Living in the Past: A Family History

An electron microscope picture of a mitochondrion, the key to all our genetic ancestry! Well, the latest round of DNA results are in!  These are mtDNA results (mitochondrial DNA -- mitochondria are tiny organelles that live within every cell in our bodies and create energy), and they tell us about our direct maternal line; that is, everyone descended from Grandma Walli Ortman.  It represents her genetic linage, through Grandma Sophie, her mother Wilhelmina Schulze, her mother ?, and on and on back.  It goes only through the maternal line, so the Hugs that I've been writing about, for example, are not at all included in this, because they are in Grandpa Bill Ortman's line.  But anyone descended from Grandma Walli Ortman is part of this lineage.   Stick with me, here, because this gets a little complicated, and I've been looking into it all day and feel like my head is about to explode.  I studied genetics and really enjoyed it, but that was 30+ years ago!...

A while ago I mentioned that a friend in Germany was going to be translating a letter that Grandpa Berneburg gave to Grandma Sophie on the occasion of their 18th anniversary, the day before Grandma Walli's first birthday. The letter itself My friend Harriet, whom I taught with at San Francisco State, holds a Ph.D. in German and has moved to Germany -- she is working as a translator at a university in the former East Germany.  Because the handwriting in the letter is so difficult to understand, she has enlisted the help of two ladies:  her host mother from when she was studying in Germany and her mother's 77 year old friend.  Here they are working on reading the letter: Note that they are fortified in their work with good German wine I'm excited to learn what it says.  I'll let you know as soon as I find out.

I'm very excited -- we have actual documentation of the Hugs in Heiligenzell!  I mentioned yesterday that I had sent an email to a group of genealogists in the Baden-Wuerttemberg area, and a nice man named Martin sent me some pages of a genealogy book taken from old church records.  And we're in there! Here's the first page:   Klicken Sie, bitte! The birth date for Blasius Hug is not there, and I assume it's because of the notation that he was "aus Wolfach," which is a tiny town up in the Black Forest.  This book is only for Heiligenzell, and it's a  record of marriages.  So it says that on the 6th of November, 1752, Blasius and Salome Bernauer were married in Heiligenzell, and again, here is the documentation that Landolin, their son, was born two months before they were married, in September.  Interesting. I looked for some pictures of Wolfach, and it looks really beautiful there -- I think it sits within the borders of a national park, though I'm no...

I spent a loooong time this morning writing an email in German to a group of hobby genealogists (i.e. not professionals, just folks) in the area where the Hugs came from, Friesenheim, Heiligenzelle, Lahr, and so on.  It took me so long because 1)  I haven't used my German in many, many years, so I need a lot of help, and 2) when I try to get help from Google Translate, it isn't always as helpful as it could be.  I was looking up history on the St. Laurentius Catholic church in Friesenheim, and here's a sentence that they translated from German to English for me:         "The parish was created in 1892 out of the church community as a game store to community Friesenheim."  Huh?  The church was created as a game store?  I ran this through a great group of German translators -- it actually means "parish." So . . . I found out a little bit more about Friesenheim, which is central to the Hug clan in southern Germany.  The town was f...

Hey everybody, long time no blog!  Now that I've started teaching again, I remember how teaching only two classes tends to suck up every waking moment of your life.  But now -- it's spring break, so I get a week to breathe! Update on the DNA thing -- my sample at the Genographic Project is 60% done; it's being analyzed right now and I hope that it will be complete very soon!  Seems like it's been forever.  And big news:  Grandpa Chris has sent in his sample too!  So we'll have a complete picture, as far as the Ortmans are concerned.  Ancestry.com (where I had my first sample analyzed) has decided to release the raw DNA data so that you can have it uploaded to another site and compare it with different people.  It's kind of complicated, but I'm exploring the possibility. So I've spent my morning lost in the Hug branch of the tree.  The Hugs (a short form of Hugo, I think) come in through Grandma Mae Ortman, whose mother was Matilda Hug.  ...

One thing I've hoped to find through this research are our long-lost relatives on the Ortman side.  If you remember, Great-grandpa William John Ortman Sr. (of CDE) was the youngest of nine children of Joseph and Anna Ortmann.  When he married our grandmother, because he was Catholic and she was Lutheran, they disowned him and he never had contact with any of his eight brothers and sisters again.  So, as you can imagine, we have many great-aunts and uncles, cousins second and third, that we have never, ever heard of. Well, we have uncovered a relative.  I won't name him, to preserve his privacy, except to call him B.  His grandmother, Mary Theresa Ortmann, was the second oldest sister of our great-grandfather, William John.  He has posted a picture of her, which I'll include here:   I don't have a picture of Great-grandpa when he was young, unfortunately, but I'll try to find one of him so we can put them side-by-side and see if they look alike. I'm exc...

Hey, everybody -- I've been slacking off here, what with the beginning of school and so on.  After two weeks of teaching, I finally have a little space to breathe, especially since I'm sitting here with a cold, and I can't possibly do schoolwork when I don't feel well, right?? Last September, I ordered a DNA kit from ancestry.com, sent them a sample (had to spit in a tube until it filled up to the line), and on November 5, received the results.  We OrtBerns are all German, right?  We think so, right?  Here are the birth places I've found: Looks pretty German, right?  That one over in Poland is where I think Joseph Ortmann (great-grandpa to EDC) was born, in what was called Prussia or Pomerania when it was part of Germany, but I don't know the town, so I can't be sure. Well, the DNA results I got from ancestry.com were rather surprising, because here's how they say it breaks down:   Huh?  No Western European at all!  We are mostly from the British...