CategoriesFamily TreePolishZalewski

With A Little Help From My Friends

As I mentioned in an update post last week, I was able to take back my Zalewski line back a few more generations. Here’s how that went down.

A few years back, I had found Frank and Anna’s marriage record in the Polish Civil Archives. That record listed his parent’s names and his birthplace which was listed as Krottoschin. This got me one more generation back, but with little more info besides names and a location.

Using sites like Kartenmeister and Google Maps, I quickly was able to find the location and it’s modern equivalent. It is now Krotoszyny, Biskupiec, Warminsko-Mazurskie, Poland. Not be confused with the more popular one in the Poznan area that I kept running into.

What I couldn’t find were any church records for this location. Civil records were available, but those didn’t start until 1874. Frank was born in 1858. I’ve always had great luck at finding record listings for almost any location using FamilySearch’s Catalog, no matter how small. For some reason Krottoschin wasn’t even listed on their site. I was at a loss and disappointed.

CategoriesBig NewsFamily TreeZalewski

An Amazing Genealogy Week

As you know, if you a reader of this site, I’ve been trying to track down information on my Zalewski line as long as I’ve been doing genealogy. For the longest time it was always my shortest line, ending at my great-great grandfather, Frank Zalewski. This week changed a lot of that and during the excitement I almost totally forgot about RootsTech, which is crazy.

I plan to add more detailed posts this week about how exactly I found this new information, but here is a quick overview. [Update: the detailed post is now up. You’ll find the link at the end of this post, so keep reading.]

A few years back, I found Frank’s marriage record to his wife Anna in the civil archives which listed his parent’s names and his birthplace. This got me one more generation back, but with little more info besides names and a location.

CategoriesFamily TreeFeaturedMysteries

One More Generation

I was just reading up on this week’s WikiTree member of the week. Sometimes I learn new things or find new people to talk to about certain locations or subjects. In the post, she mentions using a site called ofb.genealogy.net. I thought I’d check it out since it is supposed to be good for German ancestry, which I have a lot.

From there, I found their GEDBAS site, which is like a database of family trees submitted by people. I searched most of my German surnames until I tried my LAST family and saw an entry for my 3rd-great-grandfather, Johann LAST.

His entry didn’t have any more information than I had since it looked to be pulled from the parish registers of Batzwitz/Barkow where I originally found his baptismal record from 1825. The record showed that he was born illegitimate and only listed his mother, Dorothea Sophia LAST.

What caught my eye on this record is that it listed a father for him, a man named Johann Friedrich Gottlieb SCHMITT. Interesting.

CategoriesFamily TreeTechnologyTips & Tricks

Digital French

For no specific reason this week, I decided to do some more research of my paternal French lines. I decided to start with my gateway French ancestor, Claude-Françoise QUINET, or as she is mostly known, Frances (Quinet) THOMPSON. She is my 4th-great-grandmother and probably the most distant ancestor that I have a photo.

I started at the FamilySearch wiki, which is always a good place to start when researching a new location. It has great articles on the best resources and where to find them. Much to my surprise, France has digitized and made available all of the civil and church records, at least from the Department I needed, Haute-Saône. The website was very easy to use once I was able to determine the locations I needed, even if it was in French.

I had a lot of the information for Frances and many generations back, but just the information, no sources or proof. This was probably entered back when I just found info and entered it like a rabid accountant. Fortunately, finding the actual records was made a bit easier as I had dates to work from. Most of them lined up perfectly and I was able to confirm and source dozens of baptisms, marriages, and deaths. I was even able to add one new generation back. I started my search in the early 1800s, but I was able to find records back to the late 1600s available on the site. Those were more hit-and-miss as I wasn’t able to find any of my ancestors in them.

Entry for the marriage of my 8th-great-grandparents, Claude Barbut (Claudius Barbu) & Jeanne Laurence Mignard (Joanna Laurentia Mignard) on 15 Jun 1716 in Contréglise.

Early on in my research, the records were in French, so just memorizing important genealogical words (i.e., baptism, marriage) and numbers was very helpful. At some point in the 1700s, everything switch over to Latin, which is a bit different to read (see the record above.)

I’m not completely finished digging through for the missing records and I have yet to see if any of my other possible French ancestors can be found in these digitized records. If you have French ancestors, make sure to look at the FamilySearch wiki.

CategoriesFamily TreeZalewski

A Surprise Find

I recently got back into doing some genealogical research on my family. For awhile I’ve felt stuck on most lines since I’ve gone as far as the most common records go. A lot of my research now requires even more research into finding the records themselves. I need to make a lot of Family History Center stops and browse through microfilm, or hopefully do it from my home when FamilySearch digitizes it.

Imagine my surprise when doing some basic record updating on some of my great-great-grandmother, Anna (Lindner) Zalewski’s siblings. I know her younger brother John was also found in Milwaukee and I had sources from the census records. I also found his naturalization record, which not only included his date of arrival and port (29 Mar 1908, New York), but also included the witnesses. They were my great-grandfather, Joseph Zalewski, and his brother-in-law, John Strelka (husband of Martha Zalewski.)  So, I knew I had the right John Lindner.

No one on Ancestry had a passenger list attached to their John Lindner entries. I mean, he came into New York in 1908, the record had to be there. That was when Ellis Island was being used. So, I plugged in different combinations of options into the search through the “New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957” database. I went through each one and almost gave up when I spotted the name “Yohann Lendner” at the bottom of the results. The arrival date was a month off from the naturalization record (29 Feb 1908), but the birth was very close. I clicked on it to confirm it was wrong when I spotted his immediate family that matched, two siblings that matched, and then the jackpot, his mother (my 3rd-great-grandmother) that matched.

lindner

I had no idea that my 3rd-great-grandmother, Eva (SoÅ„efeld) Lindner, ever came to the United States. It seems her husband, Johann, had passed away as she was listed as “Widowed.” Fortunately for me, this passenger list also had more details like where they last resided and a relative of their’s in the “old world.” The weird thing is that for everyone in the Lindner family, including the relative, they listed Gelsenkirchen, Rheinland as their last residence. This place still exists, now located in the North Rhine-Westphalia area of western Germany. This is a pretty good distance from the place I found them last, which was then called Schwenten in today’s north-central Poland. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, but it adds so many more questions.

One other big question is where did Eva go? She’s not listed in the 1910 Census with any of the Lindner children or by herself (as far as I’ve found so far.) I also have yet to find any death record for her. All I know now is that she made it to New York in 1908, but I don’t know if she ever made it to Milwaukee. I mean, she was 68 years old and at that time that was pretty old. I also find it funny that I found her record of arrival in 1908 on that same day the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series since 1908.

As always, more questions than answers, but that’s what we love, isn’t it?

CategoriesFamily TreeFun

Birth Location Pedigree

This little pedigree looks like it has been sweeping Facebook recently, so I thought I’d put one together on my family. I first saw it on my feed from Miriam at AnceStories.

Click for larger
Click for larger

If it’s hard for you to view that whole image, you can also view it via Google Sheets here.

It was neat to see all of the birth locations of my ancestors back to my 3rd great-grandparents all in once place. Only 2 “Unknown” entries, which is pretty good (on my surname line, of all places.) I also always assumed my maternal line has been in Wisconsin the longest since they arrived in the early 1850s. It actually looks like one of my paternal ancestors, Pauline (THOMPSON) Firmenich was born in Wisconsin in 1849, only one year after it became an official state.

Back to my great-grandparents, all of my ancestors were born in Wisconsin, with the exception of my grandfather. He was born in Chicago when my great-grandparents lived there for a few years in the 1920s. My earliest US ancestor is my 3rd great-grandfather, William CORRIGAN, who was born somewhere in the US in 1823. It is assumed probably New York, but we’re not sure. They stopped in that area before continuing on to Canada.

CategoriesFamily TreeFun

I am a Cousin!

AJ Jacobs made some headlines inside and outside of the genealogy community back in 2014-15 by setting out to have a Global Family Reunion. His mission is to connect everyone in the world to each other in one human family tree. He wrote a bit about it in a NY Times article.

On WikiTree, you can see how you connect to AJ (and many others) using their site since they built it to be one large tree. I recently finally connected my tree to his and no surprise that it was via my French-Canadian line. Once I connected my CLOUTIER ancestors to their father, my connection was complete. Now, this is not a direct “cousin” as we genealogists know it, but just a “degree of relationship” connection. It’s more like six-degrees of Kevin Bacon (whom you can also see if you connect to, I do, too.)

I am 29 degrees from AJ Jacobs, so “I am a cousin!” and I am unfortunately more than six-degrees from Kevin Bacon (27). If you want to know how you connect to them, or even me, start filling in your WikiTree lines. The site is very easy to use.

CategoriesFamily Tree

Solidifying the French-Canadian Line

I haven’t spend a lot of time on my personal family tree in awhile. I always seem to work on the same people over and over, which is fine, but if you keep hitting that same brick wall sometimes you get discouraged and take a break.

Instead, I have decided to do more work on my French-Canadian line. When I originally entered a lot of this information many years ago, I didn’t exactly source everything like I do now. This line connects me to some big French-Canadian family lines including CLOUTIER, ST LOUIS, and MANSEAU. This is a line that I know I have a lot of cousins on, and I know a lot of them show up consistently in my DNA matches lists. I’d like to confirm a lot of this information before using it elsewhere.

The gateway ancestors I always start with are my maternal 4th-great-grandparents, Ephraim ST LOUIS and his wife Marie DesAnges MANSEAU. So far, I’ve confirmed a bunch of births and deaths using FamilySearch’s family tree and I am finding a lot more solid sources (thanks to the old Quebec parishes for keeping records.)

Hopefully, this turns out to bring in more information I never had.

CategoriesFamily TreeFun

Visualizing the Tree

Now that FamilySearch Family Tree is live and they also allow other programs to access that data on your behalf, we’re able to do cool things with it. RootsMagic allows you to connect members of your local family tree database to FamilySearch Family Tree where you can copy data and sources back and forth.

But, there are also other cool things that some websites are doing with your data. Puzzilla.org is one of those sites. They allow you to view a descendant or ancestor tree visually using the data on FamilySearch. Here is my ancestor tree out to 14-generations.

Brian Zalewski Ancestor Tree
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I am the small blue, circled square at the bottom. As you can tell, my maternal side is much more filled out inside of FamilySearch. I have cleaned up back about 4-5 generations, but beyond that, it’s all based on what other people have added. Remember, this is just what info FamilySearch has in their Family Tree. For example, the little orange squares mean that the individual died before the age of 16, which seems odd to have for ancestors that had children.

The cool feature that I love to use with this site is choosing a distant ancestor and viewing their descendant tree. It allows you to see distant cousins you never knew you had. Plus, it looks really neat when you do it for a “super” ancestor like Zacharie Cloutier who “had 10,850 French-Canadian descendants, the most of any Quebec colonist” and is my 11th-great-grandfather. Here is his descendant view only down 4 generations.

Zacharie Cloutier Descendant Tree
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How cool looking is that? If you look hard enough, you can see the yellow lines that lead to my family lines. Again, lots and lots of “died before 16” marks, which may be due to bad/wrong data inside the Family Tree. This is also a good way to see bad/wrong data and go in and fix it.

I love being able to use data for non-standard purposes like this and I hope a lot of other creative people plug into the FamilySearch API and make more of these.

CategoriesFamily TreeFeaturedThielke

Five Generations of Photos

Achievement unlocked! With a small collection of photos that my mom gave me to look through and scan from her side of the family, I now have photos of every one of my ancestors five generations back to my great-great grandparents. That’s pretty impressive, at least I think so, compared to my wife’s tree where she has very sporadic photos beyond her grandparents.

CategoriesFamily TreeFunZalewski

The 5th Middle

Middle ChildI didn’t actively think about this. It just popped into my head one day and after I looked into it I was pleasantly surprised.

If my wife and I have one more child, making our newest son, Xander, the middle child. He will then be (at least) the 5th generation of the male middle child going back to his great-great-grandfather.

I have only traced my ZALEWSKI line back to Frank Zalewski, but I only know of one of his siblings and nothing about the rest of his family. It is completely possible that he is also a middle child, but I don’t know, yet.

Frank’s son Joseph was the 5th child out of nine, born in 1893, making him the middle child. Frank’s 3rd child, Elsa, died within a year, so Joseph didn’t really grow up a true middle child.

Joseph and his wife Emily technically had four children, though one died stillborn, making three living children. Joseph’s son Richard was then the middle child, born in 1921.

My father, Richard’s son, was born a middle child between his brother and sister.

I was born a middle child surrounded by two brothers.

There are always neat things hiding in your family tree if you look for it.