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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MY DIFFICULT RESEARCH INTO A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY : STEP TWELVE : POST #8

Step Twelve : Citizenship of the nuclear immigrant family.

Historical research is in order here because in Pennsylvania some people pledged to become citizens of the state early on, and then the requirements for becoming a citizen changed when it came to how many YEARS an immigrant had to wait. But one thing was certain and that is that when the head of household, a man, became a citizen, his wife and all his children who had not reached adulthood would also become citizens. The United States was looking for hard working and self supporting individuals who were also honorable and decent which means that they were not criminals. It helped to integrate into the community and make some friends and go to church. In this case, since we do not know when the family arrived exactly counting years forward isn't precise and then, of course, just because you had to wait a certain number of years does not mean that they didn't wait longer.

In this search I found something of terrific interest that would lead forward the research. Well sort of; it still would not lead to the goal of finding out where in Germany-Prussia our immigrant family came from.  However.... I found the son of the immigrant family had walked in and sworn he had entered Pennsylvania / The United States before the age of 18 and that day he was sworn in.

Again let me remind you to do your historical research.  For instance, while Pennsylvania was a British colony, anyone who immigrated from Britain was already a citizen.  But not Germans.

The pledge this young man made stated the surname we had been looking for but (AMAZING) that he was going forward with a different surname!

Now, in fact he DID NOT go with a different surname when we find him on census forwards.

But at that moment he must have thought he might want to be perhaps more American. That surname was and is far more common and brings up challenges and possibilities.

But why would he have gotten his citizenship having reached the age of 18 by himself?

Maybe the immigrant parents never got their citizenship.  Maybe they were dead!

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

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