Saturday night genealogy fun................a day late

The Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Question over on Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings blog was: What event or person inspired you to start your genealogy research? Back in Feb. or March of 2002(or was it 2003?) we had a snowstorm bad enough that I decided the library could be closed for the day so I was home playing on the computer. I Googled myself, found nothing exciting, then Googled my maiden name. I found my Dad, who had passed away in 1977. What the heck was he doing on the Internet?? His name was in my G-Grandmother's obituary because he had been a pallbearer at her funeral. What the heck was her obituary doing on the Internet?? Clicked on "home" at the site it was on and discovered that it was John Kostick's Fehmarn-Genealogy site. My Mom had told me that several of my ancestors were from Fehmarn, Germany so I emailed him with the information I had & asked if he had any more. I honestly never thought I would even get a reply, but the next morning there was an email from John with an attachment that printed out to 174 pages of information about my ancesters on the Reiss, Vadersen and Suckstorf branches of my family dating back to the mid 1300s. That was the start and I naturally just had to keep looking for more.

Family history

For the last six years or so I have been working on family genealogy and that's what I've been back to working on this past week. My ancestors came from Germany, several of them from the island of Fehmarn, off the Baltic coast. Until the bridge from the mainland was built in the 1960's Fehmarn was rather isolated and the families tended to stay there. Or the ones who moved to the mainland stayed fairly close in that part of Schleswig-Holstein. That makes research both harder and easier. Many church records are available in the church archives in Neustadt but some are only at the churches on the island and haven't even been microfilmed by the LDS Family History Center.

I always considered family research back further than my parents & grandparents to be futile because I didn't know where to start researching the old Germans, didn't speak or read German, didn't have the money to go to Germany for research or the money to pay someone over there to do it. Then six years ago I stumbled upon the web site of John Kostick and he sent me 174 pages of my family history on both sides, dating back to the 1300's. That got me started and now I try to add a little bit more to it from time to time.

Lately a gentleman on the island of Fehmarn has been researching the church records from the 1900's and more recent information is coming to light. I'm sure some of it would be controversial in my family because I've never heard anything about it before. Do I ask my aunt if she knew her aunt had a child in Germany before she immigrated to America? Do I ask the woman's son if he knows anything about this older half brother? See what I mean? And is my great-great-grandfather Fritz the same man as Johann Friedrich? And if he is, what happened to him after 1860?

My mother's side has been a little more straightforward. I got quite a bit of information about one of her grandfathers from a gentleman in Heiligenhafen, Germany through Mr. Kostick who had met him on one of his trips over there. I got information on one of my mother's grandmother's from another gentleman in Germany who had seen one of my queries on a genealogy message board.

I don't spend all that much time on the project anymore but every once in a while the bug bites and I start running searches on ancestry.com, rootsweb, usgenweb and the Fehmarn site to see what I can find and add. I DO have piles of paper with stuff I need to enter into my database so maybe I'll have to start spending a little more time at it.The pile on this chair is the paperwork I've accumulated on my family and my husband's mother's family. Do ya think I need a file cabinet? And then there's the box of old family photos under my bed. They really should be scanned & added to my database. They should also be copied and shared with my brother & cousins...whether they care or not.

Just in case anybody's interested, the names I'm interested in are: Reiss, Vadersen, Blunck or Blunk, Pruess, Sienknecht,Suckstorf or Suchsdorf, Veenker, Bailey, Stolp.

Thing #20

Since I have an interest in genealogy I explored the My Heritage app site. It is the winner in the genealogy category & says it is free, private and secure. It claims to have more than 28 million members, include more than 300 million names and host more than 5 million family sites. I did find several listings for Risinger family sites but other names I searched came up with nothing. The site offers family web sites, genealogy searching, photo posting, message boards and downloadable Family Tree Builder software. I already use Legacy Family Tree but for someone just starting out this might be a free option for software. One of the interesting things about the site is their claim to use advanced face recognition technology that you can use to find relatives on the site. They offer a look alike meter to find resemblances between your child and you or other relatives. You can also see if you resemble a celebrity and strangest of all there's a program to morph yourself with a celebrity. You can even order flowers or gifts to be sent on this site. The pricing is in Euros so I'm assuming this is a European site. I intend to come back to the site when I have more time and I've bookmarked it on Delicious and my own computer.