There are several lines within my family that have come to a dead end. In other words, I simply can't get back any further than a particular ancestor, usually the immigrant ancestor.
That's the way it was with my husband's Croatian family. While we had names of his great grandparents, we had nothing beyond them, and no way to access any records here in the United States. So two options were open to us - either travel to the small island of Brac in Croatia and try to locate (and translate) church records or hire someone in Croatia to do it for us. Since we weren't planning to travel to Croatia any time soon, I hired a researcher and she found many records. I also hired a researcher in the Czech Republic to find records of one member of the family.
And now, I'm faced with the same situation in my own family. I've already traveled to Ireland and even hired a research firm to find out what I couldn't find on my own of my father's family. The firm was able to locate a few pieces of information, but records are scarce in Ireland and I fear this dead end is permanent. But my mother's German family is a different story. There are more records available and with someone skilled in searching through them, I think I may finally find out something about three family names: Moenter; Frecker; and Esch.
My great, great grandfather was Hermann Henry Frecker, born in Germany in 1837. He married Maria Bernadina Wrocklage in 1860 and died in 1869 after fathering 5 children. One of those children was my great grandmother, Mary Gertrude Frecker. I know the name of Hermann's mother and sister. They are Angela Moenter Frecker and Clara Philoemena Frecker. But I do not know the name of Hermann's father, who probably died before Hermann, his mother and sister came to the United States. I would like information on this family and their ancestors.
Hermann's wife, Mary Bernadina, was a Wrocklage, though her father's surname, before his marriage, was Esch. In those days, in the area we now know as Germany, there were strict laws of inheritance. Large farms were generally subdivided and tenant farmers could work the land for a fee to the landlord. The eldest son usually inherited the rights to tenancy, but if there was no son, or if the son forfeited his rights, a daughter could inherit the rights through her husband, but only if her husband changed his name to her family name. So in the Wrocklage family, Anna Maria Caterina Wrocklage married Christian Mathias Esch and when her brother forfeited his rights to the farm, Christian Mathias Esch changed his name to Christian Mathias Wrocklage. I would love to know more about the Esch family from which he came.
Although I have hired researchers before and always been pleased with their findings, it feels like a defeat whenever I do. Genealogy is like a puzzle that you want to solve yourself. Hiring someine is like using a dictionary to solve a crossword. It just isn't quite the same and takes some of the fun out of it. But I've been looking for four years now, and haven't gotten any further than when I started with these families, so I have decided the only way to get the information is to ask for assistance. Therefore, I have hired someone in Germany to look into these three families, and hope to hear something in about a month.
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