When you have a hard-to-obtain source at your disposal, make sure you check it for everything that could possibly be there, not just the things that you expect to see there, or the things you are looking for. I recently got a big reward from being thorough: I had obtained the Budapest Jewish marriage registry from the LDS church to get information about Adolf Magaziner (and it successfully connected him to the family tree). But before I sent the film back to Utah, I decided to skim the entire film, brides and grooms, to see if there was anyone else named Magaziner (or any other familiar names). And oh, my, what a find...
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Try, Try Again: Searching for Census Records
If you can't find the person you're looking for in the census records, try every member of the family who might be living with them. Sometimes, the name you are looking for is indexed incorrectly, but other members of the household may be listed correctly.
Monday, June 21, 2010
What's so great about genealogy?
For me, it's all about the challenge. I'm a law librarian by trade, daughter of a journalist, and I love the challenge of trying to find an obscure fact and back that fact up with as much corroborating evidence as possible.
It's a bit of a scavenger hunt. A bit like trying to put together a puzzle without the picture on the box. And when the pieces fit together, when the next fact in the chain is found and put into place, a fact that no one knew before... that is a great thrill! OK, it's a geeky thrill, but it's a thrill. The struggle to find a new approach, a new technique, a new source, to break through a barrier and push the tree back or forward another generation, is very exciting.
It doesn't have to be my own family, though that's where I've focused most of my research. With my own family, I know enough of the details to narrow my focus, and to know when I have a "hit." With other people's families, it's a lot harder, particularly putting together the first few links of the chain. Several of my co-workers and colleagues have asked for my help, knowing that I have subscriptions to many of the online genealogy services. I do what I can, finding a census record here, a birth record there, and so forth.
One of my coworkers asked me if I could find anything about her grandfather. His surname was Stern, and she thought he might be Jewish, his father perhaps an immigrant from Germany. She gave me enough details to get started, and by the end of the day I had found census records for each decade back to 1850, and then a book about the family -- not Jewish, but Quaker, and not recent immigrants, but living on this continent before the United States won its independence. In fact, the street where our office is located is named after one of her distant ancestors.
And yes, I am so much of a genealogy geek that last year I gave a friend of mine a copy of her 2nd-great-grandparents' marriage certificate as a birthday present. How's that for a present, the names of four new ancestors she did not know? And two of those names shed light on the significance of other names in the family.
Working other people's family trees helps me get past the frustration of roadblocks on my own family tree. Sometimes, when working another person's tree, I discover a trick, a resource, an idea that helps me further my own research.
Of course, it's hard to keep that level of enthusiasm going all the time. I've been working on this genealogy for about 15 years now, on and off. I would work on it for a few months, hit a roadblock, put it down for a while, pick it up a few months or a year later. But in the last year, I've picked up momentum for a rather silly reason: one of my co-workers is a very distant cousin. Seeing the family name pop up in the office a few times a week serves as constant encouragement to work on the tree!
It's a bit of a scavenger hunt. A bit like trying to put together a puzzle without the picture on the box. And when the pieces fit together, when the next fact in the chain is found and put into place, a fact that no one knew before... that is a great thrill! OK, it's a geeky thrill, but it's a thrill. The struggle to find a new approach, a new technique, a new source, to break through a barrier and push the tree back or forward another generation, is very exciting.
It doesn't have to be my own family, though that's where I've focused most of my research. With my own family, I know enough of the details to narrow my focus, and to know when I have a "hit." With other people's families, it's a lot harder, particularly putting together the first few links of the chain. Several of my co-workers and colleagues have asked for my help, knowing that I have subscriptions to many of the online genealogy services. I do what I can, finding a census record here, a birth record there, and so forth.
One of my coworkers asked me if I could find anything about her grandfather. His surname was Stern, and she thought he might be Jewish, his father perhaps an immigrant from Germany. She gave me enough details to get started, and by the end of the day I had found census records for each decade back to 1850, and then a book about the family -- not Jewish, but Quaker, and not recent immigrants, but living on this continent before the United States won its independence. In fact, the street where our office is located is named after one of her distant ancestors.
And yes, I am so much of a genealogy geek that last year I gave a friend of mine a copy of her 2nd-great-grandparents' marriage certificate as a birthday present. How's that for a present, the names of four new ancestors she did not know? And two of those names shed light on the significance of other names in the family.
Working other people's family trees helps me get past the frustration of roadblocks on my own family tree. Sometimes, when working another person's tree, I discover a trick, a resource, an idea that helps me further my own research.
Of course, it's hard to keep that level of enthusiasm going all the time. I've been working on this genealogy for about 15 years now, on and off. I would work on it for a few months, hit a roadblock, put it down for a while, pick it up a few months or a year later. But in the last year, I've picked up momentum for a rather silly reason: one of my co-workers is a very distant cousin. Seeing the family name pop up in the office a few times a week serves as constant encouragement to work on the tree!
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Cast a Wide Net
Our lesson for today is, sometimes you need to cast a wide net and get creative to find new things. Over the last week, I cast a very wide net and stumbled over a Magaziner descendant in a place I never expected. I'm still sorting out the details, but I've already added several new people to the tree, and a lot of new information. The short version: I stumbled over the Wechter family, descendants of Sara Magaziner, in the United States, mostly in Chicago.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Regina Magaziner, b. 1877
I think I've finally figured out how Regina Magaziner links up to my family tree! I am confident that she is the daughter of Adolf Magaziner. Now all I have to do is prove it...
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Genealogy: It's not just a hobby, it's an obsession
Fifteen years ago, all I knew about my family history was the names of my eight great-grandparents, all born after 1860. I started working on my family tree in the late 1990s, and I now have the names of 14 out of 16 possible 2nd-great-grandparents, 64 total direct ancestors, including one branch that goes back 10 generations to an 8th-great-grandfather born in the mid-1600s. I have also worked downward from some distant ancestors, identifying over 600 descendants of one 5th-great-grandfather born in 1785, and 138 descendants of a 2nd-great-grandfather.
I'll be blogging about some of my research strategies and developments on the three Jewish sides of my family. Over the years, I've worked my way up from simple American census records online to original vital record documents to European records on JewishGen and through the LDS church's microfilm rental. I hope this will make for some interesting reading for the genealogically-obsessed, and will give you some ideas for taking your own research to the next level.
You'll find on this page some links to some of the genealogical resources that I use most frequently.
I'll be blogging about some of my research strategies and developments on the three Jewish sides of my family. Over the years, I've worked my way up from simple American census records online to original vital record documents to European records on JewishGen and through the LDS church's microfilm rental. I hope this will make for some interesting reading for the genealogically-obsessed, and will give you some ideas for taking your own research to the next level.
You'll find on this page some links to some of the genealogical resources that I use most frequently.
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