California Family History Expo Coming Up

Just over a week to go until the California Family History Expo at the Alameda County Fairgrounds  Fairgrounds in Pleasanton. I hope to meet some of my fellow bloggers, like Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers fame.

I'll be presenting both days and look forward to hearing several sessions as well. Information about the schedule, location, and registration is available here. 

I hope to see a lot of you there!

Tombstone Tuesday: Wyatt Anderson Daniel, 1907-1942, d. Uravan, Colorado

Wyatt Anderson Daniel, 1907-1942, Dermot Cemetery, Hugoton, Stevens, Kansas

Today’s Tombstone Tuesday is about Wyatt Anderson DANIEL. It’s also about hidden sacrifice, synchronicity, and wonders of genealogy on the Internet.

My mother-in-law died long before I met my husband. When I started to research his family, he told me he thought his mother’s first husband had died in a mine accident, perhaps in Colorado, and his name was Wyatt.

I searched, without success and using a variety of names, and decided to concentrate the Curtises, his mother’s line. They are a prolific and amazing family who settled Connecticut in the mid-seventeenth century and then moved across the country, finding time, it seems, to have a family member at every major historical event in the history of the United States.
 

So when we decided to take a big road trip last spring, I was determined to go through southwest Kansas where my husband had grown up. As I searched findagrave.com before we departed, I realized there was a small private cemetery on his family’s ranchland and I determined to go there first.
 

More searches revealed that my husband’s great-grandparents, who had raised his orphaned mother from the age of 9, were buried there. A few more keystrokes and my digital visit to the Dermot Cemetery revealed one Wyatt Daniel, who was buried right next to the Sauls. The elusive first husband was found.

 

With the death date from the grave marker, I quickly found an article about the accident and his obituary in the Hugoton library when we visited.

Wyatt Daniel was a rancher, but the Dust Bowl of Kansas was not kind to him or his wife, Etta Margaret CURTIS DANIEL. Unable to make farming pay, they left for the Western Slope of Colorado.

They ended up in a town called Uravan – the name is a contraction of uranium vanadium. There they eked out a living until that fateful Saturday morning in 1942, when Wyatt Daniel died working in the powerhouse at the mine that provided part of the uranium needed by the Manhattan Project for the first atomic bomb.

Hugoton Hermes, 7 Mar 1942, p. 1

I was determined to visit Uravan until a visit to Wikipedia told me that the town no longer exists. Designated a Superfund toxic site, the town was demolished during a massive cleanup that lasted from 1986 to 2001. All that’s left is an historic marker by the side of the highway that once led to the town.
 

And that was it until The New Yorker recently ran an excellent piece on Uravan called "The Uranium Widows," by Peter Hessler. The reflections of the former Uravan residents who recount stories of living and working there and recall their lost community with longing were fascinating to me. And as Hessler notes, perhaps the greatest irony is that Uravan has been obliterated, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now both thriving cities.
 

I longed to know more about Wyatt Daniel and Ancestry came to my rescue. His niece is an avid genealogist and she generously shared her family tree; fond stories about Wyatt, born 1 Jan 1907 and his twin sister Winnie, who was born on 31 Dec 1906; more stories of Wyatt and Peggy; and a photograph of them on their wedding day.

Margaret Curtis Daniel went on to marry twice more. But she told my husband Wyatt Daniel was the love of her life. And now at least we know who he was and how he died.

Archives News: The Library of Congress Celebrates Home Movies

It looks as though film scholars are figuring out what genealogists already knew: home movies are very evocative. A "home movie summit" was held at the Packard Campus of the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia. The Packard Campus Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation is a state-of-the-art facility for the preservation of film, a 2007 gift from David Woodley Packard, the son of one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard.

A similar home movie workshop held last weekend in Ireland at University College Cork called “Saving Private Reels.”

Read more about the conference here.

Surname Saturday: Schumann and the Anatomy of a Mistake

I figured out a mistake in my tree this week. And while it’s human nature to blog about all the brilliant stuff we do to find our ancestors, I thought it might be just as valuable to examine a mistake.

When I was first trying to assemble the family group for my great-grandmother, Anna Schumann KIRSCHSTEIN KAHNS, I didn’t know much about the family. Some census work revealed that Anna had three siblings: Marie, Elise and Friedrich. Sister Marie was living in Chicago when she somehow met Christian Gross, married him in St. Paul and moved to Minnesota.

When I found Christian and Marie Gross in the 1920 census, they were right where they should be: Murdock, Swift, Minnesota. But they had an additional household member, Careline [sic] Gross, sister-in-law to Christian, the head of the household.

Eager for more Schumann siblings, I made the leap and decided the census-taker just hadn’t gotten Caroline’s surname down correctly. I’d seen it happen multiple times when a census taker used one surname for a household with two or more.

Yay! Here was an older sister Caroline, born nine years before my great-grandmother in Germany. Into my tree she went. I shared the information with others and soon there were trees up on the Web listing Caroline Schumann, b. 1851 in Germany. But I couldn’t find Caroline Schumann anywhere else. Not in census, not in migration records, not in death records. And what about that nine-year gap between children? That didn’t seem likely either.

When I thought about it, I realized that Christian Gross’s sister-in-law could have been his brother’s wife instead of his wife’s sister.

Then I finally figured out the village the Schumanns lived in before they left for America. So I’ve been mining the relevant parish records and finding wonderful things – wonderful except there is no Caroline Schumann because she never existed except in my overeager imagination.

I went through every birth in Freienwalde, Pommern, Preussen, from 1824 to 1861. No Caroline Schumann. And I found Anna’s parents married in there in 1860, about a year before Anna was born.

So my great-grandmother was the eldest child of her family group and Caroline Gross was the wife of Christian Gross’s brother. My searching did reward me with another Schumann sibling, one that I can prove: Anna had a younger brother, August Johann Carl SCHUMANN, born in April of 1874.

There may be other siblings out there, but unfortunately the LDS parish records end in 1874. But I’ve learned my lesson. No more leaps of imagination while reading the census! 

Follow Friday – MobileGenealogy.com

I'm starting to wonder how I ever did research without the Reunion app and my complete family tree with sources on my iPhone. I love being able to consult a family group or doublecheck a source for a date without bringing my laptop and balancing it on my knees while I sit at a microfilm reader.

So I was happy to find a new Web site devoted to genealogical applications for mobile devices: mobilegenealogy.com. It came in handy at the local LDS library when someone noticed me using my iPhone, but his smartphone was an Android and I had no idea what apps were out there. mobilegenealogy.com covers all mobile devices and their info is up-to-the-minute.

Because Reunion for iPhone ($14.99 from Leicester Productions) does such a great job with its mobile app, I haven't really needed to scope out the many family tree viewer apps out there. It's pricey, but WEP (worth every penny).

I do have Ancestry's Tree to Go (free from Ancestry.com), which provides access to the family trees you've uploaded to their site, but I find it slow and clunky.

A different animal is Traces of the Past ($3.99 from Truscape Solutions), which provides a search interface to FamilySearch.org. I just put it on my phone today, so I'll let you know what I think after I've used it for a while – or when I have to increase my data plan - whichever comes first!

Wisdom Wednesday: Hire a Translator

Those of you who have been reading along know that I've been fumbling my way through German parish records for the first time, working on two of my family lines with some modest success.

To educate myself, I've been to many German genealogy sessions at conferences, bought (and read) books on German genealogy and history, used Web translators, pestered friends and relations who speak German, and referred to sites that interpret vintage handwriting. And all of those things were valuable and helped.

But sometimes the smartest and most effective thing is to hire a translator.

Last week, I found the marriage record for my great-great grandparents, Friedrich Wilhelm Alexander KIRSCHSTEIN and Florentine Mathilde BRAUN. I could make out the date, the pastor, the names of Friedrich and Florentine and her father Heinrich, their ages, and the dates the banns were announced. And that was about it.

The marriage of Friedrich Kirschstein and Florentine Braun, Rawitsch, Prussia, 1847.

So I hired a pro and here's the result:

No. 48

October 20th at 1 o' clock in the afternoon

Pastor Haake [?]

Mr. Friedrich Wilhelm Alexander KIRCHSTEIN, 31 years old, citizen and master soap maker, a bachelor from here, with Miss Florentine Mathilde BRAUN, 33 years old, 2nd unmarried daughter left behind by the deceased Mr. Heinrich BRAUN, former merchant, dyer of colored goods from here. Proclamation [on] the 3rd, 10th, and 17th of October.

And now you must excuse me - I have some new information to put in my tree!

The Barbara Tunnels

John Richards of the Santa Barbara Co. Genealogical Society shared this information at my presentation at SBCGS on Saturday. The German National Archives is using microfilm and tunnel storage for the long-term preservation of their records, 855 million images to date, including Bach’s handwritten manuscripts, blueprints of the Cologne Cathedral, and Hitler’s certificate of appointment as Chancellor. 

Red vault sealing the entrance to the archives ©theworld.org

The Barbara Tunnels method may seem unbearably old school in today's digital world, but I couldn't agree more with their analog strategy. Read about it here.

Follow Friday – Geogen German Surname Mapping

Today's Follow Friday is for Geogen, the German and Austrian surname mapping Web site. There are lots of surname mapping sites out there, but this is the only one I know of that focusses exclusively on Germany and Austria.

It's the brainchild of Christoph Stöpel, a software developer from Ludwigsfelde, Germany.

About Geogen, Stöpel writes:

“Geogen is the short form for ‘geographical genealogy’ which means location-based ancestor research. On this website you can create maps which show the distribution of surnames in Germany and Austria. Significant concentrations can point to a local root of the family or of the family name.”

It's best to search in German. Stöpel advises: “Enter your surname in the upper input field and click the »Research« button. German special characters (ä, ö, ü and ß) are distinct letters. This means you must look for Mueller and Müller in separate searches.”

Questions? You can contact Stöpel at webmaster@christoph-stoepel.de.

Happy searching!

Wisdom Wednesday: Results of Planning a Genealogical Research Trip

My blog entry on planning a genealogical research trip has been by far the most popular post, so I thought it might be a good idea to revisit the topic and talk about how my 42 hours in Michigan's Upper Peninsula went.

My #1 objective was more information about my brick wall great-grandfather Gottfried Hann.

Michigan Marriages, Marquette County, April, 1891

I knew he and my great-grandmother, Anna Larsson, were married in the county on 27 April 1891. FamilyLabs has a Michigan marriage database that looked like the marriage was void. Were they actually married in Marquette County on that date? And what else could I find about Gottfried Hann?

We arrived in Marquette at mid-afternoon, so we hit the courthouse first. Based on a visit to their Web site, I knew Marquette County charged $5 per day to access records and I knew the span dates for their vital records. (I think they should have charged me double.)

I used my printed-out list of records I needed, plus my family tree on Reunion on my iPhone at the courthouse. But I had to use the county’s indexes on gigantic ledgers (the women in that office never need to go to the gym!) to figure out which volume, sub-volume, and page the record was on. Gottfried and Anna were indeed married on that date, but the original license for Godfrey Haunn and Anna Larsen was destroyed (one of those convenient courthouse fires) and all I was able to get was an abstract.

I had more luck with birth and death records: Anna’s brother, Carl Anders, died in 1915, and I got his death certificate, plus his wife’s from 1968 and his children’s from 1993 and 1997. And I found Carl Anders and Elin’s marriage license from 1900. But there was no birth certificate for my great-uncle, Ernest Max Hann, who was born in Marquette County on 3 Mar 1893.

The courthouse was closing, so we drove by the house where my great-great-uncle and his family had lived for more than 87 years. And we located the cemetery, but it was too big to search at random and the office was closed.

That night I hit FamilyLabs search again hard, looking for that birth record for Ernest Max Hann and coming up dry. After many many tries, I structured my search as follows:

Michigan Births, 1867-1902 only
Father first name Gottfried
Mother first name Anna
Surnames blank
Location: Champion, Marquette, Michigan
Year: 1893

Bingo! “Maxin Ham,” born 26 Mar 1893, father Godfried Ham, b. Norway (?!) and mother Anna Ham, b. Sweden. The next morning, we were at the courthouse again first thing, but Michigan will only let you look at the abstract page and not copy the record. The abstract had no new information.

Then we headed to the local museum/historical society, where we had an appointment. I’d sent a list of research objectives to the curator and she had already pulled all the obituaries for me – isn’t that great? She'd cut and pasted my research objectives right into her records, so she'd have accurate statistics for her own reports. I’d heard a lot about the Berggren family, but the stories were unclear on whether they were relatives. Because the obits were all done, I was able to resolve the Berggren-Larson family relationships before they closed for lunch.

My husband and I then headed to the Ishpeming city cemetery 12 miles away and got the cemetery records and headstone photographs for all of the Larsons and Berggrens. Then back to the local museum/historical society again to talk to the curator about other local resources – payroll and business records for the local mines are being processed by archivists at the university and will be available in the future. I searched city directories (no Hanns, but lots of Larsons and Berggrens) and mining accident records, and tried to parse the local Swedish newspaper from the turn-of-the-century. My extremely patient husband went next door to the public library to buy me a copy of the local genealogical society’s Genealogical Resources of Marquette County Michigan (3rd edition, 2005) while I finished at the historical society. (They were closing the next day to move to a new building, something I’d learned in my call to the curator, which allowed me to rearrange our trip.)

Still hoping for an actual birth record for Ernest Hann, we next went to the LDS library, where they had microfilm of local records. I got scans and copies of Gottfried and Anna’s marriage registry and “Maxin Ham” ’s entry in the state birth registry.

We were almost too tired to eat that night, but then I got voicemail from the local Catholic diocese while we were at dinner. I’d been calling for several weeks before we left and hadn’t heard anything in reply until I got a voicemail that night, saying the church records were open only to priests, the parish I needed was defunct, and the records were now in another town, but I could write to request a search.

As we left town the next morning, a Saturday, I realized we’d drive right through the small town where the Catholic parish records were stored. We detoured off the highway and found the Catholic church. A very nice sister agreed to make a search on the spot of their index, but affirmed that the records themselves were fragile and sealed.

She found Wilfried Hann, son of Georgi Hann and Anna Shank, and Annie Larson, daughter of Lars Larson and Carolina Larson, in her marriage abstract register. And then she found their son, Maximus Hann, born 3 Mar 1893 and christened 26 Mar 1893.

All of this is just a long way of saying that planning pays off. I was able to get about twice as much done, including research on collateral lines. And while two new names in my Hann line doesn't seem like much, it represents a big chink in that brick wall. 

And now I’ll excuse myself – I have a lot of scanning to catch up on!

Tombstone Tuesday – The Berggren Brothers

Gravestone of Erick and August Berggren, Ishpeming, Marquette, Michigan

Today’s Tombstone Tuesday is about the Berggren brothers, Lars Erick and Per August, who were killed mining iron ore in Ishpeming, Michigan, in 1889.

A widowed mother and Lars’ wife of four years, Mathilda Lind Berggren, were left to mourn. Mathilda was 25 when she was widowed. She never remarried, living with her mother-in-law, Lovisa Berggren, until Lovisa died in 1930. Mathilda died in 1932. 



They are all buried together in the city cemetery in Ishpeming, Marquette, Michigan. The inscriptions on the stone are in Swedish, but in addition to the all-important names and dates, all I could make out was “till minne av” (in memory of). The Swedish, the deteriorating sandstone, and the lichen obscured the rest.  

At the local historical society, I found the news article about the mine accident.

Daily Mining Journal, Marquette, Michigan, 18 Dec 1889, p. 6

When I first started doing genealogical research in my 20s, I wrote to my cousin who lived in the Upper Peninsula about our Swedish line. Vendla gave me a lot of important information, but much of her letter talked about friends of the family whose sons had been killed working in a mine. I wasn't even sure if they were family. After some digging at the courthouse and historical society, I now know how the Berggrens and the Larsons were related.

The women who mourned the rest of their long lives are buried in the same plot, but have no grave markers.

Speaking Saturday at Santa Barbara Co. Genealogical Society

This Saturday I'm giving my “Think Like an Archivist” presentation at the monthly meeting of the Santa Barbara Co. Genealogical Society. Many thanks to Marie Sue Parsons for the invitation.

I recently joined this group and I'm so impressed with their welcoming attitude to new members. And not only do they have their own building for their extensive library, the building is being expanded and remodeled. If you live in the area and you're not a member, you're missing the genealogical boat.

See you on Saturday!

The Schumanns of Freienwalde, Pomerania, Prussia

Freienwalde, Pomerania, Prussia

1 Friedrich Wilhelm (Fred) SCHUMANN
--------------------------------------------------
Birth:      1834, Germany
Death:    14 Apr 1908, Chicago, Cook, Illinois
Burial:    17 Apr 1908, Forest Park, Cook, Illinois
Occupation:    Ackerbürger (citizen farmer); laborer
Religion:    Lutheran
 
Ackerbürger (Ackerbuerger) : farmer in a town who has all the rights of a citizen (therefore this term was never used in villages.

Spouse:  Auguste Marie Luise LINDE
Birth:      13 Oct 1835, Freienwalde, Pommern, Preussen
Death:    21 Jun 1886, Chicago, Cook, Illinois
Father:   Carl LINDE
Mother: Luise REINHARDT

Children:    
    Anna Friedrike Luise (1861-1934)
    Marie Auguste Wilhelmine (Mary) (1863-1947)
    Elise Ernstine Hermine (Lizzie) (1865->1930)
    Friedrich August Wilhelm (Fred) (1872-1950)

1.1a Anna Friedrike Luise SCHUMANN*
--------------------------------------------------
Birth:      15 Jul 1861, Freienwalde, Pommern, Preussen
Death:    4 Nov 1934, Chicago, Cook, Illinois
Burial:    7 Nov 1934, Forest Park, Cook, Illinois
Occupation:    Seamstress
Religion:    Lutheran

Spouse:    Bruno Julius Wilhelm KIRSCHSTEIN
Birth:        25 Mar 1851, Rawitsch, Posen, Preussen
Death:      20 Aug 1924, Bremen Twp., Cook, Illinois
Father:     Friedrich Wilhelm Alexander KIRSCHSTEIN
Mother:   Florentine Mathilde BRAUN (1814-1891)
Marriage: 15 Sep 1888, Chicago, Cook, Illinois
Divorce:   5 Sep 1905, Chicago, Cook, Illinois

Children:    
    Edith Matilda Augusta (1889-1984)
    Erwin Frederick (1891-1964)
    Bruno Henry Christian (Died as Infant) (1892-1894)
    Alfrieda Charlotte Anna Elizabeth (1894-1994)

Other spouses:    Charles William KAHNS

1.1b Anna Friedrike Luise SCHUMANN* (See above)
--------------------------------------------------

Spouse:    Charles William KAHNS
Birth:        14 Nov 1859, Hamburg, Germany
Death:      29 Sep 1938, Chicago, Cook, Illinois
Father:     Joachim Heinrich (Henry) KAHN  (1828-1916)
Mother:    Elizabeth (Mary) DRAY (1821-1901)
Marriage: aft 1927

No Children

Other spouses:    Bruno Julius Wilhelm KIRSCHSTEIN

1.2 Marie Auguste Wilhelmine (Mary) SCHUMANN
--------------------------------------------------
Birth:    21 May 1863, Freienwalde, Pommern, Preussen
Death:  30 May 1947, St. Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota
Burial:  2 Jun 1947, St. Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota
Occupation:    Homemaker

Spouse: Christian J. GROSS
Birth:    19 Mar 1859, Germany
Death:   13 Apr 1922, Murdock, Swift, Minnesota
Father:  Father of Christian GROSS
Marriage:  28 Feb 1893, St. Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota

Children:    
    Erna Carlyn (1894-1954)
    Martha L. (1895-)

1.3 Elise Ernstine Hermine (Lizzie) SCHUMANN
--------------------------------------------------
Birth:    13 Jun 1865, Freienwalde, Pommern, Preussen
Death:   aft 1930

1.4a Friedrich August Wilhelm (Fred) SCHUMANN*
--------------------------------------------------
Birth:    11 May 1872, Freienwalde, Pommern, Preussen
Death:    21 Apr 1950, Oliver, British Columbia, Canada
Occupation:    Painter; farm laborer

Spouse:    Ida A. SCHLEICHER
Birth:       Dec 1884, Germany
Father:    John SCHLEICHER  (1849-)
Mother:  Caroline (1846-)
Marriage: 3 Jul 1902, St. Croix, Hudson, Wisconsin

Children:    
    Herbert R. (1903-)
    Mable Augusta (1904-)
    Walter (1907-)
    Frederick (1908-)
    Edith (1910-)

Other spouses:    Elthea May JERY

Surname Saturday: Birth and Baptism of Anna SCHUMANN

More progress on my Prussian line with the discovery of the birth and baptism record for my maternal great-grandmother, Anna Friedrike Luise SCHUMANN, and on the same wonderful roll of microfilmed parish registers, the names, birth and baptism dates of her three siblings, the names of her parents, and more.

Before I started the research, the only things I knew about my maternal great-grandmother were:

1.    Her name was Anna.

2.   Her mother’s name was Augusta.

3.   Her family was (supposedly) from Berlin.

4.    When she died, she was laid out in the front parlor of my grandmother’s Chicago apartment. My mother, age 9, is displaced by relatives in town for the funeral and had to sleep on the couch in the same room with the body. (File that under Things We Don’t Ask of Our Children Today.)

5.    Anna was divorced from her first husband and became very religious. She was separated from her second husband at the time of her death because she sent quite a bit of Mr. Kahns’s money to Billy Sunday, the evangelist.

Not a lot to go on from a genealogical perspective. So here’s how the hunt evolved.

A couple of years ago, Ancestry put up the database for U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925. I never thought this would be a useful collection for me because my immigrant ancestors (all Burke’s steerage, never Burke’s peerage) all arrived in the mid-1880s before passports were required.

But then I thought it might be worth a look when I read the court records of Anna’s divorce from Bruno Kirschstein. She vowed to leave him penniless and it looks like she succeeded. In 1913, she was doing so well she took a trip back to the old country and needed a passport. (Needless to say, Bruno never went back home - he died in the poorhouse hospital in Cook County a few years after Anna went home in triumph.)

Anna Schumann Kirschstein's 1913 passport application.

Anna listed her birthplace as Freienwalde in the application and Google told me there was a town outside Berlin called Bad Freienwalde in Brandenburg. I made the leap and put the spa town down for her birthplace.

About a year later, I had my mtDNA tested and the results came back very strongly for Pomerania. I did some reading and began to puzzle over Bad Freienwalde in Brandenburg. And then with a bit more sleuthing, I found out there’s a town in Poland called Chociwel in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship. And sure enough, before WWII, Chociwel was known as Freienwalde and was located in Germany. Wiki says the town “had a population of 3,406 in 1939. After the death and dislocation associated with the war, its population was down to 402 in 1946.”

(Can I just say here that I remember geographical research before the Internet and it wasn’t pretty – lots of gazetteers and maps and frustration.)

The Family History Library catalog revealed exactly one roll of microfilm for Freienwalde, Pomerania, Prussia, and none for Bad Freienwalde in Brandenburg. Suddenly I knew which town I was rooting for!

I order the film just before the local stake library closes for the month of August. In the meantime, I do some further research on Anna’s siblings who moved to Minnesota and find a tantalizing reference to Anna’s mother’s maiden name, but Linch doesn’t sound very Germanic.

I come back home, the library reopens, and I’ll leave out the Keystone Kops circumstances that seemed to keep me from actually getting my hands on this roll of microfilm.

Finally, finally, finally, using the birthdate from the passport application, I head straight for 15 July 1861 and there is Anna Friedrike Luise, just exactly where she should be. Parents: Friedrich Wilhelm SCHUMANN and Auguste Marie Luise LINDE.

Bottom row: Anna Friedrike Luise Schumann's birth and baptism, Freienwalde, Pomerania, Prussia, 1861

Without my recent success finding Anna’s husband Bruno Kirschstein’s birth and baptism, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to try this. Swedish and Norwegian records don’t scare me as much as German ones for some strange reason.

So I was feeling pretty smart – until I started looking for Anna’s siblings and realized that the pastor who kept the parish register wrote out the dates for births and baptisms. And my ability to pick out März and Mai and Juni and Juli suddenly didn’t mean much when I couldn’t figure out the dates that went with those months. So I puzzled along with my LDS German genealogical word list and relied mostly on the kindness of strangers. But at least I have a whole flock of Schumanns now and a lot of Lindes – but that’s a post for another day, like tomorrow.

Update: Yesterday I pestered everyone I know who reads German ran an informal poll to get a translation of Friedrich's occupation from the christening records for his four children. The consensus is: “Ackerbürger (Ackerbuerger) : farmer in a town who has all the rights of a citizen (therefore this term was never used in villages). This seems to be a very specialized and antiquated term.” Interesting!

Follow Friday – OLD GERMAN PROFESSIONS, OCCUPATIONS and ILLNESSES

Today's Follow Friday is a list of Old German Professions, Occupations and Illnesses my own dear husband found for me in about six seconds of Google searching and it's been very helpful in my recent Prussian research.

(I think he got tired of me asking him to translate things. I guess what he learned when he was posted to Schweinfurt and Baumholder doesn’t necessarily translate to nineteenth century genealogy records. It's pretty obvious I don't have even ein klein wenig of German, isn't it?)

Note: The original URL for Old German Professions, Occupations and Illnesses only loads as a Google cache these days. It’s also up at RootsWeb, but that artistic use of the German flag for a background makes it fairly unreadable.

Today's post also has a question. In the four following images, what's the word ____bürger following the name Schumann? I know it's his occupation and I have an idea, but I can always use more help. Feel free to weigh in in the comments section and thanks in advance from me, my husband, and Friedrich Schumann. 

 

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Wisdom Wednesday: Using 100% Cotton Paper

Sometimes in my Wisdom Wednesday archival tips, I feel as though I’m lecturing on what NOT to do. So today for a change of pace, let’s talk about paper and a positive step that’s easy to do.

The next time you need to buy a ream of paper for your genealogical research, give serious consideration to the permanence of the records you’re creating and then reach for acid-free – or even better – 100 percent cotton paper.

But first let’s take a brief walk through paper history. If you’ve had the chance to see papers that were made before the 19th century, you may be pleasantly surprised by how well they’ve lasted. From medieval times til the mid-eighteenth century, paper was made with flax or cotton and sized with gelatine, all relatively stable ingredients. 

In 1774, Carl Wilhelm Scheele (is that name in anyone’s family tree?) discovered chlorine, making it possible bleach dyed rags for paper. The chlorine reduced the permanence of the paper, but increased the availability of raw materials to make paper. So paper became not as expensive, but also not as permanent. The same thing happened in 1806 when alum, a highly acidic sizing, was developed.

The proliferation of high-speed printing processes for newspapers and books increased the demand for paper. In response, new and faster methods of making paper were developed. By 1858, the groundwood process, the ability to grind wood fibers, made paper even cheaper to produce. Sulphite, a highly acidic sizing, was developed to speed production and increase profits.

But by the early twentieth century, it was clear that cheaply made paper was so acidic that the the deterioration of books and newspapers using this paper had imperiled our shared cultural history. Libraries and archives began to work on ways to mass-deacidify paper. And they began work on how to avoid the problem altogether.

In 1984, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) established the standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives (ANSI Z39.48-1992 rev 2002). The goal of this standard is to reduce future deterioration issues in printed library materials through establishment of  “criteria for coated and uncoated paper to last several hundred years” under optimal conditions in libraries and archives. 

Giving our descendants several hundred years of time to decipher our family history research seems like a pretty good idea. (But after that, it's not my problem!)

The next time you’re in the market for a new ream of paper, you can look for “acid-free” on the label, but there are various standards for "acid-free" paper, with differing requirements. In some professions, paper having a pH between 6 and 7 is  considered acid-free, but archival and museum conservators consider 7.5 the threshold. 

So use the stuff from Staples that’s labeled “acid-free” for notes and the like. But when you’re ready to print copies of primary sources or produce trees for family members, use 100% cotton paper. If you were writing and submitting a dissertation, the university would require that you use paper of this quality, so why should your genealogical research deserve anything less?

Tombstone Tuesday: Alfrieda Kirschstein Schaaf (1894-1994)

Alfrieda Charlotte Anna Elizabeth Kirschstein Schaaf (1894-1994)

Today’s Tombstone Tuesday is about my great-aunt, Alfrieda Charlotte Anna Elizabeth Kirschstein Schaaf. She was my grandmother’s baby sister, born in Chicago on 26 Nov 1894, the fourth of four children of Bruno Julius Wilhelm Kirschstein and Anna Schumann. She almost made it to her centennial, dying in New Hope, Hennepin, Minnesota on 11 Jan 1994.

Aunt Frieda is buried in the Fort Snelling National Cemetery with her husband, Norman Joseph Schaaf. I was in Minneapolis a few weeks ago and finally made it to Fort Snelling. This veterans’ cemetery is virtually surrounded by the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and I think a jet comes in over this cemetery about every 30 seconds 24/7. While this might not sound appealing to most, I found it oddly appropriate, for my Aunt Frieda loved to travel.

I don’t think she and my grandmother had particularly pleasant childhoods, as their parents divorced rather acrimoniously in 1905. But as adults, I think they managed to find a great deal of pleasure in trips they shared together to Hawaii, the Grand Canyon, Banff and Calgary, and California, which made them both rather glamorous figures to me as a child.

Aunt Frieda would take the train from Minneapolis to our suburb outside Chicago and stay for a night or two before departing with my grandmother on one of their trips. She’d alight from the train carrying one of those little white Samsonite train cases, dispensing Hershey’s kisses and talking non-stop.

I’m glad I found her gravesite, although I have to say I’m disappointed with Veterans Affairs that they don’t add a surname for wives who are interred at Fort Snelling, just the first name and middle initial on the verso of the husband’s gravestone. For someone whose name was Alfrieda Charlotte Anna Elizabeth Kirschstein Schaaf, seeing it truncated to “Alfrieda C., his wife” was a bit disconcerting.

And now I’m off to the local LDS Family History Center, which has just reopened after a month’s hiatus and holds, I hope I hope, some microfilm that will shed light on more Kirschsteins and Schumanns.

Labor Day – America in Color from 1939-1943

Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room, Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Clinton, Iowa, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Happy Labor Day!

The image above comes from the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information archives. The New Deal agency was headed by Roy Stryker, who said a primary goal of the photography program was to "introduce America to Americans." 

The documentary photography produced during the 1930s by famed photographers like Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evens is justifiably famous. Less well known are the color images included in the archives. The photo blog at denverpost.com has a nice selection up entitled "Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943." Enjoy!

Follow Friday – Immigration History Research Center

Today's Follow Friday is the Immigration History Research Center at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota. It's a great place to check out this Labor Day weekend, as we reflect on the immigrants in our own families who worked to make this country great. 

The Immigration History Research Center promotes interdisciplinary research on international migration, develops archives documenting immigrant and refugee life, especially in the U.S., and makes specialized scholarship accessible to students, teachers, and the public (like genealogists).   

The IHRC Web site offers this page to orient genealogists to family history sources at IHRC. 

The archives at the IHRC collects "newspapers, oral histories, personal papers, and organizational records of immigrants and refugees and the agencies created to serve them. Holdings are particularly rich on the labor migrants who came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1930s, on the displaced persons who arrived in the U.S. after World War II, and on the refugees resettled in the United States after 1975. Holdings include archives, books, periodicals and digital sources."

The IHRC has embarked on an ambitious pilot project to digitize "letters from the IHRC collections that were written between 1850 and 1970 both by immigrants (the so-called 'America letters') and to immigrants ('Europe Letters') in languages other than English.” 

And don't give up – even if you don't find archival materials from your family, there are still those organizational records that might have just what you need. I was delighted to find they have more than 70 years of records for Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ishpeming, Michigan, when I discovered the online finding aid for these records at IRHC. 

This is a great example of the kinds of archival resources you can find if you attend my upcoming talk on at the California Family History Expo in Pleasanton.

Wisdom Wednesday: Step Away from the Laminator!

Today’s Wisdom Wednesday is about the evils of lamination.

When you’ve got a crumbling, fragile document that is precious to you and your family history, it can be very tempting to think that lamination will solve the problem.

Lamination is the process of placing a paper document between two sheets of plastic laminate (usually cellulose acetate) and using pressure and heat to fuse the adhesive in the plastic and the paper together. This process is not reversible.

Although lamination was popular in institutions 70 to 80 years ago, archivists, conservators, and other professionals never use the procedure today because it is not 100 percent reversible.

Laminating also leads to serious conservation problems, apart from the damage caused by the heat and the adhesive. Moisture can penetrate lamination and cause mold growth that will render the document unreadable. Lamination can make the deterioration caused by inherent vice (see last Wednesday's Wisdom Wednesday post) worse. The laminate can leach gasses that harm materials stored nearby.

Because lamination is irreversible, there is no treatment measure that can help. The plastic coffin of lamination doesn’t prevent further deterioration. So please, please never laminate anything made of paper (photographs, letters, documents) that you care about.