FamilySearch's annual RoosTech conference was this week, and it was awesome! There were some fantastic classes, great sales on genealogy programs and products, but my favorite thing was the new features and toosl released or announced by the big genealogy companies. One of the biggest was FamilySearch Labs, where they will be premiering beta versions of new features for the FamilySearch site. The most popular update they announced was full-text searching, where the entire text of documents in the FamilySearch library can be searched, not just the names or places that were pulled out in indexing. The databases they premiered this with is a batch of deeds and wills from across the US, and some records from Mexico. I found some really interesting looking deeds for several ancestral lines in Montana, Minnesota, and other places. But I also found a will for an ancestor that I never knew left one! That ancestor is my fourth-great-grandmother Joanna Maria Dorothea Elizabeth (Hildebrand) (Wilken) Kruger (also the winner of the longest name in my family tree award), also known as Hannah Kruger.
I didn't find the will by searching for Hannah, I was actually searching for her daughter, Matilda (Kruger) Hammer, wife of my occasionally wayward ancestor Philip Wilhelm Hammer. Fortunately, Hannah let Matilda a portion of her belongings, which is how the full-text search picked her up. She was the mother of somewhere around 11 children between two husbands. Curiously, her will only mentions a few of them. She said she was 69 when she made out her will, which makes me wonder if she knew she was running out of time. The will is dated 17 June 1888, and was probated on 12 June 1889, almost exactly a year later. Her second husband, Henry Kruger, predeceased her seven years earlier, so he's not mentioned. Her whole estate was distributed in just one paragraph:
"To my daughter Anna Kruger all my Personal Property, also house, furniture and all money except $15.00 Dollars to my daughter Matilda Hammer, and $15.00 Dollers to my daughter Emma Huve. Likewise I make, constitute and appoint my son William Wilken to be executor of this my last will and testament hereby revoking all former wills by me made."
And that was it. It makes me wonder why her other surviving children didn't get anything, including the son that was executor for her estate. Maybe they were already paid out of the estate, as I've seen that before. Or maybe she just had favorites. :) Either way, it blows my mind that I now have a document whose text was authored by an ancestor who was born over 200 years ago. She couldn't have written it, as it was signed with her mark rather than her signature, indicating she couldn't read and write. But still!
I'm really excited for this new feature at FamilySearch, and can't wait to see what other discoveries this will help me find.
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