Surname Saturday: Kirschstein (and five new German surnames!)

Today’s Surname Saturday post is an update on all of the riches I’ve found since I made it through that KIRSCHSTEIN brick wall a little over a week ago.

I’ve identified 64 (!) more ancestors in that tiny village of Rawitsch, Posen, Prussia, and I’ve made it back to the very late seventeenth century, finding two sets of my six-times-great-grandparents. The only line I know more about at this point are my Swedes and my Scots.

This has been like a puzzle where only one key –  the village where my great-grandfather was born – unlocked so many other answers. Without it, I’d still be wandering around the nearby city where I thought he was born.

Oddly, there don’t seem to be any KIRSCHSTEINs in Rawitsch before Bruno’s father, Friedrich, was married there in 1847. But the family he married into, the BRAUNs and the TRENKLERs, had been in Rawitsch for a very long time.

Other new surnames in my Prussian family tree include GUERTLER, BRAND, METSCHKE, GLAUBITZ, and my new favorite name to search: BREDTSCHNEIDER.

The new FamilySearch beta site, with the Germany Births and Baptisms and Germany Marriages databases, has been invaluable.  

So, no new blinding insights or big tips today. Just continuing to hoover up those new ancestors as fast as I can write them all down.

Treasure Chest Thursday: My Grandmother at Work in 1912

I don't do so well on the Wordless posts :D so I'm going to put up this photograph for my Treasure Chest Thursday post. 

My grandmother (second from right) worked as a seamstress and tailor her entire life in various Chicago sweatshops. She was born in 1896, two months after her father died, and left school after the 6th grade to help support her mother and siblings.

I think this was taken circa 1912, or right about the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911 in New York.

I found this photograph (a mounted vintage print) and three other similar images, after her death in 1979. Oh, what I would give to talk to her about this photograph, even for just a few minutes!

Archives News: National Archives Reveals Newly Donated FDR Papers

WASHINGTON – A handwritten letter from fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini congratulating President Franklin D. Roosevelt on his inauguration, and a note from a woman who had a brief affair with Roosevelt were shown to the public for the first time Wednesday at the National Archives.

The 5,000 documents and gifts collected by Roosevelt's secretaries include a note from Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who had an affair with Roosevelt that forever changed his marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt when she discovered the infidelity in 1918.

Rutherfurd wrote Roosevelt's personal secretary, Grace Tully, a week before his death in 1945 to arrange a visit with a portrait painter and photographer. The "Unfinished Portrait" was in progress when he collapsed and died.

The meetings with Rutherfurd were kept secret from Eleanor Roosevelt until after her husband's death, and the letter is evidence Tully was involved in communications between Rutherfurd and Roosevelt.

The 14 boxes of items had been sealed with duct tape for years, and were considered the last great privately-held collection of papers for Roosevelt's presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y.

More here.

Tombstone Tuesday: Lt. George W. Owen, Jr., 1922-1944

Today's Tombstone Tuesday is about Lt. George W. Owen, Jr., who was killed in World War II. My father’s best friend and cousin married George’s sister. My mother was helping me with that side of the family and mentioned that they had a good friend who was killed in the war. 

There are a lot World War II records, so I was able to find out what happened. George was born in Chicago on 11 Aug 1922. He enlisted in Chicago the day after Pearl Harbor and was eventually assigned to the 8th Air Force, 493rd Group, 863rd Squadron in England.

On 12 Sep 1944, he and a crew of eight departed from Great Yarmouth:

Owen, George W. – pilot

Blaydes, Edgar E. – co-pilot

Fahey, Donald – navigator

Tipton, L.C. – bombardier

Trunzo, Peter M. – radio operator

Fiore, Roy F. – engineer

Gialloreto, Charles C. – ball turret

Gray, James B. – waist gunner­

Jorg, Luther J. – tail gunner

Their target was Magdeburg, Germany. Over Wackersleben, near Magdeburg, enemy aircraft shot down the Flying Fortress and its nine young men.

The Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) states Owen, Blaydes, Trunzo, and Gray were killed when the plane went down. I haven’t yet discovered what happened to the rest of the crew.  

Update: the rest of the crew were taken prisoner, but survived the war. The World War II Prisoners of War, 1941-1946 database at Ancestry says each were "Returned to Military Control, Liberated or Repatriated."

Blaydes’s and Owen’s bodies were repatriated and reinterred together on 15 Feb 1950 at Camp Butler National Cemetery in Springfield, Sangamon, Illinois.

My thanks to pammy at findagrave.com for the use of her image.

It's often said that genealogy makes history personal, and this and excellent example. The sacrifice Lt. Owen and his crew made is not forgotten.

More Kirschsteins

Just when I have a whole new line to follow, the local LDS library will be closed for the month of August. Things never progress as fast as we might like in genealogy, but this gives me more time to search other sources like IGI and FamilySearch and then order parish records to verify what I've found.

I have learned (but not verified) that Friedrich Kirschstein and Florentine Braun, the parents of Bruno Kirschstein that I discovered last week, were married in Rawitsch on 20 Oct 1847. I suspect there may be some other children born between 1848 and 1851 when Bruno arrives.

I think it's interesting that there were no other Kirschsteins in that small village. Friedrich must have come from somewhere else and I have a few leads that I can pursue, but again I need those parish films.

Friedrich's wife, Florentine Braun, is surprisingly easy to find, despite the common last name. Fortunately, she and her family stayed put in that small village. She was baptized on 29 Dec 1814 in Rawitsch, with her parents listed as Carl Samuel Heinrich Braun and Johanna Juliana Trenkler (Trenckler). Johanna Juliana had three sisters. The Trenklers lived in Rawitsch for at least three generations before Johanna Juliana, marrying into other Rawitsch families.

The more I work with these European and Scandinavian records, I marvel at all eight of my great-grandparents. They all emigrated from eight different places (and six different countries) and yet they all ended up in Chicago:

Hans Christensen Loe

Ahne Andersdatter

Gottfried Ernest Hann (more on him later - he's my brickiest brick wall)

Anna Lovisa Larsdotter

George Ross

Mary Mutch

Bruno Kirschstein

Anna Schumann

How brave they each were to undertake such a monumental change! And without their daring, I wouldn't be enjoying a privileged life in the United States.

Follow Friday – Shorpy.com | History in HD

This edition of Follow Friday puts the spotlight on Shorpy.com | History in HD, a vintage photo blog I love. It features thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenaged coal miner who lived 100 years ago.

The blogger behind Shorpy says, "Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archive." 

In addition to Shorpy's selections from his own and the LC collections, there's also a Member Gallery section where you can upload photos of your own. I uploaded photograph of my grandmother in a Chicago sweatshop, c. 1912. It's one of my prized possessions.

Shorpy is definitely worth checking out.

Wisdom Wednesday: Five Simple Things You Can Do Today to Preserve Your Family Papers

I realized last night that in my maiden blogging efforts, I’ve been posting about my research and neglecting to share some archival tips that can help you in your quest to preserve your family’s records.

So here are five simple things to get us started. And I'll try to offer some helpful hints on Wednesdays going forward.

☞ 1. Move family records and photographs from your attic or garage into the house.

Paper-based records (and that includes photographs) do best in the same environment conditions that people enjoy. That means no storage in places where the temperature and humidity cycle between lows and highs, such as attics and garages. Archives and museums invest incredible sums to keep an ideal temperature/humidity balance. But it’s the extremes in temperature and humidity that cause the most damage. Keeping your family records in the house is the smartest, safest, and cheapest preservation tactic you can employ.

☞ 2. Move framed family photographs and records out of direct sunlight.

Even filtered through the windows of your house, sunlight can still cause a great deal of damage. Check to make sure (and recheck as the seasons change) that your family photographs aren’t getting daily doses of UV radiation from sunlight that, over time, will fade them permanently. UV radiation, which is emitted by sunlight and also from fluorescent bulbs, is particularly damaging to paper items.

☞ 3. Check the backs of vintage framed photographs.

Framers often used cardboard and scrap wood to back photographs in their frames. In some cases, we have seen photographs where the acid in the wood backing has reproduced the knotholes and texture of the wood perfectly … and ruined the photograph in the process. You can still use vintage picture frames. Just have your local framer replace the backing with acid-free materials.

☞ 4. Check your new and vintage framed photographs to make sure that the glass doesn’t rest directly on the photographs.

Add risers or acid-free mats to keep air between glass and the photographic print. This will prevent an unwanted terrarium from growing in your framed family photographs.

☞ 5. Wear gloves when handling family records and photographs.

Those latent (invisible) fingerprints that CSIs are always dusting for? They’re created by moisture and oil naturally present in your fingers – and you leave them on your family records every time you touch them. At the very least, make sure your hands are clean and dry before handling paper items, as the oils from fingers can cause staining and evetual deterioration of the paper. Ideally, wear gloves when handling photographs and vintage or fragile paper records.

Have questions about your family records? Email or comment below and I'll be happy to do my best. And stay tuned for more simple things you can do to preserve your family papers.

The Birth and Baptism of Bruno Kirschstein – Found!

Today a brick wall crumbled when I found Bruno Julius Wilhelm Kirschstein, my great-grandfather, in the parish records of Rawitsch, Posen, Prussia. I now have his birth and baptism record, and with it, the names of his parents. In addition to having the great satisfaction of finding new generations for my tree, I also overcame my quiet anxiety about working with German records.

For those of you following on Surname Saturday (no, I can’t wait for Saturday to update this!), I’ve been tracking Bruno Kirschstein and the eleven variations of his surname found in other records for nearly three years.

My only clue for some time was the 1930 census saying he was born in Breslau, Germany. It wasn’t until I found him in the Hamburg departure database, Hamburger Passagierlisten, 1850-1934, at Ancestry that I learned that his residence before departure was Rawitsch, a town just outside Breslau, in Preußen.

I still didn’t know if Rawitsch was his birthplace, but it was the best information I’d found yet. I ordered the parish microfilm at the local Family History Center for 1850-1857.

His birth year of 1851 was consistent in all records, but I was guessing about his date. In the 1900 census in Chicago, the wonderful census taker wrote down not just the month, as directed, but also the date. But I couldn’t quite make out the month – that is until today, where I found Bruno Julius Wilhelm Kierschstein (spelling number 12!) in the Rawitsch Lutheran parish records – born on 25 Mar 1851.

His parents are Friedrich Wilhelm Alexander Kirschstein and Florentine Mathilde Braun. Some more digging on that roll of microfilm yielded three sisters: Selma Helena Ida, b. 27 Jan 1853; Olga Matilde Auguste, b. 2 Jul 1856; and Wally Clara Laura, b. 18 Jan 1858, all in Rawitsch.

The parish registers were in remarkable shape: excellent handwriting, well photographed, easy to read, and after I’d spent two hours searching, I even discovered an index at the end. It doesn’t get any better than this!

I’d known from his divorce papers that he had sisters because he got to keep their photographs in the settlement, but I didn’t know how many sisters or their names.

I need, of course, to keep working on the parish registers before and after the roll I completed today to see if there are other siblings. But I already found a marriage record for his parents and birth and death dates for his mother in the IGI.

I know there are more Kirschsteins and Brauns just waiting for me to find them. Stay tuned!

20% discount to MyHeritage.com

The SBCGS's presentation on Saturday was very interesting. MyHeritage offers a lot of advantages: free family trees, family social networking, sharing photos and other visual media, printing charts and books, and visual face recognition functions that help you identify anonymous people in your family photos. And that's all free.

All of it sounded great, until they got to the Windows only part. :( So I won't be signing up there until they have Mac functionality. 

In the meantime, they're offering a 20% discount with the coupon code IAJGS10LA to their premium site. Let me know what you think of MyHeritage.com.

 

Follow Friday – Stephen Morse's One-Step Webpages

For this Follow Friday, I want to highlight the work of Stephen P. Morse, the genealogist whose One-Step search interfaces have rescued me from brick walls more than once. Morse’s first career was in electrical engineering, where he is renowned as the architect of the Intel 8086 chip.

Fortunately for those of us doing family history research, his second career has focused on the use of technology to open new avenues of research.

There's no shortage of genealogical databases available online, but often one encounters poorly designed user interfaces for searching these databases. The lack of Soundex, aka the ability to search phonetically, the inability to substitute wildcards into search strings, or forced search terms are all examples of bad interface design.

I’ve talked before about Cook County and their poor user interface. Originally, their marriage searches only allowed one surname! FamilySearch’s International Genealogical Index is another example of a maddening search interface. It demands a forename when one tries to structure a search by both parents’ names in attempts to discover siblings in a family group. Crazy!

But if you are lucky, Steve Morse has provided alternative ways to search databases you’re interested in at his One-Step Webpages site. Just a few of the sites he improves upon include Ellis Island, Castle Garden, passenger and ship lists for a host of ports in the U.S. and Canada, and others too numerous to mention.

Dr. Morse has also collaborated with Alexander Beider on the Beider–Morse Phonetic Name Matching Algorithm, which refines both the venerable Soundex created by National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the spin-off Daitch–Mokotoff Soundex.

  

His One-Step pages also help you with genetic genealogy, Jewish research, calculating dates and intervals, and other indispensable tools. He even has an eBay auction sniper up.

If you’re having trouble with an awkward or poorly designed search interface for a critical database, your first stop should be to check out Dr. Morse’s One-Step pages and see if he's provided another way into the data you need.

  

And don’t miss the chance to hear Dr. Morse speak. His presentations are witty and perceptive. I’m thankful he took up genealogy and applied his many talents to help us all.

SBCGS: Using Facial Recognition Technology in Genealogy

Santa Barbara County Genealogical Society meeting is coming up this Saturday. The speaker is Daniel Horowitz, Genealogy and Translation Manager for MyHeritage.com on "Using Facial Recognition Technology in Genealogy." 

I missed him at the recent SCGS Jamboree, so I'm looking forward to this.

Tombstone Tuesday: Haymarket Martyrs' Monument in Chicago

I don’t get back to Chicago as often as I’d like, but when I do, I always leave time for some cemetery research. One of my favorites is German Waldheim, now merged with Forest Home into one very big metropolitan cemetery just off the Eisenhower Expressway in Forest Park, Illinois.

The profile for German Waldheim on graveyards.com notes:

Unlike many other cemeteries of the time, Waldheim and Forest Home were open to all, not discriminating on the basis of ethnicity or religion, and therefore became very popular with immigrants. Funeral parties and families visiting graves could ride the Chicago and North Western railroad from the city, transferring to a Des Plaines Avenue streetcar.

I was delighted to find that my Kirschstein ancestors are buried in German Waldheim, not very far from the impressive memorial to the labor activists executed in 1887 by the State of Illinois for the Haymarket Riot three years before. In 1893, the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument was erected at German Waldheim. The inscription on the base says, "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today." Isn't that great?

My great-grandfather arrived in Chicago in August of 1883, just a few months before the labor unrest that culminated in the violence in Haymarket Square. His daughter, my grandmother, always called it “Bughouse Square” instead and was very dismissive of the political rabblerousing that took place there. Now I wish I could ask her more about this famous bit of Chicago history and what she thought passing by this monument on her trips to the cemetery to visit her Kirschstein and Schumann relatives.

Pick a Janet, Jane, or Jean

So I took the plunge and signed up at ScotlandsPeople, the "official government source of genealogical data for Scotland" yesterday. I was waiting for a clear-headed moment (they come so rarely) because I knew that ScotlandsPeople charges not only to download documents, but also to see search results.

But a blog post is fine motivation, and I decided I'd waited long enough to find Janet McFayden McFadgeon, McFadyen, etc. etc. etc. I know from research on my own flourishing Scots line that Jane, Jean, and Janet get used interchangeably.

The results are a bit disappointing, although I win a bet with myself for yet more variant spellings of the surname. Her bdate of 5 Feb 1828 was pretty consistent in other records, but there's no one in her county on that date. Line 9 is the closest match for location and lines 6 and 8 are closest for (baptism) date. I'm inclined to go with line 9, Jean McFadzen because other family members are in that county and no one has turned up in Argyll or Wigtown.

But work on my husband's gg-grandmother Janet Jane Jean McFayden McFadgeon McFadyen McFadzen will continue.

The search was structured for all female births in 1828 in any county for surname McFadyen (using Soundex) and first name starting with a J. (James and John snuck in there anyway.)

Surname Saturday: McFadyen

Today's surname is McFADYEN, which, according to Wikipedia, is a "Scottish patronymic surname meaning 'son of little Patrick.' The Celtic prefix 'Mc' means 'son of,' while 'Fadyen' is a derivative of the Gaelic Pháidín, meaning 'little Patrick.' " 

The McFADYEN in our family tree is my husband's  great-great grandmother Janet McFADYEN, b. 5 Feb 1828 in Kilbirnie, Ayrshire, Scotland. She appears in the 1841 census as Janet McFADGEAN a 13-year-old cotton mill worker. 

In 1846, Janet McFADZEAN marries John MacKIE. (In another abstract, they appear as Janet McFADYEN and John MACKEY.) In 1848, they emigrate to America with their son, Matthew. Their first home in America was in Cass, Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, but shortly after that, they settle in Truro Township, Knox County, Illinois. 

In an profile of John MacKIE published in an 1878 history of Knox County, she appears as Janett McFAYDEN. In her son's marriage record, she appears as Jennett McFADYEN. And in another son's death certificate, she's Janet McFADDEN. 

There is no death certificate for her, but I am hoping to find an obituary.

But that still doesn't solve that fairly common problem of which spelling, among many choices, to use.  So many times in our trees, surnames can be nothing but educated guesses. My next stop is searching for a parish birth record. Any bets on whether this will add a new spelling to the list?

Using the Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934

I think I am probably my own Madness Monday entry because I drive myself crazy with an approach-and-avoid response to German records. And since I have German, Austrian, Prussian and Pomeranian ancestors, I think I need to get over myself.

Lately I've had some great luck using the Hamburger Passagierlisten, 1850-1934 aka the Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934 at Ancestry. In typical fashion, the Germans were more thorough about completing forms, so I have found more of the all-important information about hometowns / birthplaces in these emigration records than I've found in the corresponding immigration arrival records in New York.

Ancestry helpfully notes that since the records are in German, it helps to search in German, and only the years 1877-1914 have been indexed at this point. They also suggest browsing the Handwritten Indexes, 1855-1934 if your ancestors have not yet been included in the index.

I find it helpful to get translations for the categories in foreign records, so I know what kind of information to expect.

Here are the headers for those fields in the Hamburger Passagierlisten.

And a German-speaking friend supplies the English translation:

1. Surname (family members are grouped together using brackets)

2. Forename

3. Age

4. Previous residence (may or may not be birthplace)

5. State or Province

6. Occupation

7. Destination

8. Number of people

9. Children under 10

10. Children over 10

11. Children under 1 year

Using my Surname Saturday Kirschstein family, I was able to find a Residence for Bruno in the Hamburger Passagierlisten that wasn't noted in the New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957. 

Have you had better luck with Hamburg or New York records in your German research?

Revolutionary War Documents Free @ Footnote.com

Footnote.com is offering free access for one week only to their Revolutionary War Pensions, Rolls, Service Records, and other Revolutionary War documents.

They had such a great rate for an annual subscription at the SoCal Jamboree that I signed up for full access, but this looks like a nice offer on their part.