Ancestry is buying Genline!

 

I don't know how I missed this, but Ancestry is buying the indispensable Swedish research site Genline.com for $6.7 million.

At present to use Genline, you have to know the town and parish to use these birth, marriage, death, and moving out parish records effectively. Ancestry's not saying how they'll roll out access, but I have to hope they'll put a couple of armies of indexers on these records.

There's also access to parish and other records directly through SVAR Riksarkivet på webben, a pay-for-access portal for digitized records from the Swedish Department of the National Archives.

I was told at the Family History Library in SLC that Genline was digitizing the parish records from microfilm the church created some time ago. SVAR was digitizing directly from the records themselves. I do know that sometimes SVAR had records that Genline did not and vice versa, so it still pays to check both places.

Madness Monday: Martha Williams Saul

The Madness Monday ancestor I'm posting about today is my husband's great-great grandmother, Martha H. Williams Saul. She was born in Virginia abt 1827 and married Albert G. Saul on 5 Oct 1846 in Franklin Co., Virginia. They had five surviving children. Before the Civil War, they appeared to be relatively prosperous, living at Oak Level, Henry, Virginia in the 1860 census. By 1870, Martha is a patient in at the Western Lunatic Asylum, Staunton, Augusta, Virginia, and dies bef 1880.

Surname Saturday: Kirschstein

My first Surname Saturday post! I’m choosing my KIRSCHSTEIN line, which should be easy and isn’t. The KIRSCHSTEIN (English: Cherrystone) surname is from my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, which is German through and through – for about five minutes. After that those borders start moving around and KIRSCHSTEIN could be Prussian, German, or Polish. Add in some transcription errors, and pretty soon I’d smacked right into the brick wall.

My grandmother, Edith Matilda Augusta KIRSCHSTEIN, was born in Chicago in 1889. I knew her parents’ names, they had emigrated from Germany to Chicago, they had been divorced, and that was about it. Her father, Bruno KIRSCHSTEIN, was mostly a mystery to me when I started researching this line about two years ago.

Cook County didn’t have a birth certificate for Edith at their Web site. The rigid search interface at Cook County leaves a lot to be desired – no Soundex for starters and a complete inability to search on partial names, but at least it’s better than when Cook County had nothing online at all. So I assumed for the time being that my grandmother had no birth certificate filed, which wasn’t that unusual in the late nineteenth century.

Then I tried Cook County for a death record for Bruno KIRSCHSTEIN. No joy. So I tried the wonderful incomparable Stephen Morse and his one-step search interface for Illinois’s 1916-1950 Death Index. I searched on first name Bruno and last name beginning with K and there was he was listed as Bruno KIERSCHSTEIN. Since poor Bruno died in the Cook County poorhouse hospital, I figured he must be a relative of mine. He was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1851, according to the death certificate.
 

In 1881, Bruno KIRSCHSTEIN (spelled right for a refreshing change) and Anna Schumann were married in a Lutheran church in Chicago.

I also checked the city directories in Chicago, which revealed that he changed jobs just about every year. The 1892 Chicago Voter Registration had Bruno KIRSCHSTEIN (also spelled right ) and born in Prussia.

In the 1900 census, he’s Bruno KIRSCHSTZER from Prussia. In the 1910 census, he is missing (or I haven’t figured out how to murder his name the same way the census taker did), but his ex-wife and family appear as DERSCHETEIN. In the 1920 census, Bruno KIRSCHSTRIN is back and the dear wonderful census taker put down Braslau, Germany, for his place of origin. YAY! 

Breslau is now Wrocław, Poland, and over the centuries, the city has been located in Poland, Bohemia, Austria, Prussia or Germany. The New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 at Ancestry told me BRUNE KIRSCHSTEIN arrived in New York from Hamburg on 28 Aug 1883, and that he was a merchant from Prussia.

On a trip to Chicago, I found Bruno’s grave at Waldheim and I visited the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court for both naturalization and divorce records. The underlying naturalization records were destroyed and only the final naturalization documents were retained. It cost me $15 to find out BRUNO KIRSCHTEIN  renounced his allegiance to the Emperor of Germany on 16 March 1891.

The divorce records were voluminous, depressing, and offered the tidbits that Bruno had two (unnamed) sisters in Germany.

I was having a lot more luck with my Swedish and Norwegian searches, so poor Bruno languished for a time. And then a few weeks ago I decided to try FamilySearch because I knew they were indexing Chicago records. And there was my grandmother, who was named EIDET KIRCHSTSIN according to Cook County. Sometimes I think they hired people in vital records in Chicago at the turn of the century because they couldn’t spell or write.

What about Edith’s brother, who had died as a child? Cook County’s interface didn’t have a record, but FamilySearch did: BRUNO HENRY CHRISTIAN KIERCHSTEINS, born 1892 and father Bruno KIERSCHSTEIN and mother is Anna SEHUMANN (SCHUMANN). Again, no death record at the Cook County site, but in FamilySearch I tried Bruno, Chicago, and 1894 and found the death certificate for BRUNO KERSCHSTENE, who was one year, four months, and five days old when he died.

Then I realized that Ancestry has added the Hamburg departure database, Hamburger Passagierlisten, 1850-1934, and I literally held my breath when I searched for Bruno and there he was, departing on 16 Aug 1883.

But the best part was a residence was listed: Rawitsch (town just outside Breslau), Posen (county), Preußen (country). (It’s probably the last time he didn’t have to spell his name to somebody!) I’m overjoyed to finally find this record and now I’m off to research the churches in Rawicz, Poland. 

Wikipedia tells me Rawicz has about 21,000 people and “the town was founded by Adam Olbracht Przyjma-Przyjemski for Protestant refugees from Silesia during the Thirty Years War. In the 1800s, it contained a Protestant church and a medieval town hall. The principal industry was the manufacture of snuff and cigars. Trade involved grain, wool, cattle, hides, and timber.”

Some family members think Bruno was Jewish and others think Lutheran, so I will check out the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic records and see what I can find. Stay tuned as I look for the 

KEIRSCHSTEIN

KIRSCHSTZER

DERSCHETEIN

KIRSCHSTRIN

KIRSCHTEIN

KIRCHSTSIN

KIERCHSTEIN

KIERCHSTEINS

KERSCHSTENE

KIERCHSTEIN

KIERSCHSTEIN

KIRSCHSTEIN family in Rawicz.

Santa Barbara Co. Genealogical Society Meeting

Saturday I went for the first time to the monthly meeting of the Santa Barbara Co. Genealogical Society and was very impressed. They were most welcoming, very organized. The topic was How I Turned a Handful of Family Mementos Into a Genealogy Reaching Back To Germany in 1740, by Dr. Kenneth Wolf, a medievalist professor of history at Pomona College. And I joined SBCGS - it's a bit of a drive but it felt like a good home for talking genealogy with some very pleasant people.

So now I am working up the courage to make some inquiries on my Prussian and German ancestors. I have John Humphrey's book on German ancestors and I made it to his German sessions at Jamboree this year and in 2008. He's a very impressive speaker and makes German research sound very doable.

So I can do this - I think. :D

Follow Friday - MacGenealogist.com

Sometimes it can get a little lonely being both a Mac loyalist and a genealogist, but a visit to Macgenealogist.com is just the ticket. Lots of tips and tricks for using Reunion, including putting your tree on your iPhone, sources, photos, and all. Thanks, Ben!

Parker Cemetery on the Spoon River, Knox County, Illinois

My husband has the most interesting family history by far and of course only a mild interest in his genealogy. He's wonderful – I'd hate to count the number of hours he's waited while I looked up just one thing (times about a hundred) in a courthouse or library. Recently we took a marathon road trip from California to Chicago and back, hitting as many cemeteries as we could. 

The best cemetery we found on this trip is a tiny, almost abandoned family cemetery on the banks of the Spoon River in Knox County, Illinois. We needed our GPS to find this place, at the end of a rutted lane too small for our car. It was really a lovely peaceful place, with wild violets and deer and the river running just below the cemetery's bluff.

I found exactly who I was looking for: my husband's great-great grandmother Mary Kinsley Curtis, who died at the early age of 42. Her widower never remarried. At least not that I've discovered yet. :D Her husband John wrote her a love letter just before they were married that Sharon has. Maybe we can convince her to let me post it here.

I also found fourteen of my husband's Mackie line in Parker Cemetery and I've added all of them to FindaGrave.

But what was truly wonderful is that Edgar Lee Masters could have written The Spoon River Anthology on that very spot. Some of you may recall that Masters wrote a volume of poems set on "The Hill" - a cemetery on the banks of the Spoon River - and each poem in the collection is delivered by the dead speaking of themselves. Masters actually lived and wrote in another Illinois county, but I'm hoping that at some point he made it to the Parker Cemetery for inspiration.

Free Access to Civil War Records at Footnote.com in June

My husband's second cousin Sharon is someone you'll hear a lot about. We found each other on Ancestry through a correction to census records on a line we were both working on.

She just let me know that during June, you can search footnote.com's online Civil War records. They've been updating and improving access to these records, so get it for free while you can!

Maiden Voyage of My Geneablog

Thanks to the Blogger Summit and veteran geneablogger Thomas MacEntee's class at the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree, I've decided to take the plunge and start blogging.

I am a librarian and archivist (and I've even played one on tv), so I thought I might share some thoughts on family research from both sides of the reference desk.


My first job out of library school was running a local history and genealogy department right about the time that Roots made genealogy so popular. A few years have gone by since then, but family history is more popular than ever. 

Just now my research is in the U.S., Scotland, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, and New Zealand. I'm a bit intimidated about Prussia, Germany, Austria, and Poland so far, though.

I feel like I need a post sign-off like Edward R. Murrow. How about:

Good night and good searching!