Treasure Chest Thursday - Zitzmann family goodness!

Sorry about the missed weeks this month. Between a family vacation to Idaho and Utah, DNA test results (which I will blog about soon, promise!), and general life craziness, blogging has fallen to the wayside. But I'm back!

I've blogged before about how much info I've found on the Actapublica.eu site about my Zitzmann family line. I'm still not done going through all the records I've found, but I wanted to give a general idea on just how much information has come my way. Before this June, when my Zitzmann cousin pointed me to all these records, my great-great-grandma Mary (Zitzmann) Hoffman's family tree looked liked this:

You can see I really had nothing except the names of Mary's parents, taken from her marriage and death records. Now that I've entered pretty much all the direct line records, this is what Mary's tree looks like:

Not only do I have much more info on her parents (including their original German names) but also all of her grandparents, great-grandparents, and 6 of her 16 great-great-grandparents! I couldn't fit him in the shot, but I also have one 3rd-great-grandparent, Andreas Seitz, father of Martin Seitz. Where I have dates for them, Mary's great-grandparents were born in the 1700s! When I started researching my family history, I never imagined I'd be able to take her family back past Mary herself, given how she refused to say anything about where she came from, or to even let her daughters say anything. But now I've got four and five generations of Mary's ancestry!

I've still got a lot more details to pull from these records. I've got records for almost all of Mary's siblings, as well as some aunts, uncles, and cousins. The script is hard to read, but I'm learning. There are details about which midwife oversaw which birth, info about the priests coming to do official visitations and verifying the records, and who performed the baptisms and marriages recorded, etc., all of which I want to learn about. But I've got so much else I need to catch up on - the church records from Poland I've found in my Joseph research, making more use of the DNA test results (especially the mtDNA and Y-DNA tests), and continuing the review and entry of the other records I've collected over the last 12 years. There's plenty of work to do, but it's good work, and I love it!