Category Archives: Personal Research

Week 2 Prompt: Challenge This week’s 52 Ancestors theme is about challenges. Simple enough, I guess. But my challenge was figuring out which challenging ancestor to write about. I’ve decided to write about one ancestral couple, who I assumed would remain brick walls forever. Fortunately, with the few clues that I had and new databases on Ancestry, I was able to find this German couple’s origins and parents. Heinrich Karl “Charles” Stoffel and Anne Marie “Mary” Braun are second great-grandparents on my maternal side. They immigrated from Germany and settled […]

Week 1 Prompt: First I’ve decided to participate in my first 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge. Since this was my first-ever post for the challenge, that was going to fit the first theme. However, when I randomly picked a number from 1 to 63 (covers six generations on the ahnentafel), up popped number 14, which corresponds to my great-grandfather George Rottman, who has his own first-related story. I’ve written about George many times over the last ten years, but I’ve never shared the story of his first marriage, which […]

Back in 2012, I wrote What’s Your Number? (…and an Epiphany), which prompted me to evaluate known ancestors in my direct line. I revisited the numbers again in 2015  in What’s Your Number? – Revisited. The point of the posts was to illustrate that genealogy is never “done.” There are always new ancestors and collateral relatives to discover. Also, there’s always more to learn about the individuals that make up your tree. I thought it would be nice to check in and see where my numbers are at today and […]

It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to do any research on my Luxembourg roots. A little over a week ago, I was able to attend a lecture entitled “Luxembourgers in Aurora,” presented by Sara Jacoby, the executive director of the Luxembourg American Cultural Society. Since my Luxembourgers settled in Aurora, Illinois, I did not want to miss this presentation, so I made arrangements to go. And since the lecture was held in Aurora, I had to get in some research time while I was there. My first stop was […]

Wait…what?  Julie’s working on her own genealogy?  Yes, it’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to work on my own family history, much less blog about it.  Sadly, I’ve been sitting on this find since May 2014, yikes!  But today, with actual free time (I know, shocking!!), I decided to work on my ever-growing pile of “stuff” accumulated from various research trips over the last few years.  It’s a neat find and I thought I’d share it with my genealogy buddies. Over the last few years (when I […]

Back in August 2012, I had read an interesting post that prompted me to evaluate known ancestors in my direct line.  I wrote the blog post What’s Your Number? (…and an Epiphany), which showed my numbers as well as what I discovered about past and present (at the time) research habits. I have seen a few people posting about this recently, and I thought it was time to do an update and see if any of my numbers went up as a result of the research (albeit minimal) I had […]

How appropriate—it’s been four years to the day that I last wrote about any progress on the case of my second great-grandfather, Emil Müller.  Sadly, it’s taken about that long to make much progress, but I have made some major breakthroughs that I thought I’d share. Last March, Archives.com released a collection of Evangelical Lutheran Church of America records.  To say I was ecstatic would be an understatement, as I knew I wanted to get my hands on those records, knowing the Müller family attended a church in Chicago that […]

Back in January, I acquired several church records for my family from Bromberg, Posen, Preußen.  While I have had luck deciphering most of them (thanks to my handy book German-English Genealogical Dictionary and, of course, Google Translate), there are a few that I’m having trouble reading.  I thought maybe my readers would be able to offer a hand. There are four records, which I will describe briefly below.  I have uploaded PDFs for each, which includes the full-page image as well as any close-ups.  The text I’m struggling with is […]