Living in the Past: A Family History

I've been doing genealogy for about two years now, pretty seriously, and I guess I'm moving from being a brand-new beginner to a category like "experienced beginner" or "thinks she knows her way around but still has a lot to learn."  Along with the elation I've felt when something clicks into place -- I find my great-grandmother's actual birth surname -- I've experienced many other emotions along the way.  Do any seem familiar to you other semi-new researchers? 1)  Frustration :  You know there's got to be a record of your grandfather's mother somewhere.  She existed, why can't you find any kind of record?  Your great-grandfather lived in one city, but died about 130 miles away -- what was he doing there?  Why did he die there, not at home?  Unlike a brand new researcher, you know where to look, you have multiple places to look, and you come up with nothing.  Just one example of the many, many ways you'll feel frustrated. My mothe...

A while ago, I wrote about wanting to plan a trip to Salt Lake City to go through the massive collection of records at the Family History Library (what Ed calls the Mother Ship for genealogists).  Well, next February there's a RootsTech conference, and I think the stars are aligned for me to go early, spend a couple of days in the library, and then attend a great conference.  I'm excited!! by Scott Law on Flickr It sure looks like a lovely place to spend a little time, and in February it should be nice and cool (with snow?).  The trick in going to the library is to know what you're looking for before you get there, to have a list of things you want to look at and head straight for those without being distracted.  Because you can browse what I think is pretty much their whole catalog on Family Search, you can have all your ducks in a row before you get there. And, I will hope to meet some of my online genealogical friends there -- yay!

I've done a lot of work in the past couple of weeks, especially on the Langer line from Silesia.  Still, I have so much to do, I thought I'd take stock in terms of the places I'm stuck and think about what to do.  So here goes --  by Peter Kirkeskov Rasmussen 1)  I'm pretty confident that I've identified the Anton who is father to Maximilian Langer; he was born on 19 May 1804, to George Langer and Theresia Schyszpin in Oberglogau, Silesia.  But I'm not completely positive, so I'm ordering the death records on microfilm.  I'm not sure they'll help, but they might.  Otherwise, I'm kind of stuck for now on definitely identifying Anton's parents. 2)  I'm stuck on Sophia Hug, Grandma Mae Ortman's grandmother.  I find only one record of her at all, as the mother of Lina Hug (Grandma's great aunt), on a birth certificate; on that record it says "Sophia Huskemeyer Hug." I can find almost no references to anyone named Huskemeyer...

In a little more than a week, I've spent 11 hours at the Family History Center looking at microfilms from the Catholic church in Oberglogau (Glogowek), Silesia.  I've come up with about 12 different Langer families, and while I don't yet have them connected so that I know who is who's brother and which kids are cousins, I think I have definitely identified the family of my great-grandfather, Maximilian Langer. As I mentioned in another post, I went through the birth records -- at this point, from 1774 to 1839 -- looking for Langer births.  Then I went through the marriage records, and while I didn't find all the wedding records, I did find a couple.  But the matched-up families are the most helpful. Here are my notes: Many notes on many people!  In the middle of the third page is Maximilian's family: I'm positive that this is the correct family unit, because on Maximilian's death certificate, his father is listed as "Anton, Master Weaver," and ...

The last few days have been somewhat disheartening but also fairly amusing, if you want to look at it that way.  What I've done is  1) make a record of all the Langer births in Oberglogau from 1774 to 1819 (I still want to go from 1818 to 1840, when Max Langer was born); 2) looked through all the marriage records for Oberglogau from 1774 to 1832.  My goal in this was to match the children up with parents from the birth records, and then, because the marriage records would typically include parents' names, be able to take a stab at sibling relationships (e.g., if the records for Anton Langer's and Joseph Langer's weddings both showed Jacob Langer as a parent, they would likely be brothers).  Ultimately, I'd like to figure out which Anton was Max's father. Well, it was a plan. As I related in my last post, I was pretty successful in putting the children together with the parents.  So the other day, I went back to the Family History Center to look at the marriage r...

So, I've spent six hours over two days looking at microfilm at the local Family History Center here in Santa Cruz.  I ordered some microfilms from Salt Lake City, and the bad thing is that once they arrive, you have to go through them . . . Here's where all the excitement takes place: It's a little cave-like room, no windows, no ventilation.  And once you get everything set up for the microfilm,  you turn off the lights and it looks like this: You sit in front of this machine in the dark for hours and hours, turning the crank and watching the microfilm go by on the white shelf.  You're looking at pages like this: Sound fun? So the microfilm I've spent six hours on is records of baptisms from 1777-1839 for the Catholic church from Oberglogau, Silesia (now Glogowek, Poland). These records are in Latin, not German.  I have the birth record of our great-grandfather, Maximilian Langer, and the names of his parents, Anton Langer and Barbara nee Kura.  I believe t...

I created a bit of a monster on a German genealogy page the other day; I asked if anyone knew the origin of the word "schnabels," and it turned into a memory-fest of all the things people recalled from having grown up in a German household.  At this point, the post has 185 responses, and everyone agreed that it was great fun to remember all those little things that were part of our German-American childhoods.  A number of them were relevant to me, so here they are, in no particular order: 1.  "Schnabels."  Most everyone had a word like this, though there were variations -- "schnivling" and "schnippel," for example.  In our house, "schnabels" were the little broken pieces at the bottom of the bag, as in "are there any chips left in that bag, or is it all schnabels?" 2.   Being called a "Weisenheimer" or a "Schnickelfritz."  I remember "Don't be a Weisenheimer" well. 3.    "Putzing" as...