And I thought it was complicated before...

I wrote not long ago about discovering that my great-grandmother Rosie Sitzman and her sister Mary Sitzman had different fathers. I had a little time this week, and started going through the DNA tests for my dad and his siblings and looking for matches that had ancestry from Bohemia or Czechoslovakia, that didn't have their second cousin in the shared match list. That way, the odds were more likely that they were related through Rosie's mystery father. I was able to find at least five or six leads, so I sent off emails to them, hoping at least someone would write back.

This weekend, I got an email back! One of the matches identified a few other matches as her first cousin and father, which gave me a little family group to work from. That was really helpful, because her cousin had a family tree that gave me enough data to identify some of their ancestors in census records in Wisconsin. With that info, I traced them back to their immigrant ancestor - John Miller, born 3 March 1883 in Kathrina, Bohemia/Czechoslovakia.

I found John's birthdate and birth place in his WWI and WWII draft registrations, where the info came directly from him, which made the info more reliable. Knowing that, I went looking in the Bohemian archives at the Porta fontium website (www.portafontium.eu) and found the most likely candidate for the village of Kathrina - Sankt Katharina, a little village that's actually part of my great-great-grandmother's hometown of Rosshaupt! The right family in the right place at the right time! I couldn't believe my luck.

I went looking through the birth records for Sankt Katharina and Rosshaupt, and with some help from the German-Bohemian mailing list I'm on, I soon had most of three generations of John Miller's ancestry identified, and even a few ancestors from the fourth generation. His family name was, as I suspected, originally Müller (I wish I could take a German class so I could pronounce these names correctly). He also has the surnames Dobner, Radl, and Heger in his tree, none of which appear in my Zitzmann line. So this is all really good news, it's additional evidence that I really am on the track of my elusive great-great-grandfather. But as I began researching this family, I ran into some roadblocks.

For starters, John's mother Anna Radl was born to a single mother. Anna's birth record lists her mother (also named Anna Radl) and maternal grandparents, but the father's section is totally blank. That leaves a big chuck of John's family tree empty. Then, to complicate things even further, John's paternal grandfather, Michael Müller, was also born to a single mother (also named Anna, as it turned out). Thus John's pedigree has two big holes in it that local records probably won't help with (if the parents later married, they would sometimes add the father's info in later, but they didn't here).

It's still early into my research on this family, so I'm not giving up by any means. Many years ago, when I first learned my great-grandma was born to a single mom, I thought "well, that's one blank I'll never be able to fill," but that was before the advent of DNA and genetic genealogy. Now, I've got at least a partial family tree for someone that I am reasonably sure is related to me through that mystery great-great-grandfather. I have names, exact dates, and specific places for vital events of his relatives! That is huge!!  It looks like he, or at least his extended family, was from the same area that Rosie and her mom and sister were from, which makes sense. It's also a bit comforting to know that too, that my ancestor wasn't some vagabond who vanished into the ether. Even though his name isn't on the records, his DNA is, which links him to his family. I really hope someday I'll be able to find his name, as he's the only second-great-grandparent I haven't identified in my tree. And I don't like having white space in my family tree. :)

One other thing this research has taught me - there's a reason we keep saying test all the relatives you can afford. If I had tested just myself, I wouldn't have had enough DNA to match some of these matches. I tested my dad and three of his siblings, all of whom show these matches as related, but they all share different amounts of DNA with them - my uncle shares the most (over 200 cM with with father of that family group I mentioned earlier), one aunt shares less than half of that (barely 90 cM) and my dad and another aunt are about halfway between the two. Thus I now know to use my uncles test when dealing with these matches, as he shares the most DNA from that line, and is most likely to be the test that picks up matches the best. It's like having four fishing poles in the same pond with different bait - you don't know which will work best or what you'll catch, but the more lines you have out there, the better the odds that something will bite. (and yes, for any of you that really understand fishing, I clearly don't. But it's the best I could come up with late on a Sunday night.)

Sitting on a goldmine

A few years ago, my grandma Blossom's DNA test at 23andMe led to one of the hugest genealogical discoveries since I started my research back in 2000. Her grandmother, Maria (Zitzmann) Hoffman, had said nothing about her background, where they were from, or who her ancestors were. Grandma's test helped me find a match who lives in Germany, who was intimately familiar with our common ancestors in Bohemia, and helped me find literally hundreds of years of my family history in that area. Being able to share that with my grandma before she passed away still stands as one of the genealogical accomplishments I am most satisfied with and happy about.

One of the challenges with all those records, though, is getting all the info out of all of them. I have somewhere between 50 and 60 individual records - baptisms, marriages, burials - that tell me about these ancestors, all written in German. I don't speak or read German much at all, though I have come to learn a few words, like baptism, day laborer, born, died, etc. so I can get the gist of who the record is about. But anything beyond that is beyond my level to get into, without a lot of time spent to read the handwriting (I did take a German genealogy course or two through BYU, but a few months' exposure isn't enough to make me proficient at the level I need to be to read these records). So, for the most part, they've been sitting in my hard drive, untranslated, waiting for the day when I have the time or funds to get them translated.

I decided to reach out to a genealogist I'm acquainted with, and asked her to translate one of the records for me - the marriage record of Lenhard Zitzmann and Maria Elizabeth Hüttl in 1810. This one is important to me, as it's the earliest record of the earliest Zitzmann ancestor that I know of. Lenhard was likely born sometime around 1785, and Maria was born in 1788. I really want to know the origins of the Zitzmann surname in my family, where it originally came from, so if any record could help me go back further than 1810, this one could. What she found startled me.

Marriage record of Lenhard Zitzmann and Maria Elizabeth Hüttl.

She said that Lenhard's info (the section on the left in the image above) said his mother's name was Katharina Weiman, the daughter of a herder, who lived in Hagendorf in the Palatinate. I'd heard of Palatine Germans, but only in the context of those who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the late 1700s. Suddenly I found I was also a descendant of Palatine Germans, but who went east instead of west. What's really interesting is that Hagendorf is almost right on the border between Bavaria and Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), and really isn't far from Rosshaupt, where the Zitzmanns lived for many years. But that short little trip is across a border, which helps explain why Lenhard just appears in the records at this time. This means I could try reaching out to churches and archives in and near Hagendorf and might be able to learn more about the Zitzmanns and Katharina Weiman. The prospect of learning about more of my ancestors is just thrilling, and the key to that all has been sitting in my own computer for years!!

Hagendorf, Bavaria. Image from Wikipedia. 

This means that I might be sitting on a veritable gold mine of information about my family, and I don't even know it. I'd like to dig in a little more, see if I can get some more of these records translated. I might need to reach out to other professionals for some help with the handwriting, but I think it's worth it. Who knows what other gold nuggets are just waiting to be discovered?

My grandparents' DNA trails, Part III - "Wagner" mtDNA

The next DNA trail I'm tracing is the path of my paternal grandmother, Blossom (Wagner) Gibson's mtDNA. I've traced this DNA back to Anna Kreutzer, my 6th-great-grandmother, who married my 6th-great-grandfather Georg Adam Salfer in Rosshaupt in the Bohemia region of the Austrian Empire in 1756. My grandma inherited it from her mother, Rosie Sitzman [Zitzmann], who married Charles Frederick Wagner.


Blossom had three daughters, one from her first marriage and two from her second. I know mtDNA is also passed on to male children, but as they can't pass it on to their kids, they are left out of this analysis. Her first daughter had three kids, one girl and two boys. The daughter, my cousin, had two children but both are boys, so they can't pass on the mtDNA. As it looks like they aren't having any more kids, the mtDNA on that branch ends with my cousin.


Blossom's second daughter had two kids, both daughters. The older daughter has three kids, one daughter and two boys. The younger daughter has one child, a daughter. So both of my cousins on that branch each have a daughter that can pass the mtDNA from my grandma on down to another generation.


Blossom's youngest daughter had three kids, one girl and two boys (noticing a pattern here?). The daughter, my cousin, has two kids, a boy and a girl, with a third on the way (so far gender is unknown). But my cousin's daughter gives us another candidate for passing on grandma's mtDNA to a new generation.


So between my two aunts that have girl grandchildren, there are three girls of the latest generation that could pass on grandma's mtDNA. Given that there are currently 18 kids of that generation, I'd say that having a full 1/6 of them be girls in the direct maternal line is pretty good. Hopefully they'll be able to keep Anna Kreutzer's DNA going to a new generation of descendants.

Wordless Wednesday - Obsolete German villages in Bohemia

I recently learned of something terrible that happened in Bohemia, the homeland of my great-grandmother Rosie (Sitzman/Zitzmann) Wagner. After World War II had ended, the Sudeten Germans, the German-speaking inhabitants of the Bohemian part of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), were brutally attacked, killed, and driven from their homes. According to one source, 3.2 million people were forcibly relocated to Germany, with no say in the matter, and only with those possessions they could carry with them. I've spoken recently to a survivor of this tragedy, who provided me with the above map. Each red dot represents one settlement where German-speaking residents, some of whose family had lived in the area for centuries, were beaten, killed, or forcibly driven from their homes and country. Most of these settlements were left uninhabited, and are now gone.

This really struck home, as my great-grandmother and her family lived on the western border of Bohemia, in the Tachau region, which is on the far western edge of the region. Her family had lived in the villages of Rosshaupt, Neuhasl, Ströbl, Zirk, and others since at least the late 1700s. To think that her relatives were treated in such a brutal way is unthinkable, yet it happened. Maybe that was one reason she forbade her daughters to speak of where they were from.

To learn more about these events, and to read English translations of first-hand accounts, please visit http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/whitebook/desg00.html.