Pictures

I am currently working on a family history book for the Eterovic side of my husband's family.  We have sent letters to family members and are in the process of collecting photographs.  After the first letter requesting stories and photos, we had only a small response, but I have recently sent out an email reminder and people are beginning to respond (lesson: it takes more than one request to get people's attention, especially with everyone so busy these days). So in the past few days, I've been getting many emails with attached photos and just a few days ago my husband's cousin began putting up family photos on Shutterfly. The above picture is the oldest one I have.  It is of my husband's great grandmother Antonia Mladinich and was probably taken sometime between 1900 and 1910.  The two men were not in the original picture and were put in the frame, probably by my husband's grandmother.  (A primitive form of photoshop.)

The Shutterfly site contains wedding pictures of a number of people and some are incredible and gorgeous reflections of the times.  For example: 

I am so excited to see all these photos.  Some have damage from age, but I'm hoping to have them restored and printed in the book so they can be viewed and appreciated for generations to come.

An Unfortunate Loss

My cousin Tim called yesterday to inform me about the loss of some valuable genealogical records we had both hoped to benefit from.

The records had once belonged to my uncle Pete, my maternal aunt's husband.  He had been studying genealogy for decades, sending and receiving letters from sources in Germany, many of which were written in German and had to be translated.  He ultimately filled a dozen binders with his genealogical research into both his family and my aunt's family (which is also my family and Tim's) and before he died, donated them to a library.  A few years ago the library suffered a flood and the genealogical collection was moved to another location. In recent days, Tim found out from a distant cousin who tried to access the records that the entire collection was destroyed in the flood. 

We both had such high hopes for that collection.   Tim had seen some of it before Pete died, and hoped to return to the records to find the answers to some puzzles we've been unable to solve regarding the family.  Now that is no longer possible.

I know there are many people who do not understand why this is such a big deal.  Like any who pursue a hobby, sport, or intellectual pursuit and become addicted to it, we are much more invested in the process than those who have never become involved in it.  I've had many relatives of my husband's, for instance, who let me know in no uncertain terms that genealogy doesn't interest them and they don't want to participate in a family history project and aren't interested in hearing about my finds.  To them, life is for the living, not for a pursuit of "dead people."

I don't see it that way at all, even as I understand their lack of interest.  When my father was alive and immersed in genealogy, I was too busy raising my family, seeing clients, and teaching classes to inquire about what he was doing.  I really regret that now.  There are so many questions I would love to ask him and my mother about their families.  While I do have some of my dad's records from his research, I fear some of them were thrown out by my mother.  She spent many days, in the year before her death, cleaing out his office and his desk and throwing out files she felt were unimportant.  I feel fairly certain she threw out important genealogical data, but at the time I was too busy helping her stay alive and supervising my dad's care.

In our conversation, Tim brought up a distant cousin who used to visit my parents from time to time.  She was a nun, Sister Agnes, and we spent every Christmas Eve with her for decades. Tim was sure she was a font of information, and I'm sure she was, except at the time, I never thought to ask her anything.  Ultimately, she was transferred back to the motherhouse in Indiana, I believe, where she died. 

So Tim and I will have to explore other avenues to find the information that Pete had uncovered, though it will take us a long time, even with the internet, which my uncle did not have access to.  And we will both do it because, even though many do not understand, it is important to us to keep searching for our ancestors.  For me, it is even more than that.  My parents moved my brother and me out to California when I was ten.  We left behind grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, most of whom have died. My few living cousins still reside in the Midwest, but I hear from them only sporadically.  Ten years after we moved here, my brother died, and two and a half years ago, both of my parents died within the same week.  So genealogy for me has become a way to reconstruct my family, to gain an extended family, and to once again feel part of several clans that were left behind many years ago.

"The Waiting Room," continued

You can read more of the prologue to my book, The Waiting Room on Family Wisdom.

My Book: "The Waiting Room"

My book is now up on Amazon.  It's a memoir of the 18 months I spent with my parents when they were suffering from incurable and devastating diseases.  It's sad, but I believe the story, and especially the ending, will inspire you. The story begins forty years earlier.  Here's a sample:

There was something about mid-afternoon—the way the sun reflected off the Spanish Colonial architecture, the view of the Pacific on a smogless day, or the chapel bells ringing on the hour—that always lifted my spirits.  Classes had ended for the day and I was free to read a novel in the shade of a live oak, meander across the elegant campus, or gaze at the forested canyons below. Each time I strolled through the arched colonnades on my way to the library, I celebrated my good fortune.  There I was, the first in my family to attend college, and not just any college, but a magnificent cocoon high in the Santa Monica Mountains, far from the turmoil that touched so many college campuses in 1965.  I was just eighteen, an idealistic and naïve young woman who still believed in dreams, miracles, and happily ever after.  That anything could go wrong was beyond my imagination.

Then on Thursday, just before dinner, Mom called. 

"Come home this weekend," she said soberly.  "We need to talk."

"About what?" 

"Not over the phone," she said. 

A stream of possibilities flowed through my mind—none of them good. I wondered if Dad had lost his job and I'd have to leave school. My scholarship only covered tuition, and without Dad's income, we could never afford room and board.

"Can you at least give me a hint?" I said.

"It's about Terry," she replied.  "Will you be able to find a ride?"

When I told her I could, she abruptly ended the call, leaving me to wonder what had happened in the weeks I'd been away—she hadn't said anything about my younger brother in her weekly letters—but before I could think more about it, my friends breezed by on their way to the cafeteria and asked me to join them. 

Fortunately, my roommate was planning her own trip home for the weekend and agreed to give me a lift, so after Friday morning classes I threw my books and overnight bag into the backseat of her Volkswagen Beetle, and we joined the rush hour traffic leaving Los Angeles for Orange County.  I walked in the door around five-thirty, parked myself on the turquoise sofa in front of the television, and waited for Mom to come home from work.  One hour later, she sat across from me, underneath the white balloon lamp that cast eerie shadows on her face, causing her to look much older than her thirty-nine years. She stared at the floor for a moment, and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes.

"Your brother's sick," she said.

"What do you mean?" I said. 

She put her head down again but didn't speak.

"I'm sure he'll be all right," I said a little too hastily.

"No he won’t," she replied. Then she took a breath and said, "He has cancer."

Like a rogue wave catching me off guard, her words sent me reeling.  I shook my head, certain I had misunderstood.

"What did you say?"

"Terry has cancer. There's a lump on his neck, and the doctor did a biopsy. We got the results yesterday.  He has cancer of the lymph system," she said, speaking slowly and dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief she always kept tucked in the sleeve of her sweater.    

"No, Mom," I said, rushing in with the infinite wisdom of an eighteen year old. "He’s just sixteen.  You need to talk to a different doctor."

"The doctor is certain," she said.  "Terry has cancer.  And there’s no cure."

The wave was pulling me under, stealing air from my lungs and immersing me in darkness, but I struggled to the surface, desperate to get my bearings and stand on solid ground.

Terry had been tired lately, Mom said.  He'd had some fevers and nose bleeds.  Then he found the lump on his neck—the most ominous sign of all—and the diagnosis was now certain: my brother had Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph system. I didn’t even know what the lymph system was.

"There has to be some kind of treatment," I said. 

"We’re going to Long Beach next week to see a specialist. Maybe," she said, "he can give us some time."

"How much time?"

"If we're lucky, we might have a few years."

This couldn’t be happening.  I closed my eyes, shook my head, and willed time to go backward, back to the ride home with my roommate when we talked about our boyfriends, back to this morning when my biggest concern was passing my weekly French quiz. Time wouldn’t cooperate.

My mother composed herself and stood up.  Barely five foot two, she seemed suddenly smaller, struggling to manage the tragic burden that had just fallen on her.   She didn’t hug me, or look to me for comfort, or acknowledge her pain, though I knew it was there, ripping her to pieces. Instead, she walked slowly into the kitchen to start dinner, keeping herself busy as she always did whenever painful emotions threatened to engulf her, then returned to add one more thing.

"Terry’s out with his friends," she said.  "He doesn’t know the results of the biopsy yet.  He has no idea…"  She stood silently for half a minute, choking back tears.  "So I want you to control your feelings when he comes home."

Solving the mystery of Latin records

The parish records (births, marriages, christenings) for my husband's family in Croatia are mostly written in Latin, though some are written in Italian and a few in Croatian.  Having taken four years of Latin in high school and two years in college, I can read some of the entries.  However, my skills are rusty and I had forgotten how the endings of names can differ depending on the relationship of one person to another, and this had me confused regarding the names of my husband's ancestors. It was another mystery to be solved.

For example, many men in my husband's family are named "Anton" which is the Croatian form of Anthony. Anthony is also my husband's name and he is named after his grandfather Anton.  In the records of his ancestors, however, the name is often written "Antonius," the Latin form.  Occasionally the name was written in the Italian version, "Antonio."  This was because the island of Brac, his ancestral homeland, was frequently under the rule of Venice, and some of the priests were Italian. However, at times, the name is written "Antoni" or even "Antonii" which puzzled me. 

Then I found a website that reminded me of why the name might be spelled with one or two i's at the end.  This ending signifies that the individual is the father of a previously named individual.  So if I were to write my husband's name in Latin, it would simply be "Antonius."  If I were to write in Latin about "Matthew, son of Anthony," it would read "Mattheus filius Antoni (or Antonii)." Since christening records and marriage records list the parents of the child to be christened or the individuals to be married, it would be common to see the father's name ending in i or ii. 

So now when I see Antonii or Antoni, I realize my researcher was simply copying records exactly as the names were written in Latin, and probably didn't realize the endings represented a relationship between two individuals in the record. The actual name of the individual would be Antonius in Latin, and Anton in Croatian.

Mystery solved!

The Dangers of Childbirth

Our ancestors generally had very large families, with as many as a dozen or more children in some families.  And it is quite miraculous that so many children and mothers survived childbirth, especially when you think of all the things that can go wrong including breech presentation, incompatible Rh factors and infection. 

Although the majority of my female ancestors survived childbirth, I have come across a number who didn't.  One was my grand aunt Rebecca Shaw Waggoner, my grandmother's younger sister.  I remember my grandmother talking about this with my mother.   Becky was apparantly Rh Negative and her baby Rh positive.  Since this was her second child, she had already built up antibodies in her own blood to Rh positive blood, but of course routine tests were not done for blood factors then so Becky and her husband had no way of knowing how dangerous a second pregnancy could be, especially if the second child was also Rh positive.  Both Becky and the baby died from this incompatibility. 

I discovered another death related to childbirth several months ago.  Bridget, the wife of my great grand uncle, Edward Brennan, had already had seven healthy children when she died along with her eighth child.  This appears to have been due to an illness or infection but since this was in 1914, when medical science was very primitive, we cannot know for certain the exact cause of the deaths.

Just today, I discovered a third death which I believe is related to childbirth. I discovered it by accident.  Elizabeth Wagner, my second great grandmother, died on August 1, 1864 and in the 1870 census her husband John is remarried to a woman named Sophia.  At least, it appears to be the same John Wagner who was once married to Elizabeth, as the children's names are the same.

I began searching in the cemetery records of Delphos, Ohio, where the Wagners lived, to see what I could find out about a Sophia Wagner.  (In the St. John's cemetery records, the names of spouses or parents of the deceased are often listed.) I couldn't find a Sophia Wagner, but I did a Wagner infant.  The child's name was Michael John Wagner and he died in November, 1864. He was listed as the son of Elizabeth and John.   I then looked at his birth date:  August 1, 1864, the same date Elizabeth died.  I think it is reasonable to assume that Elizabeth died in childbirth, and the infant died a few months later. 

I can't help but be impressed with the courage of these women.  In the days before antibiotics, sterile environments, modern medicine and the drug Rhogam that helps prevent deaths due to Rh incompatibility (I was a beneficiary of this life-saving medication) women faced danger with each pregnancy. They are true heroes.

Family Size

I went sailing a week ago, and I was talking about genealogy to one of my fellow sailors.  When I mentioned that my husband is descended from at least 3 Mayflower passengers, he asked how many descendants of the Mayflower passengers there were.  He imagined there must be a large number.  I told him I didn't know exactly, but I had read somewhere that it was in the millions.  Even though only 50 of the 100 original passengers survived the first year, those 50 went on to have many children, and over the years, the number has increased geometrically.   Of course, up until the 1960s, when the birth control pill was developed, most families were large.  In my background as well as my husband's, the number of children in families was rarely less than 5, and often more than 10.  Many men married several times - often because a wife had died in childbirth -  and had multiple families.  It wasn't unusual for a man to have as many as 15 or even 20 children from 3 different wives.

Today, the situation is very different.  It is a rare family that has more than 2 children.  People marry later these days and for financial and other reasons, limit the number of children they want to raise.  Of course, our ancestors did not have the means to limit their families, unless they chose to forego marital relations, but obviously most of them didn't.  It wasn't only the absence of reliable birth control that led to large families, however.  It was also the need for many children to help run the farms, or the obedience to religious directives to "increase and multiply," or simply the belief that children were a gift from God.

Today, we're concerned about how expensive it is to raise children and we worry about overpopulation.  Women pursue careers along with men and no longer think about child-rearing and housewifery as a lifelong occupation.  Raising children is, instead, something one does in one's spare time, or in addition to climbing the career ladder.  Some couples choose not to have children at all.  This is neither right nor wrong.  Each generation has its own culture, challenges, and desires, and the smaller families of today fit with the values and needs of our times.

It will change things for genealogists, however.  There will be fewer siblings to research, and it it will take a lot longer for an original group of 50 people to produce over a million descendants.

Yeseta - Jescheta - Jeseta - Gescheta

The above title lists 4 different spellings of my husband's paternal grandmother's maiden name, or the name of one of his paternal great grandfathers.

His grandmother Madelena's father was born in what is now the Czech Republic. (Back then, it was called "Bohemia.")  His name was Tomas Jeseta and his birthdate is 10 Nov 1851.  He met his wife, Antonia Mladinic, who was working in Bohemia as a cook, and they were married in Budva, Montenegro on 24 Nov 1874. They then moved to Brac, Croatia where Antonia and all her siblings were born. Until now, no one in the family has had any written information regarding the ancestors of Tomas Jeseta.

Two months ago, I hired a researcher in the Czech Republic who has just sent me his report.  Most of the records come from Roman Catholic parishes, and included in dates of births, baptisms and marriages are the occupations or social status of some of those listed. The record is difficult to read as some of the words are in German and some in Czech, but my researcher provided a guide to interpretation.

And so, for the first time in over 100 years, my husband's family will now know that Tomas Jesta's parents (my husband's great great grandparents) were named Matej Jeseta and Alzbeta Pechkova (Elisabeth Bechek or Pechek in German)  and his great great grandparents Martin Jeseta, Anna Hanusova, Kaspar Pechek and Barbora Berankova. The will also know that Matej was a charcoal burner by occupation and that Kaspar Pechek was a weaver. We already knew that Tomas was a shoemaker.

It seems that most of Tomas's ancestors were either farmers or middle class townspeople, living in one of several small villages or burghs, and whose addresses consisted of a number signifying a house, followed by the name of the town. (My researcher warned me that the numbers may have changed since the 1700's and 1800's when these records were written in the parish registers.)

There is much to pore over in these records, and I am anxious to put the names up on the family tree and share them with everyone.

It was definitely worth the expense.
 

Latest news from the Wrocklage - Esch Families

One of the most rewarding aspects of genealogy work is finding long lost (or previously unheard of) cousins.  And even better is being on the receiving end of their generous sharing of family details you did not have. Recently a 4th cousin contacted me through a comment on this blog and has shared exciting information with me.

As I wrote in a previous post, I have been trying to figure out some details regarding my 3rd great grandfather Christian Mathias Wrocklage, whose given surname was Esch. I had earlier speculated that he might have been adoped as I could not understand why he had changed his name from Esch to Wrocklage. As it turns out, his wife's maiden name was Wrocklage and in order to keep the farm after her father died, it had to pass into someone's hands whose name was Wrocklage.  Her older brother had already left the farm, married a woman and changed his name to hers so they could inherit her father's farm, so Christian changed his name to Wrocklage so that he, his wife and her younger siblings would not be kicked off the land.  This was apparently the law in Germany - you had to keep property in the family name.

I have also learned that Christian had three wives.  With his first wife, Anna Catharina Wrocklage, he had 4 children, one dying at birth.  With his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Gerdeman, he had 7 children, 2 of whom died young.  Then he married a third time and had another daughter.  With his 3rd wife and youngest children he emigrated to America in about 1845, and settled near some of his older children who had already arrived. Unfortunately, he and his wife both died the following year. 

Theodore Wrocklage, Christian's oldest son, was a founder of the city of Delphos, Ohio, along with a Catholic priest, Fr. John Otto Bredeick and his brother, Ferdinand Bredeick, and Bernard Esch, whom I assume to be related to Theodore (perhaps a cousin) as he has the same last name as Christian, before he legally changed it to Wrocklage.  

Now I am going to start searching for the Esch family in Germany and see if I can learn who Bernard is.

Latest discovery in the Eterovic family

I have been puzzled for some time about a member of my husband's extended family - namely his grand uncle Nicolas (brother of his grandfather Anton) and Nicolas' wife or wives.  My mother in law, who knew Nicolas for 15 years before he died in 1961, says Nicolas was married twice. 


As I previously noted in my post Ellis Island, Nicolas was first married on the island of Brac in 1904 to a woman named Karlin Kacic. They had two daughters and then a son who died in infancy. In 1907, Nicolas came to this country and his wife and daughters remained in Croatia.  Then, in February 1912, a woman named Dora Eterovic came to America and on the passenger manifest she listed herself as wife of Nicolas.  With her were two girls, Antica and Maria, who were the correct ages for Nicolas's daughters.  I was confused by the two names.  Did Karlin go by "Dora?"  Was my researcher wrong about the name "Karlin?"  Were these two different women?  If so, when did Karlin die and when might Nicolas have remarried? 

The records are scarce. There is no death record I can check in Croatia for the early 1900s and there is no new marriage record in Croatia or California.  In the 1920 census, which is the first census available after the mother and daughters arrive in 1912, Nicolas is listed as a widower with one daughter, Maria, and one son, Steven, born in December 1912. This must mean that Nicolas's wife and daughter Antica died sometime between 1912 and 1920.  So I began looking for Steven's birth record to see if I could find any more about him. 

It took me a while, but I finally found a birth record for a "Stefano Eterovich" and was both astonished and delighted to find the maiden name of Steven's mother.   It was recorded as "Casich," which is an anglicized version of Kacic.  Therefore, I have concluded that the woman who joined Nicolas in America in 1912 was his first wife, Karlin/Dora.  The name Dora (which could be short for Dorothy) makes sense as Nicolas's daughter Maria named one of her own daughters Dorothy.

I would still like to find a death record for Nicolas's wife, to verify her name, but have so far been unsuccessful. And I have also been unsuccessful in finding a second marriage record for Nicolas. 

This is the frustrating but exciting thing about genealogy - the search never ends. 

Eterovic Family

I  have just received the final installment of research into the Eterovic (Terich) family from my researcher in Croatia.  I haven't had time to digest it all, but there are a few things that strike me right away.  First, the names.  Most Croatian names, unlike Irish, English, German, and other European names end in "ich" or "ic."  Among the most recent set of names are those of Calilich, Mengic, Lucrich, Vrandecic, Faraunich, Fortunich, and Craiglievich - names my husband has never heard of. 

All of these new family members were born in the 1700s and 1800s. I always like to look at birthdates, marriage dates, or immigration dates from European ancestors and then think of what was happening in the United States at that time - it puts things in a better historical perspective and makes them seem more alive to me. My husband's 2nd great grandfather, Hyeronymum (his baptismal name in Latin) Martinic, was born in December 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence.  Others were born around the time of the Civil War.  I wonder if, isolated as they were on a small island off the Dalmatian coast, they even knew at that time what was happening thousands of miles away on another continent.  Probably not.

This brings me to another interesting point.  My husband's grandparents emigrated to America in 1904 and 1905.  Prior to that time, every ancestor of my husband's on his grandfather's side of the family lived on the small island of Brac (pronounced "Bratch.")  Today, Brac has only 13,000 residents which makes it less populous than many American towns. But even more interesting was the fact that every one of these ancestors was born, married and died in the same town: Pucisca.  We're talking of one large family, living hundreds of  years in one small town, on one small island in the Adriatic sea.  Then, one day things must have gotten too crowded, jobs were scarce, and the promise of America was calling.  From there, the story is much the same as every other immigrant family, be they Irish, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish or Croatian.

This is one of the reasons why genealogy in America is so fascinating.  Most people are not just researching the story of one group of people, but the stories of many, from diverse lands. It makes the genealogy quest endless. 

Finally!

Just got word from my researcher in Croatia that she'll finish up the work on the Eterovic family next week. Once I have the final list of ancestors, which may take up to two months to receive (I've decided Europe operates by a different clock) I'll be able to complete filling in my husband's family tree, at least back to the late 1700s.  When I started, we had almost no names, now we have hundreds.  The next step will be to travel to Croatia and find some cousins, but that will have to wait until after my trip to Ireland.

An accidental find - and a new book

I haven't been working on genealogy for the past two weeks as I've been working on the final edit of my book, a memoir spanning the 18 months of my mother's battle against leukemia, and my father's struggles with a degenerative neurological disease. As I was re-reading a passage of the book, however, I realized I had the chronology of events wrong, so I began to search for a small diary of my mother's that would help me correct the mistake.  Of course, I couldn't find it.

Tony and I searched in the garage, where I'm storing many of my parents' books and mementos, and couldn't find it there.  Then I searched inside the house: in closets, boxes, bookshelves, and drawers.  No luck.  Finally, several hours later, I found it in a box underneath my bed.  Inside was another box with papers that had belonged to my father. I had never gone through these papers and for some reason decided to look inside the box.  It was a copy of a diary written by a third cousin who was a priest (Father Bob), and it had some amazing information that will be quite helpful in my genealogy quest, including information on places and people who are crucial to my research.  Of particular interest were two letters written by the priest's father to his relatives in Ireland.  In the letter he is introducing himself to the cousins he had never met, and he lists all of his brothers and sisters as well as his children.

Another crucial piece of information was something Fr. Bob wrote in an early entry in his diary.  He said that Ned Brennan (Fr. Bob's grandfather and my great great grandfather) came over to America first, and his wife Mary followed later.  I hadn't known this before, so I had been searching in immigration records for a passenger list that contained both of them.  Now I will be able to search for them separately. 

Now that I've completed the book, I will be back to the ancestor quest and reporting my finds on the blog.  I'll also be reporting progress on the book's publication, and making an announcement about a new website where I hope to post a few of the book's chapters.  Stay tuned!

How the Irish Saved Civilization but Couldn't Save their own records

I went to the local Family History Center (at the Mormon church) yesterday to spend some time on the three microfilms I'd ordered.  They were all "census substitutes"  and the one I focused on was the record of Roman Catholic marriage and baptism records from the parish of my ancestors in the years 1790 to 1825.  The reason we have to turn to census substitutes in Irish genealogical research is that all the census records prior to 1901 were either destroyed intentionally by the Irish government, or burned in a 1922 fire in the Records building.  There are only a few places to turn to find the names of ancestors.  One is a record of "title applotments" or taxes paid to support the protestant Church of Ireland.  Another is Griffith's Valuation, a record from the early 1850s of all landowners and their tenants.  And the third is an incomplete set of Roman Catholic parish records from the late 1700s to the early 1800s.

I spent 90 minutes attempting to find anyone by the name of Brennan in the parish I believe my ancestors came from, and could only find three Brennans, none of whose first names matched the names of my ancestors.  The main problem was that the films were in the negative format, meaning the background was black and the writing white.  This format is very difficult to read.  There were two other problems, though.  Some were images of originals so faded from time that it was impossible to read anything.  And all of them were handwritten, often illegibly, with names and places crowded together in some formula I could not decipher.  I decided that trying to read the records in this microfilm format would be futile, and I gave up. 

Obviously, these records need to be rephotographed in a better format, or someone who understands the formula needs to transcribe the records into something readable.  But for some reason, the Catholic Church in Ireland has now withdrawn its earlier permission to allow the Mormon church to photograph its records.  For the sake of genealogical and historical research, this is a big setback.  I wish they would change their minds, but my experience with the Catholic Church is that they move exceedingly slowly, so it's not likely to happen in my lifetime, if at all. 

In the meantime, I've received an estimate from a genealogical company in Ireland that will research the original records (which I assume must be easier to read) and look at other possible records in the Irish Archives in an attempt to find a clue as to the ancestors of my great great grandparents. The cost is over $400 and there is no guarantee of success. Of course, the other possibility is that I could visit Ireland and do the research myself - if I'm allowed to access the archives.  That would be even more expensive: flight to Ireland, hotel rooms, meals, etc., although it would be more fun.  Again, there's no guarantee of success.

I've already decided that I will be going to Ireland next summer.  The only question is: do I want to wait until then to search for information, or do I want to fork out several hundred dollars in an effort to find something sooner?

I keep thinking of the book How the Irish Saved Civilization, and I wonder why they couldn't even save their own records.

Irish Update

Long before I became interested in genealogy, my father had been searching for his Irish ancestors.  His great grandparents, Ned Brennan and Mary Fahey Brennan, emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1861, the year the American Civil War began, but not much is known about whatever family they may have left behind.  Dad knew of one sister of Ned Brennan, Mary, who remained in Ireland, married James Clooney, and raised a family there, but he didn't know anything about Ned and his sister Mary's parents, or if there were any other siblings.  Mary Fahey's widowed mother, sister and brother accompanied her to America, but nothing is known of the family prior to that. Dad even went to Ireland to see what he could find, but there is nothing in his records that shows whether he found anything new. 

Since I have taken over the search, I have gathered much information on Mary Brennan Clooney and her family by searching the 1901 and 1911 Irish census data.  But since that is the only census data available to genealogists (all census information prior to that, and some after that, burned in a 1922 fire in the public records building as a result of a revolution in Ireland, or was destroyed intentionally by the Irish government for a variety of reasons.)  So during the time that my ancestors would have lived in Ireland there are no census records. 

There is one "census substitute" which was a survey of land ownership and tenancy called "Griffith's Valuation" conducted in the early 1850s for the entire country.  The names of all landowners (mostly English citizens) and their tenants (heads of household only) are recorded in this survey.  There are also records in some Roman Catholic parishes of baptisms, marriages and deaths, but there are huge gaps in the records.  For some reason, the records in Irish churches were not well maintained, which combined with the destruction of census records, makes genealogical research in Ireland nearly impossible. 

About five weeks ago, I contacted a genealogical service in Ireland to ask them to do a preliminary search to see if there were any other existing records that might be used to find any Brennans or Faheys in Queen's County (renamed County Laios after Ireland became independent from Britain) around the time my ancestors emigrated, as well as in the decades prior to their departure.  I just received their report, and the picture isn't hopeful. 

They did list a few more places they could look for information, so I will probably commission them to look further.  And I am waiting for some mircorfilm to be delivered to the local Mormon church from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.  Within a few days I may be able to search myself in the registers of Roman Catholic churches in the area where my ancestors lived.  In the meantime, I remain in contact with a third cousin in Ireland, a descendant of Mary Brennan Clooney, and keep hoping that he will uncover a lost family Bible, or remember some piece of information he heard from his grandparents that might lead somewhere.

I know my father's ancestors lived in Ireland for hundreds if not thousands of years, and it is incredibly frustrating to be unable to find out anything about them.  I am holding onto hope that my researchers in Ireland may find some small key that could open what now seems like a locked door. Whether or not that happens, I know I want to visit Ireland soon.  If I can't know more specifics about my family, at least I can walk where they once walked, see the land they once called home, and imagine what life was like for them hundreds of years ago.

Frustrating Day at the Library

Last week I traveled to the Carlsbad Library, about 30 miles away, to check out their genealogy collection, which I'd been told was quite extensive.  Indeed, I did find a large number of books and microfilms, most of which are not relevant to my research.  The one collection of books in which I'd hoped to find relevant information bore the promising title:  Germans to America: Lists of Passengers Arriving in U.S Ports. 


The collection contained two sections.  Section I dated from 1850 to 1892 and Section II from 1840 to 1847.  There are 73 volumes in the collection, with millions of names.  I was only able to search through about 20 of the volumes, and could find no record of any of my German ancestors.  First, I looked in the index of each volume to find the name of one or more ancestors.  Then I looked up the passenger list to check for the correct ages.  There were many names that matched my ancestors' names, but none of the ages matched.  Furthermore, I could find no family members on the list, even when I knew some had come with their families.  Since I checked all the volumes that matched the time frame in which I knew these ancestors came to America, I'm probably not going to find the information I need in this collection.  I've already checked other databases online, the family history center in Utah, census records from 1900 and beyond that list the date of immigration, and any naturalization and death records, which sometimes list immigration dates, with no success.

 At this point, I may simply have to accept the fact that I may never find the exact date of immigration of some of my ancestors.

Small World

One of the things I like the most about genealogy is finding distant relatives all over the world.  Ancestry.com makes it easy to contact people who share some of your ancestors.  As I've said before, in the past, I've heard from cousins of mine and of my husband, and I've reached out to a few distant relatives I've never met. 

Just a few days ago, I contacted some Schulien relatives in Illinois when I came across their family tree that listed a common great, great, great grandfather.  They responded and offered to answer any questions about the family.  I'm also in regular touch with a second cousin in Ohio in the Schulien family (Hi Tim!).

Then, yesterday I received a message through ancestry.com from someone who is a distant relation on the Brennan side of my family.  I responded to her and am waiting to hear back.  Her message prompted me to do some work on the Brennan side to see how her family is connected to mine. 

And now I have contacts in four European countries (Ireland, German, Croatia, and the Czech Republic) who have helped me or are in the process of helping me with my family trees. It amazes me how willing people are to help each other in the arena of genealogy.

Every day, the phrase "small world" becomes more meaningful.  And as I've said before, if you go back far enough, we're all related to each other. Maybe that could inspire us to treat each other a little better than we sometimes do. 

Ellis Island

As I've mentioned before, my husband's grandparents, Anton Eterovic and Madalena Yeseta, are both from the small island of Brac in Croatia.  They came here in 1904 and 1905, and all but two of their siblings had already arrived or joined them at a later date. 

Over the months I've gathered information on all but one of the siblings.  All of Madalena's siblings came to America, married and raised families. 

Anton's brother Joannes and sister Daniela remained in Brac and raised families there. His older brother Nicholas arrived in 1907, but I was unsure of the date of his wife's arrival as she and their two children didn't travel with him.  I also had no information on a fourth sibling, the younger sister Maria.

So I returned to the records at Ellis Island where I had so far been unable to find a date of Maria's immigration, if in fact she had come to America.  I tired all kinds of spellings for Maria and Eterovic, and finally found her.  She had come with Nicholas in 1907, but her first name on the record that had been transcribed from the handwritten  manifes was "Marifa."  Now I know Marifa is not a Croatian name, and I also know that handwriting can be difficult to read, so I looked at the original handwritten document and I believe it said "Marija" which is the Croatian spelling of Maria. Since she listed her brother Anton as her contact in Los Angeles, I knew I had the right person.

Then I decided to try to find Nicholas's wife and two daughters, Antica and Maria. The name I had for his wife, Karlin, yielded nothing, so I tried the names of his two daughters.  Eventually I found two passenger manifests in 1912 with the names Maria and Antica, ages five and six, which would have been correct.  On both manifests, the mother's name was Dora. The information regarding next of kin and final destination matched, however, so I was sure I had the right family and either I had the wrong name for Nicholas's wife, or this was a second wife. 

At first, I wasn't sure why the same names would show up on two passenger lists, one that arrived in January 1912, and one in February 1912.  Then I looked at the original handwritten document for January and could see that the three Eterovic names had been crossed off.  All I can surmise is that the three were scheduled to leave in January from Trieste, and either didn't make it in time on their journey from Croatia ("missed the boat" as the saying goes), or for some reason had to change their plans and take a later ship. 

So, as often happens, one mystery solved leads to more mysteries.  Though I know know that Maria Eterovic came to America with her brother in 1907, I can find no record of her after that.  And while I have the date(s) of Nicholas's family arriving in America, I am still unsure of his wife's actual name, and whether he was married once or twice.

As a genealogist friend once told me, "Genealogy is not a sprint, it's a marathon."  I agree.

A visit to the library

On Saturday, my husband Tony and I visited the Los Angeles Public Library.  It was the only place I could find a book that would provide the proof I needed that Tony is descended from three Mayflower passengers.

After a two hour drive, and some very helpful librarians, I got my hands on the book.  It was kept in a locked room – it's apparently that rare. As I pored over the various pedigrees, I realized the book had what I had hoped for – proof of my husband's Mayflower ancestors. But I found something else in the book I was not expecting to find.  I found a photograph of my husband's great great grandparents.  It had been taken when they were in their sixties, sometime before 1889, but honestly, in the picture they looked like they were in their nineties. (I don't think people aged well in the 1800s.)  Still, it was quite a find.

After I made all the copies I needed, including a couple copies of the photograph, I began to browse through the stacks and found the following book: A Portrait and Biographical Record of Allen and Van Wert Counties, Ohio.  Since hundreds of my ancestors lived in Allen and Van Wert Counties, I decided to take a peek.  The book was written nearly 100 years ago, and some of its pages were crumbling, so I carefully worked my way through the pages for names I recognized.  I found three which gave me more information and names associated with some of my ancestors, though I ran out of time to search any further.

At home, I looked up the Ohio book on WorldCat and found that it's also in the collection at a nearby library, on microfilm, so I'll be heading there soon. 

Tomasso Jeseta

My husband's paternal great grandparents are all from the small island of Brac in Croatia, all except one - Tomasso (Tomas) Jeseta (Jescheta, Yeseta) who was from Bohemia (the modern day Czech Republic).  Although the researcher I hired in Croatia to find more generations of ancestors has been successful in adding several names to the family tree, she does not do research in the Czech Republic and so was unable to help us find Tomas.

Recently, I was given the name of a researcher in the Czech Republic and I have asked him to pursue my husband's elusive ancestor.  I gave him the scant information I had, including place and date of birth, place and date of marriage, and date of death, none of which I had confirmed with any orignial sources.  These were mostly dates given to me by relatives of my husband, and since I wasn't even sure any of them were correct, I was somewhat concerned that I might hand over money for a wild goose chase.  But yesterday I received an email from the researcher, and before taking any payment, he confirmed Tomas's birth date and birth place.  So he is going forward with the research, though he says it may take a while. 

I'm hoping that soon I can report the names of several generations of relatives to my husband and his family, and hopefully some other information about these relatives, so they can finally close the big gap that has existed in the family tree for a century. 

Agnes Wrocklage

In my last post, I wrote of a child of Christian and Mary Elizabeth Wrocklage, a daughter I had not known about,  who was listed on the passenger manifesto with the family when it came to America.  At first, I wondered if I had the wrong family, but since everything else fit, I started to search records for evidence that this girl was part of my ancestral family and had somehow been overlooked by others who were researching the same family.

The first place to go was to the 1850 census records, the first census after the family arrived in 1845, but sadly, the parents died less than a year after the family's arrival.  That meant Agnes and her three young siblings would be orphans in a new and strange land.  So I searched for the children in the 1850 census and found both Agnes and her brother Matthias living together with Bernard Esche, a man who had come to America with their older brother, Theo, and who most likely was related in some way to the family. Why they didn't move in with an oder sibling, I don't know.

In 1860, Mathias appears in the census as a married man, but I could not find Agnes.  Then, she reappears in 1870, living with Mathias again and probably helping him care for his children, as by now Mathias was a widower.  In 1880, Agnes appears in the census in the household of her married sister Elizabeth.

I could not find Agnes in the 1890 census, as it was destroyed decades ago in a fire, and she does not appear in the 1900 census. 

In my search for records, however, I came across a website that offered information on Delphos, Ohio, where the entire Wrocklage family lived. (In fact Theodore, Agnes's older brother, was one of its founders.) This website helped my determine what had happened to Agnes.   Among the list of all burials in the cemeteries of Delphos was an Agnes Wrocklage, born around 1832,  who died and was buried in 1886. 

Solving a tough puzzle with persistence

I have the names of 27 of my 3rd great grandparents (out of 32).  Besides their names, I have a fair amount of information on about half of them.  One couple, Christian Mathias Wrocklage and Mary Elizabeth Gerdemann, were merely names to me so I decided to see what I could learn about them.  I knew they were born in Germany and died in the United States, but didn't know when they left Germany, so I first looked at immigration records. 

When you search immigration records at ancestry.com you are likely to be directed to hundreds of records with men and women of the same or similar names to those of your ancestor.  So I had to wade through many Wrocklages, but none named "Christian."  So I looked for "Mathias" as I have learned that Germans in the nineteenth century often gave their children the same first names (girls were often named "Mary" for instance) and then called them by their second names.  I found a Mathias Wrocklage that came from Germany at about the right time and I then looked at the original passenger list.  The wife's name was "Elizabeth" which fit, as like so many Germans, she probably didn't use her first name of "Mary."

There were four children also listed, so at first I thought I had the wrong ancestor, as I knew there were at least seven children in this family, all born before the date of immigration. Three of the children had the same names as three of the children on my list, though two of them had the wrong ages.  I also saw the name of one child whose name was not on my list - "Agnes." So, in addition to the different ages listed for the children on the voyage, there were at least four children not included in the passenger list, and one extra child.  Could this family have left four children behind or did I have the wrong family? 

I looked more closely at the name of the father.  He was listed as "Mathias Esch Wrocklage" and it was then that I knew I had the right family.  I recognized the name "Esch" from a handwritten family tree that my uncle had given to my mother.  Under the name "Christian Mathias Wrocklage" were the words "born Esch," which I assumed meant that he had been adopted, or perhaps born out of wedlock and then adopted later by a stepfather when his mother married.    Now that I knew I had the right family, I was curious about the discrepancies in the number and names of children that appeared on the passenger list with this couple.

Then I looked at birthdates and figured out ages of the children left behind.  They were all in their twenties at the time of the voyage, so they could have preferred to stay behind.  Or perhaps the family could not afford to bring the adult children, or were not allowed to.  In any case, they were not children who were left behind. They were adults.   There was another possibility, however.  The adult children could have come to America before their parents. 

The only way to find out was to search census and immigration records.  I started with the 1900 census, the first census that gives the date of immigration. Only two of Mathias and Elizabeth's children were alive in 1900 and one of them was named "Gertrude," and she was one of the adult children who had not come with the rest of the family.  On the census form, it indicated she had arrived in 1843.  In looking for the original immigration record, I only found one with the name Gertrude Wrocklage, in 1840 not 1843.  So whether she arrived in 1840, as the immigration record says, or in 1843, as she said sixty years later, it appears certain she came over to America before her parents and younger siblings. 

I continued my search in the immigration records for Theodore, Mary Elizabeth and Anna Maria, the other adult children who did not come with their parents and I found two interesting passenger lists.  One was in October, 1836, and included both Theodore and Elizabeth Wrocklage. A second one in 1842 contained the names of both Theodore Wrocklage and a Rinehard or Bernard Esch (the original surname of Theodore's father, and probably a relative).  Perhaps Theodore came over, got settled, and returned to Germany for a visit, bringing Rinehold (or Bernard) back with him.  Finally, I found an immigration record for Anna Maria, which lists her arrival as September, 1844, one year prior to her parents' arrival.  From these records I am fairly confident that all four adult children of Mathias Wrocklage and Mary Elizabeth Gerdemann came to America before their parents.

Now the only mysteries were the child "Agnes" and the age discrepancies of two of the children who came with their parents.  A second child named Elizabeth was listed as 8 years old, while the child Dina (Bernadina) was listed as 5.  Yet, my records showed Dina to be older than Elizabeth by several years.  The only conclusion I could draw from this was that the person who filled out the passenger list inadvertantly reversed the ages of the two girls. Since the process of listing passengers was a very informal one in the 1800s, with one person writing down the names and ages as they were spoken to him by the passengers, it is highly likely that many mistakes were made.  I believe that's what happened here.

As for Agnes, whose name didn't appear in my original records, I am still searching for answers and will post later, when I find evidence of what became of her.

This little example of trying to piece together the various events in our ancestors' lives shows how difficult it can be to find the right records and the correct information.  One has to search, formulate hypotheses about why all the information doesn't fit, and then test out those hypotheses with more searching.  It is tedious and time consuming, but when you finally fit the pieces together, it can be exhilarating.

Sturdy Stuff

Today I visited the Temecula library for the first time (It's beautiful and has a wonderful genealogy collection!) and did some research in the series of books titled: Mayflower Families Through Five Generations.  There are separate volumes for many of the passengers, including the three that are of interest to me and my husband:  Francis Cooke, Stephen Hopkins and John Howland.  

I was able to confirm the line from Francis Cooke and Stephen Hopkins for the first five generations, but the information I needed on John Howland was not available.  Now I have to go to the Los Angeles Public Library to find a book on the Landon family, and Mary Ann Landon, who  is the crucial link between the most recent five generations and the five I have already confirmed.  While I don't have any doubts as to Tony's connection to the Mayflower passengers, I am seeking iron-clad documentation and this book should provide it. 

Later, I came home and worked on the Schulien side of my family.  My mother's maternal grandparents were Schuliens.  Joseph Schulien, my great grandfather, was born in this country shortly after the family emigrated from Germany but I had not found an immigration date for his parents, and my usual sources online were not leading me anywhere.  So I began going in the "back door" as I often do. 

I looked up immigration dates for each of the children and came across one passenger list that could be viewed in its entirety.  On the list were the names of Joseph's mother, father and siblings on June 29, 1852.  Although they had come from Germany, the ship they traveled on had departed from Liverpool, England.  They must have traveled across the channel to England, and either stayed there for a while or left immediately for America.  The 4 children ranged in age from 10 years to 9 months. 

Today's genealogy quests reinforced something I am finding again and again. Our ancestors were made of sturdy stuff.  Whether they risked everything in 1620 to come to a land that was completely unknown and most likely very dangerous, or whether they left the dire economic conditions in mid nineteenth century Germany in the hopes of starting over in America, they set out with courage, determination and faith.

I couldn't help wondering how many of us would have the courage and the stamina to do what they did.

Worldwide friends

One wonderful bonus that derives from doing genealogy research, and especially from doing it through ancestry.com, is that you find many other family trees that include the names of your ancestors, which means you are related in some way (usually third, fourth cousins, etc.).  Ancestry gives you a means of contacting the owners of these trees, and thus I have been able to connect with many people who are related to either me or my husband. For example, I spent an hour talking by phone to a third cousin of my husband's - one he never knew.  And I have received or sent emails to several of my own third cousins, formerly strangers to me. 

Recently, I found a family tree that included the names of my husbands' 3rd great grandparents.  The owner of the tree claims these same ancestors as her 3rd great grandparents and so I contacted her through ancestry.  It turns out we have both been using the same researcher in Croatia and have been able to find several "lost" genearations.  We have since been sending emails back and forth and are still amazed that we have connected. 

Then just a few days ago, I learned through a second cousin of mine that he had connected with a distant cousin in Germany, from the Schulien branch of our family.  My second cousin gave me an email address and this weekend, I heard from my cousin in Germany.  Now we are "friends" on facebook. 

It truly is a small world, and more and more I can see that if you go back far enough, we are all related.

Family History Library

At the genealogy conference, there were many presenters from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.  For those of you who are not students of genealogy, the Family History Library is the largest genealogical library in the world.  It is affiliated with the Mormon Church, and boy do those people know what they are doing when it comes to genealogy!  Many genealogists, both amateur and professional, make yearly trips to the library in Utah. 

You don't have to go to Utah to access many of the records, however.  You can go to one of thousands of branches of the Family History Library, generally at the local Mormon church.  So yesterday, I went to the nearest church and was able to order three microfilms of Irish records for the county where my great great grandparents were born. These are church records rather than census records, which as I've noted before, are sparse.  So I'm hoping the priests kept better records than the English government.

It will be several weeks before I'll have my hands on the records, and I have no idea if they will produce any new information, but I'm hopeful.

More Croatian ancestors

I just received the latest report from my researcher in Croatia and she has traced the family back to the 1700s. With the ancestors from the late 1800s she was able to access both church and census records, but by the time she reached the 1700s, all she had available were parish records, all written in Latin.  The Croatian names were hard enough to figure out, but now I have a collection of names in Latin. With my few years of Latin in Catholic school and my knowledge of a few Croatian names, I can figure out what most of them would be in Croatian and English.  For instance, "Franciscam" is Francisca or Frances.  "Dorotheam" is Dorothea or Dorothy.  "Helenam" is Helena or Helen. One was particularly puzzling, however.  The name was "Hyeronima" in Latin, and "Girolama"  in Croatian.  So I looked it up.  Hyeronima is the female version of "Hyeronimum" which means "sacred name" and is derived from the Greek.  (I guess the Roman church borrowed it.) Girolama is the Italian version, and there are many Croatian and Italian names that are the same.  The English translation for the masculine version is Jerome.

The earliest dates I now have for my husband's ancestors are in the early 1700s, though I have names that go back one more generation. My researcher told me the parish books from before that are in very bad condition, most of the information unreadable.  And the priests who recorded the information did not write down dates.

So while I do not yet have a complete record, as even though records exist they may be indiscernable, I have much more information than when I started - names and dates for four additional generations. 

Now I'm going to see what I can find for the Jescheta (Yeseta) family's ancestors in Bohemia (Czech Republic).  I have the name and email address of a researcher in that area, so maybe I'll get lucky.

Stay tuned, Terich family.

Tracing the Irish Side of the Family

The difficult thing about doing genealogy, if you are an American, is that you are likely to find yourself heading off in half a dozen different directions, to half a dozen countries where your ancestors once lived.  To trace my husband's family I must look to Croatia, Czechoslvakia, Switzerland and England.  To trace my family I must access records from Germany, Belgium, England, and Ireland.

I have done fairly well with English ancestors, who have been in America the longest - since colonial days.  And I have found a book with the genealogy already completed for the Swiss branch of my husband's family.  I have hired a Croatian researcher, have the name of a Czech genealogist, and am starting to look at the German branch of my family.  And while I have had information on my Irish relatives going back to my 2nd great grandparents, I've hit a dead end on anything in Ireland before that, which has been quite frustrating. 

In some respects, however, I've been lucky with the resources I already had. In my father's files were several aides to my quest.  There was a story of my great great grandparents, Ned and Mary Brennan, and their migration to America,  and a book with the title Irish Diary.  Both were written by Ned and Mary's grandson, a Catholic priest who has often visited Ireland.  There was also the local newspaper of the town in Ohio where my great great grandparents settled, giving me much information on their descendants.  And there were the notes and records my father kept, including a family tree.

Still, I knew nothing of my great great grandparents' families who had once lived in Ireland, or the remnants of the Brennan family who currently live in Ireland. Most of the census records were destroyed by the Irish government or burned in a fire in 1922.  However, I did have the name and address of a man who was a distant relation and who lived in County Laois (formerly Queen's County), the area where the Brennans, Faheys and Finns were from.  So I wrote to him and asked him to tell me about the family, specifically about his branch, which went back to the sister of my great great grandfather, Ned Brennan.

He wrote back, telling me about Mary Brennan, Ned's sister, who was his great grandmother.  He gave me names of Mary's children, and some of their spouses, though he had no names of their children and only a few dates.  He did, however, give me an idea of how many children each of Mary's children had produced. 

Obviusly, there were large gaps and nothing prior to Ned and Mary. 

Then, at the genealogy conference last weekend, I learned that the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses had survived the fire of 1922, and they were now available online.  So I got to work and, putting together the clues from all of my resources I was able to find Mary Brennan and her husband James Clooney in the 1901 census.  They were 80 and 92 respectively, though by the 1911 census they were gone.  I had the names of their children and based on location and the number of children each had, I was able to find 1901 and 1911 census records on each of them. 

There was only one thing about which I was skeptical.  Was James Clooney really 12 years older than Mary, and did they really live to such an advanced age in the early 1900s?  So I went searching and found something that answered the question.

I had read in Irish Diary that James Clooney and his wife, Mary Brennan Clooney, were buried in the Aghaboe cemetery, so I googled "Aghaboe cemetery, Ireland" and found a blog discussing an ongoing project to index all the graves, many of which have unreadable headstones. The group doing the indexing had posted pictures of all the headstones, with the names of the ones that were readable.  I clicked on the one for James Clooney, hoping it was Mary's husband.  It wasn't.  It was the headstone for their grandson James and on it were listed the names and death dates not only for James, but for his father and mother, his two brothers, and his grandparents, James and Mary Clooney.  Indeed, James was 12 years older than Mary, and they did live to the ripe old ages of 92 and 84.

At the conference, I also learned that I may be able to access Irish church records from the 1700s and 1800s through the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or one of its local branches, and I will be looking there next.

Genealogy weekend

I just returned from a four day genealogy conference.  I learned a lot and talked to so many people, all trying to locate their ancestors, mostly from other countries.  I met a woman who can't find many of her Polish relatives, as they perished in the Holocaust.  I met a woman who cannot find any ancestors on her father's side as he is adopted and cannot access the records. I met people who are using DNA to locate ancestors.  It made me realize just how fortunate I am to have the records I inherited from my father, as well as numerous informally written family histories to draw from.

I came away with many new tools to either help me find missing family members, or enhance my understanding of the lives of those I have found.  One of the tools is Google Earth.  I have actually been playing with it this morning and have found some of the towns in Ireland where my Brennan family lived and some of their descendants still reside.  I've found my grandparents' homes, my husband's childhood homes, and some of my previous residences. 

I learned a lot more about how to find my German ancestors, and also found a contact for a person who can help me find my husband's Czechoslovakian great grandfather, who has been elusive until now. 

The genealogy community, I learned this weekend, is a large and growing group of people who are all obsessed with finding their family's history.  Thanks to ancestry.com, the Mormon church, and the television show "Who do you think you are,"  more and more people  are adopting their extremely addictive hobby.  The new genealogy craze also provides enormous opportunites for money-making, and it would have been easy for me to spend a fortune on the four day trip.  Fortunately, there are many free sites one can access and not squander one's children's inheritance, and at the conference, there was no shortage of friendly people freely offering their time and advice. 

A genealogy quest

I'm off for a four day genealogy conference in Burbank hosted by the Southern California Genealogy Society.  I've signed up for workshops on elusive immigrants in Europe, finding Irish ancestors, technology tools to assist in research, genealogy  blogging, tracking German ancestors, library research, on-line research, overcoming brick walls, and more.  The conference includes a trip to the LDS research library in Los Angeles.

I'm hoping this four day experience with professional genealogists will help me move past some of the conflicting data, and find missing data on a number of lines in my tree and my husband's.

In the meantime, my researcher is still working on the Eterovich records in Croatia.

I should have much more to report soon.

Beyond astonishment

In an earlier post I said there was more to come about the connection between my husband's ancestors and my ancestors who came to this land nearly four hundred years ago.

I've already written about Tony's direct descent from at least three Mayflower passengers, and my connection to William Ring, who would have accompanied the Mayflower but for the leaky boat on which he was traveling. In searching further, I found another group of my ancestors from the early colonial period, by the name of Doane.  John Doane, who became a Deacon in the church, is my tenth great grandfather. He came over to Plymouth around 1630 with his wife Ann and one child.  Later, they had more children.  One was named Daniel, and he is my ninth great grandfather. 

Daniel married twice, according to records of the time.  The name of his first wife is unknown, though she is considered the mother of all of his children.  Genealogists have long speculated about the name of his first wife.  Many believe her name is Constance Snow, the daughter of Constance Hopkins and Nicholas Snow.  There are strong reasons to believe this as one child's name was Constance, possibly after her mother and grandmother, and because of a book written several years later on the families living in that area at the time.  In that book, Constance Snow is identified as the wife of Daniel Doane. 

Now this is significant to me for one reason only.  Constance Snow was the granddaughter of Stephen Hopkins, a Mayflower passenger.  If this information is accurate, then Stephen Hopkins would be my 11th great grandfather.  As he is also my husband Tony's direct ancestor (his 9th great grandfather), that would mean we share a common ancestor and we can both call Stephen Hopkins "Grandpa."

I told you it was spooky!

What's so great about genealogy?

I haven't always been caught up in genealogy.  For all the years my father was interested, I was indifferent.  I think that's true of many younger folks, who are so busy taking care of the next generation, that they can't afford the time or energy to invest anything in the previous generations, whose members are mostly gone. 

I had been retired for several years before I caught the genealogy bug.  Sadly, it wasn't until after my father died, meaning I never was able to share his passion while he was still here.  So I've been asking myself why  I've finally become interested., and I think I have the answer.

Genealogy combines many of my interests in one cohesive set of activities.  First, it appeals to my love of history, my undergraduate major.   Now there is history and there is history.  Unfortunately, history, as taught by many high school and college instructors, can be deadly dull, which is why in college I concentrated on the most exotic subjects offered at my university:  Russian history, Middle Eastern history, and Medieval history.  American history seemed too tame at that time. 

The same is true of genealogy.  It can be dull or it can be exciting.  At one time, all genealogy meant to me was list of names and dates, but now it is a way to personalize history, to place my ancestors in a given time, and learn what life was like for them, surrounded by the historical events that once were simply facts to be memorized for a midterm exam.  For instance, the Mayflower never meant much to me.  Big deal - a bunch of religious protestors got on a boat and came to this land four hundred years ago, and half of them died in the first year.  But when I learned that at least three and possibly seven of those passengers were ancestors of my husband, it made me want to know more about the Mayflower and the early American settlements.  American history suddenly came alive.

I've looked at other historical events and tried to find ancestors associated with it.  I've found ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WW II.  I've found people who died around the time of the influenza epidemic and wondered if that was the cause of their deaths. I've found ancestors who came to America shortly after the Potato Famine in Ireland, and wondered if that influenced their decision. I've even found a possible ancestor who was living at the time of the Norman Conquest of England.

The second interest that was satisfied by a study of genealogy was my love of psychology.  Reading old newspaper articles about ancestors gives me a glimpse into their lives and the problems they endured as well as the supportive structures they relied upon.  I've learned how many ancestors died because of problems that could easily be resolved with modern medicine.  The Rh factor caused the death of a great aunt in childbirth, for instance.  I have inherited the same Rh problem, and were it not for a simple injection I was given after the birth of my children, the same could have been my fate.

I've learned from obituaries that almost all of my Catholic ancestors in Ohio were members of "The Holy Name Society" at their local parishes. Since the Holy Name Society was never a big thing in my California Parishes, I had to Google it.  My ancestors, it seems, were quite religious.  Several even became priests and nuns.

Further back, I noted that almost all my ancestors had enormously large families.  It wasn't unusual for someone to have 10, 12, or 14 children.  Usually the births were every two years, and in most families one or two of those children didn't make it past infancy.  So many times, I've wondered what life was like for these ancestors, who never had the option of planning their families with modern birth control methods.

I've also noted, particularly with the men and women in the early American colonies, that people did not remain unmarried for long, even after they were widowed, which many were. If a woman with many children lost her husband, she was most likely married to another man within a year.  The same for men whose wives died.  I don't imagine most of these were love matches, but marriages of necessity or convenience.   Women had no way to support themselves and men had no way to work and care for their motherless children.  I can't begin to imagine what that was like.  I think of all the couples with marital problems I have counseled over the years, how many have told me they no longer felt any love for their spouse, and I think of these ancestors from 400 years ago, married to someone in order to survive.  For them, love never even entered into it.

And finally, genealogy satisfies my interest in mystery.  For years I have read detective stories, and loved trying to figure out "who done it" along with Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Kinsey Millhone, Kay Scarpetta, or Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.  With genealogy, I am presented with mysteries every day.  Why did this particular ancestor disappear after a certain date?  Where was another ancestor born?  Which of the two men with the exact same name, born in the same town, at almost the same time, was my ancestor? Why did some ancestors come to America?  Why did others stay in their native countries?

So a study of genealogy is more than just gathering a list of dead relatives and writing their names on a family tree.  Genealogy teaches me about history, helps me understand what motivated people in previous generations, and helps me solve mysteries.

No wonder it keeps me interested.

Census records

In 2010, as the census forms were sent out, a few congressional representatives made a fuss about the census being an invasion of privacy, and a few political radio entertainers urged citizens not to participate in this exercise, which was first established in our Constitution. Yet, in addition to the importance of the census to appropriate representation in Congress and so  many other important functions of government,  the census is invaluable to another group of people: genealogists. 

First, let me reassure everyone that genealogists are unable to access census records after 1930, so the privacy of most living citizens is protected in that respect.  In a year, we will be able to finally access the records from the 1940 census, but it will be another ten years before the 1950 census report is available. 

I would never have been able to put together a family tree without census records.  They are the second on-line source of information for me after other family trees posted on ancestry.com.  I usually look up records in this order:

1. Ancestry.com family trees with the name of my ancestor.  Frequently these have misinformation which is why the next six sources are necessary.
2. Census records
3. Military records
4. Birth and Death records and obituaries
5. Newspaper stories from my hometown and the hometown of many of my relatives
6. Biographical sketches regarding early American ancestors
7. Genealogical data on specific families located other places on the internet

The census is one of my most valued sources of information.  Not only can I find (or confirm) names of ancestors, their spouses and children, I can find or estimate their birthdates as well.  Some census records give me the occupations of my ancestors.  Most give me the birthplaces of the ancestor and the birthplaces of their parents.  So if there are several census reports on women named "Margaret Brennan," for instance, I can find out if the report I am looking at is the one for my ancestor by checking the city of residence, the birthdate, the spouse and children's names, and then the birthplace of her parents.  As long as I have a pretty good idea of what these are, I can be fairly sure I have the right person.  Then, if there is a piece of information I am missing, like the name of a child, or her occupation, or her spouse's full name, I may be able to find it.

Census records, however, can contain confusing or incorrect information and the researcher must keep this in mind.  Early census reports were filled out by hand, and some are difficult to read. Often names are misspelled so you have to examine the report carefully.  But after reading hundreds of these reports you can get the hang of it and know how to look past mistakes and find the information you need. 

One thing that makes searching census records even more tedious is the number of names that are the same.  I have often laughed at the number of people who have the same name in the Irish side of my family as well as the Croatian side of my husband's family.  These families stuck to the same names and used them over and over again.  Among my Irish ancestors, the most common names are Edward, Robert, John, Michael, Mary, Sally, Bridget, Rose and Nora.  In my husband's family, the most frequently used names are Anton or Anthony, Mate or Mike, Nicholas, Thomas, Magdalena, Maria, Anna, and Antoinette. Often there will be half a dozen people in the family with the same first and last name, so finding the correct census can be a tedious process.  When the ancestors got a little creative and gave an unusual name to a child - like Cletus, my grandfather's name -  it makes the search much easier. (If the name is too unusual, however, the census worker is likely to misspell it.)

So census records are valuable sources of information for much more than just dates.  They bring people into sharper focus and round out the picture of thousands of people I have never met. 

I can't wait for the release of the 1940 census.  

More astonishment

After finding the Mayflower connection in my husband's family, it made me want to push further back in my tree, although I didn't expect to find any ancestors who had traveled on the Mayflower. Like my husband's family, mine was mostly Catholic, and I knew that at least three branches, including my father's Irish ancestors and my mother's German and Belgian ancestors, had all come to this country in the mid 1800s.  Only my paternal grandmother's family, which I knew little about, offered a possible route back to the time of the early American colonies.

The search for these ancestors was quite time consuming.  After all, with each generation, the number of ancestors doubles.  And I had to trace the family back 13 generations to my 11^th great grandparents.  (Just to clarify how many 11^th great grandparents one has – it's over 8000.)  Of course, many of the lines came to a dead end in the 1700 or 1800s, but a couple of lines kept going. 

Eventually I found an ancestor by the name of "William Ring" (1580-1621), my 11^th great grandfather.  He was a passenger on the Speedwell, a ship that accompanied the Mayflower as it departed on its journey across the Atlantic.  Unfortunately, the Speedwell was not seaworthy and had to turn back and William Ring died in Holland the following year. His wife Mary Durrant (1590-1631) eventually came to America with their children, in the year 1629.

One of the children was Andrew Ring (1618-1693) and he married a woman named Deborah Hopkins, another daughter of Stephen Hopkins. Stephen, as you may recall from my previous post, was an ancestor of my husband, and  a passenger on the Mayflower.

Therefore, it turns out that a relative of mine, who but for a leaky boat could have come over with the Mayflower, married a relative of my husband's who did come to America on the Mayflower, nearly 400 years ago.  To be specific, my 10^th great grand uncle married my husband's 8^th great grand aunt. 

Think about that.  Two English families who wanted to escape religious persecution in England made plans to travel on two ships to America.  One family managed to make it across on the most famous sailing ship in our nation's history.  The other had to come later.  These families then became connected through marriage.

Centuries passed and the families continued, branching into many different directions.  Within each family was a small branch that ended up 3000 miles away in the state of California.  And somehow, a young man from one family and a young woman from the other, having no idea their families had ever known each other, met, fell in love, and married.   

Spooky!

But there's more…..

An astonishing discovery

Once I learned about my husband's Ruby ancestors, I traced more lines on his mother's side of the family.  One of his great great grandmothers was a woman named Mary Ann Landon (1820-1889).  Tracing her line led to one amazing discovery, followed by a disappointment, followed by an even more amazing discovery.

I traced the family back seven generations from Mary Ann Landon to her father Samuel Landon to his mother Experience Cooke, to her mother Rebecca Edgerton, to her mother Experience Bearse, to her mother Experience Howland, to her father John Joseph Howland, to his father John Howland.

When I learned that  John Howland (1592-1673) and his wife Elizabeth Tilley (1607-1687) were both passengers on the Mayflower, as were Elizabeth's parents, John Tilley (1571-1621) and Joan Hurst (1567-1621), I was dumbfounded and certain the information was wrong.  He couldn't be related to anyone on the Mayflower.  After all, his ancestors were Catholic, as were mine.  And Catholics did not come to this country on the Mayflower.  But I had forgotten that my husband's mother converted to Catholicism and that her ancestors were not Catholic.

Still, I found the possibility hard to believe so I went over my records again, and sure enough, there was a glitch.  One of the names in the line is a controversial figure.  The person in dispute is "Experience Howland" whom the Mayflower Society does not recognize as a verifiable link in the ancestry chain.   

Even though some genealogists believe there is a good case to be made for the existence of Experience Howland, I realized this is not something that could be proven, so I returned to my research to see if anyone else from my husband's family came from the early 1600s.  

I found three more Mayflower passengers and this time, the information was not in dispute. 

Again, the trail started with Mary Ann Landon, only this time it led back through her great grandfather Elisha Cooke, instead of her great grandmother, Rebecca Edgerton.  From Elisha Cooke, the line went to his father William Cooke, to his father Jacob Cooke II, to his father Jacob Cooke I, to Francis Cooke (1584-1663), a passenger on the Mayflower.  His wife, Hester Mahieu (1585-1666), did not accompany him but came later with the children, one of whom was Jacob Cooke I, who later married a woman named Damaris Hopkins. Her parents, it turns out, were also Mayflower passengers, Steven Hopkins (1581-1644) and Elizabeth Fisher (1595-1639).

 

While this discovery astonished me, as no one in the immediate family had any knowledge of a Mayflower connection, I was still skeptical.  I had found a glitch in the first trail.  Perhaps there was a glitch in this one. 

Then I received a message through ancestry.com from a third cousin of my husband, someone he had never met.  The man, who has been doing genealogy research since the mid 1980s, had seen my husband's family tree on ancestry, where he also has one, and he wanted to talk. He had information to give me and wanted to ask some questions about my husband's branch of the family. I learned from him that my discoveries were accurate and that my husband's mother's family is definitely descended from Francis Cooke, Steven Hopkins and Elizabeth Fisher of the Mayflower.

But there was still more to discover-- this time on my side of the family-- and to say that it blew me away would be understating it.