MY DIFFICULT RESEARCH INTO A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY : STEPS ONE and TWO : POST #1

Let's face it.  We think Pennsylvania, one of the 13 original states, and we think Germans!  So I want to tell you about a research problem I encountered and maybe you can learn from it.

My client has an illustrious American Historical figure on one side of her family.  Heavily researched.  Books written about. Historical house tours to go on. But her other side, her surname side, the side I researched, is simply not the same.  

Step One : Census research and checking over what family had already done.

Within hours of beginning the research, though I do not go first to databases such as Ancestry TM or FamilySearch TM to see what others have come up with (too many errors and confusion) I was aware that others, likely her family members, had used those databases and posted... Basically between these databases and Find A Grave TM a lot was posted that I did not find inaccuracies with. Clearly they were all waiting for me to make the break through. I told her my goal was to try and find out where in Germany - Prussia they had come from so we could go back further, an idea she loved.

The original immigrants were on the 1850 but because a member said to be born in Prussia might have been about 2 years old when he came, calculating exactly when they came, or if they came together was up in the air.  They are not on the 1840 or 1830 in any state. (Unless going page by page brings up horribly misspelled names.  Time wise I couldn't bill her for that.)

Step Two : Finding out what might have been published in books held by a noteworthy genealogy library.

I went to the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, genealogy section, and spent two afternoons.  I pulled every book in the Pennsylvania section that included the county and city. That first generation was on census in 1870 had settled in by then. 

I looked in the books INDEXs for surnames exactly like and sounding like the German surname.  THIRTY BOOKS and no mention of them.

I did find a family they had married with mentioned.  That family was in the Pennsylvania reserves, in the War of Independence, and were landowners as well as - some of them - in Find A Grave.  Also Germans.

If any of those 30 books had information, in particular a biography of a family member in it from the original group of immigrants, it might have been very valuable information. 

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

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Woe! I had to go back in to repost a couple hours after the first post as some information got scrambled. Forgive me!

ANCESTRY DATABASES - THE POSITIVES and THE NEGATIVES : WE NEED TO USE BOOKS AND MICROFILM TOO

Although the Internet and Databases are increasingly valuable to researchers, I don't believe that in my lifetime either will eliminate the need for good "old fashioned" research skills. THE WORST PART OF RELYING on EITHER databases or Internet is that your expectations of how fast you can do research and reality will part ways. That's because there is so much that is not available and some "instant" results may spoil you when what genealogy really takes is PATIENCE!

THERE ARE STILL AREAS OF THE UNITED STATES and THE WORLD that will not give what is considered private information to databases or for microfilming. In those places there are sometimes fees or the information can only be given if you already know the details.

I may have mentioned this before but most of my personal research was done without the use of Internet or databases such as Ancestry. When Ancestry came out I was eager to see how fast the same research would take and learned I was NOT able to duplicate it USING ANCESTRY !

Recently I noticed that corrections were coming up on ANCESTRY. Some of these are provided by subscriber-members.

Every few months I look to see what is new on ANCESTRY and other databases and sometimes I find bits and pieces of information that I did not have, or that would have required archive or library fees or to pay a local researcher. So to me that is worth the exploration.

This is one of the things I did recently when I visited LDS in person; I spent time on each of their database offerings to see what would or would not come up.

To be fair in my review, there were a few pieces of information that I WAS NOT ABLE TO FIND the old fashioned way that did come up on Ancestry. The reason is that while the databases are often of no use where typists have interpreted difficult last names (bad handwriting and no knowledge of surnames in various ethnic languages, especially Slavic names) on the other hand you can SEARCH using first names or other details which may then bring up a family group (and you can see just how horribly spelled the surname was).

This is how I busted a difficult problem for a student of mine who was seeking an African American with an unusual first name and for a student of mine who was seeking his Polish great-grandfather in the state of New York.

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