing because for me, that connection was never in doubt. I KNOW I am their descendant. The Raynors are no mystery to me - they are my most researched branch. I made a connection on my Berg branch, which was nice, but boring, because the person who I connected with genetically and I had already been in contact years ago and made the paper connection very easily. Another hit I had was on my Reinhardt line, which was a pleasant surprise. Though they've become well known to me and I knew OF the person I connected with, I don't know a whole lot about them or my cousins on that line. While I didn't much doubt that line, it was a nice confirmation of research I had done on my own, and that wasn't handed down to me by my grandmother.

I have had some really pleasant surprises, though, some who connected genetically to me and some who connected genetically to my dad (since my dad and I connect genetically, anyone who connects to him genetically is also a relative of mine, even though we might not have been a genetic match - god, genetics is confusing!). Today I want to mention one of my dad's connections, which is his seventh-great grandfather, Peter Lafrentz of Stinstedt, in Cuxhaven, Lower Saxony, Germany. I discovered Peter through my own original research with the help of a distant cousin who provided me with transcribed pages of a German church book and family book, which are transcriptions themselves of original church or family records - they don't go into much detail about each person but they trace many families back generations, all the way through the late 1500s sometimes, with parents, dates of birth, marriage and death, as well as places for each - it's all very well organized and another reason I really connect to my German side - if you have German roots, try to find one of these books for your family! They are invaluable! Anyway, to have Peter turn up as a DNA connection was a HUGE confirmation that the paper trail I had followed, even though it was a secondary source trail, was correct. I don't know anything about Peter. I know that the town he came from is on the north coast of German, about 40 km northeast of Bremerhaven, a huge immigration port. Peter was born there about 1703 when it was a part of the Duchy of Bremen, though it was also ruled by the Swedish and the Danish (it's located not far from the border of Denmark and is in a part of Germany that saw a lot of Scandinavian occupation) before falling under the rule of the Hanoverian Crown. So it was a time and place of transition of authority. It was also a place of transition of religion from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism back to Catholicism then back again. Seeing this physical connection to such a distant ancestor (I have many distant ancestors on my American lines from this time period but for some reason, because Peter lived in Germany, it feels further back!) makes me want to know more about him - what did he do for a living? What was his life like? What was his world like? On that line, my family didn't immigrate until five generations later, when Meta Tiedemann Ricklefs came to New York from Mittelstenahe (the next town over to Stinstedt) in the 1880s.

What interesting discoveries or connections have you made through DNA genealogy?

Dead end or end of the road?

I had an inquiry this week from a potential client, asking for help with a brick wall they had encountered. They had traced their family back to Germany in the early 1500s and wanted help getting past this dead end.

I know some of you are green with jealousy right now that this person had managed to trace at least one family line back 600 years...I know I am!

We all encounter brick walls in our research, that one person (or two or three) we just can't get back, no matter how much research we do, no matter how many records we use. For some of us, that dead end is our great-grandfather and the late 19th century, a rather recent sudden halt in our family line. For others, it's a line we've traced all the way back to late 16th century Germany. I have experience with both. The question becomes, the further back we encounter these brick walls, is this a dead end or is it the end of the road? The end of the road means, there is no more paper trail. Sometimes, like when we do Irish genealogy or Eastern European genealogy, it's because those records were destroyed and no longer exist. Sometimes, like when we do Central American research, it's because official record keeping was sporadic and the record might never have existed in the first place. Sometimes it's just the end of the road for our online research and we have to take it to real world repositories - but sometimes those repositories might be so remote and so local (a small village church or cemetery on the other side of the world, just to use an extreme example) that we might never be able to access it or even discover it in the first place, so that for all intents and purposes, it is the end of the road. And sometimes, when we trace our family lines far enough back, the paper trail just ends. Unless you're descended from royalty, regular people weren't important enough to keep records on. And even if you ARE descended from royalty, written records disintegrate with age, and far enough back, written records just weren't kept. As much as I wish it weren't true, we cannot trace our family trees back forever - we'll never find that original ancestor. We'll never discover everybody. At some point, all our lines will end abruptly, and that will be it - there will be nothing more to discover.

Does this mean that if you hit a brick wall you should give up? Just shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that must be it"? Of course not. A dedicated genealogist always does a reasonably exhaustive search...the keyword being "reasonably." When you reach an end of the road, move on to another line - we all, if we're lucky, have many, many lines to explore and expand. And when you reach the end of all roads, fill in those gaps between the dates - make those ancestors come alive with the details you find!

Happy 8th anniversary to me!

Eight years ago today, I started this blog as Threading Needles in a Haystack on Blogger. I can't believe my baby is eight years old today! Eight years later, my family history research is still going strong - for myself, for my husband's family, and now also for clients - even if my blogging has become sporadic at best...life gets in the way! But my love of genealogy has not waned - every new discovery I make, every new person and family I get to research, is still as exciting and interesting and educational and just plain FUN as the day I started, and I hope that's what this blog still conveys to this day. And just in case you forgot or you're a newcomer to this blog, this is where it all started... :)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Becoming Nancy Drew

This blog is about genealogy, in case that isn't obvious. But I'll get to that soon enough.

When I was younger, I discovered my mother's complete collection of Nancy Drew books and being an avid reader, I devoured them. A detective who was a high school girl? How cool was that? I was quickly hooked on mysteries and soon decided I wanted to be a detective.

When I was a little older than that, my family went out to eat at a seafood restaurant in Freeport, the small village on the South Shore of Long Island where I lived. When I opened the menu, I saw the first page was the story about the founding of Freeport by a man named Edward Raynor. It immediately caught my attention and kept my interest because my mother's maiden name was Raynor. Coincidence? Could this Edward be a distant relative? How might they possibly be related? What would Nancy Drew do to solve this mystery?

As it turns out, this first case of mine would have made a very boring book, as the Raynor family, one of the first English families to settle Long Island, had already been extensively researched and my maternal grandmother, the keeper of our family tree, had given my mother all the information in a handy-dandy binder. Edward was an nth-grandfather. Mystery solved.

But my interest was piqued. And over the years, it only grew. And I soon realized that my Nancy Drew days, pathetic as they had been, were not over. What about my dad's family? Where had they come from? What was their story? And my mother's mother? Her dad was born in Ireland and claimed to have seen a leprechaun (a story that even today my superstitious Irish side is reluctant to entirely dismiss), but that's all I knew about her family. And what of these women who had married into the Raynor family - the Seamans, the Pearsalls, the Smiths - all early important Long Island families in their own right...what were their stories? The mystery was far from over. There was still a lot of work for Nancy Drew to do.

For me, doing genealogy is doing detective work. It's starting with names and places and photos and stories and looking for the facts to not only back them up but to connect the pieces of the puzzle. Geneology is like having a haystack full of needles, and not only looking for the individual needles, but also the threads to tie them together.

Since those beginnings, my family tree has grown many more branches, and I have become its keeper. But with each needle discovered, there's another one to look for. The mystery only continues to grow.

I'm not an actual detective. I'm just a lowly newspaper reporter. But turns out I get to be Nancy Drew after all.

http://www.threadingneedlesinahaystack.blogspot.com/2008/01/becoming-nancy-drew.html

The stories in between...

All too often when we do family history research, we end up being simply collectors of names and dates...I am also guilty of this. I think this is often because unless our ancestor was someone of prominence, all we often have are names and dates - birth, marriage and death if we're lucky. We can imagine the person our ancestor was when we have the stories in between - for instance, my great-great grandfather, Rudolph Stutzmann, was a prominent member of the Queens and Brooklyn German-American community, a businessman and a bank founder and president, so I have passport applications and passenger list manifests that help me imagine the traveling he did, and newspaper articles on his business dealings, philanthropic activity and involvement in fraternal organizations and singing societies that actually spell out for me actual moments in the life he lived. I have newspaper articles on family members' birthday parties, wedding receptions, injuries, illnesses and in the case of the infamous Ricklefs brothers, their prolific criminal activity. It's easy for me to picture who these people were, to make and feel that connection to them - but what about everyone else? Everyone on our trees lived a life - they cried, they worked, they felt pain, they loved. They were people in a place in a time.

Even if we don't know the details of the stories in between a person's birth and death, we can imagine them, and we should. Genealogy is so important in learning not only our own personal histories but HISTORY, and our families' place in it. If we try to picture our ancestor in a certain time and place, it can also provide possible answers to our questions, even if we don't have the documentaton - why did this person die so young? Was there a sickness in the locality? Were they poor and maybe underfed and underclothed? Could they have died in childbirth? Why did this person move around so much? What was their profession? What was the economic climate of the time and place they were living in? When they finally settled down, was it because there was a need in that place for the service they were providing? A person living in 1880s New York will not have had the same life experiences as someone living in 1880s California, and a person living in 1880s California will not have had the same life experiences as someone living in 1940s California.

I remember when my mom went back to college when I was a teenager, she was given an assignment for one of her classes - she was given a name of a fictional person, a date of birth, a date of death, and a locality. This is often all we have to go on in genealogy - her assignment? Write that person's life story. What that story was was totally up to her, but in order to create it, she had to do some research - based on that person's name and location, what might their original nationality have been? Based on that, why might they have ended up in the location they did? Based on where they lived, what might they have done for a living? What was going on in the world that might have contributed to this invididual's life? What might have been their family make up? Did they marry? Did they have kids? How many? I remember thinking this was such an interesting assignment - it was basically entirely up to you to figure out who this person might have been, but you had clues to guide you in who this person PROBABLY could've been. That's what we can do when we research our family trees - we might not have hard documentation to PROVE who these people were, but we can put our ancestors into the context of the larger world to figure out who they MIGHT have been. Because everybody is more than just a name, a place and a date. We are also the stories in between, and just as I try to remember theirs, I hope someone will try to remember mine.

Remarkable records and meaningful stories - working with genealogy clients

In response to my last blog post when I asked what you would like to hear more about, Cousin April of Digging Up the Dirt on My Dead People asked me on my Facebook page what work I'd done for clients that meant the most to them or to me, and whether or not I found any remarkable records. 

That's a hard but interesting question, and I thank April for asking it, as it's led me to look over a lot of my closed cases, reminding me of just how much work I've done and how interesting (most of it) has been. Some clients want to prove their connection to a famous person in history. Some are trying to find what international roots they might have. Some are trying to prove Native American ancestry. Some are name and date collectors. Others, due to divorce or death of a parent, know little to nothing about an entire side of their family and are trying to make a connection.

Recently, I've done a lot of work for clients with Eastern European Jewish ancestry. Talk about interesting but impossible! Name spellings become beyond creative - if you find the family under one surname spelling in a census, don't expect it to be the same or even similar in another record. And then once you've traced the family sufficiently in the U.S., making the leap across the ocean to their roots in Eastern Europe or Russia can be impossible because more than likely, the name you've traced in the U.S. is an American one, and the one they came here with is an Eastern European/Jewish one - if you're lucky, they simply Anglicized their original name and there will be similarities. But as often as this happens, it's equally possible that their original name is completely different. And then to top it off, much as African-American ancestry research almost always has the dead end of the mid-1800s that you will never get past, due to the institution of slavery and the fact that there are little to no records on slaves, many people of European and Russian Jewish descent will never be able to get beyond the early 1900s, as those records were destroyed during World War II. In this research area, I had one client who was trying to find his ancestor's original name. I was having no luck. I found his wife's naturalization record, which held a wealth of info, including HER original name, her village and country of origin and the date and ship of immigration, which led me to finding her on a ship passenger list manifest, which listed her father's name. We had that line back to the late 1800s - amazing. But her husband remained a mystery. I found in her naturalization record HIS naturalization info, but his records were not available online - we were going to have to enter the real world! His documents were not in the National Archives, they were not in the New York City Municipal Archives, they were at a New York City court house, in their archives staffed by a single person. I spoke to this man on the phone and he told me his office hours, that there was no charge to make copies of the naturalization record - IF IT WAS THERE - but you had to bring your own camera to take photos, and to be sure to not visit around 1 pm because that's when he took his lunch break. I passed this info along to my client with the caveat that there was a chance the record wasn't there and even if it was, there was no certainty that it would be as detailed as the wife's record had been - maybe the original name wouldn't be there, but maybe his date of immigration would be and we could pick up the search from there. I only do online research currently for my clients, so he asked his sister to go and find the record. I didn't hear from him for a few months but he finally wrote to me to let me know that his ancestor's naturalization record WAS there and more importantly, so was his ancestor's original name, information he and his family had been searching for, tirelessly and fruitlessly, for years and years. I was beyond thrilled that he had written me to share the success of the search and his discovery, and so happy and proud that I had helped make that discovery possible for him.

There are several lessons in this story - if you can't find the answer to your genealogy question, look at records other than the obvious (there are other records out there besides the census!); if you can't find it online, go out in the REAL WORLD - visit an actual records repository; and if you can't find it on your own, ASK FOR HELP! :)

That's only one example of many cases I've worked where I've been honored and so happy and proud to help people break through longstanding brickwalls... turns out that helping others with their family history research can be incredibly fulfilling!

It's also an example of the difficult, frustrating and incredibly interesting and fun records I get to use when I work with clients that I don't get to use on my boring, well-established Western European family tree. I've had the chance to research families of so many exciting and diverse backgrounds - Native American, African-American, Eastern European, Swedish, Mexican, just to name a few - I've even gotten to research Icelandic and Finnish families! In short (too late for that), I'm not only having a lot of fun, but I'm learning so much. It's been such a wonderful experience so far.

Happy New Year!

Well, today is the start of a new year - can you believe 2015 has come and gone? It's been awhile since I last wrote. Unfortunately, even as I resolve to keep current on this blog, life always finds a way to get in the way! I am currently not working, which would make you think I would have more time to devote to this, but the reason I'm not working is I gave birth to the newest leaf on our family tree, my son Julian James, in the beginning of December. We are beyond thrilled at our new family addition - like my daughter, who is now a feisty, precocious, exhausting 2 1/2 year old, Julian looks like he'll inherit my coloring - somehow my fair, Northern European genes kick the butt of my husband's dark and supposedly dominant Latino genes - but his features are all his dad's side of the family. Julian is a new name on the family tree - if you know me, you know I am a deep believer in tradition and paying homage to family, but I let my husband pick the baby's name this go-around (with my approval, of course lol). The family tradition concession is my son's middle name, James, which is my father's middle name and a longstanding family name on my dad's side of the family.

I actually have been very busy with genealogy research, some of my own, moreso on my husband's side, trying to make connections to other researchers and their trees, anything to add generations and information because while it's not MY tree, it's the family history of both my children, and it's important for me to know as much as possible about both sides of their family. That's what my grandmother did - she actually had very little research on her side of the family (and sadly, despite my best efforts, that's still the case) but she devoted years of research to her husband's side of the family.

I've also been busy doing genealogy research for clients, which, while not my own family history, has become extremely rewarding. As much as the thrill of genealogy for me is discovering a little bit more about who my family is, I am a Nancy Drew at heart, and the detective work of putting together the pieces of a puzzle, whether it's my puzzle or somebody else's, is just so much fun for me - and the satisfaction of finding the answer, where someone never knew the answer before? Where the research was hard and roundabout and labor intensive? Where you're able to hand answers to someone, even a complete stranger, who was searching for those answers for so many years? There are literally no words.

And the doing research for others fills a genealogy void when I'm not having much luck on my own tree. It's fun. It's been keeping me busy. Too busy to blog? Apparently. I'd like to say I resolve to blog more this year, but with a newborn and a toddler in the house, it might be awhile again before I get this way. But I can ask you this - is there a specific genealogy topic you'd like to read about? Something you've been having trouble with? A particular website or database you'd like to know more about? Do you have any questions for me about a particular problem or ancestor I've had to tackle? Let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to make time to blog about it - if and when the kiddos ever nap! :)

In the meantime, I'll make a couple of genealogy resolutions anyway:

  • to try to blog more, despite the odds not being in my favor
  • to try to do a better job of documenting the sources of my information
  • to try to not be just a collector of names and dates - to remember that these people WERE people, who lived lives in between their births and deaths, and to try to record more about what those lives entailed
  • to continue my pursuit of the origins of Jacob Raynor - Cousin April, you know what I'm talking about!

That's all for now! PS, new episodes of Finding Your Roots resume on PBS starting January 5th - check it out to get your genealogy fix!

God bless the FamilySearch volunteers...

If you live anywhere on the U.S. East Coast, it's probably a very rainy, windy day - perfect for staying inside and doing some genealogy research. Today I just want to give a shout out to all the people who volunteer their time transcribing and indexing family history records for the LDS's FamilySearch website...if you've never used it, check it out. And if you have the time, do as I say, not as I do, and volunteer to help them getting all their invaluable worldwide genealogy records accessible online! Today I went on the website to continue looking into my husband's family tree - his family is from Honduras and those records are in Spanish, which thankfully I read, and many are unindexed - that is, they WERE unindexed. I have spent months scrolling through probably thousands of images of handwritten Spanish hoping to untangle and add to his tree, only to discover today that many of those records are now available by simply typing the desired name into the search engine. Technology is amazing. And I am frustrated. And exhausted. But that is the life of a genealogist. My grandmother had to do this research without any internet - she probably thought I was spoiled just having online images available to me, even if I had to search page by page without an index. And I have been spoiled. And my children and grandchildren will be even more spoiled as more and more genealogy resources become more widely accessible, just as it should be. It makes me a little sad though too, I'll admit - as much as it's an amazing help to be able to just plug a name into a search engine, half of the fun and satisfaction of family history research is doing the detective work yourself. But I want to go on record now that I am going to be that grandmother who tells stories of "how I did genealogy back in the day..." I can't wait. :)

Happy Friday everyone - stay warm and dry!!