MY DIFFICULT RESEARCH INTO A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY : STEP THIRTEEN : POST #9

Step thirteen : Deaths for the County in Pennsylvania where the Immigrant nuclear family lived. Checking Pennsylvania deaths.

If I had not found the naturalization for the 18 year old mentioned in the previous post, I would not have been able to do this next step.  

Find A Grave TM is a web site I have very mixed feelings about.  People are uploading death certificates and I think that is beyond tacky (defying the sensibility that the dead should be left in peace) but also a total privacy invasion.  Sure, if you find out that some relatives of yours posted, you might be able to take it down, but it was up for the world to see, and that is disrespecting the living too.

As previously stated members of this clients family had gone so far in their research and some of the more modern ancestors generations from the immigrant nuclear family from Germany-Prussia, were on Find A Grave TM.

But one thing we should not forget is that Find A Grave is not the end-all. If this were a more modern family who lived at a time, as we do now, where people were forced to have Identification cards, and their birth, marriage, and death, were documented that would be an early research task. But these people lived in the  - and the full names of family members did not appear until 1850. 

Now that I knew that there was a possibility that the family used a different surname I was able to find the death of the first female immigrant ancestor from Prussia.  She was not yet 40 and had died of TB.

TB usually takes some years to kill a person and it gives us the speculation that this hard-working family had a sick wife and mother that required attention. 

Hold that thought!

Posts in this series will be brought up using the label PA-GERM research path

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FIND A GRAVE CHANGES POLICY TO BE MORE SENSITIVE : OPINION BY ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

FIND A GRAVE, the web site that features volunteers and others posting private information on where a human has been buried, has changed its policy, giving some credence to the sensitivity of living family.  It is not enough.  They have determined that they will allow family to grieve for three months before posting the location of the burial. (FIND A GRAVE WILL GIVE YOU A CHANCE TO OBJECT, if you register with them, then they will hold off for a YEAR.)

The lack of privacy in death that the deceased person and their loved ones has makes me feel some outrage at the whole situation - costly burials and the whole lousy funeral industry included. 

Apparently if you are living in the United States, you have about 70 years of privacy when it comes to census records, but almost none in death, and since most people who are alive have family who have died THIS ERODES THEIR PRIVACY TOO.  It is no wonder that fraudsters, including people who call up old widows and try to get their money, operate so easily. They see an obit, do a little research, and soon they have the person's address and phone number thanks to some of the most popular genealogy databases.  It's shameful.

I know someone whose parents were robbed of their life savings by such a fraudster and he knew all sorts of things about them and their children, which the criminal used in his story.  

Someone else I knew, who was in very deep grief over the death of his wife, was solicited by some lonely widows!  (To his credit he joked that he could not move to Florida because there would be even more of them after him there!  He had no interest in dating or remarrying.)

I had this experience years ago when a loved one died after a long, horrible illness. I was still in grief when I found out that the expensively paid for funeral and grave site - supposed to be on HOLY GROUND in a RELIGION-BOUND CEMETERY YET, was posted on FIND A GRAVE.  I recall seeing this on the Internet and a sick feeling spread through my stomach.

Apparently, the whole cemetery had been tramped on as a couple went around taking down information about the tombstones but when? I called the cemetery and tried to express my displeasure and got a snotty person on the phone who did not give a damn. She sure wasn't going to contact these people for me.

This person, who I was calling long distance, previously also did not want to reveal to me where my very own ancestors were buried in the cemetery - apparently it would take a visit to find out. Since then I have to wonder how many cemetery workers just think "go look at the FIND A GRAVE web site!" Since then others have died and been buried in that cemetery and the same thing - the information is exposed to the world! 

It was at that time that I decided if I myself was buried I would NEVER WANT A TOMBSTONE. (We really need to rethink why we need to have a tombstone at all. I don't think too many people actually visit cemeteries and the whole kneeling on the grave, looking at the tombstone and saying prayers thing, which I've witnessed others doing, is something I will not do. That person is gone. The best embalming and the heaviest locked up casket will not stop a body from decaying, be it in the ground or above ground.)  

Though the couple who did this outrageous privacy invading reportage did post that if you objected you could contact them and they would take the information down, I had to wonder how many people even knew what they had done and who they were! Latter Day Saints in a Catholic cemetery?  People who were with the local historical society?  Did they have any family buried in the cemetery?  What about the cemetery management and the church that claims this is Holy Ground - a great place for co-religionists to wait it out until The Second Coming resurrects them?  Maybe Jesus has his own database?

The idea that someone will offend you first, and then if you object, they will backtrack on the Internet yet, which is after all is world-wide, is sort of like when some man you're out on a first date with grabs your breast (or worse) and only if you object will he remove it. In other words, FIND A GRAVE and their cohorts seem to be, like some social networks with empire building agendas, speculatively depend on being caught and you making a fuss rather that ASKING YOUR PERMISSION IN THE FIRST PLACE. That is simply NOT DECENT.  

Further, FIND A GRAVE has turned into a place where people are posting private genealogy information as well: this is something I NEVER do as a professional. It is one thing to find out someone who died in 1906 in Austria is buried at a certain place, another to find out your mother's grave has been revealed. 

Privacy Rules for the Deceased and Their Families should be the same across the board.  Leave the dead to rest in peace and their loved ones alone too! 

There are many other privacy deprivations in place in the world of genealogy including in databases, and you can be sure FIND A GRAVE INFORMATION IS SHOWING UP ON ANCESTRY (The genealogy database: This blog has no relationship with it.) and well, lots of other places, including FAMILY SEARCH. 

I do wonder if FIND A GRAVE just decided to foist all that free, volunteer-given work over to ANCESTRY or if ANCESTRY PAID THEM?  FAMILYSEARCH? There is nothing wrong with contributing your free time and knowledge to a database but they need to be held accountable for privacy invasion. I await the day when someone who has been a victim of crime can point to these sites as to how the criminal found them and hold them accountable.)

Can cemetery sites help you with genealogy?  Certainly.  But let's get PRIVACY LAWS IN PLACE to show respect. Let the person rest in their grave without the world knowing where to locate them until decades have passed.

C 2022 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy.

(By the way, you are under no obligation to publish an obituary, and the funeral businesses putting obits and a plea for commentary and soliciting people to buy flowers and so on the internet, can also be insensitive. If someone has died and you have been informed, the thing to do is make a personal contact with the loved ones, not post on the Internet. If they are not personal enough to you to have been notified, you're just minding other people's business. This solicitation of posting remarks on Internet obits has become a sort of pressured activity, and funeral businesses are behind it.  If you want your privacy in death, be sure that your contract with the funeral home and cemetery include a contract in which they will not post and will not allow your burial site to be revealed!)

 

SEARCH FOR HERITAGE - ORPHANAGE - ADOPTION - LOVING HOME Research Path Heritage Search 1 - Three

Since the surname of the birth mother - her maiden name - seems to be the one she went through life with - I search for her grave using FIND A GRAVE.  

I would not have found it if I had not known the name of the birth father!

To my surprise I find both her maiden surname and the name of the birth father who never married her (unless he was a bigamist which no longer seems likely) on the tombstone as if they were married. I also now have a full birth and death date.  If I get the burial record it's going to tell me who informed the undertaker. Tombstones are generally not inexpensive so someone had this carved. But would the funeral home do research to prove that this woman was indeed MARRIED and had a married surname?  NO, they would not. So someone paid for her funeral and someone paid to have this gravestone made. I asked my client if he buried his mother.  He doesn't take the bait. (Information on tombstones can be wrong.)

Also, on FIND A GRAVE I see that someone responsible for photographing and listing the grave has put down that she was the child of "Bob and Mary So and So."  Who is this person?  I click on his info and he's someone who has uploaded thousands of photos of graves and so on. He probably is not a family member with a personal interest in this. I doubt that he has also looked at cemetery records and other paperwork. Is he a relative?  Perhaps from that birth father's side of the family? 

Turns out that birth father and his legal wife are in the same cemetery.  

Well, there are not too many cemeteries around in that area and now that I know that this birth mother lived her life alone and unmarried - that he was LOCAL all those years - well, I feel upset. The birth father never visited the birth mother, who remained unmarried her whole life. He must have known where she was. I wonder.  Did she tell people she was a divorced woman when she was not?  Use his surname? 

What's going on?

I locate the couple that are attributed to be the birth mother's own birth parents according to the FIND A GRACE listing on census in another state, along with dozens of other prospective families. By now I feel pretty sure that it's my client himself who did the funeral, burial, and the tombstone, and maybe he's forgotten or he doesn't want to discuss it.  (Is he playing a game with me to see if I'm a good genealogist?)

It's important that he be honest with me. Now I begin to wonder if his birth mother was honest with him. I begin to wonder if anyone at the orphanage or her birth family were honest with her as well because...

I run a search for everyone in the United States born in the year she was using the 1930 census, when she was already a child and in the Catholic orphanage or a mid-west city. Up come dozens of families who already had a child in or about 1924. Unless she was a TWIN and was given away while the other twin was kept, she does NOT FIT INTO THE BIRTH ORDER of ANY OF THESE FAMILIES who are located in the same diocese - the diocese that was behind the Catholic Orphanage she lived her childhood in.  

This opens the possibility that though all oral history and evidence thus far points to her being connected to the dozens of families there with her birth surname, she may actually have been sent there to them from somewhere else.  I remind myself not to get map bound.

But there is ONE candidate family in the area simply because there are no children listed born in that family after the date she was born....


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To follow along on this genealogy research path click on the label below that says Research Path Heritage Search 1

ANTHROPOLOGY, ARCHEOLOGY, BURIALS, MUMMIES

Anthropology is one subject I love.  I love learning how the human developed culture, how cultures spread, and DNA is enhancing our understanding of human migration, ethnicity, and race.. 

I love knowing this life I lead is so much of the times.  Can I even really imagine the world of my great grandparents?  The ancient Greeks?  The life of a tribe in the Amazon?  Well, could they in their lives imagining air travel or rock and roll?

With anthropology we can try on what it was to live in another time and place, since we cannot yet actually TIME TRAVEL for a look-see.  But besides living there is dying.

Along with Anthropology, there is Archeology (digging evidence up and applying scientific methods and analysis to it), the two often going hand in hand.  One of the things that the Anthropologists and Archeologists look at is BURIALS.

Burials tell us so much about the person, the people.  The posture they are buried in, if they have a shroud, if there are tools or jewelry buried with them, or perhaps their pet cat...  if they were laid into the earth, had stones put on top of them, had a carved wood casket, were embalmed, had ordinary clothing on or were naked, and what direction they - and others in that graveyard - were facing; all of this telling.

One time I asked an Archeology professor, if so many millions of people had died on this earth in the past, why were there not MORE burials, more evidence of their lives.  He said most people were not buried.  They were cremated, or left out for the vultures,  or otherwise exposed.  Also many burials are now deep under the earth or the graves were robbed.  So when a burial is found and explored it can be a wealth of information.

Some of the more exciting burials I've learned about are in museums.  I saw an exhibit at the Getty in Malibu, California that had the painted cases that some ancient Greeks had been buried in, though living in Egypt.  Each had a painting of the person's face, as to be remembered in life. This was a time and place burial, influenced by both Greek and Egyptian notions.

Then there are the burials found in Hungary in which the people inside beautifully painted caskets, many who had died of TB, were found to be naturally preserved mummies.  Scientists of medicine are studying TB through these mummies.

Take a look at the stack of beautiful coffins at this link VAC HUNGARY - NATURAL MUMMIES - NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

Reading around these Hungarian mummies, I've learned that they are known people, for whom there are records, and descendants alive.

I don't know about you, but I personally do not think I would want to see any of my dead relatives  dug up so I could see what they look like, but did you know that a son of the Big Bopper,  the 1950's rock and roller who died in a plane crash, did just that, before having him cremated?

Can you tell that it's that time of year... that Halloween and All Souls Day are not so far away?

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MEMORIAL DAY - DOES ANYONE VISIT CEMETARIES ANY MORE? CREAMATION ANYONE?

A few months back I attended a short introduction meeting to a well regarded pre-needs service that features no frills cremation.  Years ago when I first heard of cremation, along with first hearing about Hinduism and reincarnation, I thought it made sense as an option.   With the cost of funerals and burials outrageous (I was quoted $25,000 average to be buried in the same town my parents are - were - for much less) it is more the ONLY OPTION for many, including me.  As it turns out the cost of this pre-paid no frills cremation in a much larger more expensive city than that town is far less that $5000.  I had been quoted double that for cremation in the smaller town.

My feeling is that when my time comes nobody is going to travel to my funeral or to see a stone in a cemetery.  Wouldn't it be better to just have my urn (or in this case a wood memory box) shipped somewhere or better yet, to someone who will then spread my ashes?

But you know, as a genealogist, someone who checks into FIND A GRAVE as a resource, as well as tombstone projects, cemetery records, and burial records, to accept being so - so - disappeared - is a thought.

What I did not want was a burial at sea.  Romantic a notion it is I've spent little time on boats and generally expect to get sea sick.  I love the view of the ocean, but no, I would only want my ashes to be spread in view of the ocean, not in it. 

And really, I can imagine the memory box with my ashes in it, turning up at a Garage Sale, or stashed in a moldering basement, or, if you've seen the funny film, MEET THE PARENTS, sabotaged by a cat as a litter box.  (!)
To go back to the beginning of this story though, this recent inquiry of funeral costs started because I called a cemetery to find out if a burial record I had could be confirmed.  Was there a tombstone and what was the plot number should I come visit.  The cemetery asked me to send the death certificate that stated that the burial had taken place there.  They said there had been a flood but basically, they would look into it but could not identify the burial as is.  They even said that perhaps there had been an "illegal" burial which was that relatives would have buried the person in the middle of the night there... I doubted that, as  there was the county death certificate stating the name of the funeral home and the priest and the cemetery.

While I was on the phone, I asked what it might cost, if the grave was located and did not have a stone, to put a simple stone on it.  I was shocked when I was told the cost would be $10,000. 

Sorry but $10,000 is for a college education, a business start-up, a newer used car.  I personally wouldn't spend that much on a wedding.

Still, I thought that with dozens of descendants alive, maybe they would want to pitch in for the tombstone. 

There are so many forgotten people.  The woman who was buried, probably legally, whose grave was so poor as to never have had a stone, or perhaps that was washed away in a flood, died young and horribly, with young children in the house.  Today, dead since the 1920's, she is the great mother of two, the grandmother of two, the great grandmother of several...  Only her DNA survives.


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FIND A GRAVE VERSUS CEMETERIES OPPORTUNISTICALLY CHARGING FOR DOCUMENTS

FIND A GRAVE is a site that I've found useful, and I'm linking to it (again) here.


I'm concerned about the ethics of volunteers putting personal information up on the Internet without concern for the family's permission, the sense of privacy in death that a love one felt or believed in while alive, and cemeteries allowing the trampling of graves and photography of tombstones (while also asking for fees for genealogy research even when the family has paid for perpetual care!)

Perhaps the trend towards cremation and spreading the ashes on land or at sea will continue not only because it is less expensive and more ecological, but because fewer people believe in a bodily resurrection at Judgement Day.

I feel strongly that if I, as a family member, want copies of documents for my own people in a cemetery that the cemetery should not opportunistically be charging me under the guise of genealogy research. I've encountered that too, and it made me furious. What will be next? DNA evidence that I'm related and have a right to that information?

SOLDIERS PHOTOGRAPH EVERY GRAVE IN ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY and SEARCHABLE DATABASE MAY RESULT

More than 300,000 people buried there... 219,000 grave markers... and a few messed up burials or confused records... so the Army decided to take a photographic inventory. This project may turn into a searchable database!

As someone who has a relative in Arlington, which came up on FindAGrave, I am feeling excited about the possibility of a comprehensive database.

Attaching to a Yahoo news article by Kimberly Hefling of Associated Press!