Living in the Past: A Family History

 This article was published in the Fall-Summer 2018 issue of the Germanic Genealogy Journal. In Search of Max Langer Elise Ann Wormuth My great-grandfather, Maximilian Langer, was a chimney sweep in Bremerhaven, Germany, in the late 1800s. As a child I found that delightful, as I imagined him dancing and singing on rooftops like in the original Mary Poppins movie. When I began pursuing genealogy, Max was one of the first ancestors I wanted to investigate, and doing so led me on a journey that I never would have imagined. It turned out to be far from delightful. My initial research revealed that Maximilian Joseph Langer was born in Oberglogau, Silesia, on 21 July 1840. At some point, he made his way from Oberglogau to Bremerhaven, where he married my great-grandmother, Wilhelmine Schulze — he was 44; she 25. Together, they had three daughters: Sophie, Hannah, and Lina. Then I came across a bit of information that puzzled me greatly: Maximilian Langer died not in Bremerhaven, where h...

This article was published in the Fall/Summer 2021 issue of the  Germanic Genealogy Journal .* Down the Rabbit Hole: A Cautionary Tale By Elise Ann Wormuth As newbie genealogists, we often approach our research with equal parts of enthusiasm and incompetence. We are eager to leaf out our family trees and to have access to the genealogical world the internet facilitates in pursuing our passion. So much information exists to explore and to be grafted onto our trees. As newbies we sometimes do not pause to analyze whether the tidbits fit together in the ways they should. I’d like to tell a cautionary tale of how I, as a greenhorn, put too much trust in an experienced researcher and consequently fell into a deep genealogical rabbit hole. I wanted to research the family line of my paternal grandmother’s mother, Matilda “Tillie”  Hug . Through the usual sources, I determined that Great-grandmother Tillie’s father was a German immigrant, Wilhelm Hug, but that was as far as I got —...