I have been an active member of the ancestry.com website for a number of years.It has been a very valuable tool in my research. The latest improvement to this site is a section called Recent Activity. In this section Ancestry lists people who have looked up the same person you have been researching. Then you have the ability if you want to contact that person and share information....More about sharing later.
From this section of the site I was able to connect to a distant relative on the Heins side of the family who had some new information for me. Also a distant cousin filled in a gap in my knowledge of my family that I had been researching since I started this hobby.
I had the name of my great grandfather and I knew he had a wife that was my grandmother's mother. But I could tell from the birth dates of the other children there had to be a first wife...or else she had children when she was 5.I had asked in a few areas but no one knew he had a first wife and had never done the math to figure out that all the children were not hers. Then out of no where I get an email saying that his first wife was this person, her parents were these people and that she had been born in this place and died in that place..Never would I ever been able to find her had not the kindness of a stranger willing to share information been shown to me that day. Why would I look for the death of this woman in Texas when she was born in the early 1800s in Kentucky?
Other resources I use, I have had to find on my own or I have been given as a tip by other researchers. One site that I check in on every day is called Myfamily.com. This particular groups of people either come from Pulaski County, KY or have relatives that still live there, like me. But the absolute best part of this site is that they share pictures.
I never knew my dad's father. He died a couple of years before I was born. In all the pictures I have ever seen of him, he was old and bald. But on this site, thanks to some very giving people, I now have a picture of my grandfather as a young soldier in WWl and one of him even younger with hair! The man had hair, dark curly hair like mine. Oh wow!
I am very fortunate thatI have relatives that are still alive that will confirm or flesh out what I have discovered. As you know I am not shy bout asking questions or confirming facts.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
So much for resolutions....
I had resolved to work more on this blog and update it at least once a week since I could use it as a log of my weekly activities. Not that many people read it and those that do are sure to be interested in my every move and thought, right? The lurkers deserve to be bored!
I had not done much on the genealogy part of my hobbies.I had gone about as far as I could on my mother's family and my father's side. Far enough to get one individual in the DAR and me started on the process. Plus I was in contact with numerous relatives from that side of the families that I never knew existed.
However, I had come to a standstill on the Heins side.
Then I decided that there had to be information out there, I just had to find it. I mean they lived in this very town. How hard could it be? So I asked for help from a number of people. Those that responded were a great help. More on that later....
I went to the local German cemetery here
. From there I got lots of names but very few connections just names. Then I went to the new amazing library in downtown Charleston and started digging. I found burial records that listed names, date of birth, date of death, where buried, next of kin and cause of death. (It is all too sad to find the death of a young child listed as dying from "teething".)
From that information, I just kept looking. The library has baptism records, some marriage records and some burial records on microfilm from the local Big German church.
Geez those microfilm readers have not changed since I was in college in the 60's, and I do remember the 60's but that is another post.
The library had city directories from the 1800's that listed addresses and occupations for some of the relatives.
Names, names and still no family connections. I know they are related, they all came from about the same place in Germany with the same last name, but how are they connected?
I had not done much on the genealogy part of my hobbies.I had gone about as far as I could on my mother's family and my father's side. Far enough to get one individual in the DAR and me started on the process. Plus I was in contact with numerous relatives from that side of the families that I never knew existed.
However, I had come to a standstill on the Heins side.
Then I decided that there had to be information out there, I just had to find it. I mean they lived in this very town. How hard could it be? So I asked for help from a number of people. Those that responded were a great help. More on that later....
I went to the local German cemetery here
. From there I got lots of names but very few connections just names. Then I went to the new amazing library in downtown Charleston and started digging. I found burial records that listed names, date of birth, date of death, where buried, next of kin and cause of death. (It is all too sad to find the death of a young child listed as dying from "teething".)From that information, I just kept looking. The library has baptism records, some marriage records and some burial records on microfilm from the local Big German church.
Geez those microfilm readers have not changed since I was in college in the 60's, and I do remember the 60's but that is another post.
The library had city directories from the 1800's that listed addresses and occupations for some of the relatives.
Names, names and still no family connections. I know they are related, they all came from about the same place in Germany with the same last name, but how are they connected?
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