Are we Ire-man, or Germ-ish?

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!!

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

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

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

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!

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!!!!

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.