Who Do You Think You Are? Genealogy Q + A

I love this photo of My mom and grandma in the summer of 1950...couldn't this be a photo of me and one of my kids?

Over the course of this summer, I have become incredibly passionate about genealogy and I've learned so much about my ancestors along the way. I've used the internet, county healthy departments and clerk's offices, visited cemeteries, quizzed and pestered all of my relatives and even connected with a distant cousin once removed at a small town gas station (she had photos of my third great grandparents!) I'm really proud of all I've discovered thus far, but I'm no where near stopping! 

Getting so far in my quest has been a mixture of hard work and a lot of luck. It's like my own real life mystery to unfold! I went out to you guys last week to get some of your burning family tree questions which I'll answer below! Some if it is a little repetitious from my previous post with my Top Ten Tips for Finding your Family Tree, but here's a refresher and some new ideas too! 

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What is the best way to get started? Where should I start online?

Before you go signing up for your free trial, the very first thing you need to do is make a date with your parents, or even better, grandparents, to ask them what they know. Not all family oral histories match up to what you'll find online, but the more recent generations should be quite close. If you have the names of all four grandparents, or better yet, all eight great grandparents, you'll be able to get a great tree started. Ask for maiden names, other family members (like aunts and uncles, birth, marriage and death dates and where they lived) From there branches will grow thanks to other genealogists who have collected information and shared it online. 

I'll be honest, I didn't get a whole lot of traction in my first round of questions with my own folks. There are so many things I want to know that just don't seem interesting to others. But I think the persistence is paying off. When you ask enough times, relatives just seem to find old documents and know that you want to see them! In just the past couple weeks I've been handed birth certificates, older genealogy work done by past generations, scans from county records and photos galore! 

I chose to start my online quest with the free service from FamilySearch.org. I found A LOT of great info and leads there, but they don't have access to every single document, so I finally decided to get on board with a free trial at Ancestry. I've since decided to pay for a subscription for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because a lot of other genealogists use it and upload to it (such as with family photos) it's a wonderful tool for adding depth to each ancestor you're working on. Secondly, they just have more information, including scans of genealogy related books (for me, I wanted to see the first edition of The Roush Family in America, and Ancestry had it!)

Another key difference between the two is this: Family Search has one main page per person that many people can contribute to (and change for better or worse) while on Ancestry you build your own tree, but can reference other public trees. If you get back far enough there are professional teams at Family Search (I've heard of a Medieval team, for example) that verify those ancient records. Then again, if you have someone who was, say, a Mayflower pilgrim with millions of descendants (I'm looking at your Elizabeth Tilley!) then those records can have dozens of changes each week. If someone has new information = awesome! But if someone makes a mistake or makes an incorrect update then it has to be changed back. There are pros and cons with using that kind of system. On a positive I hope there are people watching all of the photos I have been updating to our common ancestors! I would be thrilled if a distant cousin of mine did the same! 

In addition to Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, I also decided to subscribe to Newspapers.com and have found SO MUCH there that fills in a lot of the blanks. Old newspapers printed things we might find inconsequential, like who had lunch and where last Sunday, but it can really help paint a more vivid picture of relationships from the past. In my case, it's also help connect some family members where I didn't have great documentation (like the 1890 census, which was almost entirely lost in a fire). You never know what kind of drama might unfold either!! 

Lastly, because of the big sale, Adam and I just ordered DNA kits from Ancestry. I have a family link I'd really like to know for sure where the paternity is a little questionable and I hope this gives me connections to solve that mystery. You can save 15% off your DNA kit using my link here. 

I've done what I can with census records, what comes next?

Census records are so great. In the later parts of the 19th century and onwards they really tell us a lot about who lived in what house, their relationships and usually who lived next door! In fact, what got me started on this whole research rabbit hole was looking up my own home from the 1940s census and my neighbors now lived in the same houses back then! I've also seen a lot of coupling up with neighbor kids who later got married.

Next start collecting vital records to confirm birth and death dates. Most of the recent versions of both of these will list parents, including maiden names. You might also find that your ancestors had more than one marriage and possibly children with another partner. This has happened in a few cases for me and I was able to connect with other FamilySearch and Ancestry users who had more details!

What do you do if there aren't documents online for your family? 

Don't be so sure there aren't! In my experience, sometimes taking a break and moving on to a different line helps give me ideas for other branches of my tree. For example - spelling can really vary depending on who was recording the information, especially because compared to modern times, far fewer people were able to read and write. A lot of names were Americanized as well like dropping accents or umlaut over the o. Two examples in my family line are Roush, which was changed from Rausch and Schroeder from Schröder - both German names. 

Check your state's vital records availability through Family Search. Most records post 1900 should be available, but if they're not, try the county's health department. I found my great grandparents, born in 1893 and 1901, which were not online. 

How much time do you devote daily to researching?

Depending the day I can spend between 15 minutes and a few hours. I check in on Family Search, Ancestry and Newspapers.com daily, just to see if any new hints are available. I also keep a notebook of questions and tasks I have for myself. Your ancestors will multiply quickly as you get back further generations and you can spend an entire week on just one of those great grandparents! Because I'm usually working while my kids are playing and can be easily distracted, it helps to have notes to go back to when you're able to pick it back up again. 

You seem to have found so much! Do you just have good luck or are there also dead ends?

When you're given a hint about a family member, it can be really tempting to just create a tree that's as big and wide as possible. Think it through. Do the birthdates make sense? Are they in the same state as siblings (or do they move westward, especially in the early 1800s when land opened up beyond the 13 original colonies?) I remember one of the first nights I was looking around on FamilySearch and dozens of generations later saw a connection to Cleopatra (and the early kings and queens of Europe). Other people told me they were connected to Noah or Adam and Eve. I get that there's a desire to connect yourself to the beginning of recorded time, but I also have no faith in humanity's early ability to keep reliable records. If you want to be serious, you'll want to seek out actual records. And sometimes, you just have to admit to yourself a link isn't correct. Remember what happened with Sarah Jane King?

Speaking of connections, don't be shy when getting in touch with other genealogists, especially if you share a common ancestor. I commonly write people who have updated a record of one of my family members and ask how they are related and do they know anything else that's not in the file for that person? Sometimes folks also have their settings set to private (on Ancestry) and I've found most are willing to share what's behind the photo or file with me. 

Do you think it's easier to search for US records? Any tips for first generation immigrants on international research?

I started my search with the goal of finding each ancestor from the time they came to the United States and connect it downwards. I haven't done much research beyond my American ancestors especially because I can't read German! I wish I had better advise for searching in other countries!

What was your goal when starting this?

My goals have changed a little bit since I first started building my tree. Initially I just wanted to see how far back I could go. Like I mentioned above, I have doubts on the validity of those really old records, so then I thought I would gather and confirm all of the documents for all of my immigrant and first generation American ancestors (and following generations). Then, because of some traction, I was made aware of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) which is a linage based genealogy club. Yes! I am currently in the process of submitting an application to join and proving my connection to a Patriot from the Revolutionary War.  If that weren’t enough, I've also started pursing a second line for a different Patriot (I have seven I'd like to check out!!!)

These ancestral connections to 18th century Americans have also really sparked a desire  in me to learn more about that time in US history, including another love of mine, costume history. It's a nerdy dream come true to have so many intersecting hobbies! 

While I finish my application and then wait for professional genealogists to verify it, I'm going to continue to flesh out each and every ancestor I've found. I've been calling on my parent's cousins and older living generations to conduct informal interviews and ask questions about their grandparents. I just want to know more about where I came from and get stories about those real living, breathing people. Lastly I am borrowing albums and copying photos for two purposes. Firstly to upload online so my distant cousins can see our shared ancestors and secondly for a legacy wall in my home. I have a couple gems going as far back as the early days photography (well... maybe mid 19th century) that I can't wait to frame. 

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One of the things I love about genealogy is that you never know what you're going to find. I've uncovered some pretty big surprises and it's such a thrill to piece together all of the evidence you can find. How deep you dig is up to you! 

Please feel free to ask questions on anything I might have skipped over in this post (or others!) I am happy to answer anything that could help someone else!

A Family Through the Decades

On a Friday morning in late June, I found myself with a stack of piles and boxes at my aunt and uncle’s dining room table. Just to set the scene a bit further, i wasn’t uncovering treasures just anywhere. It was at one of my very favorite historic houses - a  Hoosier homestead built in 1885. I’ve always loved this house and it kind of makes looking at equally old photos (like the wedding shot from 1880 below) even more surreal. 

So I'm at the dining room table, opening boxes that my aunt has carefully labeled and divided into categories when I see the above photo. To me, this is like finding gold! From the clothing I can date it to the Edwardian era, probably around 1910. Then I ask my uncle Walt if he recognizes anyone and he immediately points out the woman second from the left. “That’s grandma Kramer!” He says.  

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Carl Stoppenhagen and Wilhelmina (Minna) Kramer post for their wedding portrait in 1880.

With this clue I’m able to start comparing labeled photos and start connecting the dots. Of course it’s Wilhelmina Kramer Stoppenhagen! She’s my second great grandmother (or Dorothy’s grandma) her face is easy to pick out in the dozen photos I’ve found of her so next I aim to put a name to the rest of the faces in the portrait.  

Because there are three other women and three men, my next assumption is that she’s posing with her children, husband and grandkids. If I look closer at the woman in a dark hat and dress, I can pick out the smile of my great grandma Mary (see her wedding portrait below). When I look at records, I can also see she would have had three daughters when this photograph was made - Minnie born 1903, Hilda born 1907 and Edith both 1908. I also think the blurry little boy behind them is her son Arnold, who was born in 1910 and is being held by her father Carl Stoppenhagen. 

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Mary Katherine Stoppenhagen and Charles Nicholas Werling pose for their wedding portrait in 1902.

So who else had children by 1910? Her sister (first woman on the right) Minnie! Thanks to additional records I found at Barb and Walt’s house, I could date Minnie’s children - Paul born 1908 and Gerhert born 1911. Those kids look roughly like they are three and under a year! 

By taking into consideration the youngest child together with the next to be born (Mary is not visibly pregnant with her next child who would be born in March 1912) I’m ninety nine percent sure this was taken in the summer of 1911! 

The younger woman on the far left would have been the youngest - Lydia. She would have been seventeen. Although she’s wearing a woman’s dress, check out the enormous hair bow she’s wearing in her hair. This indicates so me she might still have been treated as the baby of the family. Or maybe it was popular with the other girls in her class?! Who knows! 

Lastly are the two men on the left and right of the photo. Those would have been the brothers Fred and Charles, but they were only born two years apart - one man would be 24 and the other 26. I’m really guessing on this but the man on the left in the bowler hat looks a little older so I think that’s Fred which makes the man on the right brother Charles. 

So that’s the family! Next I’m going to try to compare this to Minna and Charles Sr’s 50th wedding anniversary photo taken in 1930 (below) to try to match younger and older faces of the same people. My grandmother Dorothy is the second child from the left in the front row! Mary and Charles Werling are standing on the right side just behind the seated elderly couple and I'm pretty sure Charles' twin August is standing just a few people to the left of them! 

Have you ever aimed to date photos? I love using my costume history background to give it my best shot! I’d love to see links to your posts or photos of your family too!  

The Mystery of Sarah Jane and her Father David King

Front Row: David King Jr, Almena Caldwell King, Samuel Nobel King, Robert Quigley King Top Row: Mary Elizabeth King Gotwald, Sarah Jane King, Almena King

Take look at this beautiful family, especially the young woman standing center in the back row. Her name is Sarah Jane King and she was born in 1839. Sarah is part of a mystery I’ve been working on for weeks, which all started with a leafless branch extending from her father, David King.  

So far in my genealogy research I’ve had remarkably good luck. Maybe because I wasn’t expecting to find much more than what my parents had already shown me. Any branch that’s opened up to a previously unknown set of parents or a new piece of vital information im able to fill is a whopping victory. The farther youre able to go, the taller and wider your tree. 

David King Sr.

But with David King and his parents, I kept getting dead ends.  That is to say - I couldn’t find any parents at all. 

So I turned to his children - specifically the names they were given - in hopes that might provide a clue to David’s own parents’ identities. His wife’s side of the family (Almena Caldwell) was incredibly well documented, so it was easy to identify which of their children’s first and middle names came from her ancestry. 

One name unaccounted for was Quigley - two of David and Almena’s sons had it as a middle name and that struck me as worth noting. If I searched David’s mom’s maiden name using Quigley, would something pop up? 

I tried so many combinations and still, nothing in the Family Search database. So over to google I go, searching each of his kids’ names, hoping there will be a headstone somewhere or maybe even a photo. 

And that’s where I struck gold. David’s grandson David Ward King (he went by his middle name, Ward) was quite the 19th century inventor and developed machinery which made paving roads easier. For this he gets his own Wikipedia page complete with stories and photos of his ancestry. In the telling of Wards’ family history, I learned his grandfather was found wandering the streets of Baltimore as a toddler. The child only knew his own name, so his birth year is estimated and we don’t know anything about his parents, although it’s presumed they died during the yellow fever that swept through the city around that time. That child was David King! 

Enter Robert Quigley, a Pennsylvania farmer. He took young David in and raised him as his own, but never legally adopted him. So what do you name your own children to honor the man who became a father figure to you? Bingo. The missing Quigley link. David and his wife Almena named their fourth son after David’s guardian Robert Quigley. Even though I wasn’t able to find David King’s parents I was happy to complete this portion of the puzzle of how he named his children and to realize I shouldnt use more energy on trying to find David’s parents for that branch of the tree.

When I found the post on Ward King I also found a lot of photos - of Almena and David and Ward at various ages. I used google image search to see what else might turn up.

And that’s where I found the photo of Sarah Jane. Dig deep enough, and with specific enough names, and you might find someone’s old photobucket account.  Bonus points when someone else has written on the back of the photo with everyone’s names. I couldn’t believe it!! I had found a photo from approximately 1860 of my third (Sarah Jane) and fourth (Almena) great grandmothers along with great aunts and uncles (Robert Quigley King is seated at the bottom right).  

Then I got greedy and that’s how the story shifts. In addition to a the photo of young Sarah Jane alongside her mother and five of her six living siblings, there was a photo of a much older Sarah taken forty years later. Her brothers David Jr and Robert and sister Mary Elizabeth are pictured. Below someone has labeled the photo with names. Her sister’s surname reflects her married name - Mary Elizabeth Gotwald but Sarah is still Sarah Jane King. That’s when a red flag went to to me. Why would one sister have been labeled with a maiden name and the other her married name?

Col. David King Jr., Sarah Jane King, Mary Elizabeth Gotwald, Robert Quigley King

There was another hole in the story I also needed to fix. On my Family Search page for David and Almena’s children, all but one were accounted for - either through stories, vital records or through photos. All children but one - Jennie. According to the information I had, she was second youngest - born in 1841 but with no date of death.  After a little googling this and that I finally found a headstone for S Jennie King, which I updated in her file along with her life 20 December 1841 to 2 March 1927.

Then I went back to the siblings, which I often do when a direct line isn’t giving me answers. This time I looked around for Mary Elizabeth Gotwald and found a Wikipedia page on her husband Luther, who was a well known minister of the time. And a side note here, I do not take everything I read on Wikipedia to be the end all be all truth. Nor do I trust everything I find on family search, but they can and do help corroborate information.  

That said, after reading about Luther I see that Mary Elizabeth’s Sister, Sarah Jane “Jennie” King lived with Luther and Mary at the King Homestead for the rest of her adult life. Then I keep reading to see a quote from Luther describing Jennie as  “one of the sweetest and best “Old Maids” the world has ever had.” 

Uht oh. 

It all comes together. The woman in the photo isn’t my third great grandmother Sarah Jane Fisher (neé King). She’s Jennie King, who never married or had children.  

This one error canceled out a long and well documented ancestry on my tree. If Jennie King wasn’t my great grandmother, neither was Almena Caldwell King. And that knocks out a captain in the Revolutionary War, who legend has it was given 200 acres of land by the great George Washington himself. No great grandpa Europe Hamlin. Or connection to Abraham Lincoln through his Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. 

And that’s the thing with genealogy. It’s what happens when you crowd source your lineage. My Sarah Jane King was born in the Midwest in the late 1830s. Another Sarah Jane King, also born in the Midwest (Ohio) just a year or two later. Both had fathers from Maryland. No wonder someone saw that and thought it a match.  It’s the first big disappointment of what I know will be many as I carefully review documents for each and every generation, every grandmother and grandfather.  

This false connection sends me back to ground zero for my Sarah. Probably a farmer’s daughter who never had a photo taken. But she still existed. She may not be the beauty in the antebellum photo above but she was a real person. I wouldn’t be me without her.

I wouldn’t be me if any of my thirty two third great grandparents didn’t get together to create my sixteen great great grandparents. All of those people meeting, falling in love, making love, having a child who grew up and did the same thing for generation after generation for ME to happen. That’s why genealogy is so fascinating to me.

It’s not just one sliding door that made you who you are today, it’s hundreds and thousands chance encounters, or parallel social classes, shared geographty, the same religious group, mother county, language, birth order and so on. One missing connection and you’d never be you. The odds of getting your special blend of good looks and talents are thousands of years in the making! And the odds that you’ll have the genes you do are microscopical small! But alas! Here you are! 

So if you’re able to name your distant great grandparents- great. If you can put a face to a name - awesome.  But if you can’t, it doesn’t mean that an unknown mother or father in your family tree wasn’t an absolutely necessary link in you being you. 

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Now tell me - who has done a mail order DNA kit? Did it reaffirm what you already knew or surprise the hell out of you? Has anyone done more than one and able to provide a comparison with pros and cons? Tell me all about it!  

You can read more about my family research (and what websites I use!) by clicking here. 

Throwback Thursday | Herman Amos

When it comes to family history research, one of the most thrilling things for me is uncovering never before seen photos or details of someone's life. Case in point - my mom's grandfather Herman Amos Roush. He died before she was born (my grandma was only three) so his legacy doesn't come with many stories. I may have heard his name once or twice growing up, so when I started work on that branch of my family tree, I was really excited with what I uncovered.

A couple of weeks ago I was visiting my parents and went through a big box of old loose photos and albums. There were two prints of the handsome gent you see above, but the photo studio listed was in Mississippi. I had never heard anything about any ancestors from that far south, so I peeled back the plastic cover and gently pulled back the portrait. Bingo! Herman Roush was written on the back. 

I kept digging, going back through the same boxes over and over. Maybe there were more details written on the back of photos? I lucked out again when I found two more photos of Herman - looking like a total stud alongside his dog and another with my great grandma and Harry (who's Harry? I have no idea! I hope that mystery can be solved one day too!) My grandmother had written the names of all those pictured on the back of each snapshot. Thank you grandma! I also found her aunt Ruby (Herman's sister) so I was able to put a face to the name for my chart. 

I also uncovered some military documents which listed Herman as a Corporal in the Indiana Reserve forces during World War I. Online I found his draft card, an application for a military head stone and that all had his regiment information. So then a little Googling and another jackpot - The Story of the 139th Field Artillery which documented the activities of the soldiers, their deployment to France, what camp was like and so on. I'm not really into military history (although now that I've found connections to almost every American war, I'm kind of interested!) but this account really brought life to what it was like for my great grandfather during that time. As for the MS portrait? That's where they were stationed for training and the style of sitting along with the uniform echoes what I found in the recap of the 139th! Luckily the war was over just weeks after they got to France and once home he married Eva (remember her?)I found their original marriage license in those boxes as well!) Sadly, however, he died as a young man and left behind three young children (Including my great Uncle J. Edward Roush who served in Congress and brought forth the legislation for 911!) I'm so grateful to be able to see what he looked like and verify his time as a solider through these various documents. In the coming months I hope I can also confirm our shared Roush ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War!

Want to read more about my genealogy research or learn how I do it? Read here!