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.

Slim pickins, postwise

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

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

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!

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!

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

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.