Brandt's Rants

Treasure Chest Thursday - Play it again, Sam

2012-02-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Samuel Joseph (center) and his children -
back - Augusta and Lydia, front Pat and Elmer.
Courtesy of Fred Gibson

One night about two weeks ago, I was entering some of my Joseph records into my Rootsmagic database. After a while, I needed a break, so I bounced around some websites, not really looking for anything in particular that I can recall. I can't even remember what website I was looking at, when I saw a link for Black Sea German Research. It said something about a German Lutheran church up in Manitoba, and that caught my attention. I followed the link, which led me here. The website talked about an index for the church records of Trinity German Lutheran Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the time period (late 1800s-early 1900s) was exactly when my Joseph family was up there. So I clicked on the search link, and looked for anyone with a last name of Joseph. I got 43 hits!! I scrolled through the records and saw lots of names I recognized - Ludwig, Wilhelmine, Gottlieb, and yes, Samuel! I browsed through them, and recognized a few marriages and deaths, and when I got to Samuel - I was confused.

Sam's record said nothing about Pauline, or any of his kids. It linked him to his father, Ludwig Joseph, so that matched. But it had another name listed as well - Elizabeth Ackermann. Who was she? How was she related to Sam? Each record was created with the subject's name at the top, then listed family members below, and gave any pertinent dates and relationships. Next to Elizabeth's record, it said married. I did a double-take, and then a triple-take. Married??? Sam Joseph had a third wife? Really??? I double checked the birth info, just to be sure it was my Sam, and the birthdate was 1869. Ok, so that means it's him (how many other Samuel Josephs, born around 1866, being the son of Ludwig Joseph, could be living in the same little town as mine?). The date of the marriage was 15 November 1909. That also made sense, given that Sam's first wife had passed away 6 January 1909. Elizabeth was born in Russia, according to the database, around 1886. That meant she was roughly 20 years younger than Sam. I started having flashbacks of watching that old guy Lazer Wolf (or however you spell his name) in Fiddler on the Roof that tries to marry the girl who later becomes the tailor's wife - except my great-great-grandfather was Lazer! I've been surprised by things in my family history, but this just blew my mind. I sat there thinking "Really? Really???" over and over again.

Marriage record of Samuel Joseph and Elizabeth Ackermann

Eventually I got a grip and emailed George Murray, the administrator for the database. The website said you could ask for copies of any of the records in the database, as long as the subject and all immediate family members were dead. Not a problem for me. I wrote him, asking for records of my Joseph family, and gave him the names and record numbers in the database. I think I surprised him with how many I asked for, because he wrote back asking for clarification on who some of them were, and how they were related to me. I gave him that data, and I was even able to help him clarify some of the family relationships between the Josephs in his database, as the records weren't complete enough to link all the families together. A couple days later, and I had the records in my inbox!

I went right to the marriages, and found the record for Sam. It was indeed a marriage for Samuel Joseph, of Grass River, Manitoba (the same city where his wife, Pauline, had died just 10 months before) to Elizabeth Ackermann, daughter of Phil. Ackermann. Once again, I sat there staring at it, unable to believe it was really him. I really wanted to know more about Elizabeth, but there wasn't anything else on her in the Trinity church's records. I searched the censuses for 1906 and 1911 - nothing. I searched Manitoba's vital records - found a civil copy of the marriage! Ordered that (and some other Joseph records I've been wanting - no sense ordering just one, right?) but couldn't find anything else. Went back and searched other Canadian census indexes for 1906 and 1911 - nothing. Searched FamilySearch - nothing. Went through the plat maps in Tracks of Time looking for Philip Ackermann - nothing. Went through the index of Tracks of Time - not one Ackermann. I wrote to Adrene Schmidt of Christ Lutheran Church - nothing. She even went through the communion lists for the period, and saw Samuel listed as attending communion, but alone. He does eventually appear with a wife, but not until 1914 - which would make the wife Juliana, not Elizabeth.

Not one to be deterred, I wondered if she might have come down to Montana with Sam and then died there. Searched the Montana death index - nothing. Searched Montana censuses - nothing. Searched Montana marriage indexes to see if she remarried - nothing. Searched border crossing records - nothing. What was going on? What happened to Elizabeth? It's like she dropped out of the sky just to marry my ancestor, and then disappeared. Something happened to her - death or divorce seem equally likely. Sam was listed as a widower in the 1910 census, living with his kids. The census was taken in April, just five months after his marriage to Elizabeth. Did she die? If so, that makes sense, seeing as Sam could and did marry Juliana in 1913, just four years after his marriage to Elizabeth.

Closeup of Lydia Joseph's marriage, showing her
mother "Lizzie Rossanke"

I did come across one interesting tidbit this week, quite by accident, that might be a clue. I was going through the marriage records of Sam and Pauline's kids, looking at how they spelled Pauline's maiden name (that's another puzzle I still have to figure out). Then I noticed the name that Lydia gave for her mom wasn't Pauline - it was Lizzie! In some Montana marriage records, it actually records the mother's name twice - once for her married name, and once for her maiden name. Lydia's marriage record said her mom was "Lizzie Joseph," maiden name "Lizzie Rossanke." Rossanke is one variation of Pauline's supposed maiden name Rosen (I've also seen Rosenke, Rosen, and Rosinski). I don't think I'd noticed that before, but even if I had, I probably would have brushed it off as just a mistake. But now that I know about Elizabeth, I wonder - was she thinking of her birth mom (who had died 19 months prior to the marriage) and her dad's second wife, and jumbled the names? Did she mention both and the clerk jumbled the names?

Unfortunately, that's where I'm at still. I haven't been able to find anything else on Elizabeth or her father, Philipp. I still need to follow up on the address given for Elizabeth in the marriage record - 508 Henry Ave. If I can find a city directory for the Winnipeg/Waldersee/Glenella area for 1909 or thereabouts, I might be able to find her or her dad in it. And I'm still waiting to get that civil copy of the marriage record, which will hopefully at least give me Elizabeth's parents full names, and an address for her residence at the time of marriage.

Until then, I'll keep looking through the records I have now, only I'll be looking at them with new eyes.

Tombstone Tuesday - My evolving picture of the Joseph family

2012-02-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

Grave marker for Samuel Joseph, Mt. Carmel Cemetery,
Anaconda, Montana. Photograph taken by me.

When I started doing genealogy research 12 years ago, one of the lines I knew least about was my Joseph line. I had info going back to my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph and his four kids, Olga, Augusta (my great-grandmother), Elmer, and Helena Patricia. I didn't know the name of Samuel's wife, or where they were from, except that they were German (so I figured they were from Germany). I got to take a trip to Montana in 2008, and made a side trip to Anaconda, just to see the cemetery where Samuel and Augusta are buried. That really drove it home that these were real people, and really got me interested to learn as much as I could about them. As time went on and I acquired more records and info, I learned my great-great-grandmother's name was Pauline Rosen (or Rossenke or something like it), and that Sam and Pauline had a fifth child - a daughter named Lydia. My grandpa Fred had a picture of the Josephs, and with the help of relatives like Pegge Marjamaa I came into contact with, we identified the Josephs in the picture, including Sam's father Ludwig Joseph, his brother Gottlieb, and other relatives. I received a huge shock when a border crossing record told me Sam and his family weren't from Germany, but from Ulanowka, Russia (now in Ukraine). That led to me to original birth records for two of Sam's siblings - Justine/Christina and Wilhelmine. Then another shock came when I was contacted by Jim Joseph, who had scans of a Joseph family Bible I'd never known existed, as well as pictures of Ludwig and Justine (Witt) Joseph, and other Joseph relatives as well. That Bible, and other info Jim had, helped me fill out Sam's family group even more - brothers named Heinrich, Ludwig, and Michael. I really felt like I was making progress on learning about Sam's family, getting a more complete picture of who he was.

Grave marker of Pauline Joseph, Christ Lutheran Church
Cemetery, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Photo courtesy of Adrene Schmidt

All of that was prelude to last year. I finally obtained a copy of Tracks of Time, a big book about the small town of Glenella, Manitoba, where Sam and his family settled after leaving Ulanowka (thank you, eBay!). The book made prominent mention of a church in Winnipeg, the Christ Lutheran Church, where Sam's parents Ludwig and Justine, and his wife Pauline were buried. One day I decided to write them and see if they didn't have any records on the Josephs. I found their email address, and wrote a simple email asking if they knew of any records on some relatives I had who'd lived there 100 years ago, and named some of them. An employee of the church, Adrene Schmidt, kindly wrote back saying that after a quick perusal of the records, she had a LOT of info she could send me for very low cost. I couldn't wait to get my hands on those records!

Headstone of Augusta (Joseph) (Staffan) Gibson
and her first husband, Charles Staff. Photo taken by me.

My grandpa kindly paid for them, and within a couple weeks, I had almost 50 individual church records - baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials for various members of my family! I spent a few days just poring over them, entering the info in my Rootsmagic database, when I came across one record I thought had to be a mistake - a marriage record for my Sam Joseph, to a woman named Juliana Lorentz. I'd never heard of her, my grandpa (who has an amazingly sharp memory for minute details of his family) had never mentioned her, and had only known him as a widower. So I found a civil copy of the marriage and sent for it. The civil copy confirmed it was indeed a previously unknown marriage of my ancestor to someone we knew nothing about. Turns out, my grandpa's cousin had heard of her (I'm still trying to set up a chance to talk to that cousin) but no one else remembers her. I later found she died alone and poor in 1933 in Manitoba, while Sam was living in Montana with or near relatives. I still don't know much more than that about her, though I keep searching. But after absorbing the news of Juliana, I figured I had gotten past all the surprises there were to find in Samuel's life.

I was wrong.

To be continued...

You're what? From where?

2012-01-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

I got to thinking about nationality and ethnicity, and how they don't always mean the same thing. They sometimes do - my Irish ancestors are from Ireland, my Norwegian ancestors are from Norway, my English ancestors are (as far as I know) from England. But my German ancestors, they're from all over:

My Wagner line seems to come from Mecklenberg, now in northern Germany.

My Sitzman/Zitzmann line comes from Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic.

My Joseph line comes from Ulanowka, near Zhitomir in Ukraine, and from Kepa Kikolska, Poland

My Beilstein line comes from the Grand Duchy of Hesse (now the state of Hesse in central Germany).

My Waechter line comes from Alsace-Lorraine (now part of France).

My Kruger ancestors gave their country of origin as Prussia and Mecklenberg. Not sure about the distinction (if there is any) between the two, or where exactly they were from.

Anyways, I think you get the point. Maybe other ethnic groups are just as complex, I don't know. But it seems to me that you can't just say your ancestry is "German" when there are so many different places those Germans seem to come from!

And in case you were wondering, yes I am more German than anything. As far as I know so far, at least. :)

Wisdom Wednesday - When it rains, it REALLY rains

2012-01-25T13:15:00.000-08:00

Obituary for Augusta (Joseph) Gibson

I have had a crazy week in genealogy research, and it's only Wednesday! Here's a quick summary of what's come my way since Sunday:

1. My sister was contacted by a relative named Delores on our Bergstad side, and passed her name and number on to me. I called Delores last Sunday and talked to her for over an hour, and found out she is my first cousin twice removed, and she has a lot of info on the Bergstads I didn't, including pictures!! I still need to sit down and really sift through the notes I took while talking to her.

2. While going through my Joseph family files, I noticed I was missing obituaries from a lot of people. I got the feeling I might be able to find some of these on my own, so I went to Newspaper Archive, and looked for the edition of the local paper for their localities (Butte, Anaconda, and Helena) that came out the day after they died. Instead of relying on the indexes, I actually read through the paper quickly (first time that I've done it this way). In just an hour or two, I had obituaries for my 2nd-great-grandaunt Tina (Joseph) Leistiko, my great-grandmother Augusta (Joseph) Gibson, and my great-great-grandmother Catherine (Cain) Gibson. The one for Catherine was really hard to see, but I was able to read most of it. But it just amazed me how quickly I found these, and the details and info about each person were priceless.

Obituary for
Christine (Joseph) Leistiko

3. My grandmother made a huge breakthrough on our mysterious American Indian ancestor Lisette Rainier, by finding out a relative (son or brother are the most likely relationships) of Lisette's named Joseph Rainier bought some land in Montana in 1904. His last name is spelled Reynier in the land record. I'm still trying to find him in the 1900 and 1910 censuses, but no luck so far. The only other records I have on him are a mention in the journal of Lisette's husband Thomas W. Harris, and the 1860 census where he and Charles Rainier are listed as living with Thomas and Lisette. Nothing else is known about him, so the land record is huge!

4. Upon hearing about Joseph Rainier's land purchase, I went to the BLM GLO website (which I admittedly haven't used much at all till now) and starting poking around, searching for ancestors in different parts of the country. In just a few minutes, I had copies of patents from several ancestors! So far I've found patents and other records for Alexander B. Shute, Thomas W. Harris, James E. Craddock, Knut J. Bergstad, Turby (Bergstad) Cornell, and the previously-mentioned Joseph Rainier. And that was just the ones I found on random searches. Can't wait to see what a thorough search will reveal!

5. Last night, I came across a link for Black Sea German Research group. These wonderful people have gone through German Lutheran church records for the Trinity German Lutheran Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba, indexed them, and linked the people together in family groups. Trinity church was associated with Christ Lutheran Church, also in Manitoba, where many of my Joseph relatives lived. I did a search for the surname Joseph, and came back with 43 hits, many of whom I recognized as my relatives right off. I sent away for those church records last night, and am waiting anxiously to hear back on them.

Land patent for Alexander Blood Shute

6. Found out that RootsTech 2012 (which takes place next weekend) has an official app for smartphones. It has a photo gallery, speaker bios, conference documents, videos, a link to Twitter that pulls up all entries marked with the #rootstech hashtag, and more. This year I'm hoping to follow RootsTech much more closely, even though I can't attend in person, and this app looks like it will let me do just that.

The only downside to all of this genealogical goodness is that I have a ProGen assignment due next week, and I'm trying to finish that, and keep up with all the stuff I keep finding. I mean, once I find a little something on one of my lines, I can't help but dig and keep digging until I find everything I can. But I have literally been overwhelmed with everything that has come my way this week. I almost wish I had an assistant or something just to help with the filing and organizing. :) But it's a happy problem, one I will never seriously complain about. Just hope I can document everything before I lose track of where I found it.

Celebrating Sylvester?

2012-01-08T22:19:00.000-08:00

Sylvester the Cat, courtesy of Wikipedia.org

After finishing my last blog post, I started reviewing a newspaper article that I thought might contain a reference to John Adolph Leistiko, a German immigrant from eastern Europe and first husband of my great-great-grandaunt Christine/Justine "Tina" Joseph, but wasn't sure if the Adolph Leistiko it mentioned was him. The article (more like a paragraph in the "Society Notes of the Week" section) was about a fraternity I'd never heard of called the Sons of Hermann, celebrating something called "Sylvester abend". The only Sylvester I know is a cat who says "thufferin' thuccotash." After a little internet research, I found that Sylvester is the German name for New Year's Eve, because that's the night of the feast of Saint Sylvester, a Catholic Pope who died on December 31, 335. Abend turned out to be German for 'evening', so Sylvester abend would be New Year's Eve night. That made sense, as the issue of the paper was dated 5 January 1902. So a German New Year's celebration sounded like a pretty good connection for Adolph Leistiko.

Tina Joseph and Adolph Leistiko
on their wedding day

Then I wanted to know more about the Sons of Hermann. A little internet searching led me to a great newsletter put out by the Indiana German Heritage Society that gives a whole history of the Sons of Hermann, with a detailed background on Hermann himself, a German hero from 2000 years ago who kept the Roman armies out of Europe (or something like that, I haven't finished reading the whole story yet). The Sons of Hermann, according to the IGHS newsletter, was started by some German immigrants in New York as a mutual support group, who chose Hermann as a symbol to unite them. They grew to be a nation-wide fraternity (hence the presence of a lodge in Montana), up until World War I, when membership started declining. Like a lot of other fraternities I've read about, they got into offering insurance, mostly life insurance, to their members. But it was the German connection that really stood out to me. A German holiday, celebrated by a German fraternity, made up of German immigrants sounded like a really good fit. Not only that, they had a Mannerchoir (or männerchor, as it probably should have been spelled, meaning a male choir) that sang at the party. Could they get any more German?

Tina and Adolph Leistiko,
with their son Alfred

The only part that still kind of seemed out of place was the actual reference to Adolph. I have two pictures of him - one is from the day of his wedding to Tina, and the other is of the two of them years later with one of their children. In both of them Adolph looks very serious and somber. Contrast these images with the article, which says Adolph and another fraternity member named Charles Burg "sang comic songs." I guess the photographs may not represent his total personality, but I have a hard time picturing someone who can look so serious singing comic songs at a New Year's party. I guess even old Adolph could let his hair down (so to speak).

Sentimental Sunday - Shot in the back, and you're to blame

2012-01-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

Montana Standard article -
3 Jun 1938

Now that I'm back to going through my own family records after going through everything I have on my wife's ancestry, I'm happily back in familiar territory - the Joseph family. A quick glance at how many records I have on these guys told me this is not going to be a quick job. But I'm ok with that; I'm actually very interested to see what I've collected on them, and seeing what I have that I don't know that I have.

I came across one very interesting person on the first day I started doing the Joseph records - Adolph William "Bus" Leistiko. He's my first cousin three times removed (he was my great-grandmother Augusta Joseph's cousin), and had a short but eventful life. He was born in 1915 in Anaconda, Deer Lodge, Montana to John Adolph Leistiko and Justine/Christine Joseph. Bus was the youngest of the seven children born to his parents, though Tina, as his mom was often known, later had a daughter with her second husband, John Levick. He and his half-sister Mary Levick married their respective spouses, Lucille Bailey and Michael Frankovich, on the same day, 18 June 1934, both in Anaconda, Montana, by the same Justice of the Peace, William Lorenz. Mary's mother-in-law, Helen Frankovich, was a witness to both weddings. Sadly, Bus's marriage to Lucille was short-lived, as he married Rose Richards less than three years later, on 18 May 1937, and gave his marital status as divorced.

Shortly after his marriage to Rose, Bus was traveling with two friends (one of whom was a brother-in-law of his half-sister Mary), driving near Anaconda. Bus was at the wheel and his friends were in the back seat, examining a .22 pistol, when the pistol went off. The bullet went through the front seat and hit Bus in the back. Apparently they avoided crashing somehow, as Bus was taken to a hospital to receive emergency treatment for the wound, and was released the same day and allowed to go home to recover.

Montana Standard article -
19 Nov 1950

Bus did recover, and went on to have five children and a career in the garage and surface department of the Anaconda Reduction Works, according to the Montana Standard newspaper. He even ran for the position of constable of East Anaconda Township in July, 1950. Just a few months after the election, he started complaining of pains in his left arm and side. On 18 November 1950, a week after the pains started, he got up from the dinner table to walk into the living room, when he suffered a heart attack and died. He was only 35, and while I don't know how old most of his kids were, I do know that one of his daughters would have been about 10. Given that he'd only been married for 13 years, the rest of the kids would have probably been close to that in age. I can't imagine what a shock that would have been, to have just finished dinner, when someone just...dies, right there, and possibly right in front of the family too.

So that was the life of Adolph "Bus" Leistiko (or what I've found of it in a few vital records and newspaper articles). Short, kind of rough, and a pretty sad end. But I'm glad I was able to piece together this much of his life, and retell the story. It makes what genealogy research so much more meaningful when I can find some of the stories behind the names, dates, and places. It's one of the reasons I do this research - all of our ancestors had stories like this, some longer, some shorter. But finding these stories makes me feel connected to these people, and hopefully I'll be able to pass that connection on to my descendants and relatives before my story ends.

Surname Saturday - William Thacker, the Last and the First

2011-12-31T16:31:00.000-08:00

William Thacker's headstone, courtesy of Findagrave.com

No, this post isn't about anything in the Bible. It's about something I came across while finishing up my review of the McFarland-Red Corn family documents. Yes, I have finally finished going through all the documents I have on my wife's family! Can't believe it took as long as it did, but I learned a lot about them in the process, and got to see a lot of new document types along the way. This week, I found myself looking at the last document (hence the "last" in the title of this post) - the death certificate for William Thacker, son of Samuel Thacker (my wife's 3rd-great-grandfather) and his second wife Nannie Roberts. He died at the age of 39, and was apparently married at the time (it lists Lucille Thacker, wife, as the informant). When I looked at the cause of death, it listed three causes. The primary cause was pulmonary embolus, which my medically-inclined family and friends told me means a clot in the lungs. There were also two secondary causes, which brought on the clot - the first was mesenteric thrombosis. Again turning to my friends and family who know about such things, this was another clot, this time in the arteries supplying the intestines. (As a side note, when asking your family and friends about mysterious medical terms, make sure you let them know up front where you got the terms. That way, no one will freak out thinking that you have these problems.) Both of these causes were likely brought on by the third cause - "gunshot wound abdomen".

I did a double-take when I read those words. Gunshot wound? Abdomen? I remember thinking "that doesn't sound like an accidental wound." That's when I noticed the entry in section 21A of the death certificate. Where the certificate asks whether the death was an accident, suicide, or homicide, it said homicide. William Thacker was murdered! It was an awful thing to read, and the first time I've ever encountered a murder in my genealogy research (hence the "first" in the title). Going through the rest of the death certificate, I saw that the gunshot happened on May 5, 1951, in a public place, but not at his work. He was taken (I'm sure he was in no condition to transport himself) to Knoxville General Hospital, where they discovered he had a perforated colon and liver. He died 8 days later, on May 13, 1951. He was also a veteran of World War II, as the death certificate gives what I assume is an enlistment date of March 2, 1944, and his headstone states he was a private. (The actual wording is "Tn Pvt 33 Sig Training WWII". Anyone with military knowledge care to translate this for me?) I find it tragically ironic that he survived World War II, and whatever dangers he may have encountered during his military service, only to be murdered back here in the States.

Unfortunately, that's all I know of the story so far. I haven't been able to find anything further on Google, Mocavo, Ancestry, FamilySearch, or Newspaper Archive, and I don't have time or means to get to an actual repository or library this weekend. I would assume there was a story in the newspaper about the event, but haven't been able to find one so far. I might try contacting the hospital, see if they have anything they can release to me (William died 60 years ago this past May, so hopefully that puts him past whatever statute of limitations they may have on records, if they have any remaining). I just find it very interesting that right as I'm about to finish up my work on my wife's family, at least for now, I stumble across probably the most interesting story of them all, and now feel compelled to get out there and find the rest of the story.

Treasure Chest Thursday - the Forgotten Children

2011-12-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

David Lanz is probably my all-time favorite piano player. I have a few of his CDs, and I just love his music. I'm not advertising for him, I just really like his music. He has a great Christmas CD, and one of the best songs on there is called "Dream of the Forgotten Child". There's a story behind the song, but I can't remember it, and can't find it online. One person on Youtube did say it was about homeless children at Christmas, and I think Mr. Lanz was thinking of what a child would feel if he/she were forgotten on Christmas. He wrote the song, if I remember correctly, because it helped him get over the thought of any child being forgotten.

In my research in my wife's ancestry recently, I've come across a number of death records, including several records of children or infants. With my family having just gotten my kids over being sick (not fun, especially just before Christmas), the thought of losing either of my kids is just overwhelming. So, at this Christmastime, I'd like to remember these children, and all other children, who didn't get to share many, or any, Christmases with their families.

Baby Patterson (boy), born 25 April 1915, died 25 April 1915

Baby Thacker (boy), born 8 February 1915, died 8 February 1915

Louis Junior Patterson, born 2 November 1925, died 2 November 1925

Pearl Worthington, born 27 August 1920, died 16 October 1923

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night!

And the real Jane Thacker is...

2011-12-12T21:34:00.000-08:00

Once I'd gathered all these records on Jane Thacker, I started comparing them, seeing what they told me and whether they were talking about the same person. I started dividing them into two groups - those that defined Jane McFarland, and those that defined Jane Thacker/Patterson. The first group was larger, so I'll start with what those documents told me.

The Jane McFarland group included a marriage bond for her marriage to Allen McFarland, three census records (1910-1930), a photograph of her headstone (obtained from my wife's cousin, Diana Moss-Clark), and a memorial for her on Findagrave.com. The marriage record is the only one that mentions her maiden name of Thacker. No in-laws, siblings, parents, or other relatives appear in the censuses; it's just her and her kids (and her husband in 1910). Her headstone simply gives her name, Jane McFarland, birth and death dates, and the inscriptions "MOTHER" and "Asleep in Jesus". The Findagrave memorial is likewise brief - it transcribes the birth and death dates and the inscription of "Mother", and gives the headstone's location as Indian Creek Cemetery, Anderson County, Tennessee.

The Jane Thacker/Patterson group included one census (1900), death certificates for Prior Patterson and Jannie Patterson, and a series of emails from Sharp's Funeral Home. The census lists Jane as the daughter of Samuel and Margaret Thacker, living in Roane County, Tennessee, with Jane's siblings and step-siblings. It also gives her birthdate as June 1891. All these details match very well with the death certificate for Jannie Patterson. The death certificates for Prior and Jannie establish their marriage, though they don't help in determining when that marriage took place. Jannie's death certificate states she was buried in Cove Cemetery, Oliver Springs, Tennessee, which is where Prior Patterson was buried, according to his death certificate. And, as it turns out, Oliver Springs is pretty unique town - it is simultaneously part of three counties - Morgan, Anderson and Roane.

As far as I could tell, nothing in group A overtly conflicted with anything in group B. But neither was there a "smoking gun" - a document that explicitly linked Jane McFarland to Jane Thacker/Patterson. But one thing that helped me make the decision on whether these two women were the same person was the series of emails I mentioned. Jannie's death certificate said that her undertaker was Sharp's Funeral Home in Oliver Springs. A quick Google search led me to the Sharp's Funeral Home website, complete with contact information! I sent them a short email asking if they had any information on whether the Jannie Patterson they provided funeral services for could be the same person as Jane McFarland, and whether Indian Creek Cemetery was also known as Cove Cemetery. Ninety minutes later (yes, that fast!) I had a response! They did not have any funeral records on Jane McFarland, but they did show Jannie Patterson as being buried in the Indian Creek Cemetery. They also said that Indian Creek Cemetery was also known as Indian Creek Baptist Church Cemetery, Cove Cemetery, and the Cove Road Cemetery. This meant that Prior Patterson and Jane Thacker/Patterson were buried in the same cemetery as Jane McFarland.

So, while I still don't have that smoking gun, I think I have enough evidence to make a conclusion. Given the location of burial for Jane and Prior; the coincidence of Jane's birth and death dates between census records, the death certificate, and the headstone; and the lack of significant conflicts between the data in these records, I have concluded that Jane McFarland and Jane Thacker/Patterson are the same individual.

Which Jane Thacker are you?

2011-12-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

I'm still pushing my through the documents I have on my wife's family, about two months after I started on them. I know I said this last time, but I still can't believe how long this is taking - I didn't think I really ever sat down and did a ton of research on them, just grabbed a few records here and there, based on the info I got from my mother-in-law. I'd made it almost all the way through all of the census records for both my father-in-law's and mother-in-law's families, when a branch of my FIL's side stopped me cold yesterday.

The Thacker line in my wife's ancestry has always puzzled me. I don't know what it is, but every time I try to sort things out, I come out feeling more confused than when I started. But, now that I'm trying to be more serious about doing really good, sound genealogy, I figured I'd do what I've heard the pros say over and over - start with the most recent generation and work back from there. That meant starting with Jane Thacker.

From what my MIL gave me, Jane was born 15 June 1891 in Roane County, Tennessee, to Samuel Thacker and Margaret Vann, and lived her whole life in Tennessee. She married Allen J. McFarland in 1908 and had four boys with him - Walter, James, Edward, and Charles. Allen died in 1919, leaving her a widow to raise the boys alone. She died 11 Aug 1946 in Roane County, Tennessee.

To back this up, I had previously found the marriage bond for Jane Thacker and Allen J. McFarland, showing their marriage took place on 9 May 1908 in 1910 and 1920 censuses, with Jane and Allen living with their oldest son Walter in 1910 (along with Allen's two daughters from his first marriage), and Jane living as a widow with sons Walter, James and Edward in 1920. That agreed with the 1919 death date my MIL had given for him, and decided to keep looking. With a little digging, I found the 1930 census, and Jane was again listed as a widow, still living with her son, Walter. So far, so good, but I wanted more info on Jane. I figured FamilySearch would be a good place to look, so I started browsing their Tennessee collections on birth, marriage, and death records for Jane Thacker or Jane McFarland.

I didn't find anything at first for either name, so I started searching for a Jane that died in Tennessee in 1946. That returned way too many results, so I filtered them down by adding variations on her father and mother's names, Samuel Thacker and Margaret Vann. That did the trick - I found a death record for a Jannie, daughter of Samuel Thacker and Maggie Vann that matched the death date exactly, the birth date was just a couple days off, and the county and state matched, though not the city. There was a problem, though - it was for a Jannie Patterson, not McFarland. It even listed that she was a widow of Prior Patterson. Could this be the same Jane Thacker?

Photo courtesy of Findagrave.com

I went back to the 1900 census I had found earlier on Jane Thacker's family. It listed Samuel and Margaret Thacker, with children Jane, Emma, and Elijah, and stepchildren Nancy and Mary Turpin (from Margaret's previous marriage). Jane's birthdate is given as June 1891, the same as the Jannie Patterson death certificate. The link between the two seemed obvious, too much information matched. So if Jane Thacker, daughter of Samuel and Margaret, was married to Prior Patterson, was she the same Jane Thacker that married and had children with Allen McFarland?

I thought researching Prior Patterson a bit might help answer the question, so I started looking for info on him. I was able to find a bit - he appears in the 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses, and his death certificate was in the same database Jannie Patterson's was in. From these records I learned he was married twice before Jannie, and both of those wives died, as he was listed as a widower with two children, Melvin (8) and Addie (4) in 1910; married (but no spouse listed) with four children, Melvin (18), Adda (13), Clifton (5), and Maggie (3) in 1920; and widower again in 1930 with his two youngest children, Jennie (13) and Clifton (17). I couldn't find the mother of Melvin and Addie, but I did discover who the mother of Clifton and Maggie/Jennie was - Emma Thacker, sister of Jane Thacker!

Photo courtesy of Findagrave.com

Prior and Emma had married on 19 Feb 1911 in Anderson County, Tennessee (according to FamilySearch's Tennessee marriage database). Thus he was still single in 1910. However, I soon found Emma's death certificate, and saw that she died 23 April 1919, a full year before the 1920 census. Perhaps the census taker misunderstood Prior's marital status, or Prior may have still been grieving the loss of his wife, especially given her cause of death - child birth. Of all the ways to lose a wife, that would have to be one of the worst. Not only that, the couple had already suffered the loss of another child back in 1915, when a baby boy was stillborn. So Prior had a pretty rough life - between 1906 and 1919, he lost two children and two wives. Still, he was willing to get married again, and sometime between 1930 and 1940 he married Jane Thacker, sister of his second wife Emma, and stayed married until his death in 1940.

So back to Jane Thacker. Now that I knew all this info about Prior Patterson, it seemed clear that the Jane Thacker my MIL had attached to Allen McFarland was the same as Jannie Patterson, widow of Prior Patterson. The major question in my mind at this point was - were there two Jane Thackers? Stay tuned to see what I found!

Madness Monday - I knew I was behind, but this is just sad

2011-12-05T14:29:00.000-08:00

For the past year and some, I've been going through all my old files, and trying to make sure every document I've gathered over the last 11 years is noted in my database. I've found a few censuses and letters and such that I missed, but by and large I've been pretty good about getting things entered. Or so I thought.

The last six weeks I've been working on entering the documents I've collected on my wife's family. I had a lot more than I thought, and I never thought it would take me this long. I remember getting a gedcom of her ancestry from her mom not too long after the wedding, and going through Ancestry and grabbing whatever I could find - SSDI references, census records, WWI draft registrations, etc. I filed them all away to be entered soon (at least, that was the intention). I did go back and enter some of them, as I've discovered in going through my files the last few weeks. But a lot of them never got entered - particularly the censuses for my wife's Osage Indian ancestors (probably due to the fact that the censuses were annual, so there's a lot of them).

Now, five and a half years later, I'm finally getting around to entering them. Some of the people I downloaded censuses for I no longer remember how they are connected, and I don't have any emails or notes on them. I must have heard something from my mother-in-law on them, but since I didn't write it down, and my memory of stuff I just hear is pathetically short, I don't know who these people are any more. Luckily, my MIL is just an email away, so I can ask her again and (hopefully) she can tell me what she knows about them. But if this had been info from a grandparent or other older relative that was now gone, I'd be sunk. And the worst part is, it'd be my own fault.

My main problem is when I get on a research kick, I collect documents, but don't enter and file them right away. I also don't yet have a good way of noting where exactly I found something if I don't take the time right then and there when I find it. If you have any ideas on how to organize your findings so that you remember both where you got them and to enter them sooner than five years after you collected them, I'd be very interested in hearing them.

Little side note on the Indian censuses - they don't note everyone in the household every time. My wife's great-grandfather's brother, Wakon Iron (or Wah-kon-te-ah, his Osage name) and his wife Ida had a son named Walter Iron in 1914. Walter is listed in every census after his birth that I have for the family - 1915, 1916, 1917, 1919, 1920, and others. Walter and Ida had another son named Owen Woodrow Iron in April 1918. The family of four appears in the 1920 US Federal Census, but only three of them in the 1919 and 1920 Osage census - Owen is nowhere to be found. Likewise my wife's grandfather, Douglas Red Corn, who was born 1918, doesn't show up in the 1919 or 1921 Osage censuses (his first appearance is 1924). What was the deal with leaving some babies off the census but not others? Walter made it in the census the first year after he was born, but his cousin Douglas took several years, and his little brother never did. I know very little about the Osage tribe in general, so there may be a perfectly logical explanation. Just one more thing to look up, right?

Treasure Chest Thursday - so much to be thankful for!

2011-11-24T12:54:00.000-08:00

On this Thanksgiving Day, I thought I'd take a minute to just list some of the genealogy-related things I'm thankful for this year. In no particular order, here they are.

1. Ellis Island records for my great- and great-great-grandmothers. I finally have a connection to Ellis Island, even if they did deport my ancestors.
2. Church records for my Joseph ancestors - I have learned so much going through these records, and still haven't finished mining them for everything they contain.
3. The SS-5 for my great-grandaunt Mary (Sitzman) Wagner. I totally didn't expect the request to go through (long story) but the SS-5 arrived in the mail this week after a lengthy 3-month wait. Now I have to puzzle over the fact that she gives her father's name as Chris Schmidt, when everything I've seen before named him John Schmidt.
4. Mom's excellent record storage methods. She has safely preserved many of my grandfather Tom Bergstad's records. Now that I have scans of them, they can stay in storage and stay preserved.
5. My ProGen class members. It's been such an education and pleasure to work with a group of people as passionate about genealogy as I am, and working together towards being able to do genealogy on a professional level.
6. Old family photographs, and the ancestors who took them. I've had more family photographs come out of the woodwork this year than I could possibly really analyze in several months. They really bring these names, dates, and places to life, and help me remember that they were flesh and blood people, with all the ups and downs and joys and disappointments of life.
7. The ability to not just understand my family's past, but to come to terms with the difficult parts of our past, and not just ignore them or gloss over them. I have found some skeletons in the family closet this year, which I shouldn't have been so surprised about since we all have them. But as learned about the difficult and sad parts of my ancestors' lives, instead of blaming them or getting angry or disappointed at them, I found myself feeling a compassion I didn't expect, an understanding that they were imperfect people who led imperfect lives. Yes, their actions had consequences for my family, but we've become a stronger family through those events. And now, I know we can get through difficult times, because we've done it before.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my family, past and present!!

A Sad and Slightly Twisted Joseph Family Story

2011-11-20T01:02:00.000-08:00

A couple months ago, I decided to splurge and purchased a couple of records from the Manitoba Vital Records Agency. At $12 a pop, it's not often I can do this, but I'd been wanting those records for quite some time, so I finally cracked and ordered them. They arrived this week, and I'm very glad I ordered them!

Let's start with the death record for Juliana (Kublick) Lorenz. She was the daughter of Gottlieb Kublick and Christine Klein, and my great-great-grandfather Samuel Joseph's second wife. She couldn't have been married to him for too long, as my grandpa remembers Sam (and only Sam) living with him around 1930, and Sam and Juliana were married in 1913. The death record doesn't actually give Juliana's first name - it says her first name was 'not known' - but I could tell it was her because of other details -
1. It gives her surname as Lorntz-Joseph. When she married my ancestor, she gave her last name as Lorentz, so the surname on the death certificate made sense. Not only that, the death certificate says she was married three times - no surname was given for her first marriage, and her maiden name is listed as unknown, but the surnames for her second and third marriages are listed as Lortnz and Joseph respectively.
2. Her date of birth in the death certificate is July 1852 (with the word 'about' written in above the year). That's reasonably close to the calculated birth year of 1859 from her marriage record.
3. Her nationality is given as German, which makes sense given that she was married in a German Lutheran church, whose records were kept mostly in German.
4. Her death certificate says she'd been living in Manitoba for approximately 20 years, which equals out to the year she married Sam Joseph.

The death certificate also lists some things which (if they are accurate) I didn't know about her. Of course, her death date of 6 January 1933 was new info, as was the cause of death - cerebral apoplexy, which it says lasted two days. If the Wikipedia definition is correct, that means she died of a brain hemorrhage. Yikes. The death cert also says her place of birth was "Lublanc, Poland." Oddly enough, the place name was written in twice, once on the line, and once more in smaller letters, above it. Maybe someone who knows Canadian records better would be able to explain why they would do that, because to me, it makes no sense to write the same name in twice. The death place and residence were identical, so it sounds like she died at home.

The saddest part of the record was the info given in the occupation field. It gives her occupation as none, but for 'kind of industry' it says "Indigent." Just seeing that one word changed how I saw the whole death record. It made me see Juliana as this elder lady, living in poverty, who died at home of a brain hemorrhage, and couldn't even be fully identified for her own death certificate. What changed between her and Sam from the time they were married in 1913 to her death alone and impoverished in 1933? I still know so little about her, and not knowing Canadian records that well, it may be a time to begin learning them so I can discover her story.

Though actually, the other record I ordered did give me a bit more of her story already, more than I thought it would. This was the marriage record for Sam's younger brother Ludwig Joseph (who also went by Louis). Ludwig's wife was listed on the Manitoba Vital Records Agency website as Seraphine Lorenz, and when I ordered the record, I hoped that somehow the marriage record would show a connection between Seraphine and Juliana. As it turned out, it did. The marriage record made by Manitoba lists a lot of info about the couple - name, age, residence, marital status, religion, and - names of parents. Seraphine's parents were August Lorenz and Juliane Kubelik.

This I had not expected. I'd thought that maybe they were sisters, or related in some other way. I never thought that Ludwig had actually married the daughter of his brother's wife. Given that Ludwig and Seraphine got married first, it may be that Sam met Juliana because of his brother's wedding. It also leads to an interesting thought - that the baby that Ludwig and Seraphine had in 1918, a girl they named Adeline, was not only Sam's niece, she was also his step-granddaughter. How's that for a dual relationship? Sam wasn't quite his own grandpa, but not everyone can accurately claim to be a (step) grandparent to their niece!

All in all, it was totally worth the expense to learn all this about the Josephs. I have at least a little more information on Juliana, her first marriage to August Lorenz, and her unfortunate end. Now I just need to start filling in the gaps in between. I've already got at least one more lead on her - I just learned tonight she was buried in the same cemetery as many of my other Joseph relatives. I've written the church, so we'll see if they have any additional light they can shed on this still somewhat mysterious relative, and whether I can learn enough about Manitoba records to dig up some info on my own.

Treasure Chest Thursday - Assume nothing

2011-10-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

Roland John "Tom" Bergstad

When I got into genealogy 11 years ago, my mom gave me the records she'd collected up to that point, as well as a pretty good sized PAF file with everyone she'd found and what she knew of them. It got me off to a fantastic start, as most of the 3rd and 4th generations were already filled in. Of course, being the impetuous, naive budding genealogist that I was, I immediately started at the furthest generation of Gibsons I had and went from there. I didn't stop to look too much at my grandparents, because three of them were (and, thankfully, still are) alive (note: DO NOT EVER DO THIS!! You never assume someone, particularly a grandparent or elderly relative, will live until you make time to talk to them. Mine fortunately did, but if I could do things over again, I would have started pumping them with questions from day one. Ok, soapbox rant is over).

In time I came to the line of my maternal grandfather, Roland John "Tom" Bergstad. He died before I was born, but because I had info on his parents, I skipped over him, and went on researching. I've found a goodly amount on the Bergstads, who were Norwegian, and have traced their line into the early 1800s and beyond. I'd always taken it for granted that because my mom's stories about Grandpa Tom began in North Dakota, that's where the family had put down the most roots, and never looked much into whether they had a Montana connection beyond just my grandfather.

That changed yesterday. I decided (both as part of an assignment for the Professional Genealogy course I'm taking, and out of my own curiosity) to go through my files and see what I had on Grandpa Tom. My database had the birth, marriage, and death dates my mom had entered, but no documents were sourced to those dates. I was taken aback - my own grandfather, completely undocumented? I thought, well, I must have something on him. I went into my files, and dug through them all, here's what I came up with - five pictures, a copy of a business card from his band, and a parade ribbon. That's it. I was pretty shocked that I had missed someone so recent - one of my grandparents - so completely. So I am setting about to change that. Grandpa Tom is the focus of my next research assignment, and I'm going to see how much in original sources I can dig up on him in the next two weeks. I've also asked my mom, grandma, and aunt and uncle to see if they have anything on him as well. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping they can help fill in the gaps I've left for far too long.

Then, just to see if I really had misjudged my Bergstad family as badly as I thought I had, I went to my favorite FamilySearch database - Montana County Marriages 1865-1950. I did a search for the last name Bergstad, and within three minutes, I had found thirteen marriages! Thirteen!! And those were just the ones that I could tell right off were my family. Including Tom's parents! I have a lot of re-evaluation and research to do on the most recent generations of this branch of my family.

Bottom line - assume nothing. We all make mistakes early in our research, but hopefully the rest of you haven't made the mistake of not researching your own grandfather.

Wisdom Wednesday - Shute facts

2011-09-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

I'm still in the middle of going through and cataloging all the documentation I've collected over the years. I finished the Wagner/Sitzman piles (finally!) and now I'm into the Shutes. I started researching this line way back when I first got into genealogy, and have dabbled in it now and again since then. But I haven't really brought my research lens onto the family in quite some time. Thus, while going through my records, I've found a few little tidbits I thought were kind of cool.

1. My 4th-great-grandparents Alexander and Letitia (Sanford) Shute lived in Princeton, Mille Lacs Co., Minnesota in 1870. A few doors away, Alexander's youngest sister Mary Josephine Shute, an 18-year-old teacher, was rooming with the family of Letitia's oldest brother, Gilbert Sanford. Must have been interesting, living your sibling's in-laws.

2. In the 1890 Veteran's Census, Alexander says he was a Corporal in Company D, NY 115th Infantry, and that he served two years, 10 months, and eight days in the Civil War. I think it's pretty cool a) he knew how long he had served down to the day, and b) he was a Corporal after serving for just under three years. He also says he suffered sunstroke, and was wounded in the foot and hand, but doesn't say which foot and hand. I'll have to look in an old dictionary to see what sunstroke meant to him, see why he thought it worth mentioning along with a hand and foot injury.

3. In 1910, Alexander's son Burr Shute was living with his wife Annie, their three daughters, and a hired girl named Alice Profitt who was 16 and was born in Wisconsin. In 1920, Annie is no longer in the home, Burr and Alice were married (you can tell it's her because of her age (26), and the fact that she was born in Wisconsin), and had a seven-year-old son named Ralph (whose mother was born in Wisconsin). I'd sure like to know how that trade-off worked out.

Surname Saturday - Sitzman, Zitzmann

2011-09-04T08:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if I'll get this post done in time to be posted on Saturday, but oh well. I wanted to wrap up this little miniseries on the Sitzman/Zitzmann line, and tell you about the last few discoveries I've made this week, and other things I've learned.
Since learning my great-great-grandma and her daughters were deported on June 11, 1906, I've tried to find where and when they came back to the States, but haven't been able to yet. I'll keep looking, because I'm keen on finding out now that I know getting to this country was more difficult for them than I first had thought. But even though I haven't been able to find that specific record yet, I've found several others that I think are just as important in tracing this family, and which have also helped confirm where this family came from. Using the location names of Rosshaupt and Bohemia, and the alternate spelling of Sitzman as Zitzmann, I went to Ancestry.com looking for other immigration records. They just happened to have a week's free access to all immigration and naturalization databases going on right now (through Labor Day), and I thought, if I can get lucky once, why not twice?

I went back to the 1910 census I had for Sebastian Sitzman, and saw that he said he came to the US in 1891. I tried searching for Sebastian in the (temporarily) free databases at Ancestry, and found him! In the passenger list I found for him, he is listed as being born in Austria and 23 years old (making him roughly 8 years older than my great-great-grandma), which fits well with the data he gave in the 1910 census, (where he said he was a German born in Bohemia, and 45 years old). He arrived in Baltimore, Maryland on the SS Hermann on August 7, 1891. His stated destination was Pennsylvania, and that got me thinking - by 1910, he was in Montana. What drew him to Pennsylvania? The only thing I could think of was the same thing that drew four of his other siblings there 15 years later - family.

I went back to the obituary for Barbara Wills, thinking there might have been something said about when she came to the US in the article. Lo and behold, there was indeed! Her obituary said she came to Buffalo, New York, in 1883, moving later to Pittsburg before coming to Butte, Montana around 1913. Wondering if my luck would continue to hold, I went back to Ancestry and did a search for Barbara Zitzmann arriving in 1883. I did not find a passenger list showing her arriving at an American port, but I did find Barbara Zitzmann, a single 30 year-old, from Rosshaupt, Bohemia, leaving for New York on April 12, 1883, on the ship Polynesia. Not only that, there's a J. Plumer also from Rosshaupt listed just above her, and a Margaretha Hofner, also from Rosshaupt, on the previous page. It looks like another instance of people from the same hometown (again, a very SMALL town) immigrating together, and that last name Hofner sounds a lot like Haffner, as in Johann Haffner, who came with a later group of Zitzmanns. It feels like all this stuff I'm finding is just the first chapter or two in a whole new book! (By the way, I've since found the Port of New York record showing Barbara's arrival, so I have both the departure and arrival records for Barbara now).

Still, I've never really been the type to stop and thoroughly analyze documents I've found until I've stopped finding them, so I decided to keep looking. Frank/Franz Zitzmann's passenger list entry had a naturalization record number next to it, so I thought I'd try to find it (again in the free Ancestry records). Nothing came up for Frank, but I did find his brother Joe's record under the name Josef Zitzmann. I knew it was him because in the declaration of intention he gives his date of arrival as June 4, 1906, having sailed to the US on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, and states his birthplace as Rosshaupt, Bohemia, Austria. To paraphrase that old guy from the A-Team, I love it when genealogical details come together! I haven't had time to look over this record properly yet, but I did notice that by 1912 (the year he filed the declaration), he was married and had four kids - his wife was Teresia, and his children were Rosa, Catherine, Frederick, and John. I wonder if I can locate any living descendants of his? It'd be fascinating to compare notes with them, and see if any tales of the 'old country' survived in their lines better than they did in mine.

Just for fun, I also looked for and found Joseph Haffner in the 1900 Pittsburg census. I did so for two reasons - one, to see if I could find something on him before the Zitzmanns came over with his brother Johann, to see if he'd been in the area for a while. And two, to remind myself I need to look into his family and see if they are perhaps related to my Zitzmanns. I still need to find Louis Fullmer (who, according to the 1906 passenger list really was family), J. Plumer, and Margaretha Hofner. The to-do list never grows shorter, does it?

But still, even with Grandma Hoffman's silence on the issue, we're starting to blow some big holes in that brick wall. I've got a lot of new information to sort through, a lot of really good, solid leads to follow up on, and some really interesting stories that no one knew about. Not a bad week, eh?

Follow Friday - Almost an immigrant

2011-09-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

Christ Hoffman and Mary Sitzman's marriage license

After I'd gone through the obituaries and census records for Grandma Hoffman, I went to FamilySearch's Montana County Marriages database (which, as I've said before, is a goldmine for anyone doing Montana research) and looked for the marriage record for Mary Sitzman and Christ Hoffman. Didn't take long to find it, and I am now SO glad I did! It gives the names of both of their parents - Christ's parents were Gottlieb Hoffman and Kunijnunda Buchner (if you can tell me how the mom's name is pronounced, please do), and Mary's parents were John Sitzman and Teresea Doffler. The witnesses were Rose Sitzman (probably Mary's sister, not her daughter), and Charles Aspling (no idea who he is). But the real find was the birthplace Mary gives - Rosshaupt, Fromberg county, Austria.

Rozvadov in the Czech
Republic, courtesy Wikipedia

I know nothing about that part of the world other than a few names of countries that no longer exist (Czechoslovakia, anyone?) so I hopped online and did some digging for info on Rosshaupt. What I found was very interesting. It turns out, Rosshaupt is now known as Rozvadov, and is just inside the western border of the Czech Republic. The best part is, it's a tiny town, the population is only about a thousand inhabitants even today. That's the best part because it means it's more likely that it's where she's actually from. Kind of like when people from out of state ask where I'm from, I don't tell them Fife, because they've never heard of Fife. They might know about Tacoma, five miles south of here, but to save myself from having to explain where Tacoma is, I just say I'm from "near Seattle," even though Seattle is 30 miles north of here. But Rosshaupt isn't a Seattle town - it's a Fife town! Heck, compared to Rosshaupt, Fife IS Seattle. But that little village name has become very important in finding out more about the Sitzmans, as I'll explain later.

In researching Rosshaupt, I asked for help in finding it from the Germans in Volhynia and Poland mailing list I'm on. One of the members of the list said it was in Bohemia around Grandma Hoffman's time, and Bohemia had been part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and thus outside of the scope of the mailing list. Bohemia, if you'll recall, is where Grandma Hoffman said she was from in the 1910 census, so that made perfect sense. It also explained why she said Rosshaupt was part of Austria on her marriage license. On their recommendation, I joined a Germans in Bohemia mailing list and asked them for assistance in finding Rosshaupt and Mary Sitzman and her family. Within a few short hours (yes, hours!) I had several responses. The good people of the Bohemia mailing list told me Rosshaupt was in an area known as Pfraumberg (which sounds like Fromberg), and sent me a whole host of links and tidbits about the area, which I'm still wading my way through.

One especially nice lady, a fellow Washingtonian as it turns out, suggested I look at Ellis Island's records as the Sitzmans might have come through there when they immigrated. I'd tried searching the Ellis Island website before, but I'd had no luck on finding Mary Sitzman, and figured she must have come through another port like Baltimore or Philadelphia or something. I asked her why she thought Mary would have come through Ellis Island. She responded, but not with words - she sent me a copy of the passenger list from Ellis Island, showing Maria Zitzmann, her two daughters Marie and Rosa, and three siblings - Franz, Rosina, and Josef, all from Rosshaupt!!! The passenger list says they sailed from Bremen, Germany on the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, and landed in New York on June 7, 1906. She also sent a copy of the immigration record (a little plaque-like thing Ellis Island creates showing the immigrant's info extracted from the passenger list) and a picture of the ship they had sailed on. I just sat there, stared at the screen, and couldn't believe my eyes - there was Mary, Rose, Frank, and Joe Sitzman, with my great-grandma Rosie and her sister Mary as little girls, ages 2 and 6. But I'd never found them because I'd always searched for Sitzman, and never thought to try Zitzman or Zitzmann.

SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse

The more I stared at this passenger list, the more info I started to see - Josef Zitzmann had a long number written next to his name, which (thanks to Lisa Louise Cooke and Stephen Danko) I figured was his naturalization record number. All the Zitzmanns were listed as going to visit a brother-in-law, Louis Fullmer, who resided at Rear 153 - 43 St. in Pittsburg. (I still don't know who Louis Fullmer is or whose sister he was married to, but I am going to find out!) There was another former resident of Rosshaupt on the boat with them as well, Johann Haffner, who had been to the US before and was going to see his brother Joseph Haffner, who also lived in Pittsburg. I'd like to find more on him too, see if maybe he was a relative or something. The family had $300 between them, which (according to this inflation calculator) would be equivalent to $6800 today. Not bad! But then I noticed that the word 'deported' was stamped over a handwritten SI that had been written next to Maria, Marie, and Rosa's names. My mailing list friend didn't know what that meant, and neither did I. No one in my family knew anything about any ancestors being deported, so that didn't make sense. To really understand this passenger list, I needed help from someone who knew these records better than I did. So I turned to the only person I could think of - Stephen Danko himself.

I certainly didn't expect Mr. Danko to get back to me so quickly (he is a well-known and very busy man, after all), but he did. He responded just a couple hours later, with a lot more info than I was expecting! First, he confirmed that the number next to Josef's name was in fact the information that will lead me (when I get time and opportunity to do it) to his naturalization record. He also said that the SI notation meant Special Inquiry, and meant that Maria and her girls had to meet with an inspector from the Board of Special Inquiry before being admitted to America. There was a page in the ship's manifest (which Mr. Danko was kind enough to look up and send me) that showed the results of all Special Inquiries from this voyage. The notes from inspector Cowley about my Zitzmanns just say "LPC Illegit. ch." Mr. Danko explained that the notation meant the "reason for deportation is LPC, meaning that the authorities thought that since Maria was unmarried and had two illegitimate children, they would likely be unable to support themselves and would become public charges." Whether the girls were really illegitimate, I don't know, but the inspector apparently felt that the risk of them becoming public charges was great enough to send them back to Europe.

And that is how my great-great-grandmother and her two little girls were deported from Ellis Island.

There's more that I've found, but that will have to wait until next time.

Wisdom Wednestay - From brick wall to stepping stones

2011-09-01T00:04:00.000-07:00

Mary (Sitzman) Hoffman

My great-great-grandmother and her two little girls were deported from Ellis Island.

But before I get into that story, first let me give you some background. Ever since I started tracing my family's history back in 2000, there have been two lines that were the hardest to find concrete details on - the Josephs (my paternal grandfather's mother's side), and the Sitzmans (my paternal grandmother's mother's side). Within the last year or so, as I've blogged on here many times, I've had a lot of success (both in my own research, and in genealogical serendipity) in breaking through the Joseph brick wall. I now know much more about the Josephs than I thought I ever would, and I still have several leads I need to follow up on when I have time. But then my grandmother requested that I come over and talk about her side of the family, which pulled me away from the Josephs, and got me looking at her Wagner and Sitzman lines.

As I started going through my Sitzman records, I realized I still didn't know very much about Mary Sitzman, my great-great-grandmother. Her daughter Rose, my great-grandmother, once told my mom that Grandma Hoffman (as my great-great-grandmother was known) had come over pretending to be the wife of one of her brothers so he could sponsor her passage. She came over and used her maiden name, which she also gave to her girls, which led us to suspect she might have been running from her husband, but that was just a theory. We knew she was German, that she and her girls had come over around the turn of the century, and that Grandma Hoffman was very tight-lipped about the 'old country'. She didn't want her girls speaking German, and she said nothing about her life or family back in Europe. I knew of several siblings - Frank, Mike, Joe, Barbara, and Rose - via my grandmother, but grandma didn't know any concrete dates or events, though she did know some stories about them, and even had a few pictures of them. But no records from that line have come down, and without solid info to go off of for any of Mary's siblings, finding records on them was nigh impossible. For Grandma Hoffman herself, I had her death certificate, a few census records, and an obituary, plus a lot of photos. I hadn't really found anything or seen anything in those records that jumped out at me with any real clues to where she was really from. So while I could trace her life from 1910 (the first census record she appears in) to her death in 1960, I didn't know of any leads that could tell me where she came from. Her death record and a census record said Germany, two other censuses said Bohemia, wherever that was, and the obituary was silent on the issue. Not much to go on.

The first break came when I was going through old newspapers online, and started finding some obituaries. The first one I found was for Christ Hoffman, who died in 1942. The obit for Christ Hoffman confirmed the names of some of Mary's siblings, namely Rose, Frank and Joseph, but it also named additional siblings - Fred Rhump and Sebastian Sitzman, both from Butte, Montana, and Carrie Morgele from Pittsburgh. I also found an obituary for Barbara, which listed most of the siblings I knew about, both from my grandma and from the other obits - sisters Rose (Mrs. William Fredrickson), Mary (Mrs. Chris Hoffman), and Carrie Magual, and brothers Frank, Joe and Sebastian. There was still no mention of Mike Sitzman, but I got really excited at finding all these names anyways, and started making a list of all these siblings to run past my grandmother.

When I visited my grandmother last week, I showed her the list of Sitzman siblings I'd put together. She recognized Joe, Frank, Rose, and Barbara, of course. She was puzzled at Sebastian, who in one of the obits was said to be from Dewey, Montana, which is where Grandma remembered Mike being from. She concluded that Mike and Sebastian were the same person, given that the name Mike never appeared in any of the records I'd found, though Sebastian did (I'd also found him in a city directory, newspaper articles, and census records). I've found other cases in my family where a person went by a name that had nothing to do with their actual names (my grandfather Roland John Bergstad went by Tom; my great-granduncle Donald Roscoe Wagner went by Bill; and my great-grandaunt Mary (Sitzman) Wagner was called Susie by her daughter). So Sebastian and Mike being the same person made sense. And honestly, I felt a little relieved that it wasn't another relative somehow managing to stay out of all major record sources! Grandma had never heard of Carrie, nor either of the last names she was given in the obits (Morgele and Magual), nor yet of Frank Rhump. I still know nothing more about Carrie and Frank than what's wirtten in the obits, so I still have work to do on them. But I was finally starting to feel like I had a handle on who my great-great-grandmother's siblings were.

The second big break came with what I discovered once I found Mary Sitzman and Christ Hoffman's marriage record. But that story will have to wait until next time.

Madness Monday - Random family connections abound!!

2011-08-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

I think I've written before about how all of my family lines come together in Montana, and how much of my genealogy I've found there. But it's been brought home to me tonight on a whole new level.

I've been going through my Wagner-related files, sorting through the documents and newspaper articles and census records I've collected over the years, finding the info they contain, and entering and sourcing it in my Rootsmagic database. A lot of the records, probably most of them, are already there. But there's a goodly number that are not, and even the ones that are haven't all been documented thoroughly. I'm finding I don't really need to do a lot of research at this point; I really need to delve deeper into the piles and piles of stuff I already have!

So while I've been going through all these Wagner documents, I've come across a number of really interesting/weird/coincidental family connections between different lines of my family. I think part of this comes from the fact that Montana isn't a densely populated state (even in its mining heyday), so families were bound to bump into each other over several generations. But some of these connections are just so interesting and random, they jump out off the page at me. Here's some of them that I've discovered just in the last couple of days:

Elsie Dean was the wife of Howard Wagner, my great-grandfather Charles Wagner's brother. Reinhard Nelson was the father of Thomas Nelson, my grandma Blossom's first husband. Gilbert Bacon (uncle of Elsie Dean on her mother's side), Reinhard Nelson, and Winfield Dean (Elsie Dean's father) and their families, all appear in the same city at the same time - Colgate, Steele Co., North Dakota in the 1910 census. Also, the Bacons and Nelsons were both Norwegian.

Rev. Martin Hudtloff was the pastor of St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Butte, Montana. He performed
the marriages of:
Augusta Joseph and Charles Steffan (my great-grandmother and her first husband)
Lydia Joseph and Jacob Reitnauer (Lydia was Augusta Joseph's sister)
Edward Haft and Hilma Hubredt (Edward was my grandpa Fred's cousin)
Augusta Haft and Charles Moutrey (Augusta was another cousin of my grandpa Fred)
Robert Richter and Elizabeth Metz (parents of Rudy Richter, who married my grandma Blossom's cousin Ellen Weyhe)

St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Butte

He also officiated at the funeral of Frederick Hoffman, the 2-year-old son of Christ Hoffman (my great-great-grandma Mary Sitzman's second husband) and his first wife Annie Clausen.
I would love to just sit and pick that man's brain about my family!

David Wolfe, a minister, officiated at the marriages of both my second-great-grandaunt Rose Sitzman and William Fredrickson, and Rose's niece (and my great-grandaunt) Mary Sitzman and Henry Winter. The marriages were less than a year apart.

Grace (Craddock) Cote (my great-grandmother Edna's sister), Beatrice (Baltazar) Morris (sister-in-law to my great-grandmother Rosie's second husband Clarence Morris), and Jane (Norton) Talbott (mother-in-law to my great-great-grandfather Ernest Craddock via his second marriage) were all at the same party in Twin Bridges in 1956.

It's just fascinating to see these different family lines living near each other, going to church together, and attending social functions together. I tend to think of the world getting smaller being a modern phenomenon. In Montana, at least, it's always been small.

10-14-11 update: Found a couple more connections to throw into this pot. Martin Hudtloff also married Mary (Wills) Hatton, my great-grandma Rosie (Sitzman) Wagner's cousin, to her second husband, Fred Bechtold. That means this one pastor knew my Hoffman, Sitzman, and Joseph relatives!
Also, George David Wolfe also performed the marriage for Mary Wills and her first husband, Sidney Hatton, making three Sitzman family marriages he officiated over two generations (Rose Fredrickson, her neices Mary Winter and Mary Hatton).

Wedding Wednesday - one bride, two husbands, and some twisted branches in the family tree

2011-08-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

Just a quick but interesting thing I discovered/rediscovered this week. In going through the files of my Wagner and connected families, I came across a census I had mislabeled. I had thought it was George Greenfield with his first wife Cala and their kids, Boyd, Clarence, Iva, and Charles. The fact that the husband's name was given as W O Greenfield didn't really register as a problem, as census takers do get things wrong sometimes, and George's middle name was Oliver, so I figured the census taker had just gotten the first initial wrong. However, I noticed in going through the census records for George that he had a brother named William, and I found in my notes that Cala had married William Greenfield at some point (didn't know for sure when, but it was before 1930). I had totally forgotten that my great-great-grandmother's second husband had a sister-in-law that at one point had been his wife! I haven't yet dug deep enough to know what became of all the kids, though I did find the three younger children, Boyd, Clarence and Iva, were living with Cala and William, along with a Charles Greenfield, born around June 1919, and I presume the child of the two of them. That would make Charles both the half-sibling and cousin of the other kids in the house, since their mother was his mother, and their father was his uncle. I wonder what that will mean for their kids' relationships?
One other thing that kind of complicated the Greenfield tree was the names of the boys in George and William's family. After going through the censuses I've collected so far on them - 1880 Federal, 1885 and 1887 Washington state censuses - there were three boys whose names got a bit confusing. It worked out like this:

1880 - George C. (3) and Oliver (1)
1885 WA - Charles (8), George (6), and C. (2)
1887 WA - C.G. (10), George (8), and Charles (4)

So between the three boys, there are two Georges, two Charles', and an Oliver. How in the world did the boys know who was being called, when each of them shared one name with another brother? The oldest and youngest of the three were likely named for their father, Charles Greenfield, but I don't know why they felt two sons also deserved the name George. Just one of those unexpected quirks that makes unraveling our family history that much more interesting and intriguing, and at times, head-scratchingly odd.

Marriage Monday - Samuel Joseph and Juliana Lorentz

2011-08-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

I got the civil record for Sam Joseph's marriage to Juliana Lorentz! It came a while ago, but I've been too swamped to blog about until now. But this record definitely identifies the groom as my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, son of Ludwig Joseph and Justine (Witt) Joseph. His marital status is widower, which he had been for four years by that point, his age puts him born about 1865, and religion is Lutheran. It all fits. The most interesting bit of information was his residence, which was listed as S22 T18 R12 in - Manitoba! This was supposedly four years after his move to Montana. When I saw that residence, I remembered that the Tracks of Time book I picked up on eBay had some undated maps of several townships in the Glenella, Manitoba area. I looked them up, and there actually is a map of S22 T18 R12 there! I looked through the map, and found a plot of land owned by none other than Gottlieb Joseph, Sam's brother. Kinda makes me wonder if Sam really lived there, or if he just crashed there to get married. Particularly because his bride gives the same address.
As for Juliana, the marriage record confirms that she was a widow, so that means Lorentz wasn't her maiden name. It also says her father, Gottlieb Kublick, was deceased, though it gives no information as to where she or her parents were born. I was kind of hoping for birth information to help me locate Juliana in other records, so I guess I'll have to keep searching. I probably just need to sit down and look up what kind of records exist for Manitoba, aside from the census and vital records I already know about.
One avenue I still need to pursue is ordering the death record for Juliana. I'm pretty sure it's her, as the last name is Lorntz-Joseph (no given name listed), born about 1852 (compared to 1859 as given in the marriage records for Juliana), and decedent is female. If that document doesn't pan out, I'm gonna have to do a lot more digging to find more on Juliana.
All in all, the civil copy of the marriage record was worth what I spent - it confirms all the details of the church's version, and gives me the added info regarding Juliana's widowhood (if that's a word). I'll post a follow-up with what info the death record has, and what I think it means for my future research.

Just when you think you know someone...

2011-07-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

I finished going through all the church records I got from Christ Lutheran Church in Manitoba, and boy, what an education! Most of the records were for Gottlieb Joseph's family, as they seemed to stay closest to the church, and for the longest length of time. I did get to see some of my direct ancestors in the records, though, and that was really neat to see. Here's some of what I found:

My great-grandmother Augusta was a witness for her older sister Olga's wedding to Gustav Hoeft (also spelled Haft, Heft, and Hoft) at her wedding in 1906.
Of the five children in the family, only Augusta and her sister Lydia were confirmed in the church. Augusta was confirmed in 1906, just a few months after her arrival in Canada, and Lydia in 1907.
Augusta was a witness at the marriage of her cousin Olga Joseph (yes, same exact name as her sister) to Philipp Oswald in 1908.
Also in 1908, my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, was named godfather to his nephew, Helmut Joseph (the only time Samuel appeared in a record that didn't directly involve him).
Augusta was also godmother to her cousin, Wilhelmina Magdalena Liona Siegel, when her cousin was baptized in 1912. That suggests that she stayed in contact with her family up there, maybe even made some trips.

It was fascinating for me to see these records. The other records I've found of my great-grandmother - censuses, passenger lists, even her marriage records - seemed more of a "here I am" stamp, showing me her location at one point in time. These chuch records just bring her to life for me. They show her being involved in a church community, staying interested and involved in important events in her family's lives. It's also interesting that her siblings (with the exception of Lydia's confirmation and Olga's wedding) are totally absent from all of the church records. I know Augusta's brother Elmer ended up marrying an Irish Catholic girl named Julia Barrett, and her sister Helena married Jack Walsh, who was also Catholic. The aforementioned Olga Joseph (Augusta's sister, not cousin) married Gustav Hoeft, who came from an active Lutheran family, and a couple of their children were baptized into the Lutheran church. But after Gus died in 1949, she married Michael McKeown, an Irish Catholic (notice a trend here?). Lydia married Jacob Reitnauer, an active Lutheran German, and stayed Lutheran once they moved to South Dakota (per the South Dakota state censuses I've found so far). And Augusta's first husband was Charles Steffan, who might have been Lutheran as well; I don't know for sure if he was, but I do know they were married in St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Butte. It's just intriguing to see a trend like that - those who were in the church records stayed active, and those who weren't, didn't.

But as for the title of the post, it's more in reference to a couple of things that I've come across recently. One is a church record that my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, appears in. I knew that his first wife, Pauline, died 6 January 1909, and that he moved with his five kids to Anaconda, Montana, in April that same year. So far as I knew, he lived with his kids until they all married off, and then with one or the other of them after they'd all gotten married until he died in 1955. However, in going through the church records, I found one that pointed to a chapter of Sam's life none of us knew about - his second marriage.

According to the marriage record Sam married a woman named Juliana Lorentz, daughter of Gottlieb Kublick and Christine (nee Klein). Her name is interesting because it suggests that this wasn't her first marriage either, and because Sam's brother Ludwig/Louis married Seraphina Lorenz, who could have been a relative. I plan on following up on this, once I get the marriage certificate for Sam and Juliana (which I ordered a couple weeks ago, and should be getting in the mail any day now). I'll need to order the marriage certificate for Louis and Seraphina as well, but first I want to find out more about this mystery wife.

Since I discovered the existence of this second marriage, I've tried to find more about Juliana, but she doesn't appear in the 1911 or 1916 Canadian censuses, and a general search of Ancestry.ca turned up nothing. Nor could I find her in the 1930 Montana census where Sam is living with his daughter Augusta, son-in-law Frederic Gibson, and grandson (and my grandfather) Frederick. In that census Sam's marital status is widowed, which I'd always taken to be a reference to Pauline, his first wife. Now it might actually be referring to Juliana.

The other interesting tidbit from the marriage record is that (if I am reading the German correctly) it says that Sam was living in Waldersee at the time of his marriage, which was 26 December 1913. Did Sam move to the States, then move back to Canada? It might help explain why I can't find him in the 1920 census. But neither can I find him in the 1916 Canadian census. The time between 1913 and 1930 is kind of a "lost period" for Sam. I'll have to do more digging to see what happened to him during this period. But for now, I'm still getting over the shock of the second marriage. I wonder what other surprises I'll find?

Turns out, I've already found a couple! We had a family reunion for my grandma Blossom's Wagner family a couple weeks ago, and on the way to the reunion, we stopped at my grandparents' house for breakfast. While we were there, my dad thought it'd be a good idea to bring the Wagner pedigree chart we printed a few years ago, just in case the chance to talk genealogy ever came up (it never did, sadly). While looking for it, I came across a notebook on the Josephs my mom had put together for my grandpa, which everyone had forgotten about. In it were mostly just some pedigree and descendancy charts (which I've filled out quite a bit more in the 11 years since they were created), but towards the back were some pictures I'd never seen before. One of them was a photo of Sam Joseph and four of his kids. Papa Fred recognized three of them, but didn't know the fourth (I think it's Lydia, the daughter who married Jacob Reitnauer). If I'm right, then those in the photo are (l-r, b-f) Augusta, Lydia, Helena, Sam, and Elmer Joseph. The lower right corner of the matte board is stamped Hunter, which I'm assuming is the photography studio that took the photo. It has Anaconda, Montana stamped underneath it, so that would date the photo to sometime around 1909-1910 (between when they moved to Anaconda and when Augusta got married to Charles Steffan). There's a handwritten note on the back that says "Mrs. Olga Haft" so I think they took the photo and gave it to Olga (who isn't in the picture). I just couldn't believe there was another photo of Sam and the kids. I was (and still am) ecstatic. It gives me hope that there might be other pictures floating around out there.

The last thing I found out about was another picture in the same notebook on the Josephs, which led to the other reason for the title of this post. There was a picture of four people, one of which I recognized right off to be my great-grandfather, Fred Gibson Sr. On the back someone had written "Freddie, Vera, Emma & Fred Deer Lodge, Mont 1938." I asked my grandpa about it, and he said it was him, his dad, his dad's second wife Emma, and his step-sister Vera. I about choked when he said step-sister! I had no idea he even had a stepsister! I never thought to check if Emma had any children from her previous marriage (I can't remember who she was married to, I'll have to follow up on that). I've never heard anyone mention Vera before, so I'll see if I can get more info on her. But to think of my grandpa having a step-sister is just mind-boggling. He's always been an only child in my mind, so this really shakes things up a lot.

In short, it's been a very eventful, very paradigm-shifting couple of weeks. My grandparents are in town today, so hopefully I'll be able to mine a few more details about some of these new facts.

Treasure Chest Thursday - Finally into the church records!

2011-06-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

After several months, I've finally waded through all the stuff in my "Stuff to file" folder! Now I'm into the church records I ordered from Christ Lutheran Church in Manitoba, Canada. I've only read through six of the 48 so far, but I ran across one that just tugged at the heartstrings a bit. My great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, came from a family of seven children, of which he was the second-oldest. Some (most? I still haven't done the timeline yet) of his family got to Manitoba before he did, in late 1905, including his older brother Gottlieb and his family, and his parents Ludwig and Justine (Witt) Joseph. But the record I reviewed today was the death record for Samuel's youngest brother, Michael, who died at age 21 on 21 April 1905. Michael's death occurred just six months before Samuel and his family landed in Quebec, so I wonder if they even knew of the death before arriving in Manitoba. That would be one of the worst things to have happen - to travel thousands of miles to be with your family, only to find out your littlest brother died just months before you got there.

I'm not sure how they used this, but there's a scripture noted in the death record (it's a church record, after all). The verse is 2 Samuel 1:26, which reads: "I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." The verse is very fitting, and shows the love the family members had for each other. I can't imagine Ludwig and Justine's heartbreak at losing a son just before their family would have been reunited after many years apart.

Divorce in the Joseph family

2011-05-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

I've got two interesting tales of divorce to chronicle today - one involving stolen fruit, and one that was part of an epidemic. First up, the fruit. My first cousin three times removed, Louise Leistiko, was born in Montana around 1912. I recently found a marriage license for her at FamilySearch, stating that she married a man named Arthur Popham, another native Montanan a few years older than she was, on 16 Feb 1929 . I also found another marriage license, linking her to Harold Dunville, dated just nine months after her marriage to Arthur, while also stating that she had not been previously married. This caught my attention - either there was a case of mistaken identity on my part, or there was a story here that would explain this situation. I figured newspapers would be my best source for quickly answering the question, so I went looking for more information on NewspaperArchive.com. A few clicks later and they had answered my questions - there was indeed a story!

The first article I found showed me what probably led to the breakup of Louise and Arthur. In May 1929, while the two were on a trip to Saint Maries, Idaho with a friend named Louis Helm, something happened, I'm not sure exactly what, that caused the three of them to be arrested for stealing 50 bushels of fruit. My city-based upbringing leaves me completely ignorant of what exactly a bushel is in terms of size or weight. Wikipedia helped out greatly the last time I had a question like this, so I went back to them. Wikipedia's definition was one bushel equals four pecks. Ok, what's a peck? 8.81 litres or 297 fl. oz, or apparently two of those white paper bags of apples with the handles on them. All right, so eight of those white bags is one bushel, and Arthur and company were arrested for stealing 50 bushels? That's a LOT of fruit, so there's no way this was a case of walking away from a farm with an extra apple in his pocket. Again, I don't have all the details of who did what, but obviously something happened. The article covering the incident also mentioned that Arthur was an "old offender." He'd apparently already done time for grand larceny and forgery, and just finished a parole term when the fruit incident happened.

The next article I found seemed to indicate Louise and Louis (the friend) were not found guilty. It was from July 1929, so it was two months after the fruit incident and five months after the wedding. It stated Louise was then filing for divorce "on the grounds that her husband was convicted of a felony on charges of grand larceny in May and that he was given a five-year term in the state penitentiary." Shortly afterward, the divorce was granted, and Louise was ok to resume using her maiden name of Leistiko. Within a couple months of the divorce, she married Harold Dunville and (to my knowledge) lived happily ever after. That's a lot to have gone through in just one year's time!
The second tale of divorce comes from the life of John Levick, the second husband of my second-great-grandaunt (and Louise's mother), Justine "Tina" (Joseph) Leistiko. Years before he married Tina, John married his first wife, Natly "Nettie" Moliniak (no relation to Megan Smolenyak, I already checked). I had been told previously that Nettie had died about a year after marrying John (sometime around 1903), but hadn't found any corresponding records confirming the story. I went on FamilySearch and found Nettie and John's marriage record, confirming they were married on 11 Aug 1902. However, I found another marriage for John dated 26 Apr 1904, less than two years later. This marriage was to Mary Zylick, a name I'd not heard before, and someone had written on the license that John Levick had been married before but had been divorced. Obviously both stories - the death and the divorce - couldn't be true, so I went back to NewspaperArchive.com and did some more digging. A few minutes later, I'd found several articles about John and Nettie's divorce proceedings. The divorce was filed sometime around Oct-Nov 1903 (after the death date I'd been given for Nettie, so that showed me the death info was incorrect), and was being heard by Judge Napton of the local court. One article even stated that John was not considered likely to attend the hearing, meaning Nettie would just need to bring her proofs and she'd be free and clear. John must have changed his mind, or the reporter was just misinformed, as the case did continue through December, when Judge Napton postponed judgment on it indefinitely.

You're probably wondering by now how this divorce was part of an epidemic. John and Nettie's divorce was apparently one of many lawsuits then going on in the area. The article that announced the finalization of the divorce listed many other rulings and status updates of other cases, and the article was titled "LEGAL EPIDEMIC HERE." Many other people were suing for various things (there was even another lawsuit of John Levick against Nettie and a guy named George B. Winston, though I don't know anything about that case yet). But eventually, in January 1904, the judge ruled them divorced and told them "to go on their way rejoicing. I'm not sure that's what I'd tell a divorcing couple, but maybe they were happy to have their marriage ended by that point. At any rate, it freed John up to marry Mary Zylick in April, three months after his divorce from Nettie was finalized.
The two cases are interesting to me not because they involve divorce, which seems to have been a fairly common occurrence in Montana even then. It's interesting because of the shortness of the two marriages - one lasted a few months, the other a year and a half; also because of the unusual circumstances Arthur and Louise's divorce - theirs is the only marriage I know of that ended because of fruit theft. As for John and Nettie, I wonder if they got caught up in the "legal epidemic" or just happened to drift apart at the same time all those other lawsuits were going on. I don't know that there's any way to ever know, but it's intriguing to think about.

More interesting connections

2011-05-10T23:39:00.000-07:00

My grandmother, Sally Crawford, has some deep Montana roots. She's descended from Thomas W. Harris, one of the first white settlers of western Montana, who came to Montana in the 1850s. Sally married Jim Crawford back in 1993, and started researching his genealogy soon thereafter. She discovered that among his ancestors were the Colcords, with his most recent Colcord ancestor being his great-grandmother Mary Eleanor Colcord, daughter of Thomas Colcord and Eleanor Davis.

I mention these details because tonight I discovered that my grandmother's wedding was not the first Harris-Colcord wedding. It turns out, George Harris, brother of my grandmother's grandfather Frank Harris, married Leona Colcord, daughter of John Colcord and Effie Williams, in 1911. Leona is Jim's first cousin twice removed (ie Jim's grandmother Eleanor Knapp was Leona's first cousin). Which makes the children of this marriage (there were two that I know of Dorothy and Ralph Harris) both a first cousin once removed to Sally, and a second cousin once removed to Jim. So while Sally and Jim aren't directly related by blood, they do share some cousins. Pretty interesting, no?

A quick funny

2011-05-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

I saw this and thought I had to post it. I've been going through Montana marriage licenses like nobody's business (it still amazes me just how many relatives of mine lived their whole lives, or at least a good portion of them, in Montana). The form that was filed on the state level for the marriage certificate requires the officiating party to state where the marriage took place - usually just the city and county, though sometimes the person filling out the form has listed the address of the building or residence where the marriage was performed. However, in looking at my great-great-granduncle James Harris' wedding to Florence Irene Thomas on 21 Sep 1927, the officiator wrote something I've never seen in this field - the time. Where most officiators wrote the name of the city the marriage was performed in, J.D. Wasson, a minister, wrote 9 o'clock P.M.

I think that's very interesting, mostly because I don't know anyone personally who got married that late at night. (The reception for my own wedding was well underway by then). To me, it's just one more example that you really can't take anything for granted as to what your ancestors did and when - not even the time of day for a wedding.

Why do some traditions die out?

2011-05-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

In going through my stack of stuff to file, I came across a very humorous story (though I didn't realize that's what it was at first). My great-grandfather Jim Harris had six older brothers (though one died as an infant) and though I have a few census and other records on them and their families, I don't really know too much about them yet. Mostly they're one branch of the family I still have yet to do real research on.

However, today I found a newspaper article about the second-oldest son in the family, William Harris, and his marriage to his second wife, Mary Mazza. The article begins with the normal details - they were married in the rectory of a Catholic church, in a ceremony officiated by Father John P. O'Malley (a good Irish Catholic name if I've heard one). It even gives some details on the bride's gown.

The funny part is what happened after the honeymoon was over. After spending a few days in Butte, they came home to "a charivari ride through the business section of the city on an improvised sulkey made on the back springs of a cart hitched to an automobile, after which a reception was given at their new home in
Parker's addition by their friends."

European sulkies, courtesy of Wikipedia

Being the modern city boy that I am, I had no idea what a "charivari ride" or "sulkey" were. A quick trip to dictionary.com and Wikipedia helped fill me in though. According to dictionary.com, a charivari, or shivaree/chivaree, is a "discordant mock serenade to newlyweds, made with pans, kettles, etc." And Wikipedia had a really good article showing just what a sulky is (the newspaper mispelled it apparently). It's a little carriage usually pulled by a horse, often in races, having only a seat and wheels, but no body.

So, if you reread the article, it sounds like William and Mary came back from their honeymoon, and sat on a little mini-carriage hooked up to a 1930s car, and were pulled through the business district of Philipsburg, while all their friends and neighbors followed banging on pots and pans and singing loudly and purposefully out-of-tune. Which leads me to my question - how do traditions like this ever die out? I think it's an absolutely hilarious way to welcome back a newly-married couple, and would love to be in on a revival of the tradition should one come about. It just goes to show you - people back then sure knew how to have a good time.

Wisdom Wednesday - What I learned about and from Christ Hoffman

2011-05-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

Mary and Christ Hoffman

Christ Hoffman (b.1861 in Germany to Gottlieb Hoffman and Kunijnunda Buchner) was the second husband of my great-great-grandmother, Mary Sitzman. I first started learning about him in going through my Grandma Blossom's photo albums, as Grandma Blossom's mother, Rosie Wagner (one of Mary Sitzman's daughters) had taken a lot of pictures of Christ and Mary. Before he was married to my great-great-grandmother, however, he was married to a girl named Annie Clausen, b. abt 1858 in Germany. I think they married in Nebraska, as that's where their oldest surviving child, Christ Hoffman Jr., was born in 1891. I say oldest surviving, because in the little research I've done on the family so far, I've found that of their seven children together, only three lived to adulthood. Two children, whose names I have not yet found, died before 1900. Another child, August, born around 1894, died somewhere between 1900 and 1910. The only death I've found much information on was little Frederick, who died at the age of 2 years and 7 months. His passing was mentioned in a newspaper article in the Anaconda Standard in 1905, which also stated the funeral would be held at the family home. A really touching thank you from Christ and Annie appeared in the Standard a few days later, which said : "We desire to express our heartfelt thanks to our friends and neighbors for their kindness during the illness and death of our beloved son. We also wish to thank our friends for the many floral offerings.
Mr. and Mrs. CHRIST HOFFMAN".
I think it says a lot about Christ and Annie to have responded so quickly to thank their friends and neighbors, even in the midst of their grief.

Christ was also very successful at raising chickens. He won several awards for his Barred Plymouth Rocks and single-comb white Leghorns at the Montana state fair in 1909. He used those wins to his advantage the next year when trying to sell the eggs from his "prize-winners" in the local paper. In another ad he placed in 1912, Christ said he was willing to trade two very large St. Bernard dogs for chickens - a trade which would seem a hefty loss on the part of the dog owner to me, but then, I don't know chickens like Christ did.

One of the most fascinating things I came across was an ad he placed tyring to sell an egg incubator. The model he listed was a 240 X Cypher's Incubator. I got curious as to what that would have looked like, so I did a Google search. I didn't find the exact model, but I did find some pictures from a vintage Cypher's catalog someone was trying to sell online, which included pictures of several other models of Cypher's incubators. The photo at left shows the 360- and 440-egg capacity incubators, so I'm guessing the "240 X" in the model name meant it was a 240-egg capacity incubator. That's a lot of eggs!!

Christ married my great-great-grandmother on 1 July 1919, and they stayed married until his death in 1942 at the age of 80. He had a very interesting life, and I look forward to learning more and more about him and his descendants.

Things I've Learned Lately

2011-04-11T23:37:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the absence the last two weeks, I've been trying to get caught up on my pile of stuff. I've made a LOT of progress in the last week, having spent 5 hours at the Heritage Quest Research Library last Saturday just going full tilt at cataloging, documenting, and filing. It was awesome! I finally made it through the first batch of marriage records I'd downloaded, as well as the pile of Craddock documents from my grandma's cousin Carol, the Pushard documents I found and blogged about back in February, and some other odds and ends that I've been collecting. Here's a couple of things I've learned going through these documents:

1. My uncle Ralph Mahlen (who passed away a few years ago) came from a BIG family. He came from a family of six kids, four boys and two girls, none of which I can recall ever meeting. His dad, Joel Mahlen, came from a bigger family of seven girls and four boys. I can't imagine how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren Joel's parents had!

2. I got my first look at a court record. It was a write-up of a divorce hearing back in the 50s. Apparently the husband didn't even come to court, and was divorced in absentia, with his wife getting full custody of their kids. What surprised me was the fact that the court order gave him visitation rights, as long as the visits were done at reasonable times, and he was "sober and well behaved." Interesting language.

3. Ruth Young, second wife of my great-grandfather James Harris, had another sister. I had found marriage records for Annabelle Young, and seen a sister named Ada in the 1930 census, born around the same time. My first thought was that these were the same girl. But after going through the marriage records more closely, and documenting an obituary for Ruth's third husband, Rudolph McCaslin, I found they were different people. The key was the obituary. It listed sisters-in-law for Rudolph named Mrs. R.L. Storm and Mrs. John [Joseph] Sterle. I didn't know who R.L. Storm was, but a little research led me to find out it was Ada, with Mrs. Sterle being Annabelle.

4. Loring Pushard, great-great-grandfather of my cousin Jimmy, enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War at the ripe-old age of 17 as a private on 23 January 1862. He was discharged two years and two days later, on 25 January 1864, as a Corporal, at the age of 19. I don't know much yet about how the army was organized back then, or the distance in rank between a Private and a Corporal, but I do think it's very impressive that a 17-year-old kids could advance to a Corporal in two years. Especially given what most 17-year-olds do with their time these days. He got married about three years after leaving the Army, worked as a piano maker, and lived to be 62 years old. Just an average man, but such an interesting average man. It makes me wish he was a closer relative.

It still amazes me how much of peoples' lives we're able to reconstruct with a few documents. Some people, like Loring Pushard, just seem to come together so easily. Some, like my great-great-grandma Lena, you have to work and work and dig up every scrap just to try and piece the basic picture together. No two stories are even close to the same.

Family coincidences

2011-03-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've been making a little progress on my pile of stuff to file this week. (I'd make more if I could stop myself from going after more while I'm supposed to be working on what I have, but you and I both know that's not gonna happen). While I was working through some marriage licenses, I noticed I didn't have a lot of background on one spouse of my great-grandmother's sister Grace Craddock, a guy named Edward Cote. I'd found some newspaper articles on him and Grace, mostly about them visiting Ed's parent's for dinner over the weekend (imagine that, a weekend visit for dinner was considered news for the community!) but I didn't really have much on him beyond that, except for the marriage license for his first marriage, to Glenna Ruth Brown. The license said Ed was born in Alder, Montana, which led me to wonder whether his parents had married in Montana as well. After a few minutes, I found a marriage license for Ed's parents, Charles Cote and Nora Munster (and, interestingly enough, the marriage record Charles' sister Alice as well, as it was on the same page as Charles'). Charles's parents were listed as Odilon Cote and Frances Thiebault, and Charles was said to have been born in Butte, Montana. I thought a name like Odilon Cote would be easy enough to find, so I searched for his marriage record to Frances, and soon found it as well. I was now back to 1889! Odilon gave his birthplace as Canada, so I figured Odilon's parents, Desire Cote and J. Turgeon, were not likely to have married in Montana. I was pretty happy though, having gone back three generations from Ed Cote, I now knew a lot more about his family than I did just a couple hours before.

It was then that I noticed the names at the bottom of Odilon and Frances' marriage license. I didn't recognize the witnesses, Alex Martineau or Annie Theobald (though I still think Annie is probably a relative of Frances' somehow), but the officiating judge's name I did recognize - Caleb E. Irvine. A cousin of mine, Bob Fulkerson, has published portions of my (our) great-great-great-grandfather Thomas W. Harris' journal online, and in that journal, Thomas talks several times about Caleb Irvine. Caleb lived and worked with Thomas at Fort Owen, one of the earliest settlements in Montana, and later worked as a probate judge. But to see his name on a marriage license was just - very surprising. It kind of brought it home that Montana was a very small world, and seeing a connection between my Harris and Craddock families, even a bit remote like this one, was really a neat thing for me.

Then I found another interesting connection. Thinking I was done digging up info on the Cotes, I moved on to a marriage record from 1946 for my great-grandfather James Harris and his second wife, Ruth. Ruth gave her last name as Colesaric, but listed her parents as Holly Young and Frances (Knight) Cote. Another Cote! And with Ruth's last name obviously so different than her father's, and her mother's married name being different as well, that told me there were at least three marriages involved in these names:
Ruth Young married to someone surnamed Colesaric
Holly Young (formerly) married to Frances Knight
Frances (Knight) Young married to someone surnamed Cote

I took a crack at finding more marriage records (I'm telling you, this FamilySearch database on Montana marriages is a GOLDMINE) and soon found more than I bargained for. I discovered that Ruth was married several more times - her first marriage was in 1930 to Joe Barbieri. The marriage didn't last long, because in the 1937 Butte city directory she appears as Ruth McCaslin, wife of Rudolph McCaslin (Ruth McCaslin was actually the name my grandma Sally Crawford gave me for her). Rudolph passed away on 28 Jun 1941, leaving Ruth a widow, but not for long, as she marred Edward Colesaric on 27 Feb, 1943. I'd finally found the Colesaric marriage that was hinted at in Ruth's marriage to my great-grandfather. Her marriage to Edward Colesaric ended in divorce, according to the marriage license for her and James Harris, making James Harris her fourth husband.

Now that I'd solved the Colesaric mystery, I wanted to get some closure and figure out who the Cote was Ruth's mother Frances was married to. I went to find Ruth and her family in the 1930 census, and did so pretty quickly, living with her six siblings, her mother Frances, and - a new husband for the mother named George Duncan. I am still just taken aback with how many marriages this one family is a part of! I went back to FamilySearch, and found Frances Young and George Duncan were married in 1929, just in time for the 1930 census. Frances now had three marriages that I was aware of:
Holly Young, sometime around 1913, probably in Nebraska where most of their children were born
George Duncan, 18 Sep 1929
someone named Cote between 1930 and 1946

I went back to FamilySearch, and tried looking for Frances Duncan marrying a Cote, but with no luck. I then tried Frances Young, and hit paydirt. Frances Young married Orval Cote on 11 Aug 1938, after having divorced from George Duncan. Orval listed his parents as Joseph Cote and Florence Pearson, and said he was born in Butte. I confirmed this by finding him in the 1930 census (with his name spelled Orville), living with his parents Joseph and Florence and four siblings. All the children were born in Montana, so (you guessed it) I went looking for Joseph and Florence's marriage record.

In no time at all, I had it. Joseph and Florence were married on 5 June 1907 in Butte. But best of all - Joseph parents were listed, and I had my connection at last! Joseph's parents were none other than D. Cote and Julia Turgeon - the same Desire Cote and J. Turgeon listed for Odilon Cote, grandfather of Edward Cote. In short - Edward Cote and Orville Cote were first cousins once removed.

If your head is spinning after all this, don't worry. It took me a little while to sort it all out myself. Here's a simple graph of how it all works:

The fun part comes in realizing that Ed Cote's second wife Grace Craddock was a sister of my great-grandmother Edna Craddock. Edna's first husband was James Harris, the 4th husband of Ruth Young, the daughter of Orville's wife Frances (Knight) (Young) Duncan, and that Ed's grandfather (and Orville's uncle) Odilon was the one whose marriage was performed by a close friend of James Harris' grandfather.

Clear as mud?

Are we Ire-man, or Germ-ish?

2011-03-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

I've been working through a couple of the marriage licenses in my "stuff to file" folder, and I came across an interesting phenomenon. I was looking at the marriage for Hazel (Craddock) Heard and John W. Kaufman, and wanted to get a little background info on John for my database. He said was born about 1901, his parents were John E. Kaufman and Rose Warren, and that he was from Iola, Kansas. I went digging, and found his family in the 1910 census, living in Humboldt, Kansas. It turns out both cities are in Allen County, Kansas, and aren't very far apart. John and Rosa had a fairly young family at the time - they'd only been married about 8 years, and had for kids, ranging from 8 years to 10 months (John W. was the 2nd youngest, at 3, so he was a little off on his birthdate on his marriage license to Hazel).

What caught my eye about this family is the fact that John E. Kaufman's father was German, and his mother was from Pennsylvania, where there were a lot of Germans. Rosa (Warren) Kaufman's parents were both from Ireland. This combination of Irish and German appears several times in other places in my family tree:

Augusta Joseph (my great-grandmother, German) married John F. Gibson (my great-grandfather, whose parents and grandparents were all Irish)
Elmer Joseph (Augusta's only brother) married Julia Barrett (daughter of Irish immigrants)
Olga (Joseph) Haft (Augusta's oldest sister) married Michael McKeown (an Irish immigrant)
Helena Joseph (Augusta's youngest sister) married John "Jack" Walsh (son of Irish immigrants)

Maybe it was just the Joseph family, but it's interesting to me to see German immigrants (or their children) marrying Irish immigrants (or their children) so often. Was there something that they saw in each others' heritage that rang a bell? Was it just chance that they all happened to go for someone with that background? Once again, more research leads to more questions for more research. :)

You like me! You really like me!!

2011-03-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

Ok, so that line's been used and reused ad nauseum, but it expresses how I felt when I got an award for my blog today!

I received the "One Lovely Blog" award from Joanne, author of the Keeper of the Records blog. This award was originally created by Sara at Works of Art by Sara. Her original award looks like this:

A great big THANK YOU to Joanne, and all the other readers of my blog. I sometimes feel I'm writing this solely for my own benefit, but it's great to know that others out there enjoy it too.
Sara says:

"Here are the rules that MUST be followed:

1. Add the logo to your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received this award
3. Nominate 7 or more blogs
4. Leave a message on their blog, letting them know they are "One Lovely Blog!"

As for nominations, I put forth the following (and not all genealogy-related):

Elyse at Elyse's Genealogy Blog
Casey at Perfectly Crazy
Natalia at Once in Lifetime Love
The Generations Project
Kate Klim at You Can't Help But Read It

That's all I can think of at the mo. Thanks for reading!

Treasure chest Thursday - a little bit more Beilstein history

2011-03-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

This will be a short post (probably), as time is of the essence today. I finally started in on my pile of stuff to file, beginning with the marriage license for my great-great-grandmother Lena Beilstein's first marriage, to David Marion Briscoe. While I was looking at the license, I went through and noted the names of everyone mentioned - Lena and her parents, Jacob Beilstein and Amelia Wachter; David and his parents, Thomas Briscoe and Martha Ann Barney (spelled Barny in the license). I then saw that the witnesses were David Barney and Mrs. Susan Barney. Given David Briscoe's mother's maiden name of Barney, I figured they were probably relatives, and did a little digging. Before long, I found some records (Ancestral File, and some census records) that showed David Barney was the brother of Martha (Barney) Briscoe, and Susan was his wife. Isn't that what genealogy speakers/teachers always say - check the witnesses' names for relatives? Once again, they are right.

I was about to close the license, but thought I'd check to see if it was a minister that performed the marriage or a justice (just out of curiosity). The officiator turned out to be a "minister of the Gospel," who says he performed the marriage at his own residence. I found that pretty interesting, as I don't think I've ever seen that noted on a marriage license before. I then looked at the minister's name - Arthur Barney. It seemed a little too coincidental to have another Barney involved. I went back and found him in Ancestral File, which listed him as another brother to Martha and David. I also found him in the 1900 census living in Carbon county, Montana, where the marriage was performed, and his family members listed in the census matched those listed in Ancestral file. So not only was the marriage witnessed by family of the groom, the ceremony was performed by a minister who also happened to be the groom's uncle.

I still don't know anything about how Lena and David Briscoe met. But it's interesting that David's family was so involved in their wedding, especially since Lena's family was probably still in Nebraska at the time. It's also kind of sad, since she and David were only married for a couple years (she married her second husband, Clarence Johnson, in 1907). But it adds a little more dimension to the wedding, to think of at least some family there to celebrate. Maybe David Briscoe's immediate family was in attendance as well, as they lived in the same city. I wonder what they thought of this 19-year-old young man, marrying a 15-year-old girl who lived so far from the rest of her family. Maybe one day I'll find the answer.

Just when I thought I'd seen it all

2011-03-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

I seem to have found myself in a vicious circle lately. I think it began with my research on my cousin Jimmy's Pushard ancestors. I kept finding things - newspaper articles on different branches of my family, marriage licenses for a lot of my Montana relatives, a whole set of documents and pictures on my Craddock side, the stack of church records on the Josephs in Manitoba, and then more and more photos from my great-grandmother Rosie (Sitzman) Wagner. All of these things have been piling up in my "stuff to file" folder. I haven't had the proper time to go through much of these yet, but I can't seem to stop myself from going after more. You start getting some line, you keep tugging till it runs out, right?

Well, this weekend I was completely cut off from my genealogy research, attending the wedding of my wife's best friend Autumn out in Spokane. I felt badly that I was missing my dad's birthday (especially as they went out for steak Saturday night). My grandparents came down to help celebrate, and they brought a little something with them. My grandma has been talking to her brother, Uncle Howie, and he gave her a couple of old manila envelopes with some documents she hadn't seen before. One envelope contained 28 old postcards addressed to my great-grandparents from various relatives - Charlie's mom and dad (who divorced, and so sent their postcards separately), cousins, siblings, and some from friends. The other envelope had some old legal papers - mostly deeds to property my great-grandparents owned in different places, though there is also a stock certificate for one share in the Monroe Memorial Park, Inc. (Who knew cemeteries sold stock?) So now, on top of all the other papers I have to go through, now I have 28 postcards and several deeds and a stock certificate to look at. I'm not really complaining, I'm actually ecstatic at all the family info that's been coming to light these last few weeks. I just don't know how in the world I'm going to get through all of this, organize it, and note it in my database.

I suppose there are worse problems to have though, hm?

Just can't get enough

2011-03-08T00:02:00.000-08:00

Normally I don't start writing a blog post at half-past bedtime, but this one couldn't wait. When I scanned my grandmother's red and brown photo albums a few years ago, my computer had a (by modern standards) pretty small hard drive, so hi-res scans weren't very practical at the time. I scanned the pages, digitally pulled out the photos from each page, and then scrapped the too-big scans of the full pages. Nowadays, with storage capacity much cheaper than even a few years ago, I have a couple of external hard drives, each with several hundred gigabytes free for me to fill up with genealogy-related goodness.

Upon discovering the blue photo album, I asked if I could scan it, as well as rescan the red and brown albums (the beige one was done just recently, so I have good quality scans of the full pages for that one). Grandma was nice enough to say yes, so the last few days I have been steadily working my way through these albums again. I guess it's been a while since I've looked at a lot of these pictures, because a lot of them don't look familiar at all. Some of them I know very well, and it's been fun to see them back in context.

However, I made an interesting discovery while redoing the red book. I don't know if I saw this last time or not, but a lot of the pictures in one section of the book are only taped down on one side. When you flip the picture over - there's writing! Some of them have a short description of what was photographed, but some of them have little stories or funny comments about the photo or people in it.

Here's one example. The picture above is my great-grandfather, Charles Wagner, aka Pop. He looks like he's taking a nap in a chair by a pool. This was one of a series of photos taken at a hotel called the Hacienda, I think near Las Vegas. On the back of the photo was written (spelling and punctuation in original):

At the Hacienda pool pop said, I'll pretend I'm taking a sun bath, just as he layed down & I was about to snap his picture, the sun went behind a cloud, the wind came up, & it was cold. You can see by the ripply water in the pool, how the wind was blowing

That just really stood out to me. It just felt like I was there, in a little scene with my great-grandparents just trying to take a silly picture, and mother nature not cooperating. Once again, my great-grandmother has given me something so amazing in these photos. I'm glad I got a chance to give this album a second look.

Let the analysis begin!

2011-03-02T22:49:00.000-08:00

I'm in process of scanning all those documents I got from the Lutheran church up in Manitoba. I've scanned about 30 of the little slips of paper with different church records on them - confirmations, weddings, deaths, births, and a couple that I'm still not quite sure what they are. But I've seen a couple of very interesting snippets of data so far - my great-grandmother Augusta Joseph was one of the witnesses for her sister Olga's wedding to Gustav Hoeft in 1906. She also appears in 1908 on some kind of record related to a marriage for her cousin Olga Joseph (daughter of Gottlieb and Justine (Foth) Joseph) to Philip Oswald. Then in 1912, after she'd married Charles Steffan, she was one of the godparents for her cousin Wilhelmina Magdalena Liona Siegel, daughter of Wilhelmina (Joseph) and Karl Siegel.

It's awesome to have more records of my great-grandmother like this. I mean, before this I'd found her death certificate, a couple of censuses, two marriage records, her passenger list to America from Liverpool, her family's border crossing from Manitoba to the US, and a newspaper mention for her first marriage. But all those other records, at least to me, didn't really connect her to her family the way these church records do. The other records (except for the marriages) report where she was at a given time. These records show how she interacted with her relatives, participating in church ceremonies with them. For some reason, it just seems to make her come more alive in my mind.

In short, I think these records are going to teach me a lot about my family. I'll probably need to take my time with them, get them translated, analyze them, and probably do a little background research into what these ceremonies meant for them as Lutherans. Let the analysis begin!

PS I'm probably going to create a Flickr account for these. If you want to see them and download them for yourself, check back in a day or three and I should have an update to this post with the web address for the album.

It came!!!!

2011-02-27T00:34:00.000-08:00

The waiting is over! The package of records from Christ Evangelical Church in Manitoba came today! It's got a few scans of pages from the Tracks of Time book, a copy of an article about my great-grandmother's sister Olga and her first husband, Gus Haft, and a whole BUNCH of church records. Some of them I can tell what they are - baptism records, death records, even a couple of marriages. Some of them, Adrene (the church employee who copied these all for me) wrote 'confirmation' on, and there's quite a few of them (including my great-grandmother, Augusta Joseph). I'll have to take some time to scan them, label them, organize them, and then add them to my database. But what a treasure trove! I did notice there are a lot of Oswalds and other descendants of Gottlieb Joseph, my great-great-grandfather's brother. That makes sense, as his family stayed in the area, and he had a lot of kids (10 or so). But I'm very much looking forward to seeing what I can learn from these records, and to sharing them with my cousins, my grandpa, my parents, and any other interested parties. And just to give you a taste of what I'm looking at, here's the birth and baptism record for Gustav Hoeft, my first cousin twice removed.

Slim pickins, postwise

2011-02-24T15:24:00.000-08:00

First, let me apologize for not posting in so long. It's not like I haven't been doing genealogy - quite the contrary. But I've also been swamped at work, and busy working on my latest ProGen class assignment (a locality guide, which is WAY more complicated than I thought). However, I do have some quickies to write about:

1. The church records from Manitoba are on their way!! Thanks to some help financing the research from a very generous relative, the records have been paid for, and should be arriving any day now. I can't wait!!!

2. My great-grandmother Rosie was waaaaay more photo-prolific than I ever imagined. I've written before about the three albums I've scanned and (thanks to my grandmother's patient help) identified, totaling over 1300 pictures. My last visit to my grandparents' house to celebrate my grandpa's 85th birthday turned up even more pictures. There's a blue album (shorter than the red, brown, and beige ones) devoted to pictures of my great-grandfather Charles Wagner's involvement with the Technocracy movement. I've read a little on it, but need to do some more digging.

3. Not only that, there's a couple little boxes FULL of literally hundreds more pictures of Grandma Blossom's family. One box is broken out by decades, and if I remember right (I only had time to briefly glimpse the contents) the other was just a jumble of stuff from the 40s through the present. My mom (who is awesome at big projects) has graciously volunteered to scan the individual photos in the boxes, and then go back and label them with whatever was written on the back by my great-grandma. I may still need to do some additional identification, so hopefully Grandma Blossom doesn't mind a few more hours of who's who.

4. I also got to see for the first time a portrait style photo of Grandma Blossom as a young woman, and one of Papa Fred as a 17-year-old Marine. Very good quality photos, that I didn't know existed.

5. I FINALLY finished annotating my database with all the easy-to-cull data from Tracks of Time, a book on the area of Glenella, Manitoba where lots of my Joseph ancestral relatives lived. I'm now working my way through the stack of marriage licenses I found at the Montana County Marriages database at FamilySearch.org. If only I could stop myself from going after more...

6. Speaking of which, while trying to do research for my locality guide assignment, I took a moment to just play around with one of the newspaper databases I was looking at, and found the marriage announcement for my mom and dad. It included the same photo that's in their framed wedding photos on their wall at home. That's probably the most recent record I've ever found in my genealogy research.

7. One of my wife's relatives recently started a Facebook group for descendant's of my wife's grandfather, Walter Allen McFarland Sr. The response has been awesome! Lots of Lisa's cousins and a few aunts have joined and posted who they are, how they're related to Walter, and who they're married to and who their kids are. It's been awesome to see how interested everyone is in each other's lives, and how they're really coming together, even planning a reunion for next year. Lisa and I put together a little chart (well, it's actually a pretty big chart!) of everyone that's posted so far, and how they're all related.

8. And one of the biggest highlights of my genealogical career was my grandpa's birthday party previously mentioned. Aside from having a lot of relatives there (which is always a good time with my family), for a birthday present my mom (and the rest of our family) gave my grandpa a DVD set of all his old home movies, completely and professionally digitized. He had over 50 reels of old home videos going back to the mid 50s (including my dad's 7th birthday party!) and we just sat and watched a few of them for a couple hours. Everyone just busted up laughing at some of them, and told stories and backstories about them, and I just had the best time I've ever had with my relatives (even when they started playing the videos from karaoke nights at the reunion back in 2000). I got a short recording of everyone just laughing at one video, and it's awesome to hear. Really brings home why I do genealogy - it's all about family, and just remembering and rejoicing in being a family.

Treasure Chest Thursday - The Joseph Family Bible

2011-02-03T23:56:00.000-08:00

As a genealogist, I've heard several stories about how much information can be found in an old family Bible. I got another taste this month of just how rich family Bible information can really be. Just recently, a cousin of mine sent me photocopies of some pages from a family Bible I never knew existed - a Bible from the Joseph family (the family of my grandpa Fred Gibson's mother, Augusta (Joseph) (Staffan) Gibson). Jim Joseph, a relative of mine up in Canada, was nice enough to scan copies of the family bible pages his mother has and email them to me. Once I received the pages, I was suddenly grateful for the class I took at BYU on reading old German script - the Bible and all the entries were in German! For some reason, I guess because they were in the New World, I just assumed the Bible and family data entries would be in English. I'm not sure who wrote the entries, but all the births look to me as though one person did them in one sitting. The handwriting is all very neat, done in the same style and (from what I can tell) the same ink and pen. I'm not making myself out to be an expert on handwriting (you'd know I'm not if you've been unfortunate enough to have read something I've written). I just mean there's no noticeable variation in the entries that suggests a different person wrote it, or with a different type of pen.

Fortunately, since I don't know German except for the words 'born' 'baptism' and 'hello', there's a transcription and translation that Jim included for me. One of the most interesting things about these pages is the note written at the top of the page for births. According to the translation provided, it says "This Bible was bought in Winnipeg, Man., Canada on 11 February 1901 for $5." So the information in the Bible can't be any older than that date. It's just fascinating to think of one of my ancestor's at a store in Winnipeg, picking up this German Bible, going home with it and starting to make all these entries.

The births listed are those of Ludwig Joseph, my great-great-great-grandfather, his wife Justine (Witt) Joseph, and five of their children - Gottlieb, Justine, Wilhelmine, Ludwig, and Michael (I did find it interesting that Michael was spelled in German the same as it is in English). One thing I noticed immediately - my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, was not listed. I had wished to see him in there, and was a little disappointed he wasn't. So that struck me as a little odd that one of their children had been left out.

Another thing that gave me pause was the gap between Gottlieb and Justine. Gottlieb and his father are listed as being born in Kikoler Kempe, and Gottlieb's mother Justine as born in Reischewo. I have no idea where those two places are, so I'll need to email the German-Poland-Volhynia mailing list I'm on for a little help on figuring out where they are. Also, Gottlieb was listed as born in 1862, and Justine in 1875. That's a 13 year gap, which is unusual in most families. My Samuel Joseph was born about 1866, so he would help fill that gap (had he been listed). They also listed the birth of Ludwig (the son) as 1881, ten years later than I had seen listed in the 1911 Canadian census (though this wouldn't be the first time the census was wrong). Jim had also mentioned Ludwig and Justine had another child, Henry or Heinrich, and he wasn't listed either. These pages were giving me almost as many questions as I already had about the family!

However, not all of the data was previously unknown or disagreed with other records I'd found previously. The birth dates for Justine and Wilhelmine matched exactly with their birth records as given in the registers I'd found on FamilySearch in Lutheran Church Book Duplicates database. The birth place for Justine and Wilhelmine (they were both born Ulanowka, in the Volhynia region of modern-day Ukraine) matched up as well. What's more, the information in the Bible list of births led me to find the birth record of Ludwig Joseph (the son) in the Lutheran Church Book Duplicates database (which you can see in the above picture). The SGGEE-VKP (short for Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe - Volhynia, Kiev and Podolia Parishes) birth database had Ludwig's name backwards, listing him as Joseph Ludwig, rather than Ludwig Joseph. I had a feeling I should look for Ludwig's mom's name (Justine Witt) and not his dad's, and search for the birth date, and there he was. So the data in the Bible indeed proved accurate on everything I could test against in original records from Russia. This was very exciting!

The main thing I learned from this family Bible - the Josephs were accurate in their family information, at least as recorded in the births page (I haven't yet started to analyze the info from the page on deaths). The names, places, and dates they recorded in this Bible matched up exactly with original documents back in Russia. I think I now know where my grandpa Fred gets his amazing memory. I hope some of those memory genes have filtered down to me, because the handwriting genes sure didn't.

Update: I received word back from a couple folks on the German-Poland-Volhynia mailing list, and they have located Kikoler Kempe. It's also known as Kepa Kikolska, Poland, as shown on this map. http://bit.ly/fBM4p7 This is where my 3rd-great-grandfather Ludwig Joseph was born in 1837! Thanks to Jan Textor and Jerry Frank on the mailing list for the info.

Update 2: I zoomed out on the map for Kepa Kikolska, and noticed it wasn't far north of Warsaw, which is where I originally heard Tina (Joseph) Leistikow was born (though I later found out it was Ulanowka, as noted above). So the fact that the family did live near Poland around the time the kids were born did filter down the generations. Not only that, on Samuel Joseph's death certificate, his daughter Pat Walsh gave his birthplace as Torun, Germany. As far as I've been able to find, there is no Torun, Germany, but there IS a Torun, Poland, a not-too-unreasonable distance northwest of - Kepa Kikolska! It just keeps coming full circle, what I learned years ago is coming into a brand new light. I LOVE genealogy!!!!

Update 3: Thanks to Jerry Frank and Hannes Werner of the mailing list, I now know that Reischewo is a town some miles south of Kep Kikolska, also known as Rajszew or Rayszewo.

Tombstone Tuesday - the life of Loring Oliver Pushard

2011-01-26T13:46:00.000-08:00

While working on an assignment for my ProGen class, I created a timeline of known events in the life of Loring Oliver Pushard, the great-great-grandfather of my cousins Jimmy and Tommy Pushard and Maryanne Tatterson. I found it really interesting, so I thought I'd post it here.

* Sep 1844 – born in Phippsburg, Sagadahoc county, Maine to parents also both born in Maine (US Federal 1900 census, Loring Pushard death record)
*23 Jan 1862 – enlisted as Private in Company B 15th Maine Infantry (1890 Veteran’s schedule)
*25 Jan 1864 – discharged from enlistment (1890 Veteran’s schedule)
*abt 1866 – married Abby Ellen Rines (US Federal 1900 census, Howard Pushard’s birth record)
*abt 1867 – birth of daughter Annie M. Pushard in Maine (1870 US Federal Census)
*Between 1867-Feb 1870 – family moved from Maine to Massachusetts (1870 US Federal Census)
*Feb 1870 – birth of son Daniel R. Pushard in Massachusetts (1870 US Federal Census)
*1870 – lived in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts with wife Abbie, daughter Annie, son Daniel (1870 US Federal Census)
*Between 1870-1887 – births of five children, deaths of two children, family moved back to Maine (US Federal 1900 census)
*Apr 25, 1888 – birth of son Howard Lincoln Pushard in Wiscasset, Lincoln, Maine (Howard Pushard’s birth record)
*1890 – lived in Wiscasset, Lincoln, Maine (1890 Veteran’s schedule)
*1900 – lived in Wiscasset town, Lincoln co., Maine with wife Abby and son Howard (US Federal 1900 census)
*24 Jan 1907 – died in Gardiner, Kennebec, Maine (Loring Pushard death record)
*Probably Jan-Feb 1907 – burial in Greenlawn Cemetery, Wiscasset, Lincoln, Maine (Wiscasset in Pownalborough, p.400; http://www.findagrave.com/)

It came!

2011-01-18T21:19:00.000-08:00

I blogged last week about learning of a photo of my great-great-grandfather John Gibson. Well, thanks to the promptness of Becca Kohl and the US Postal Service, the photo came today! It was taken in 1891 in front of an old brick building, my guess would be the police station, and there are 23 men in the picture, with John Gibson on the far right of the photo. I love the style of the uniforms, it reminds me of a typical constable from an old British movie or something. The force has one chief, William Sims, and one sargeant, Sam Nicholson, both in the front row. All the other officers are named without title or rank.
Now that I've seen the photocopy, I'm itching to get my hands on a digital print of the real actual photograph. It's a good thing payday is this week, I don't think I could wait much longer! And now, for your viewing pleasure, the photograph:

Lightning strikes again!

2011-01-15T08:16:00.000-08:00

Last Christmas, I gave my Gibson grandparents each a photo family tree, with pictures and names of their direct ancestors, as far back as I had them. The gifts went over pretty well, and I was happy they were appreciated. While looking at his tree, my grandpa Fred said he knew of a picture of his grandfather, John Gibson, that he'd seen in Helena once. John Gibson was at one point a policeman in Helena, and a photo had been taken of the Helena policemen and put on display at the state archives. That got me interested, so I wrote to the Montana Historical Society and asked if they knew of any archives in their possession or in local libraries that might have a copy of that photograph. They got back to me a few days later, saying they'd forward my request to their Photo Archives department. That was back on the 7th, and I got busy with other things and forgot about it.
Then yesterday, I got an email from Becca Kohl, a Photograph Archivist at the Society, saying she'd located the photograph of Helena's policemen from 1892, with John Gibson listed as one of them! She said she'd also checked the Helena city directories from 1892 through 1899, and 1902. In them, John was listed as a teamster in 1892, a policeman in 1893-1894, a clerk in 1895-1899, and a boilermaker in 1902. This was welcome news as well. I'd found John as a teamster in Ancestry's database of Helena city directories, but only in 1891. I'd also found him in a later directory working as a clerk, but forgot to note the year the directory was published (this was back in the early days of my genealogical research - I know better now!). Ms. Kohl's information now tells me that directory was from 1895-1899. The other entries I'd never heard of, but am now very interested in getting copies of them.
But the best part of all - Ms. Kohl is sending me a copy of the photograph! I can't wait to get it and share it here, and with my family. Once again, my grandpa is dead-on about information regarding his family. What would I do without him?

Research into the Pushard family

2011-01-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

I got an interesting request last week from my cousin, Jimmy Pushard. He knows I've done research on the ancestry of our grandparents, Fred and Blossom Gibson, and wanted to know if I'd be willing to look into the history of his other grandparents, specifically his dad David Pushard's side. I've been interested in knowing more about that side of the family, since all I know personally is Jimmy and his sister, Maryann, and his brother, Tommy. So I asked him what he knew of the Pushards, and he said his grandfather's name was Earl Pushard, his grandmother was Virginia Sterle, and that was about it.

Armed with all that information, I went online. I didn't know if the Pushards had a long history in Montana, and since I was starting with people too recent to be in the 1930 census, I went to the FamilySearch Montana, County Marriages, 1865-1950 database. Nothing came up for Pushard, which I kind of expected, as Jimmy's parents wouldn't have gotten married until the 1960s. I searched for Sterle, and found a marriage for Joseph Sterle, son of John Sterle and Frances ____ to Annabelle Young, an apparent sister of Ruth Young who married my great-grandfather Jim Harris after he and my great-grandma Edna Craddock divorced. I still haven't determined whether Joseph is related to the Pushard-Sterle family I'm related to, but it is an interesting possibility I intend to pursue later.

Since that didn't pan out like I'd hoped, I went to Ancestry.com and tried their newspaper database. I stuck with Montana newspapers only, and did a search for Pushard. I found a baptism notice for Charles Hoskin, son of Charles and Mrs Charles Hoskin. (That's one thing that I find a little peculiar about old newspapers - the wife is very often identified only as Mrs. Hoskin or Mrs. Charles Hoskin, not by her own first name). The article said baby Charles was sponsored by aunt Linda Hoskin and uncle Gerald Pushard. That caught my eye, because Jimmy had mentioned having an uncle Gerald, and I hadn't thought to search for him. (Note - sideways genealogy does pay off!!) It also said that the baby's grandparents attended - paternal grandparents Mr. and Mrs. William Hoskin, and maternal grandparents Mr. and Mrs. John Sterle. Now my ears really perked up! Uncle Gerald Pushard + grandpa and grandma Sterle = good chance of a connection!

The goodies didn't end there. It said the baby's great-grandparents were Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Coulombe and Howard Pushard, all of Gardiner, Maine. The Coulombe name I didn't recognize, but the Pushard name I sure did. I asked my grandpa what he knew about the Pushards, and he didn't know that family too well (seems my aunt was only married to David Pushard for a few years) but he thought they were from Maine. I've written before about my grandpa's amazing ability to recite generations of descendants from anyone really connected to the family, so I really trusted his instincts on the Maine connection.

So I went back to the FamilySearch beta site, and found they had a database of Maine marriages, from 1771 to 1907. I searched for Virginia and Earl's marriage in that database - but no luck. I searched for Virginia and John Sterle's marriage - but no luck. I went back to Ancestry, and searched their Maine marriages 1892-1996 database - and hit paydirt. There was a marriage in 1948 of John Sterle to two Virginias - on the same day. One was Virginia Pushard, the other was Virginia Coulombe. It turns out, Coulombe was her maiden name (I have since found her birth record confirming her parents were Joseph Coulombe and Annie Peaslee). Thus she married John Sterle under the name of Virginia Pushard, and the license or whatever record this was taken from likely mentioned her maiden name of Coulombe as well. This record helped explain the names in Charles Hoskins baptism record, too. If Virginia Coulombe and Earl Pushard divorced, with Virginia remarrying to John Sterle, then it was Virginia and Earl's daughter (whose name I still don't know) that gave birth to Charles Hoskin. And it was Virginia and Earl's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Coulombe and Howard Pushard, listed as baby Charles' great-grandparents. It took a few minutes and some mapping it out on a spreadsheet to get it all straight in my head, but once I had figured out what I had, I was feeling pretty excited by this point. What I'd learned up to this point was:

Earl's father was Howard Pushard

Earl and Virigina Coulombe had married and divorced in Maine

Virginia had remarried in Maine to John Sterle, and then moved to Montana with David, Gerald, and an unnamed daughter

Howard was still living in Gardiner, Maine when his great-grandson Charles Hoskin was born

Not content to stop there, I kept going through the newspapers to see what else I could find. It was very interesting! There was an article in 1960 about Gerald Pushard enlisting in the Army, where he would train in cable splicing, and a follow-up article about his completing the cable splicing course. I also found articles in 1964 about his marriage to Carol Parnell, complete with photograph. Seems the Pushards kept popping up in the news, which made for easy tracing of the family.

Now that I knew a bit more about the family, I thought I'd try to go back to the 1930 census and find Earl and his father Howard, where Earl would have been a young man. I knew Howard was living in Gardiner, Maine in 1958, and hoped that he'd stayed there for a long enough time to find him in the census. As it turns out, that's exactly what he did.

I found Howard's family in Gardiner City, Kennebec county, Maine. It was a pretty large family - Howard, his wife Bessie (which was new info for me), and eight children - Earl, Clyde, Kenneth, Frances, Gerald (uncle of the Gerald mentioned above), Donald, Grace, and Clifton. The kids ranged in age from 17 (Earl) to just over 2 (Clifton). I haven't done any research yet to know what happened to the rest of the kids, who they married, etc. But it seems that there were a lot Pushards in Maine to do research on, from this generation alone.

I went back a decade to find Howard and family in the 1920 census, and again struck gold. This time, the family consisted of Howard, Bessie, Earl, Clyde, Kenneth, Frances, and the father-in-law Laforest Rines, giving a possible maiden name for Bessie. The ages all matched, the names and birth order matched, and the father-in-law was an added bonus.

There was a bit of a twist, however, when I went to look for Howard in the 1910 census. I have found Howard, but in this census he's married to a woman named Ina, with a baby whose name looks like Italy, but I hope isn't. So it seems Bessie Rines wasn't his first wife, but his second. A search of Ancestry.com's Maine Birth Records 1621-1922 database showed he and Ina had two children after "Italy", a girl named Elma, and another girl whose name was not recorded. Finding out what happened to those children and Ina is, of course, another project entirely. Ancestry's Maine Marriage Records 1705-1922 database confirmed Howard's marriage to an Ina Pollard (though the birth records for their second two children list her maiden name as Ida James, with the birth information being the same), and another marriage record of Howard to Bessie Rines states Howard was divorced and this was his second marriage.

Ancestry had one more find for me that night - a birth record for Howard Pushard. It gave Howard's full name as Howard Lincoln Pushard, born April 25, 1888 to Loring Oliver Pushard and Abbie Ellen Rines. It appears that it's a delayed birth record, as the date the record was filed by his mother with the local clerk was July 6, 1942. The record states that Howard was the 8th child, but by the time of filing only four other children were still living. That matched what was given in the 1900 census, where it was stated Loring and Abbie had had eight children and six were then living (two apparently died between 1900 and 1942), with only Howard living with his parents.

To sum up what I found:

Loring Pushard is the earliest Pushard ancestor found so far. He was born in September 1844 in Maine. He married Abbie Rines, and they had 8 children, last of which was Howard Lincoln Pushard.

Howard married Ina Pollard and had three girls with her. They divorced and he remarried to Bessie Rines, with whom he had eight more children, with Earl Pushard being the oldest child from this marriage.

Earl married Virginia Coulombe, daughter of Joseph Coulombe and Annie Peaslee, and had at least three children - David, Gerald, and a daughter. Earl and Virginia divorced, and Virginia remarried, and moved with the kids to Montana, as stated above.

David married my aunt Eileen, and had three kids, one of which was my cousin Jimmy, the fifth generation of the Pushard family as I have so far traced it.

Not a bad find for a couple of days' research, eh? Now to enter it all into my database and stop doing research for a while, until I can at least get caught up on all I've found and received over the last few weeks.

Surprise Sunday - More Lena Beilstein info comes to light!

2011-01-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

I've had another case of genealogical serendipity this week. I've been interrupting my main project of going through my files due to scanning some of my wife's family photos (which project I had to interrupt due to the space it's taking up on my hard drive), and thought I'd go back and check the New FamilySearch database of Montana marriages. Well, while I was there I saw a new database - Montana, County Marriages 1865-1950. Very similar to the other database, but with a key difference - this one has images!! So I went in, dug around, and found marriage records (licenses and certificates) for my Lena Beilstein to David Briscoe and Clarence Johnson, her first two husbands. I thought I'd keep digging, and see if I could find more - and I did. I now have marriage records for her marriages to James (Ed) Layfield and to Charles Roper (not Clarence, as I previously thought his name was). It turns out, both of these marriages were in the 1930s - Layfield in 1932, and Roper in 1937. I still have yet to fully analyze everything in these records, because I got sidetracked by another thought - what if I could find marriage records for her daughters? Thinking that they would list their mother by her married name, I thought it might help me pin down how long she stayed with each husband a little better.

So off I went in search of the marriages for each of her four daughters, Edna, Elsie, Grace, and Hazel. This took some doing, as each daughter was married multiple times (one daughter married four times, the others three each). To make a long story short, I eventually found 9 of the combined 13 marriages for these four sisters. (Elsie married at least once in Nevada, so I found her marriage record in a Nevada database, so I guess technically I've found 10 of the 13, but that one was just an index and gave no info other than the names of Elsie and her husband Lester Fleming). I then pulled up Excel and made a little spreadsheet, with columns for the name of the daughter being analyzed, husband in the marriage, year of the marriage, and Lena's name as given in the marriage record. I even included the four marriage records I had for Lena, just to see what I could see.

The results weren't as good as I'd hoped for, but did offer one interesting new piece of information. Of the 13 marriage records analyzed (9 from the daughters, 4 from Lena), seven gave Lena's name as Beilstein, though four of those seven only asked for the bride's mother's maiden name, not current/married name. Three more marriage records gave her name as Lena Craddock, though all of those were from 1945-1946, about 20 years after Lena and Ernie Craddock had split (which is interesting on its own). But the new piece of info I discovered was from Hazel's marriage to Arthur Krutar in 1931. It gives Lena's name as Lena White, a surname I'd not heard associated with Lena before. Lena actually had to sign the record, as Hazel was only 17 at the time, and needed a parent's signature authorizing their minor child to marry. Lena did so, and gave her name as Lena White in this signature box, as well in the section for witnesses to the marriage. The other witnesses included a John C. White, giving a possible source for Lena's name change.

The puzzle is complicated a little by the fact that my Grandma has never heard of John White, or of Lena going by Lena White; the fact that I can't find Lena in the 1930 census to confirm this John White was her husband; and the fact that Lena married Ed Layfield in 1932, and gave her name as Emily Beilstein (Emily was her middle name), and was the only time in a marriage record (hers or otherwise) where her middle name was used without her first name. So I'm still not sure how Lena became Lena White, when she stopped, or why she used her middle name for that one marriage to Ed Layfield.

Like I've said before, the more I find on Lena, the more it throws a new spin on everything I've found before. I still want to take more time to look through all these marriage records and look at the names of the witnesses, see if there are any family witnesses, and where the marriages took place, see what it gives for Lena's residence at the time. I swear, I have never seen an ancestor's life as complicated to figure out as Lena Beilstein's. But that's what makes it interesting, right?

Christmas gifts- tangible and intangible

2010-12-27T13:14:00.000-08:00

Another Christmas has come and gone, and this year was chock full of genealogical goodies! For starters, I put together a simple photo pedigree for each of my dad's parents, using pictures for each ancestor I had a photo of and their name, with no other details. I wanted to do something simple and clean that would show visually some of the results of the last few years' worth of research. For my grandpa Fred, I only had pictures of his parents, his maternal grandfather, and that grandfather's parents. But it was still cool to see them all lined up in a pedigree format. I also included a picture of a family get together (I think it was Papa Fred's birthday?) where all five of his kids, and a bunch of his grandkids and great-grandkids were all together. To me, it all represented my grandpa being in the middle of this genealogical crossroads, as son, grandson, and great-grandson on one side, and father, grandfather, and great-grandfather on the other, kind of like Elder Gerrit Gong talked about during the last General Conference.

For my grandma Blossom, I've been able to collect a lot more pictures of her ancestry, with photos of her parents, her maternal grandmother, and up to five generations back on her dad's side, back to Lewis Parks Shute and Esther (Mitchell) Sanford (they weren't married, but their kids, Alexander Blood Shute and Letitia Sanford, were). It was really something to be able to show my grandma visually who her ancestors were, and how they are linked to her.

I'm not very skilled yet at putting together projects like this, but I think they both came off very well. I think I need to amend them a bit, adding in birth and death dates, and probably some kind of arrow or line linking each generation to the next. But it would be interesting to try this for my mom's parents, though I'd have to get more pictures from my mom and grandma to do my maternal grandfather's side, as I have hardly any pictures on that side at all. But who knows, there may be an artistic side to me after all! Even if there isn't, I can always lean on my wife and get her to help. :)

Another tangible genealogical gift or 5 I received this Christmas was the Clooz program to help me organize all my genealogy documents, and a set of books from my purchasing plan to complete the my basic shelf of genealogy reference books. I got:

Locating Lost Family Members & Friends

BCG Genealogical Standards Manual

Producing a Quality Family History

Genealogy as Pastime and Profession

So a big THANK YOU! to my parents for supporting their family historian son. :)

Now for the intangible gift. Late Christmas night, my folks pulled out an old cardboard box that had an old movie projector, and some old reels of film. Turns out it was old home movies going back to the late 70s and early 80s. Some of the movies were from before I was born, even one of my parents' rehearsal dinner. There was footage of my great-grandma Edna, great-grandma Rosie, and me and my sister as little kids back when we still lived in Montana. But the real treat was getting to hear my parents and grandparents talk about who was in the movies, naming people they saw in them, and reminiscing about things they'd done with them. I wanted to just sit there and video tape the old movies being played, so I could record the stories they were all sharing about those old videos. Maybe I'll get to do that next time, after the movies have been transferred to DVD (which my parents plan on doing for all the old videos they have). I really look forward to that, as there are some movies that go back into the 60s that I've never seen before, and can't wait to watch.

So, all in all, it was a fantastic Christmas. Got a lot of reading to do, research to do, and movies to watch. Let's get started!

Genealogy and history - a complementary education

2010-12-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

I've known for a long time that learning more about history can help me in my genealogical research. Learning about world wars, flu epidemics, immigration routes, and such has really helped me understand my family's history and make sense of it. However, I recently had the reverse happen - studying my genealogy has helped me learn more about history.

A couple weeks ago I found several dozen newspaper mentions of my great-grandmother's sister Grace and her second husband, Ed Cote (I can't call them articles as most of the occurrences of the names are tiny one-paragraph blurbs about who visited who over the weekend). I downloaded all the newspaper pages, but didn't have a way at the time of marking where on the page the Cotes were mentioned. Thus, I've been spending most of my genealogy time lately going back through these newspapers and highlighting the sections where my family names pop up. It's been pretty fun to look at some of the other articles in the papers while I hunt for Ed and Grace's names, seeing various advertisements and announcements of the local clubs, churches, etc.

One article caught my eye in particular, titled "Special Event Given at Lima." It was about an Americanism program given at the Masonic Hall in Lima, put on by the Masons and Eastern Stars (another fraternal society). They had a Reverend Beard give an opening and closing prayer, with patriotic songs sung by a quartet, and some speeches or talks given, and refreshments served afterwards. What was different about this event, though, is it said at the end of meeting, the audience recited the "American Creed" and sang "God Bless America." The only creed I knew offhand was the Nicene Creed, so this interested me. A quick Google search revealed that the American Creed was written by William Tyler Page in 1917, as an entry in a patriotic contest. It's only 100 words, so here's the full text of the creed:

I believe in the United States of America, as a government of the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.
I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.

I was amazed! A very short, but powerful, statement of belief in the Constitution and the Republic, which was apparently formally adopted by the House of Representatives in 1919 or so. And apparently the public at large was at least aware of it some 45 years later, reciting it at that patriotic rally in a small town in Montana, perhaps even from memory. And I'd never heard of it until stumbling upon a mention of it in a newspaper from 1964. I even went onto Facebook and asked a few of my more politically involved friends if they'd heard of the American Creed, and they all said no.

It made me realize - as time goes on, it's not just a family's history that can be obscured and lost. A nation's history, unless carefully preserved and passed on, can be lost just as easily. It makes me feel such a weight of responsibility to pass on to my kids, not just their family heritage, but their country's history and legacy as well. Let's hope I'm up to the task, on both counts.

Treasure Chest Thursday - Newspaper Overload!

2010-12-16T13:40:00.000-08:00

I've written earlier about finding newspaper articles about ancestors and their family and friends, and what a surprise that was. Up until earlier this year, I'd all but given up hope on historical newspapers. But the last few months have been very good to me, on my Sitzman line especially.

As I was finishing up my work on sourcing my Craddock family files, I was transcribing some obituaries for my great-grandmother's sisters' husbands, and stopped on the one for Edward Cote (he was married to Grace Craddock, as her second husband). I thought, why don't I go online to Ancestry and see if they pop up in the newspaper databases they have. So I did. What I found was over 50 newspaper mentions of Ed and Grace! Though Grace usually only appears as Mrs. Ed Cote. But I suddenly had a much more vivid picture of the social life of my great-grandma's sister - visiting her in-laws almost weekly for dinner, celebrating birthdays with them, wedding receptions they visited, parties and events put on by Ed's company (he worked for the phone company in Twin Bridges, MT), and social organizations they were involved in. The papers span about 15 years, going from the late 50s to early 70s. This was WAY more than I expected to find.

Now I get to go through all these and document them. I don't think I'll ever get finished with my documents review project at this rate. :)

Brandt's Rants is officially Ancestor Approved!

2010-12-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

Until this week, I didn't know there even were awards given to genealogy blogs, except maybe those given out by ISHFWE and other such organizations. But the kind writer of the Nolichucky Roots blog (a great blog to read, btw) has given me and nine other bloggers the Ancestors Approved award. This award was created by the author of the Ancestors Live Here blog, Leslie Ann, as a way to let other geneabloggers know how much their stories, tips, and tricks are appreciated.

Per Leslie Ann's instructions, upon receiving this award, I am asked to list ten things I have learned about my ancestry that have surprised, humbled, or enlightened me, and to pass it on to other geneablogs I feel are doing their ancestors proud.

I'll start with what I have learned about my ancestors. Fair warning - I tend to ramble (as the title of this blog suggests) so I won't blame you if you skim or skip these. :)

1. Their lives were far more complex and involved than I'll ever be able to fully understand. It seems every time I find a new record or newspaper article about someone, I see something about their life that hints at friendships, associations, and experiences I can only guess at.

2. How precious pictures are, and how much you can learn from them. I've blogged a couple times about the massive stock of photos taken and kept by my paternal grandmother's family, and I still have so many photos to really go back and analyze fully (there are 838, after all!). I do find myself wishing more of my ancestors had passed down photos, but I am grateful for those that have survived, both in my family and in the families of distant cousins willing to share them.

3. The effect one person's life can have on generations of their descendants. After studying Lena's life, for example, the lives of her children and grandchildren make so much more sense. Her experiences with marriage and family really affected the way her daughters' lives all turned out, which in turn affected how her granddaughters were raised, and so on down to me. Some descendants went through similar cycles of marriage, and some went in the direct opposite direction from what happened in earlier generations.

4. Not everything is on the internet, but a LOT is. Finding all those old pictures of the orphanage my grandmother and great-grandmother lived in was a shock. Those pictures took a family story and made it a historical event for me.

5. My grandparents know far more about our family than I'll be able to plumb from them, even if I sat them down and interviewed them for hours and hours and hours. It's just not fair that I can't simply download all their memories onto my hard drive, but I'm doing the best I can to capture their stories and experiences to pass on.

6. My ancestors weren't perfect. I know that should be obvious, but for the longest time I guess I was still operating under the "not in my family" delusion. It's been surprising, even shocking, to learn what some of my ancestors did.

7. One of the biggest shocks was finding out my 4th-great-grandmother, Lucinda (Berry) Harris was a slaveholder. I knew her father Benjamin Berry was, and her husband's grandfather Harrison Harris was as well. But to find that one branch of my family owned slaves right up until the Civil War started (and possibly until it ended) was a big surprise.

8. I've met some amazing cousins recently that have opened up whole new areas of research and interest for me. These cousins have details, stories, even pictures, that I never knew existed.

9. Until recently, I've been focusing on my own research. But I've also had the opportunity to work as a volunteer at the Heritage Quest Research Library in Sumner, WA, and to help out a friend that I may be related to. I really enjoy helping other people find answers to their questions and seeing them do the genealogy happy dance when they get a breakthrough.

10. The most humbling thing I've learned is - I've only begun to scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg that is my family. I've made a lot of progress, this year especially, but every step forward shows me a whole new road to be explored, mapped, documented, and preserved. I can only hope I live long enough to get some of these roads mapped!

Now to bestow the Ancestor Approved award on the blogs I think are doing the best job. Apologies to them if they've already received it. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Elyse's Genealogy Blog

2. The Genealogy Gems News Blog

3. Your Genetic Genealogist

4. Dick Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

5. Geneablogie

6. The Generations Project Blog

7. Keeper of the Records

8. Geneamusings

9. Randy Seaver's Geneabloggers

Thanks again to Nolichucky Roots, and kudos to all these geneabloggers!

Marriage Monday - Lena's Marital Adventures: Epilogue

2010-11-22T14:33:00.000-08:00

After having researched and written so much about Lena herself, I thought it would be interesting to see what I could find on one of her husbands. I chose the husband that I knew most about but wasn't actually related to - Clarence Johnson.

When I say I knew the most about him, I don't mean that until I started researching him I knew a lot about him. I didn't. All I really had on him was
1. a marriage record from the FamilySearch beta site's Montana Marriages, 1889-1947 database
2. a census record of Clarence and Lena living as husband and wife in Montana in 1910

I thought that since every relationship had an effect on Lena and how she lived and raised her kids, and since Clarence is the second best documented relationship I have of Lena's, I could learn more about her by learning more about him. So I spent a couple hours on Ancestry.com to see what I could find. The marriage record from FS said his parents were Merit and Eliza Johnson, and that Clarence was originally from Kansas. That matched the census record's info. So I went off in search of more information on Clarence's family.

Of course, I started with census records. I always start there, as they are the easiest to search and contain a lot of info. I started with the 1900 census, and soon found Clarence living as the oldest of four single children - the others being Jennie, Leo, and Lio - of Merit and Eliza Johnson, though with an older widowed sister named Letta Harvey also listed in the family. Letta also had two children in the household, Eunice and Eustace, aged 4 and 1. So in 1900 Clarence lived in a household of ten people, ages 56 to 1, all living in Clay county, Kansas. I thought that was very interesting, as ten years later he lived with his wife Lena in a household of two. What really interested me, though, is that the 1900 census said Clarence's mom was the mother of 11 children, of which 8 were still living. I wanted to learn more about Clarence's family, and why he had two brothers with apparently the same name, Leo and Lio.

I started poking around other census records, but this time went with the Kansas state censuses. I've been listening to the Genealogy Guys podcast and remembered George saying Ancestry.com had added a huge database of Kansas state census records, so I went there first. George wasn't kidding! I found the Johnson family in the 1885, 1895, 1905, and 1915 censuses pretty quickly. It was through these censuses I found that Lio's name was actually Lionel. The other Leo stayed as Leo in other censuses so that may have been his actual name. I also found that Clarence's sister Lettie remarried to a man named Harry Bender, and stayed near her parents.

I then went back to the federal censuses. Fortunately for me, Merit and Eliza didn't move out of Kansas. It was pretty interesting to see their family grow from 2 kids in 1870, to 5 in 1880 and 1900, then to just Merit and Eliza in 1910. Each census had a different list of children, depending on how old they were, who was still living, and who had married and gone off on their own.

Going back to Clarence, he and Lena split sometime around the end of 1910 (assuming they split when Lena got pregnant with Ernie Craddock's daughter, Edna). Clarence married Ruth Hauscan on 4 Sep 1913, in Havre, Hill county, Montana. They stayed together at least through the 1930 census, and by then had had six children - Hazel, Lila, Leo (probably named after his uncle), Shirl, Laurie, and Kevin.

I haven't found what happened to Clarence after 1930 yet. But it's interesting to look at his life and see what his background was like, and his life after Lena. He came from a big family of 8 kids, his parents stayed in the same state for over 50 years, so (in that regard at least) he came from a stable home, and that seems to be the lifestyle he sought for himself. Clarence and Lena married when Clarence was 25 and Lena was 19, and were only married for 3 years at the most. Clarence, at least until 1930, was married to one more person for at least 17 years, and seemed to just settle down and raise a family.

It kind of makes me wonder what would have happened if Clarence and Lena had stayed together. My great-grandma might have been a Johnson, and not a Craddock (if they'd had any girls that is); I might have had an ancestral line that probably would be much harder to trace (Johnson seems to be much more common than Craddock); and all of this research would have taught me more about blood relatives than simply the family of one my great-great-grandma's ex-husbands. But it was still interesting to learn about them.

Has this ever happened to you?

2010-11-18T09:28:00.001-08:00

I was working on my project last night, taking all the data I've collected over the years and adding it to my database. I'm still working my way through the Craddock family files (that's my maternal great-grandmother Edna Craddock's line). I was working on the family of my great-great-grandfather's sister Edna (whom my great-grandma was named for) and adding source citations for what I'd found, like I've been doing for months. I started looking at the info I had on her kids, and saw that I didn't have very much. Not even a census record or anything, just that I'd gotten the info somehow from my Grandma Sally. Well, being the type of genealogist that I am, I couldn't just let that stand; I had to try to find something in the way of original records on them.

So I trundled (electronically) off to Ancestry.com, and did some quick census searching. I eventually located Edna and her second husband Thomas Morton in the 1930 census, with their sons Lloyd, Hugh, and Hervey (first time I've seen a guy named Hervey and not Harvey). I also found Roy Morton (who I have linked to both Edna's first and second husbands-got some cleanup to do there) and his wife Iona. I even found a marriage record for Hervey on the FamilySearch beta site's Montana marriages database. After entering most of these records in the database (I printed and put the marriage aside, as I wanted to look at that one some more before entering it) I realized I'd spent almost an hour on my little side track. I'd been listening to some of my custom radio stations on Pandora.com, always telling myself "just one more song, after this song I'm done." So here's a tip - don't listen to good music while you're doing genealogy if you're using the music as a timer to tell you when you're done. :)

Then I realized something - that's why this project is taking so long to complete. I started back in May with the Beilsteins, and here I am, six months later on the Craddocks. Yes, I took some time out for the photo album project, but now that I'm back on my original project, I find that I can't just sit down and enter data. I have to keep looking, keep digging, trying to complete the data I'm entering, invariably adding to the mountain ahead of me.

And you know what? I'm totally fine with that. :)

Wisdom Wednesday - Elyse Doerflinger

2010-11-17T14:18:00.000-08:00

For the last few months I've been following Elyse Doeflinger's genealogy blog. She's a very young genealogist, in her mid-20s, but is already VERY good at it. She's already authored two ebooks, Conquering the Paper Monster Once and For All, and A Mini-Guide to Being a Part-Time Genealogist. I recently bought and read these two books and found they had a lot of great information. Best of all, they were both short enough to read in one sitting. I highly recommend both of these books to anyone struggling with time constraints and storage problems in doing your genealogy (like me!).

Tombstone Tuesday - More and more Josephs!

2010-11-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

Since discovering genealogy podcasts a couple months ago, I've been spending my commute time every day listening to Lisa Louise Cook's Genealogy Gems Podcast, and the Genealogy Guys Podcast by George Morgan and Drew Smith. All of them are fantastic genealogists, and I have been able to put their tips and tricks into practice in my own research, with great results. One example of this happened just this week. The Genealogy Guys have talked about using public and academic libraries, WorldCat, Heritage Quest, and other library-related repositories for your research, which is something I (sadly) haven't done too much of the last few years. I've been trying to find a way to get hold of a copy of a book called Tracks of Time, put out by the Glenella History Book Committee about the area in Mantiboa around Winnipeg and Waldersee. My Joseph ancestors lived in that area for a generation or so, so I've been anxious to see this book. But it's too expensive to buy at the mo (over $70), and no local libraries have it. Per their suggestion, I went on WorldCat to look for it, and saw that two libraries did have a copy. Unfortunately, both libraries were in Canada. Not knowing whether interlibrary loan worked internationally, I thought it couldn't hurt to put in a request for the book, so I did. Then I forgot about it and went on with my research.

Then yesterday, I got an email from my library saying the book had arrived and was available for pickup! I went down on my lunchbreak to pick it up - it's huge! Over 800 pages, about 3 inches thick, and probly 12 or 14 inches long. I spent some time going through it last night, and found the story I knew was already in there about Albert Joseph (my great-great-grandfather Samuel Joseph's nephew, son of his brother Gottlieb) and his family. This story was only two pages long, only really gave info on Albert's wife and children, and I already had a copy of it. So I pulled out my database, and started looking at the other surnames attached to the Josephs to see if I could anything on them.

First I looked for Karl Siegel, who married Wilhelmina Joseph (Sam's sister) and found a 3 page story on them, including a picture! It tells the story of how they met at the butcher shop where Karl worked, and how Wilhelmina's father Ludwig Joseph (my 3rd-great-grandfather) oversaw the construction of his daughter's home. It also said the Joseph family (including Mina and Karl) moved to Montana, but found that Mina's health didn't agree with the climate, so they moved back to Manitoba (a story I hadn't heard, and am still trying to find records to confirm).

Next I rememberd that Sam's oldest daughter Olga had married Gustav Haft (also spelled Heft, Hoft, and Hoeft) and looked for them. I found another 3 page story on Gustav's parents, Augusta and August Heft, again with a picture. This was very detailed, and talked about their family's moving from Germany to Russia, and then from Russia to Canada. It also listed Gustav and his siblings and who they married, which gives me more people to do further research on.

After the Hefts, I went back to my database and tried to find another Joseph daughter, and saw Olga Joseph (daughter of Sam's brother Gottlieb) had married a Philip Oswald. I looked in the index and, you guessed it, found a bio of Philip and Olga. By this time I was thinking I was going to end up scanning most of the book. But I had never seen so much info on the Josephs in one place before, and was thrilled to be finding so much.

The only Joseph female I haven't found in the book is Tina Joseph, Sam's sister, who married John Levick in Manitoba. Most of the bios seem to be written by descendants still living in the area, which would explain why Sam and Tina didn't have bios included (both of their families moved to Montana). I've still got a couple more families to look up, so we'll see if there's any more info on them.

The book also has a lot of geographical, social, and historical information in the front. It has several pages of maps of the land allotments, which all show the last name of the original owner. What's more, it also has articles on the cultural groups represented in the area, including one on the Germans that's a translation of an article written in German for a local paper back in 1904. There was another series of articles on the various settlements in the area, including one on Grass River, why my great-great-grandmother Pauline Joseph died. I still need to go back and review the other articles and check for any more that might apply to my family.

One special treat was a listing of all the churches in the area, with articles of varying length on that church's history, leaders, members, and (in some cases) listings of who was buried in that church's cemetery. The longest article was for the Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, attended by the German immigrants to the area, including my ancestors! I gathered this from the church's cemetery listings - my great-great-grandmother Pauline Joseph, as well as her husband Sam's parents Ludwig and Justine Joseph, are all buried in that church's cemetery. I plan on writing or calling the church to see if they have any additional information on them.

All of this came from one book, after making one loan request. I was expecting just the two pages, and maybe a couple more. So far, I've got more than 24 pages of info - bios, church histories, settlement histories - directly relating to the Josephs. And maybe more to come. Can't wait to get home and read!!

Storytime Saturday - Lena Beilstein's marital adventures, part II

2010-10-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

My last post ended with Lena's leaving Ernest for parts unknown, though probably still in Montana. I'd like to back up a little bit and tell a little more about what life was like for Lena being married to Ernest, which might shed some light on why she left. Most of the following stories are family stories, and I'm still looking for historical records to verify the details. But stories I've gathered from various relatives at different times have been consistent, so I feel they are reliable enough to post here.

The family seemed to be doing all right for themselves - the photo at right was taken when Edna (my great-grandma) was a baby, so around 1911. Next to Lena (who's holding Edna) are her mom Amelia and sister Maggie (who must have come up from Nebraska, or else Lena and Edna had gone down to visit). After Ernie and Lena had at least three of their four girls, Ernest moved the family to a little mining town called Southern Cross, Montana, near Georgetown lake. The house they moved into was, compared to their earlier standard of living , pretty rough - the house was a one-room cabin, and had a dirt floor. The scene actually moved Lena to tears. Not too long after moving into the cabin, one of the girls had a birthday coming up. Lena made a big cake to celebrate, and put a towel over it to help it stay fresh for later. When time came to eat the cake, Lena pulled back the towel and found a huge rat, which had eaten a portion of the cake already. Needless to say, she ended up tossing the cake.

Ernest (who also went by Ernie, Creamy, or Red) was apparently quite the ladies' man. Grandma said he was very popular with the girls in town, and that didn't sit well with Lena. She eventually got upset enough (whether because of that, the poverty or something else I'm not sure) that she left Ernie and took at lease Edna and Grace and went to Seaside, Oregon. Ernie went after his children, and probably Lena too, and brought them back to Montana. The family remained poor, and Lena left Ernie for good sometime in the mid-1920s. Ernie had to put all four of his children in the Montana State Orphan's Home, as he couldn't afford to take care of them. A cousin also tells me the state had issues with young children living in a mining camp, so that may have added to the family stress. At any rate, the girls, aged 14 or 15 down to 5, were put in the home, away from both parents, though Ernie at least went and visited the girls several times while they were there.

Lena, as I said before, seemed to bounce from man to man for the rest of her life. Grandma tells me she was happiest with Ed Layfield, but I don't know when or how long they were together, or if they were ever married. Her last husband was Clarence Roper. He is the only other husband of Lena's of whom I have a picture (shown at right with Lena). Knowing that she left Ernie sometime in the mid 1920s, and that she was single by 1950, that gives her about 25 years to have gone through all those other relationships. During this time, I do know that she stayed in contact with her children, or at least tried to. I have a photo of her and her daughter Edna taken sometime in the 30's I believe, as well as a picture of Lena with a note from Lena to her daughter Hazel written on the back, asking why Hazel isn't allowed to write to her. I don't know any more of that story, maybe my Grandma or one of her cousins knows more.

The end result of it all was that Lena moved in with her daughter Edna and her family (husband Bill Moore, and two of Edna's children) for a short while in 1950, before moving into a hotel room above the Metals Bank in Butte. She later moved to another hotel above the Board of Trade Bar, also in Butte, and lived there until just before she died. Her circumstances in this hotel were pretty grim - a bed, no refrigerator, and a hot plate to cook on. She received a welfare check for $35 a month (yes, a month), of which she paid $20 a month for rent. She happened to fall and injured herself, but as she had no insurance she just stayed home in her bed and developed bed sores that caused her a lot of pain. Her daughters Edna (who had moved to California, and had just moved back to Montana) and Elsie put her in the County Hospital in November 1963, and she passed away in the hospital on 22 February 1964.

One of the interesting things I discovered recently that I alluded to in my last post on Lena was her obituary. It was published in the Montana Standard on 23 Feb 1964, the day after her passing. It reads:

Mrs. Lena (Craddock) Roper of 22 1/2 E. Park died Saturday in a local hospital after an illness of three months.

Mrs. Roper was born Feb. 26, 1887, in Chicago. She attended school there. She resided in Nebraska, then Victor, Mont., as a young woman with her parents in 1909. She came to Butte in 1926 to make her home.

Mrs. Roper was of Mormon faith. Her body is in White's Funeral Home where services will be announced.

Surviving are daughters, Mrs. Elsie Landon of Boulder City, Nev., Mrs. Edward Cote of Twin Bridges and Mrs. William Moore of Butte; 11 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

This obituary is interesting for a few reasons:

1. I am fairly certain she was born in Illinois (the census records I have show that, and her father was naturalized in Illinois in 1884). Her mother was living in Nebraska in the 1910 census, with her sister Maggie and Maggie's first husband, Arthur Cooper. That might help explain Lena's move to Montana - Nebraska to Montana is a lot shorter jump than Pennsylvania to Montana. If Lena's mom moved the family to Nebraska between 1900 and 1903 (her father Jacob supposedly died in PA in 1900), then Lena could have moved out or run away or something.

2. The comment about Lena living with her parents in 1909 is false - Amelia was a widow by then, and living in Nebraska, while Lena was already married to Clarence Johnson.

3. The statement about her coming to Butte in 1926 is very interesting. If this statement is accurate, then that could be the date she left Ernie. That fits with what I know about her already.

4. The biggest shocker was the statement about her being "of Mormon faith." Being a Mormon myself, and having very few family members in the church (my parents and siblings, one grandparent, and Lena's daughter Elsie), this was news to me! I've done some preliminary searches in LDS church records, and can't find a baptism date for Lena. Elsie joined the church in 1962, less than 18 months before Lena died. I don't know who gave the info for the obituary, but as Elsie was visiting from Nevada at the time, and the obit was printed in a Montana paper, I don't think it would have been her (though she is the first daughter listed). Is there an order in listing surviving children in an obituary - furthest away listed first, closest last? At any rate, I'd like to do some more research into this, see if there's anything in Butte LDS records of Lena's joining the church there.

One thing that leads me to believe she had at least some connection with the LDS church in Butte was the fact that it was the LDS church in Butte that conducted her funeral services (as announced in the Montana Standard on 26 Feb 1964). An LDS bishop gave her obituary, and missionaries spoke and gave the closing prayer. That was another big surprise to me. Maybe Elsie helped arrange things through the local ward while she was up in Butte. But whatever happened, I think it's pretty cool that an ancestor of mine at least had an LDS funeral.

So there you have it, Lena's story. There are still more pieces to unravel and put together, more questions to have answered. But I've learned a lot about her in just the past few weeks that has thrown everything I knew about her on its ear. I can only wonder what future discoveries will do to the composite picture I have of her in my head now. But the overall feeling I get from reading and hearing about her life is just - tragedy. So many husbands, so much hardship, and at the end just living alone in a hotel, eating her meals in the bar downstairs. She loved her girls though, that much I have learned. And her daughters loved her, even though they suffered with her (and at times because of her).

Tombstone Tuesday - Wagner Family headstones and more

2010-10-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

On October 16, I got to take a very cool family trip. I drove up with my wife, kids, parents, and grandparents up to Monroe, Washington, where my great-grandparents Rosie and Charles Wagner lived for many years. It wasn't that far of a drive, and I was pretty stoked to go. Our first stop was the IOOF Cemetery in Monroe. It was my first time seeing the gravesite of Grandma Rosie, who passed away when I was five. We (my family and my folks) arrived before my grandparents, and dad couldn't quite remember where Grandma Rosie was buried, so we got to explore the cemetery for a bit trying to find her headstone. My son sure appreciated the chance to get out of the car after 90 minutes of driving and being able to run around. It was interesting to see the different styles of markers, some flat, some traditional, some so old and worn you couldn't see who they marked any more. I tried to find the cemetery office to ask if they could help us find the stone we wanted. While I was on my way over to the office, my grandparents pulled up, and pointed us right to the stone, which, as it turned out, was not 20 feet from where we parked. Isn't that always how it works? Next time I go to a cemetery, I'm searching the immediate vicinity before asking any questions. :)

I wasn't expecting to find any more than one headstone, but it turns out, there's a whole family plot there. In the plot, there's Grandma Rosie, Grandpa Charlie, Donald "Bill" Wagner and Mary Wagner (Bill was Charlie's brother, and Mary was Rosie's sister, so both families were in-laws of each other), Charles Wagner III (Rosie and Charlie's youngest son, who died at the age of 10), and Eldora (Shute) (Wagner) Greenfield, Charlie and Bill's mom. I was in headstone heaven! Ok, that sounds really lame. But I was really excited to see all of these graves, when I was only expecting one. I'd seen pictures of all of them (especially after going through those 800+ photos of Grandma Blossom's beige album). So I really felt connected to all of them.

After leaving the cemetery, we drove by the spot where the Wagner Brothers Mill had been. In its place is a HUGE brick mansion. It was actually just a couple minutes from the cemetery. I didn't know what it was until after we'd passed it, so I didn't get a picture of it unfortunately. Maybe I'll try pulling it up on Zillow.com or something. If I can get a photo of it, I'll post in here later.

Down the street from the mansion is the house that Charlie built for his family, probably sometime in the 1950s. It's still there, and looks great. We snapped a few pictures of the outside. Then my dad, who's a lot more adventurous than I am (must come from years of motorcycle racing, military service, and raising three kids who put him through heck), went up and knocked on the door. A guy came out and dad started talking to him, telling him about who we were, and why we're in the neighborhood. He just opened up, and invited us in to take a look, let us take pictures and video of the house, which he had actually just purchased three weeks previous. As it turned out, my grandparents sold the house to Bill, Charlie's brother, and moved to Twisp (they later moved back but to a different house). Bill and Mary sold it to a guy named Granden, or something like that, who lived in it till he died. His son then got the house, and he was the one who sold it to the current owner. He seemed really interested in the history of the house, and asked that we send him copies of the pictures I have of my great-grandpa building it. He also said his wife was coming home from the hospital that day, and once she's had some time to recover, he'd like us all to come back up for a barbecue or something, which sounded great!

For me, though, the real treat was when we went back and got my grandparents (they'd stayed in their car, as they have trouble walking over long distances, and the driveway up to this house was pretty long). They drove up the driveway and came into the house, and my grandma just looked to be flooded with memories. She started talking about her dad building the house, and especially the cabinets and fireplace. I managed to record a lot of what she said, as I'd remembered to bring my camera with me, and had hoped for her to tell stories about the house that I could record. It was just amazing to see something put together by my great-grandpa and his brothers, that looked so well kept and new.

All in all, it was a very rewarding afternoon. And I look forward to repeating the experience in the near future when we have that bbq.

PS I don't have the pictures available at the moment, but I'll put some up as soon as I get them.

UPDATE: Pictures are now posted!

Storytime Saturday - Lena Beilstein's marital adventures

2010-10-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

Today's post is all about my great-great-grandmother, Philena Emily Beilstein. She was born 26 Feb 1888 in Chicago, Illinois to Jacob and Amelia (Wachter) Beilstein. She was the younger of the two surviving children of this marriage (she had an older sister named Annie Margaret, or Maggie), and grew up in Illinois and Pennsylvania. She lived in Pennsylvania in 1900 at the time of the census, yet by 1903 she had found her way out to Carbon county, Montana, and was married to David M. Briscoe, a native of New Mexico from a large Mormon family (though it seems he himself never joined the church). Finding this marriage was a bit of a surprise, as the first marriage I knew about for her was in 1908 to Clarence Johnson. I was actually trying to find a record of her marriage to Clarence on the FamilySearch beta site, when I found the marriage to David Briscoe. My mom and grandma new nothing about David, which makes me wonder if my great-grandma Edna (Philena's oldest daughter, who told my grandma a lot about her mom) even knew about him. His mother and siblings were living in Carbon county, Montana at the time of the 1900 census, so how Philena met him and decided to marry him is a total mystery. Also, the fact that David came from a Mormon family is very interesting, given some things I've recently learned about the end of Philena's life (which I'll write about later). As far as I know, this is the earliest contact any of my family lines had with the LDS church (assuming that Philena had some kind of contact with David's family). This is very interesting to me, given that one of Philena's daughters (Elsie), granddaughters (my grandma), and the whole family of a great-granddaughter (my mom and our family) all joined this church. Funny how life keeps going in circles throughout the generations.

A quick but interesting sidenote about David Briscoe - he's one of the rare cases of people listed in the same census twice, the 1900 Montana census in this case. In one entry, he's listed as the servant of Henry Foust, and the other he's listed with his mother and siblings.

Her marriage to David didn't last long, because Philena (or Lena as she was often known) married again in 1908, to Clarence Johnson. I have recently obtained a scanned copy of two postcards Lena wrote to her mother, Amelia, while married to Clarence, one of which gives her address as 214 South H Street in Livingston, Montana. So it seems she stayed in Montana during the time of these two marriages (she ended up leaving Clarence towards the end of 1910). I have been unable to find any record of children born to either of these marriages, so as far as I know Lena walked away from these two marriages with no kids.

That changed when she met her next "husband", Ernest Craddock. I put husband in quotations because as far as we know (we being me, my grandmother, and other researchers of this family) Lena and Ernest were never officially married. But they got together shortly after the 1910 census was taken, as my great-grandmother Edna was born to them in 1911. Edna was followed by three more girls - Hazel, Elsie, and Grace. The family stayed in Montana at least through 1920, and were living in Granite, Montana at the time of the 1920 census.

After the 1920 census, I'm not sure where she went. I know from what my grandma has told me she left Ernest in the mid 1920s and was involved with several different men (aside from the three mentioned so far) over the course of her life, including Art Palmer, Ed Layfield, and Clarence Roper (Clarence Roper being the last one). I'm not sure at this point if she actually married anyone after Ernest, but Grandma says Lena was in Butte when her grandson James Harris Jr. was born in 1931, so that would point to her being in Montana for the 1930 census. But not knowing what name to search for, or what county she might have been in, I haven't been able to find her yet.

I've got more to write about Lena, but that will have to wait for another post. Stay tuned for Part 2 of Lena Beilstein's marital adventures.

Treasure Chest Thursday - The Scribners

2010-10-21T10:18:00.001-07:00

This is a family crest for the old Scriven family of England. My Scribner ancestors (who I've been told descend from the Scrivens) supposedly have authorization to claim this crest as theirs. I haven't gotten around to verifying it yet, but I thought it was a pretty interesting image, so here it is. I have traced my Scribners back to Zachariah Scribner of New Hampshire. He was born about 1817 in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and was the father of six children from two wives, Judith Sawyer and Mariah Jeanette Beardsley. I'm descended from his second wife, Mariah. Zachariah met and married Mariah in Minnesota (how's that for a tongue twister?), where he and Judith had moved to and where Judith had died. They had four children in five years, and later relocated to Montana, where Zachariah died in 1901.

Mariah was originally from Ohio and had been previously married to Norton Johnson. They were the parents of at least four children, and moved to Minnesota sometime between 1854 and 1860, the birth years of their second and third children. Norton died in 1864, leaving Mariah a single mother of four children ages 12, 10, 4, and 2. Mariah married Zachariah three years later (while he was raising two teenagers of his own, a boy and a girl). Altogether, they had ten children from four parents -quite a mixed family! After Zachariah died, she moved out west to Washington state and lived near her oldest child, Mary (Johnson) Perry. She died in 1911, ten years after her second husband.

Sorry for the brevity of the post, but at least it's something, right? I'm still working on the post about Lena, which will be a lot fuller. More full. Better.

Quick note

2010-10-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

I haven't forgotten about my blog! I'm in the middle of a big post about my great-great-grandmother, Philena Beilstein. It's more complicated than I first thought, and the more data I gather, the more it takes to sort it and verify it and analyze it. I'll post it as soon as it's ready.

Treasure Chest Thursday - My latest acquisitions

2010-10-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

To help me in my quest to collect and preserve family artifacts, my mom combed her house and found a few items, most of which I knew nothing about, and gave them to me.

This is a time table schedule for the Northern Pacific Railway Company from 1947. I'm not sure if it was my grandpa's or great-grandpa's (mom wasn't sure either), as both of them worked for the railroad. If it's my grandpa Fred's, he would have been 21 at the time, so it's not unreasonable that it's his. If it's his dad Fred Sr.'s, he would have been around 63, so it's not too unreasonable that it's his either. I'll probably end up asking my grandpa about it, and I'll post the update here.

UPDATE: I asked my grandpa, and the schedule is his. He started working for the railroad on October 1, 1947, and this was their current train schedule.

This is a ribbon my grandmother got for her participation in the Siskiyou County Fair in 1964. She was about 24 at the time, and she, my grandpa Tom, and a friend of theirs (don't know his name) played in a country band they called Kountry Kuzzins. Their band marched and maybe played in the parade, and got this ribbon for their efforts. Pretty cool!

This is a death certificate for Olga (Joseph) (Haft) McKeown, my great-grandmother's older sister. This one I knew about, as I'd asked my aunt to pick it up for me from the county clerk in Butte, Montana, along with 2 or 3 other death certificates. However, I was living in Utah at the time going to school, so my aunt was going to mail them to my mom, or give them to her when they visited, or something. I totally forgot about them (even though I had been the one to request them!) and was pleasantly surprised to see they were in pristine condition, even 7 or 8 years later. My mom really knows how to store things well!

In the future, I plan to take the information I gather from these items and try to dig up a few more clues (maybe a newspaper clipping about the parade? or some info on the trains my grandpa/great-grandpa worked on, or something), and I'll post a follow-up.

Thanks mom!

Wisdom Wednesday - The Montana State Orphan's Home

2010-09-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

I'm back to working on my old project (that I was doing before the beige photo album project) of going through my files and documents and verifying that everything is entered into my database. While taking a few minutes last night to enter a couple census records on my Craddock ancestors (my great-grandma was Edna Craddock, one of two great-grandparents I actually got to meet, and the only one I actually really knew), I stopped at the 1930 census record of my g-grandma Edna's sisters Grace and Elsie. There were little girls at the time, living in the Montana State Orphan's Home (later called the Montana Children's Center). They weren't orphans really, as both parents were still alive and would be for years to come, but they couldn't afford to take care of the girls (there were four altogether) so they put them in the Orphan's Home for a while. It never really hit me until last night that this was how my great-grandma lived through the Great Depression - basically like an orphan.

Anyways, I decided to see if there wasn't any info on the Internet about the Orphan's Home, so I headed to Google searched for Twin Bridges Montana Orphan's Home. What I found was a website for the property owner of the now abandoned Children's Center. The main page had a bunch of pictures that cycled through like a slide show, so I saved a bunch of them to my hard drive (it was really helpful that they were labeled, so I knew a little bit of what I was seeing). Then I noticed that they had a history tab at the top, so I clicked on it. There I found a bunch of old photos from the 1930s and forward - staff photos it seemed mostly, and of the grounds from different points and at different times of the year. This was really interesting, to see the house as it would have looked to my great-grandma while she was there, and maybe some of the workers she knew.

But wait - there's more! They also had a group of buttons on this page, with a label that said "select era to see more photos", and one of the buttons was 1930! I went to that page, and found a whole slew of pictures - more pictures of the staff, but a lot of pictures of the kids in the orphanage, as well as pictures of the animals they had at the orphanage (who knew orphanages had animals???). Hope does spring eternal, so I went through all the pictures, hoping to find one or two of my great-grandma and/or her sisters. Sadly, there weren't any pictures of my family up there, but I did find one very interesting picture. They had a photo of Ruth Morris and Madeline Sabo, taken about 1935. Those names sounded familiar for some reason, so I went back to the census record for Grace and Elsie. Sure enough, they were on the same census page! Madeline is listed the next line down from Elsie, and Ruth is just a couple lines up from Grace. It kind of took me back for a minute, looking at these two young girls, who in all likelihood knew my great-grandma and her sisters. Were they friends? Did they fight? I don't know, but it's fun to think about. It also brought home that this was an orphanage, and (from what I read on the orphanage's website) some kids never got to leave, even died there. I'm glad that fate didn't befall my ancestors, but sad that it happened to people in other family trees.

So the wisdom I gained about my great-grandma's life - a view of the orphanage she lived in, more info about conditions and life there, and even a picture of some of her fellow 'inmates' (as the census refers to them) - was a lot more than I bargained for from what was meant to be a quick internet search. But that's what I love about genealogy - it's hard to find what you're looking for, but sometimes, you hit the jackpot.

The Wagner Bros lumbermill

2010-09-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

For this blog post, I thought I'd put up some more pictures from the beige album. There are so many to choose from, I could easily spend weeks or months posting on different themes from just these pictures. Here are some of the ones I found most interesting:

This is my great-grandfather Charles Wagner (left) and his brother Ralph Wagner, part way up one of the trees they were felling. Look how tiny they are compared to the tree! I can't imagine how big the whole thing must have been, or what it took to chop it down. Notice how they had to wedge boards in to stand on. I remember my grandma saying this was part of the felling process, but I can't remember exactly how (I didn't have my recorder on me when she told me).

Here's a section of a tree all tied up and ready for transport to the mill. Wonder how many truckloads like this it took to take a whole tree?

Sometimes family would come out to the forest and visit, and even pose for silly photos like this one. This is my great-great-grandmother, Mary Hoffman. I like this, because it shows that while my great-grandfather knew how to work, it also shows he took time out for family fun as well.

Here's another photo of family visitors to the worksite. The ladies are Claire Wagner (Ralph's wife), Rosie Wagner (Charles' wife), Mary Hoffman (Rosie's mother), and Blossom Wagner (Rosie's daughter and my grandma).

This is one of the trucks they used to haul the trees from the logging site to the mill. Can any of you truck afficianados out there tell me what type of truck this is? I'd like to know!

These photos are of the mill itself. Not being familiar with the milling process, I couldn't say what exactly is going on, but it looks very busy! I'm sure it was terribly loud, with all the machinery and saws going, plus the trucks hauling trees in and lumber out, and the constant moving of lumber everywhere. But as my great-grandpa did this for many years, he must have enjoyed it. Or at least gotten used to it.

Wisdom Wednesday - what I learned from 838 old photos

2010-09-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

After going through the photos I've scanned and saved, I realized that I know a lot more about my great-grandparents Charles and Rosie (Sitzman) Wagner than I did before. I'll post a few pictures, and tell you what each one taught me.

1. My great-grandfather and his brothers owned a lumber mill. I learned this from a picture of one of the trucks from the lumber mill my great-grandpa worked on - with the words Wagner Bros on the side. I've known for years he worked for the mill, but until that picture came along, I had no idea it was HIS mill. I'd like to find something about the mill - maybe a mention in a city directory, or a newspaper ad, or something about the mill. Maybe I'll start collecting things for each of my ancestors' occupations...once I get a bigger house, that is.

2. My great-grandparents knew how to ride horses, and apparently really enjoyed it. Most of the pictures I'd seen of them were of city scenes - pictures of the house, their farm, traveling different places, etc. I don't think they ever owned horses, so I never would have thought of them as riding them much. But apparently they did. This is a big thing to me, as my own experiences on horseback are limited mostly to one old horse named Old Shoes, which I rode on my honeymoon and which tried to buck me off after biting the horse my wife was riding. Needless to say, I'm not as much of an equestrian as my ancestors were. :)

3. They loved the outdoors. There are a LOT of pictures like this - mountain scenes, views of different lakes, photos of their annual moose hunting trips up to Canada, and a whole two-page spread of pictures of the trail up to and inside the Lewis and Clark Caverns in Montana. This I can relate to. Even if I don't care for spending a week in the woods hiding from bugs in a tent, I can still appreciate the beauty of nature, and love seeing the view from a mountaintop (or hilltop, as those are more accessible :) ).

4. My great-grandpa was an amazing woodworker. He not only knew how to cut down trees, he knew how to work the wood from raw timber to finished product. He even built his own house! Not to mention several other houses in Monroe, Washington. A lot of those houses, according to my dad, are still standing. I'll have to ask him to take me up there one of these days to take pictures of them. It just amazes me that he could cut the trees down, cut them into lumber, design a building, and (with the help of his brothers) turn the lumber into a finished house - all without going to other sources for help or labor.

5. They were very social people. My great-grandma was involved in a few different clubs - the Pocahontas Lodge, the Home Demonstration Club, and maybe some others (unless she just liked getting all dressed up just to get together with friends). One interesting page had a photo of one friend named Ethel taken in the 1950s, and another photo of the same woman taken in 1972. So my great-grandma made long-time friends, which I think is pretty cool. There are many pictures of family friends, many of whom my grandma remembered by name. I don't know if I could name my parents' friends in a photo, so this kind of shows me where I have room to improve on.

6. My great-grandparents loved their family. This is abundantly evident by how many pictures they have of their parents, siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces, and grandchildren. There are probably several hundred pictures of just my Aunt Eileen, who was Charles and Rosie's first grandchild, playing with friends, dressed up for the dancing and skating events she participated in, etc. One of the hardest pictures to see (though it technically came from a different album) was a photo of my great-grandparents and their kids Blossom (my grandma) and her brother Howie visiting the grave of their youngest child, Charles Wagner III. Grandma Blossom and Uncle Howie were smiling, but Rosie and Charles just looked so sad, even years later. I can't imagine losing one of my children at such a young age (Charles III was only 10 when he died), so I can understand why they looked so sad. But, on the other hand, it really shows how much they valued their family, and how much they loved each other.

I'm sure there's more I've picked up from some of the other photos, but I think that's a good start. It's a remarkable feeling - getting to know someone you barely even met, even 25+ years after they've died. But now, my great-grandparents aren't just names on a pedigree - they're people that I know and love.

It's done!!!!

2010-09-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't been posting much on here the last several days, but I have a really good excuse! My grandma's third photo album, the one with the most pictures of all three, is finally scanned, identified, and every single individual picture separated (digitally) and labeled. In total, there were 838 pictures!!! As my wife will tell you, I haven't been much use around the house the last week as I've been pushing (slowly but steadily) to get this monumental project done (well, monumental in my mind at least). It's been fascinating to see the places my great-grandparents went, the people they were friends with, and some of the things they did. In a future post, I'll talk about some of the things I learned about my great-grandmother by doing this project (it was a lot!) and throw some of the pictures on here so you can see what I've been up to. But first, let me breathe one big sigh of relief that a major project is finally done!

*SIGH*

Ok. On to the next project!!

Treasure Chest Thursday - overload!

2010-09-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

It has been a crazy week, genealogy-wise. I already wrote about finding info on Heinrich Joseph, my great-great-grandfather's brother. I had fun sharing that info with my cousin, Jim Joseph, who's also researching the Joseph family. Hopefully this weekend I'll have time to update my file with the info. Jim also sent me a gedcom of his family file on the Josephs, so I have that to go through as well.

Then, I was recently contacted by Eileen Bremner, whose husband is a relative on my Shute side. She sent me almost three dozen pictures of the Shutes, including an old map of Duanesburg, NY, showing the family names of people who lived in the town and where, a page from the Shute family bible (which I didn't know existed!), and many headstones. On top of that, she also sent me a gedcom of the Shute family info that she had collected, so I have THAT to go through as well!

And just last night, I officially began the ProGen 9 class, a free group that studies Elizabeth Shown Mills' book Professional Genealogy. It's overseen by a certified genealogist (Jay Fonkert for our group), and administered by Elizabeth O'Neal, who does a great job of taking care of all the housekeeping duties. Angela McGhie runs the whole ProGen program, creates all the assignments and everything. My group has about 15 people in it, mostly from the eastern US (Elizabeth and I seemed to be the only west coasters) and they're all as geeky about genealogy as I am! Talk about heaven! :D I'm way excited to be in this group, and learn how to step up my research and reporting skills. Best of all, it goes on for 18 months, and it covers EVERYTHING about being a professional genealogist. What more could I ask for?

All in all, it's been a fantastic week for genealogy. It leaves me with one burning question though - how do you incorporate other people's research into your own? The old me would have just dumped it in, no questions asked. But that combines info and notes in a way that leaves it impossible to tell what was mine and what I received from elsewhere. What strategies do you use when inputting info from other researchers into your file?

A new branch for the Josephs!

2010-08-31T08:58:00.000-07:00

I was on the FamilySearch Labs website yesterday (eventually, at least. I think it was down for a bit). On a whim (or perhaps, more than a whim) I thought I'd do a search for my 3rd-great-grandfather, Ludwig Joseph and see what I could find. There weren't all that many hits, so I thought I'd scrool through and see what they showed me. Imagine my surprise when one of the hits listed Ludwig and his wife, Justine Witt! I opened the record, and it turned out to be a death record of Heinrich Joseph, son of Ludwig and Justine. My semi-distant-cousin Jim Joseph had told me there was a Henry Joseph in that family (as well as some other siblings I haven't been able to find records of yet), and this was proof! I love it when historical documents and family stories tell the same story.

Excited with my new find, I went off to Ancestry.com and found Henry Joseph living with his family in Chicago, Illinois. Best of all, his son Albert was living with him. This same Albert was living with Tina (Joseph) Levick in 1920, but had only been identified as a lodger. I now know that Albert was her nephew, son of Tina's brother Heinrich. Albert worked as a smelter in Montana in the 1920 census, and was a handyman at a steel mill in Chicago in 1930. It's puzzled me for years who that Albert was, and now I know!

Now I need to go back and see if I can round out the info on Henry/Heinrich and his family. I've got his wife Emilie and at least one son Albert. He was living next to an Edward Joseph and his family in 1930, and Edward does happen to be the perfect age to be a son of Henry. So this Joseph family, which stymied me for SO LONG at least seems to be coming out of the woodwork. Can't wait to see what else I can find!

Tombstone Tuesday: John Frederick Gibson

2010-08-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

Today's spotlight focuses on my great-grandfather, John Frederick Gibson. Fred was born 21 Jan 1884 in Saint John, New Brunswick to John and Catherine (Cain) Gibson. John and Catherine were both children of Irish immigrants and were married in Cathedral, a Catholic church in New Brunswick (pictured at left) a few years before in 1879. Fred had an older sister, Annie, an older brother named Thomas, and a younger brother named David. One other child was born to the family, but I haven't been able to find records of him/her, only a mention in a census record of Catherine bearing five children with four surviving. All the children but David were born in Saint John. When Fred was very young, perhaps only 1 or 2 years old, John and Catherine moved the family to Helena, Montana, where David was later born. To the right is a photo of Bridge St. in Helena, taken about the time of John Gibson's arrival to Montana.

Fred lived and grew up in Montana with his family, including his grandfather Dennis Cain (who joined them in Montana in 1891), who lived with them until his death in 1906. Fred's mother was Catholic, and attended the local Catholic church. Fred's father John, who had been attending the Church of England while living in Canada, would wait outside the church and go home with Catherine afterwards. Catherine died in 1907 from pneumonia, and Fred's father John died in 1914.

Fred worked for the railroad for a good part of his life, as did his brothers David and Thomas, and his father-in-law, Samuel Joseph. Fred lived for a while with his sister Annie, who had married William Condon, until he met and married Augusta (Joseph) Staffan, widow of Charles Staffan, on 13 June 1923. They had a son, whom they named Frederick Joseph Gibson (my grandfather). Augusta died in 1931, following a hysterectomy. Fred Jr. stayed with his aunt Pat Walsh for a brief time while Fred Sr took care of things after Augusta's death.

Fred married Emma Kitzel about 1932 (you can see their picture at the top of this post). She was a clerk at the railroad where Fred worked. They later joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1951, and stayed active in the church for about five years, until Emma's death in 1955. Following Emma's death, Fred married Ethel Lindberg, a Catholic, and began attending the Catholic church with her. According to his son, Fred attended just about every church around.

Fred passed away on 5 August 1967 at the age of 83 in Butte, Montana. He is buried in the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Butte.

Wordless Wednesday: My awesome Great-Grandma Rosie

2010-08-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite picture of my great-grandmother, Rosie (Sitzman) Wagner. I'm not sure when it was taken, perhaps when she was in her 40s or 50s, but I love the fun-loving, zest for life look on her face. She passed away when I was five, so I barely remember her, and most of what I remember was from one visit, seeing her sitting on the couch with a big afghan on the back of it in her old home. I wish I'd had the chance to know what she was like when this picture was taken. But at least I have pictures like this one, that I can show to my kids and (future) grandkids.

Madness Monday - genealogy in general

2010-08-16T10:54:00.000-07:00

Today's madness doesn't involve an ancestor, or a hard-to-read census page, or someone who apparently got married at the age of 13, or anything I normally would gripe about. Today I've got two things that have been driving me mad.

Number one - Geni.com. I uploaded my file there some time ago, thinking it would help me connect with other researchers, and as another backup (I practice at least triple redundancy with my backups now). After a couple weeks, I started getting some 'merge requests'. At first, this was exciting. Finding people who shared my ancestors! Yay! But then I realized - these requests were for people waaaay back in the undocumented part of my file (yes, I fell into the 'download everyone on the internet' trap at one point in my research, and I'm still trying to separate what's accurate from what isn't). For several months I just combined everyone that I thought matched (and most of them did, from what I could tell). But then a few months ago, I got tired of merging all these people who I wasn't even sure were my family any more. So I stopped. Then yesterday, I logged into Geni, just to see how many of these merge requests were pending, and it was over 170! These matches take 3-4 minutes each to do (maybe it's my computer that's slow?) so we're talking several hours of work just to merge these people. I know there are many genealogists who use Geni, perhaps as their sole genealogy database, that my tree is tied to. Now I'm stuck with a dilemma - do I delete my tree completely? Do I let it sit there unused and unmerged? Or do I 'trim' the branches of the unverified families and add them in later as I verify/correct the info? The last one seems like the best way to go, so I might end up going that route, but with all the time it would take to go family by family...ugh. So yeah, I haven't made up my mind on that one.

The other issue I'm having is the funding for my future genealogical eandeavors - I really want to improve my skills (research, writing, networking, the whole she-bang), as well as join a few professional societies - APG (both local and national), BCG, NEHGS, and start subscribing to a few genealogical publications - Family Tree Magazine seems good and affordable, and the more pricey and professional ones like The Genealogist and the NEHGS Register sound very interesting too. I'd also like to renew my Ancestry.com subscription, and maybe try the DNA testing for my paternal and maternal lines. The only problem is - the only way I can afford these things is by selling my truck! Seriously, how do professional genealogists pay for all of this? Unless they make a lot more money than I think they do, or don't care about credit card debt, I don't see how they can afford it. If you have any ideas, tips, tricks, discount coupons, or any other suggestions on how to afford moving towards more professional genealogy research, I'm all ears. Till then, I'll just keep pulling my hair out. :)

Follow Friday: My Grandpa

2010-08-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

Today I'd like to blog about one of the best genealogical resources I've come across over the last decade of my research - my grandfather, Fred Gibson. He has one of the sharpest memories I've ever seen - he can rattle off 16-digit account numbers, give you his aunt's address from 75 years ago, or name 3 or 4 generations of descendants of his wife's stepfather's first wife's half-sister - all of which I have seen him do! He remembers the funniest old songs and breaks into singing whenever something reminds him of a song. He and my grandma Blossom have been married 62 years (it'll be 63 in November), raised five kids, have 13 grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren, and they stay a part of the lives of each and everyone one of us. I was named after him (we share the same middle name) and I'm proud to 'follow' my grandpa.

Treasure Chest Thursday: Picture time!

2010-08-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

I got a call last night from my mom about 8:30. She had some questions about my great-grandma Rosie's second husband, Clarence Morris (whom we all called Unc). I had a little info on him entered in my database, but not a lot. I took a look in the files I'd saved on the Wagner family (the family Unc married into) and compared them to my database. I saw that I hadn't even entered in the censuses I'd looked up on him and his family, including his first wife Blanche (which is one reason I'd taken on the project of going through my files and making sure they were all entered in my database - I knew I'd missed stuff like that). So I took a minute to plug in Blanche's name and a little about her from the census, and added Unc's birthplace while I was talking to my mom about them, and I asked when Blanche died. Mom said she died sometime in the early 70s as Unc had married Rosie in 1976, and that she and Unc had stayed married until Blanche died. I went on to Ancestry.com and saw that she didn't have a record in the SSDI (Social Security Death Index). Fortunately, Ancestry also has a really good death index for Montana, going from 1860 up through 2007. I found Blanche in the index, which gave her death date as 3 July 1971, which fit what my mom had said.

Being the curious little rabbit that I am, I decided to search all of Ancestry (now that I had an approximate date for her birth and exact date of death) and see what I could see. A few entries down the list of hits, I saw a listing for a Blanche Gasser, born in 1906 and died in 1971, and a picture included (the one you see at right). I'd never seen a picture of her before, and didn't know whether this was the right person, so I kept going down the list.

A few lines down, I saw an entry for a Blanche Morris, married to Clarence Rosco Morris, with a death date that exactly matched the Blanche I'd just looked up! Better yet, it had a picture attached to this one as well. I pulled it up, and it looked just like Grandpa Unc (as I'd grown up calling him), only a lot younger and with more hair than I'd ever seen him with. :) I was still on the phone while seeing this, so I told mom what I'd found and quickly emailed her the pictures. She agreed the picture of the couple was indeed Unc. I was pretty excited to have a picture of Unc that was so much earlier than anything I'd seen of him before.

I looked at the family tree of Blache (they didn't have much on Unc, just his mom), and it seems the owner of the tree tied into Blanche's mom's side, as they had several pictures on that side of the family. I emailed the owner of the tree, and look forward to (hopefully) swapping information on our common relatives. I also have some good leads on Blanche now, and can't wait to start digging up info on her. All of this, just in time for Treasure Chest Thursday. :)

Tombstone Tuesday - Michael H. Barrett

2010-08-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Today for Tombstone Tuesday, I'm going to spotlight a slightly more distant relative - my great-grandmother's brother's father-in-law, Michael H. Barrett. I don't know a whole lot about his life, sadly, as I haven't really researched him as thoroughly as I have my more direct ancestors and family. I do know that he and his wife Julia O'Connors were from Ireland, and Michael was born about 1860. He and Julia had at least three children, Thomas, born in 1892 in Minnesota, Julia, born 21 January 1895 also in Minnesota, and Mary Margaret, born about 1907 in Montana. They were Catholic, which I thought was interesting, as I have two direct-line Irish families, one of which was Cathlolic, while the other was Anglican. Makes me wonder how much of the Irish population of western Montana was Catholic. Anyways, Michael died on 9 August 1916 in Anaconda, Montana at age 56. He's buried in Mt. Carmel cemetery in Anaconda, with his wife Julia, daughter Julia, son-in-law Elmer Joseph, and grandaughter Marie Joseph.

What really interests me about this headstone is the imagery used on it. I'm not too familiar with symbols and iconagraphy used by Catholics (I myself am a Latter-day Saint aka Mormon), so when I saw some unfamiliar symbols and phrases on Michael's tombstone, I hit the internet to see what I could learn. For example, on top of Michael's headstone is a cross with the letters 'ihs' inscribed. A quick Google search led me to a page that told me that those letters stand for Ihsus, or the name of Jesus in Greek, and that letters and phrases like this (or in Latin) were most often used by Catholics in the 20th century. This fits this family - a Catholic family from the early 20th century - perfectly.

Another symbol on Michael's tombstone I found intriguing was the one pictured at left - a dove flying over a log and some woodworking tools, and the Latin words "dum tacet clamat". I'd never seen this before, so I did another Google search, which told me this symbol often appears on tombstones of men who were members of a lodge/insurance company called Woodmen of the World. The words mean "though silent, he speaks." I'm not sure what the significance of the phrase is, but I did see that at the bottom of the headstone (you can see it if you click on the first picture) the words "HERE RESTS A WOODMAN OF THE WORLD" are engraved. From what I've read of this group, they offered insurance and help to members, and even paid for their burial and headstones. So Michael was apparently a member of this lodge, and reaped at least one benefit - a nice headstone for himself and his wife.

The last thing I wanted to note about Michael was something that I saw in the plot a little behind and to the side of the main headstone:

It looks like a little mini headstone, with Michael's initials on it. I'm not sure what it was doing there, maybe it was a placemarker until the big headstone arrived? If you know what this could have been for, please post a comment here. I'd love to find out!

So that's Tombstone Tuesday - a little information about Michael H. Barrett, and his interesting headstone.

Treasure Chest Thursday - goodbye brick wall!!

2010-07-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

This is a part of the census record that helped me blow a big hole in a brick wall that has been bugging me for years. My great-grandmother, Rosie Sitzman Wagner, came to the US as a little girl with her mother and sister, both named Mary. I knew quite a bit about the three women from about 1920 onward - who they all married (even Mary the sister, who married several times), where they lived, when they died. What I didn't know is how to go backward before 1920 and get more info on the Sitzman family closer to the time they came to the States, which was sometime around the turn of the century.

My grandma, Blossom Gibson, over the last couple years has given me all kinds of information on the Sitzmans, including letting me scan several photo albums, each containing several hundred (yes, several HUNDRED) pictures. She remembers names, some dates, places, and interesting tidbits about lots of these people. The only problem is I've been pretty unlucky in terms of finding historical documents on the Sitzmans. I wrote a few posts ago about finding a goldmine of Sitzman info in some historical newspapers on Ancestry.com. I've had those in my "waiting to sort through and analyze" pile since then. Not that I didn't want to go through them, but they had a lot of names I didn't recognize at first glance, and I wanted to take my time and go through them properly. I also wanted to have something in the way of primary source documents to check them against. As it was, all I had was a few census records for Mary and her daughters.

Enter yesterday. I was looking through the records I have on Mary Sitzman and her daughters, and noticed that I didn't have the 1910 census. I thought this was odd, as I should have collected all the censuses I could find by now. So I went looking, and found it pretty quickly. But, as you can see in the picture up top, the head of the family wasn't Mary Sitzman - it was her brother, Sebastian Sitzman! This was the first historical document with definite proof of one of Mary's siblings that I'd discovered. Boy was I excited! Using that info, I went back into the newspaper hits from a few weeks ago, and began compiling a list of all the names and relationships listed in them. It turned out be a good idea to use a list like that, as there were a lot of people that appeared in multiple articles, but under slightly different names. I knew from talking to my grandma that Mary had a sister named Rose, another sister named Barbara, and three brothers, Mike, Frank, and Joe. Oddly enough, she'd never mentioned Sebastian, so I'll have to ask her about him. But the articles listed an additional sibling as well - Carrie Morgele (also spelled Magual in another article; apparently it was an unusual enough name that the writer just spelled it as he/she heard it).

After going through one or two newspaper articles, I went back to the FamilySearch Labs site and searched through their Montana marriages database, and found a whole slew of marriages related to the Sitzmans, at least six or seven marriages. I'm not sure I even pulled all the marriages I could have, as it was after midnight when I was looking them up, and I was a bit groggy at the time, even though I was excited about what I was finding. I even found Sebastian in a few Butte, Montana city directories!

So now, needless to say, I have a treasure chest FULL of documents to go through and analyze more fully, which will hopefully propel me onto finding other documents (I know, for example, that Sebastian was naturalized, and his sister Rose petitioned in court for the authority to sell part of his estate some time after his death, so there's a couple documents to go after right there!). If I can only track this Sebastian, find out more about him and where he's from, it might be enough to FINALLY track this family across the pond. Woo hoo!!!!

Tombstone Tuesday

2010-07-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

Today for Tombstone Tuesday, I am profiling my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph. He was born on 2 February 1866 at or near Uljanowka, in the Volhynia region of present day Ukraine, to German parents - Ludwig and Justine (Witt) Joseph. He had several siblings, including Justine (also known as Christine or Tena), Gottlieb, and Wilhelmina (known as Minnie). He married Pauline Rosen (or Rossenke, as it's been spelled in other documents) about 1888 in Ukraine. Together they had five children: Olga, Augusta, Helena Patricia, Emil, and Lydia.

Sam's older brother Gottlieb moved from Volhynia to Manitoba, Canada in 1896. Sam and his family stayed in Ukraine for another nine years before following Gottlieb to Manitoba. The family of seven made their way up to England, and set sail from Liverpool, England on the SS Tunisian on 5 October 1905 and arrived in Quebec, Canada a few days later. Soon after arriving, they made their way west to Manitoba, and settled near Winnipeg, close to Sam's brother Gottlieb and his family.

The family didn't stay long in Manitoba. Olga married Gustav Haft in 1906 and moved shortly thereafter to Anaconda, Montana. Three years later, Pauline passed away on 6 January 1909 in Grass River, Manitoba. Three months after Pauline's death, Sam packed up his family and they moved to Anaconda.

Sam lived the rest of his life in Anaconda, but made frequent trips back to Winnipeg to visit his father and mother, who had emigrated there around the same time as Gottlieb. Four of his children married and stayed in Montana. Emil changed his name to Elmer and married Julia Barret, daughter of Michael and Julia (O'Connors) Barret. Augusta (my great-grandmother) first married Charles Staffan in 1910, and he died in 1918, probably as part of the worldwide flu epidemic. She then married John Frederick Gibson (my great-grandfather) in 1925. She died in 1931, following a hysterectomy. Helena (who later went by her middle name, Pat) married Jack Walsh, a wealthy business owner in Butte. Lydia married Jacob Reitnauer and they moved to South Dakota. Apparently, from what my grandpa tells me, they didn't have much contact over the years after the move.

Sam worked for many years on the Butte, Anaconda, and Pacific Railroad, as did his son-in-law, John F. Gibson. He lived with John and his son, Fred (my grandpa) for several years, and then moved in with one of his other children. He passed away 10 April 1955 in Rocker, Montana. He is buried in the Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Anaconda, as are his daughter Augusta and son Elmer.

Treasure Chest Thursday: My Recent Acquisition

2010-07-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

Most of the genealogical 'treasures' I've collected over the years have been historical documents - census records, birth, marriage and death certificates, draft registrations, and the like. One of the non-documentary treasures I've come across is the set of photo albums my grandmother owns, with about 800 pictures taken and/or collected by her mother, Rosie Wagner, over the course of 40 years. It's been amazing to go through those old photos and get to know some of my relatives that have long since passed away. It's also shown me where I get my 'shutterbug' drive, as my mom calls it - the desire to take lots and lots of pictures.

But the treasure I want to talk about today is an unusual one. It was never actually owned by my ancestor, as it was created a couple years after his death. But it was held by people who knew him, that served with him in his regiment in the Civil War. And the fact that it's now 111 years old (eleventy-one years, as Bilbo Baggins would say) makes it by far the oldest object in my house. The object I'm referring to is this:

It's a ribbon commemorating the 18th annual reunion of the NY 115th Infantry regiment that served in the Civil War. My 4th-great-grandfather, Alexander Blood Shute, was in that regiment from the time they mustered in early 1862 to the end of the war. He would have seen a lot of battles, and was even captured by the Confederates early on at Harper's Ferry (if I remember the regiment's history correctly). He died in 1897, two years before this ribbon was created. But his fellow soldiers would have met, and maybe shared stories and remembrances of him, at their reunions. And it just hit me that people that probably knew him better than I ever will owned this ribbon. So getting to own this helped me feel a little more connected to this somewhat distant ancestor.

Eventually, I'd like to get something to commemorate all the military heroes in my ancestry - my great-grandfathers Jack Bergstad and Jim Harris who served in WWI and WWII respectively, my grandfather Fred Gibson's service in WWII, and my dad's service in Vietnam. My great-grandfathers have both passed, so I can try to look up info on their service records. But my grandpa and dad are still alive, so I'm not sure how to approach them and ask them about their service. Do you have any ideas or tips on how to talk to living relatives about their military service? If so, please share! I'd love to hear what you've done to find out more about family's military history.

Madness Monday: My family and slavery

2010-07-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

This is kind of a follow-up post to my last post. In looking into the Berry family records I have (which, it turns out, were not as plentiful as I had previously thought) I saw I didn't really have as much info on Lucinda Berry, daughter of Benjamin Berry (one of the two slaveholders I knew were in my ancestry), other than the fact that her dad left her some land in his will. I had found her in the 1850 census, living in Greene, Platte county, Missouri, with her children (her husband had presumably died by 1842, though I apparently forgot to note how I came to that conclusion). I hadn't found her in the 1860 census, though by 1870 she had moved to Montana to live near her oldset son, Thomas (my ancestor), at his farm in Three Mile. So, I decided to do some quick research to try and find a couple more census records on Lucinda.

Before going into what I found, I should note something. My grandmother, Sally Crawford, has researched this family quite a bit, and had heard somewhere that Lucinda had owned a big plantation with slaves in Kentucky or Missouri, had lost everything in the Civil War, and then decided to come up to Montana to live with her son Thomas. I didn't know how accurate that was, as I knew little (and still know little) about records showing the transmission of slaves between family members, and the only record I did know of was her father's will, which, as previously noted, didn't leave her any. I'd assumed (a bad thing to do in genealogy!) that that meant she'd had no slaves, so I just put that family story aside in doing my research.

Now, however, I decided to put that assumption aside, and do some more digging. I started by pulling up the 1850 census slave schedule on Ancestry.com. I knew where to find Lucinda in that census, and could easily verify it was her if she did appear in it. When I clicked search, I was surprised to see she did in fact appear in the slave schedule as a slaveholder. I counted the entries, and she owned 12 slaves in 1850. Almost 10 years of assuming slavery had stopped with Benjamin Berry were thrown out the window by looking at that one document. It was a bit hard to take in, that slavery had gone down another generation in my family tree. I determined to find Lucinda in the 1860 population schedule, and to see if she continued to hold slaves. Within a few minutes, I had located her, listed as LB Harris, with some of her children, still in Platte county but now in the city of Weston. I pulled up the 1860 census slave schedules, and found a listing for NB Harris with 14 slaves. I checked back at the 1860 population schedule, and there was an NB Lober listed in the household above Lucinda, and thought for a minute that maybe the census taker had confused the two households. I tried a new trick I'd taken from Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems podcast - looking for info on the neighbors of your ancestors in the census. I tried finding the Lober family in 1850 in Platte county, with no luck. I also looked at the other names listed on the pages before and after Lucinda in the slave schedule, and confirmed they were her neighbors in the population schedule. I also noticed one or two other names in the same section of the slave schedule differed slightly from the population schedule (EE Wilkerson vs EE Wilkinson, for example). So it doesn't seem unreasonable, given the last name, the number of slaves, and the slight name differences of others in the schedule, that this is my Lucinda Harris.

So, the long and short of it - Lucinda Harris was a slaveowner, for at least 22 years after her father passed away. This means I now have a whole new set of records to try and find. I also want to know how she got the slaves - did she receive any from her father before he made his will? Did she and/or her husband Lewis Harris purchase them? Did her husband receive any from his father? What happened to the slaves after the Civil War? That's my "Monday Madness" - being hit with a whole slew of questions about a generation of my family tree I had thought for 10 years didn't apply, and may not even be able to find answers for.

A tough wrestle

2010-07-05T02:22:00.000-07:00

So I finally finished going through my Bergstad files and updating my genealogy file with everything that I have (and have added). I say finally because I started going through the Bergstad stuff back in January! I added probably 30 or so census records (the only research I did, really, during this phase) so that kinda stretched out the process a bit, but I feel very confident that everything Bergstad-related I've gathered so far is noted in my file. Now I move on to a line with much more diverse documentation - the Berry line.

My Berry line ends with Lucinda Berry, my 4th-great-grandmother on my mom's maternal side. She was one of 18 children of Benjamin Berry (11 kids by the first wife, 7 by the second, and no he wasn't a polygamist, his first wife passed away and he remarried). Benjamin was a pretty well-to-do guy - he was a farmer, had a distillery and a mill, he had a big estate, left lots of money and land to his kids, and he owned a lot of property - including slaves. Benjamin was one of two known slaveholders in my family tree (the other being Harrison Harris, grandfather of Lucinda's husband, Lewis Harris). I haven't really spent a lot of time researching the Berry family, as my grandmother Sally Crawford has done most of the research on that line, and most of what I have is copies of her discoveries. But now that I'm getting into recording the Berry side, I kind of want to try something - I'd like to see what happened to those slaves, where they ended up, and maybe learn a little about them. From what I've seen in shows like 'The Generations Project' and 'Who Do You Think You Are?' when slaves were freed, they often took the last name of their owner. There also seems to have been a lot of cases where the female slaves were taken advantage of, and the offspring of those women were moved on to other family members. I sure hope none of that is in my family's history.

As far as where Benjamin fits into the larger slavery picture of pre-Civil War Kentucky, I'm not sure yet. I know he had at least six slaves, as they are mentioned by name in his will - Frank, Rose, Belville, Martin, Jerry, and Friday. Benjamin stated in his will and the codicils that Frank and Rose were to be given to his son, Benjamin Jr., Bellville was to go to his son, Younger (yes, his name was Younger), his daughter Harriett Redd was to receive Jerry, while Friday and Martin would go to Lewis, one of the executors of the will. Most of the slaves were given a monetary value (it shocked me to see it the first time I read it, seeing a price attached to a person), except for one, Friday. Regarding Friday, Benjamin said: "I leave my negro man Friday to my son, Lewis A. Berry, he is to take care and protect him as long as he lives, for his labor, he being an old and faithful servant and wish him well taken care of." Part of me wants to see this as Benjamin seeing Friday's humanity, realizing that he deserved some dignity and good treatment in his old age. But at the same time, part of me sees this could also just be "take care of this for me, it's old and fragile," like asking someone to take care of an old pocketwatch. I mean, Friday was as much a human being as Benjamin, but even after an apparent lifetime of 'service,' Benjamin didn't release him from it. Why not? If Friday was an old man by this point, why not free him? If you really wanted to thank him, that seems a more appropriate gesture.

But I also can't judge Benjamin by my days' standards; I can only try to understand him by what he saw and knew and understood. In his day, slavery was legal. It would be for nearly 30 years more after he died in 1838. If Friday was old when the codicil was written in 1836, it's not likely he lived to see the end of the Civil War. What I'd really like to know is: what did Friday think of Benjamin's request? Did Lewis fulfill that charge? Did it mean anything to Friday? What was Friday's relationship to the other slaves that were divided among some of Benjamin's other children? Were any of them his family - sisters, brothers, even children? If so, how could Benjamin have justified splitting them up like he did?

Obviously, in genealogy, you're lucky to find a few facts about your ancestors - birth, marriage, and death dates and places if you're lucky, maybe a will (like Benjamin's) or some land records, maybe a mention or two in a local newspaper, and at possible best, a journal or two and some photos. Answers to questions like mine just aren't going to be found in most of those records. As far as I know, Benjamin left no journal, and he lived too early for photos to be taken. Haven't really tried looking for newspapers yet, and I have a land record or two (or at least know of them). I guess that's why I want to see what his kids did with the slaves they inherited - it's really the best way I can think of to kind of see what their father taught them about slavery. It won't be perfect, they were their own individuals and made their own choices, I know that. But at least it can give me an idea of what they were taught. Who knows, maybe it all had something to do with Lucinda's son Thomas (my 3rd-great-grandfather) striking out west all on his own in 1850. Then again, maybe not.

Vacations ROCK!!

2010-07-04T00:55:00.000-07:00

So last week Lisa and I took our first ever kid-free vacation, courtesy of my mom and dad. We went down to Orlando, Florida for 5 whole days of fun in the sun! Well, 2 days in the sun, 2 in the hotel, and 1 getting lost on the road, to be exact. Quick recap:

Days 1 and 2 - Lisa and I went to the Magic Kingdom and Epcot parks. HOLY CATS there are a billion things to do there! SO many exhibits and movies and restaurants and other things to see/walk through/eat.

Days 3 and 4 - BOTCON!! Yes I, your humble correspondent, got to attend Botcon this year, thanks to my wife's careful, devious planning. All I can say is - wow. So many awesome people, made some new friends, met some of the folks behind Transformers, and got some pretty awesome, hard to find stuff.

Day 5 - tried to go to church (missed the first hour due to getting lost in rural Florida), and visited Lisa's grandma Charmaine Smith. What a fun lady, very feisty and opinionated, but very sweet too. Lisa hadn't seen her in about 15-20 years or so, so it was pretty neat to be in on that reunion. Here's a photo of Lisa and her grandma. Do you see a resemblance? I sure do.

Overall, it was the best vacation EVER!! Now I'm trying to get caught up on all the genealogy I missed. Starting to make some progress on the Bergstad documents - I've finally got all of Philip Hammer's pioneer record noted in his file. Now I just have to go through a few of the Bergstad-related emails I've gotten (there's only 5 or so) and I'll have the whole Bergstad folder finished! It's hard work, going through the files I've compiled over the last ten years and making sure they're all noted in my genealogy file. Most of them haven't been, so it's been a lot of work. But I feel good about knowing that everything I've found so far will (eventually) be noted in my file. Then, once that monumental project is done, I need to go through my source list and edit it, make sure it conforms to Elizabeth Shown Mills' standards in her Evidence! book. That will be another task. Then comes breaking out the pictures from the pages I scanned from Grandma Blossom's beige book. Hooo-ee! Have I got my work cut out for me or what?

Say cheese!!

2010-06-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

The last few days I've been sick, so now that I'm finally on the mend again, I can blog about my favorite topic - genealogy!!

A few weeks ago, Lisa and I took a trip up to my grandparents' house in Marysville. My grandma has three old photo albums full (and I mean full) of pictures, over 550 pictures between the two books I've already scanned and identified. On this trip, my grandma spent about 4 hours identifying people in these old photos while I took notes, and we finished going through the whole album! We'd already spent 2 or 3 previous trips on this same book, so it was no small task going through those pictures and pointing out who was who. But now the third album was all identified, and just needed to be scanned. From May 25th to today, I've scanned 71 pages of pictures, each page having an average of 6-12 pictures. I've still got another 12 pages to go, but I'm on the downhill side of it finally. Right now I'm scanning full pages (well, technically it's half pages, as the pages are too big to fit completely on my scanner), and later on I'll go into Paint.Net or something and pull out (digitally speaking) each picture into its own file. Here's a sample of what I'm working with:

These pictures are from a lumber mill my great-grandpa worked on back in the 40s with his brothers. It's been amazing to go through these photos and get to see some of my ancestors - my great-great-grandma Mary Hoffman, her daughters Rosie (my great-grandma) and Mary and their families, my great-grandpa Charles Wagner and his brothers and their families, and their cousins and their families - and get to see little snippets of the times they lived in. Maybe someday I'll have someone help me identify the makes and models of the cars and trucks they drove, and other neat little details like that.

The main thing I have to figure out - how do I preserve these in a way my kids and others will be able to see them and appreciate them? I might burn them to CDs and send them as Christmas gifts or something. I can't just hoard them on my hard drive - they don't do many people much good that way. Maybe I'll have Lisa help me on that one. She's the artistic one of the two of us. We'll see. For now, I have to get them digitized. One step at a time.

Mawwaige, twue wove

2010-06-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

I've known for a while that FamilySearch has other websites out there besides the old http://www.famliysearch.org/ and new.familysearch.org sites, but I've rarely ventured to explore them. Well, I've recently decided I have no reason not to see what's there, and would probably benefit from getting to know what they are, what they have, and what's coming out soon. I started with the labs.familysearch.org site, as that's the only one I could remember the URL for off the top of my head. The first site they listed was the FamilySearch beta, which looks like a whole new reimagining of the site, and looks awesome. I tried doing a search for my great-grandma, Augusta Joseph Gibson, and once I narrowed the results down to Montana (where she lived for most of her short life) I was shocked - there was the marriage record of Augusta to her first husband, Charles Staffan!!! Not only that, it gave the names of Charles' parents (including his mom's maiden name), and a different maiden name for Pauline, Augusta's mom - we'd had her name as Pauline Rosen, but this record (made roughly a year after Pauline's death) said Pauline Rozinko. That was very exciting, so I started searching for the marriages of Augusta's siblings Elmer, Pat, and Lydia (Olga was married in Canada), and found them all. Elmer and Pat's marriages still said Rosen or Rozen for Pauline's last name, but Lydia's said Rossanke. With two out of four marriages adding a syllable after Rosen, I think I have good proof that Rosen or Rozen was not the last name of my great-great-grandmother. What it was exactly, I don't know. But I know something I didn't know yesterday when I started - the FamilySearch website has stuff even Ancestry.com doesn't have.

I kept searching and found the marriages of at least 10 or 15 more couples in my family tree, some dates I had and confirmed, some dates that I didn't have at all. I even found the marriage record of my great-grandma Rosie Sitzman Wagner's aunt Rose Sitzman, and (best of all) Rose's husband's first name - William. All my grandma knew was his last name, Fredrickson, so this was awesome to find. I found a few more Sitzman marriages too, which is fantastic because the Sitzmans have been very difficult to find records on. My newspaper breakthrough last time, and the marriage record breakthrough last night, have really helped make a few cracks in that brick wall. There's still a LOT of work to do on that side (the marriage records grossly conflict each other in terms of my great-grandma Rosie's father's name, for example) but the fact that I now know records EXIST, that I can find them, and (hopefully) begin to unravel this mystery is very exciting. :)

A Paradigm Shift

2010-06-03T23:59:00.001-07:00

How do you say that word anyways? Pair-a-dime? Para-dijum? Oh well. I've undergone a big shift in my thinking the last couple weeks. Maybe not so much in the way I think, but the focus of what I think about. This blog has pretty much been relegated to whatever political-themed rant was on my mind, and it has served as a pretty good vent for my frustrations (and they are many) with the political landscape. But no longer! Well, one or two may slip in, I'm not making any solemn oaths on that. :)

I would much rather rant about my fascination with genealogy! It's so much more interesting and worthwhile, and less frustrating than trying to figure out how our president and his Obamatrons are trying to screw up our country today. I've had a lot of success lately in learning more about my family, and trying to piece together its amazing, intricate, and still hard-to-find history. A couple of the successes I've had lately -

1. Met a cousin (third cousin once removed, to be accurate) named Jim Joseph. He's on my dad's dad's side, lives up in Canada and has all kinds of information about my Joseph ancestors (my g-g-grandfather Samuel Joseph was a German from Russia, and his daughter Augusta Joseph was my grandpa's mom, and the source of my middle name, Joseph). He's got oodles of info on the Josephs, including pictures!! I love old pictures, and seeing my family in them is a double treat.

2. Newspapers! I'd always figured old newspapers would never have info on my family that would be useful, but boy was I wrong. I found a boatload of articles on Ancestry.com this week about my dad's mom's side, the Sitzmans, and their relatives. It's been hard to find any real records on the Sitzmans, so this was awesome, almost miraculous, to find that many newspaper articles - obituaries, funeral details, etc. Also found some articles on the Joseph side too - notices of birthday parties, notices of the family traveling on the coast, even mentions of long lost relatives finding each other after decades of separation. Also, thanks to some awesome librarians in California, I have a copy of a newspaper article detailing how one ancestor on my mom's dad's side was killed by a train, and how he was probably broke at the time and walking between towns looking for work at the time of his death (sad story!). I am now a big fan of old newspapers.

3. My favorite genealogical staple is the census, and it has been especially good to me the last few weeks. I've been reviewing my notes and updating my file with EVERYTHING I have, making sure every mention of every person in my file is noted. I've seen there were a lot of gaps in the census records I had, so back to Ancestry.com I went, and found a bunch of them! I'm probably still missing a few, but a new type of census was opened recently there, a non-population census. They took down details of the farm or business or whatever of the head of the household or farm or business, and in my ancestors' case, it was farms. I learned all about Andrew Olson's farm - that in 1879, he owned 40 acres of land valued at $480, produced 40 tons of hay, owned 6 horses, 6 milk cows, 4 pigs and 6 chickens, grew 10 bushels of Irish potatoes and 100 lbs of tomatoes, and sold 450 lbs of butter and 18 dozen eggs. He was a Norwegian immigrant who had been in the States for about 25 years at that point, so he seems to have done pretty well for himself. Way to go Andrew!

Now wasn't that better than politics? I thought so, too. I'll be writing more about future success stories in my genealogical adventures, so stay tuned! And if you've actually read this whole post, I owe you a dozen eggs or a pig, you pick. :)

Despair and Hope

2010-04-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I wasn't really despairing, I just thought it made for a good post title. But I've been reading (well, listening really, it's an audio book) this book by Mark Levin called Liberty and Tyranny. In it, he details all the crappy, corrupt things the government has done to twist and contort our country into what it is now. It's very enlightening, and very maddening/frustrating at the same time, because you come away feeling like you've been robbed over and over again. So I've been thinking lately about what my part is in all this - how do I react to this information, and what can I do about it all? The first thought was - not much. I can't reform Washington, I can't make Obama and his cronies respect and live according to the Constitution. Does that mean I give up, crawl into my little corner and ignore the rest of the world? That didn't feel right either, for several reasons (least of all being that it's hard to sleep like that). Then, while trying to decide what to teach in the Gospel Essentials class I teach on Sundays, the answer presented itself in the form of chapter 27 - Work and Personal Responsibility. I see this as the answer for a couple different reasons:
1. I can't make others be more responsible, but I can be more responsible myself. I can't force others to work for their own support, but I can work for mine and my family's.
2. Rolling up my sleeves and getting to work will give me less time to focus on the negatives, while at the same time helping me provide for those dependent on me for their support, helping me see positive results from my actions.
3. Lastly, perhaps in some small way I can help influence and encourage others to do likewise.

I've taught this lesson a couple times in this class (been in this calling for over two years now, you know). One line in the lesson always used to be difficult for me to really accept, a quote from David O. McKay: Let us realize that the privelege to work is a gift, that the power to work is a blessing, that the love of work is success." The back of my mind would always think "pfff, not working is better, duh." But now, having seen the country struggle its way through this depression, and seeing the government bent on taking people's initiative and motivation for self-reliance and responsibility and accountability away, and replace it with a handout mentality, I've begun to realize how right Pres. McKay was. I think of those underemployed or unemployed, unable (and some now unwilling) to find work, either because the search is too hard, too long, too frustrating, or because they are used to having their needs met for them by someone else and they no longer feel compelled to provide for themselves. I hope to avoid both of those scenarios, whether or not I have a job. I am grateful for the work I have, that it allows me to provide for my family a comfortable standard of living, even if (and perhaps this is a blessing) we don't have everything we wish we did. Whatever the future holds, I now understand a little better what my parents were trying to teach me all those years - that you NEED to work, not just for what your work brings you, but for what working does FOR you and TO you. If those lessons can be spread a little farther, at least hopefully to my kids, by the work I do, I feel that will be all the success I can ask for.

Are you kidding me?

2010-03-29T15:13:00.001-07:00

I just read an article on biggovernment.com about a growing fear in some corners of secession due to the conservative/radical liberal split our country is facing. For a moment I almost had to check my calendar to make sure this wasn't 1860. Are you kidding me? Secession??? After everything this country has weathered in the last 150 years - two world wars, multiple smaller wars overseas, the Great Depression, several smaller recessions (including the current one), race riots, overcoming communism, fascism, Nazism, the Cold War, winning the space race, putting not just one man but a whole GROUP of men on the stinking MOON (with 1960s tech at that), ousting several brutal dictators overseas, liberating country after country on this planet, sending BILLIONS of dollars in humanitarian to people who in some cases hated our guts - and now, after all that, we're done? Fight's over? No more United States of America? After everything this country has meant to people, done for people, in this world, we can't come together any more? What the heck happened to my country? Who did this? We're the melting pot - everyone is different, but we all come together and make it work BECAUSE WE'RE AMERICANS and that's what we do.

If this is true - if the Great Experiment is really winding down towards its end, the world has dark, dark days ahead. Like Ronald Reagan used to say, we're the shining city on the hill (he added the word shining), and dog-gone it he was right! At least, he was then - we used to shine. We used to stand for something. Think of Superman at least - created in 1938 by a man whose father was just murdered - there's no coincidence that his colors were red and blue. But what did Superman originally stand for? Truth, justice and the AMERICAN WAY. Look at the old GI Joe cartoon back in the 80s - a real AMERICAN HERO. At one point in our history we weren't afraid to show the world what we were - something good, something to look up to, to stand up for. Even our kids' media showed that. But now what do our kids hear? The Founding Fathers were just rich, racist capitalist pigs; that progressivism is great and good and got us out of the Great Depression; that separation of church and state means you see and serve only the state and religion should be shuttered into your closet and never let out, or better yet, just mocked out of existence; and a lot of other crap.

No, I know differently. I know this country was founded on good principles, by good men, with a noble, untried idea - that men could govern themselves based on principle, not on divine right of kings or placing all power in a single tyrant. But when you take away or replace the principles this country was founded on, what are we left with? The same crappy governments that haven't worked in the rest of this world's sad history. I don't know about you, but I'm teaching my kids where this country came from - the God Himself had a hand or two involved in its establishment, that its early leaders trusted and relied on Him to guide them; that as money and power became more important, they left God out of their decisions, and have dragged us into the muck; but that we can still dust ourselves off, go back to those principles and reclaim His help in leading this nation. If the nation is lost, if there really is a secession ahead...then they'll be seceding from me. I'm holding true to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the other founding documents this nation was based on. I know others will stand with me in holding to those God-given truths, and with His help these truths and those who hold to them will stand, and those who let them go will have nothing to stand on.

A little better

2010-02-07T20:19:00.001-08:00

Things have been good today. My wife needed help with something, and I actually got off the computer and went and helped her without thinking about it. My kids wanted to play, so I ignored the book I had brought, and played with them. They both went to bed without a fuss, and Asher 'taught' Leah how to say prayer. It's not even 8:30 and they're both asleep, a new record I think. Studying for the lesson I get to teach next week in Sunday School has already taught me new things on the topic. This is probably the best Sunday I've ever had. :)

Massachusetts - a stay in execution

2010-01-19T23:35:00.001-08:00

Massachusetts - you did it! You elected a (slightly more) conservative senator who can help stall, maybe even stop Obamacare. He has promised (and you can believe, we will be holding him to it) to stop this atrocity from passing. Yes, the Dems could still go for their 51 vote (restriction? what was it called? I forget) and still pass it. But to lose Ted Kennedy's 47-year-old seat to a Republican? That's gonna shake them up a bit.

America, we have this chance - a chance to keep Uncle Sam, at least temporarily, from taking control of almost every aspect of our lives. DON'T GIVE UP THIS CHANCE. Be responsible. Do the hard thing - research your candidates, study the issues, and vote your values, not for one party or the other. They've both proven faithless and unworthy of our trust. Find wise men and women, good men and women, and vote them into power. We can still save the republic from Obama's socialist/fascist/progressive nightmare.