When we were working on last week’s post about Henry and Anna Vonderhaar, I was interested to note that their parents had all immigrated at about the same time. I started looking at where they were from and discovered it was very likely they knew each other before they moved to Iowa. They were all from the area near Ankum, Germany.
Tag: genealogy research Page 2 of 3
Posts about researching family history
I’ve talked in a couple of previous posts about the challenges of keeping track of all the information and the photographs that we have for our family history. My post about the photographs covered the digital side of organizing. Now we needed to come up with a storage and organizing solution for the actual photographs.
I had originally planned to write about the anniversary of one of Walt’s great-great aunts, Rhoda Hole. Our information had her marrying John Christy on January 13, 1861. But it turned out not to be the case.
The family information we had told us that she was John Swisher Hole’s younger sister, born in 1846. The notes also mentioned that she had been married twice, the second time to someone with the last name of Monroe, but that was all the information we had.
You most likely noticed that there have been a bunch of documents showing up on the blog lately – census reports, marriage certificates and the like. We have a temporary subscription to Ancestry© and I have been using it to gather information. Using an online genealogy service like Ancestry© has the potential to provide huge amounts of information. They have family trees, census records, marriage records and other resources located in one place.
Erasmus Straub was the brother of Walt’s 4th great grandfather. He was born in June of 1870 in Bieringen, Baden-Württemburg, Germany to Josephus Carl and Anna Maria Truffner Straub. We don’t know a lot of his story in Germany, but we do know he married Maria Sauter on the 25th of November, 1807 in Bieringen. They had 9 children, two of whom died in infancy. Maria died in 1824. Erasmus and his children immigrated to the United States in the 1840’s.
On a recent trip to visit family, my dad showed me an old family bible of the Barns branch of the family. Margaret Barns was my great-great grandmother. In the center of the bible was a series of pages to record births, deaths, and marriages.
Family bibles can be a source of information for genealogy research. Originally, people wrote on the inside front and back covers. In the late 1700’s printers started adding special pages for the recording of information. (Read more about this here.)
We became the family historians kind of by accident. Walt always says that his brothers elected him when he wasn’t there. At any rate, we were given a bunch of typed and hand-written sheets of family history and genealogy put together by Georgie (Walt’s mom) and Leonard Brune, Georgie’s second cousin. There were also photocopies of newspaper clippings and a few documents.