ROOTS & BRANCHES

My longtime friend André Dominguez of Lancaster County came to me for advice on tracking down a German immigrant to York County, Pennsylvania.

The man for whom he was searching was named George Mohrline “but I have also found a possible alternate spelling Merlein,” Dominguez reported.

Those spellings made me confident that German phonetics would indicate the original spelling of the surname would be Möhrlein.

That was the easy part! There were various facts about the subject that were known, including an assertion on his 1892 Baltimore passenger arrival list that he was from Bamberg, Germany.

I had a few observations and suggestions for Dominguez to investigate.

First of all was checking for naturalization papers. The early 1900s U.S. Censuses listed him as taking out the so-called “first papers” (technically known as the “Declaration of Intent.” While these did not give the parents’ names it did confirm a lot of data about him (exact birthdate, embarkation place, ship arrival, etc.) and also some great personal info (complexion, height, weight!).

Next up when seeing that he was identified as a Roman Catholic, I advised trying for church records of his marriage or burial to supplement the civil versions of his marriage and death, neither of which listed his parents’ names.

Dominguez went to the new York County History Center they had St. Mary’s Catholic Church baptism, marriage and burial records. “Unfortunately their burial records did not include the year George died,” Domingues reported.  “However, there were several baptism and one marriage record with George’s name on them.”

Dominguez found the marriage record was particularly illuminating.  “It identified George’s parents as Joannis & Eliz. Möhrline,” he wrote.

With the marriage record identifying his parents—and the likelihood that he was born in 1876 just as civil registration was being instituted across the Second German Empire—I recommended the following possibilities for confirming that birth with records in Germany:

• For a birth in 1876, the civil registration should be publicly available. If the Bamberg origin is correct, then they’d either still be at the original Standesamt (civil registry office) or in an archive. I recommended that Dominguez send an email to the Bamberg office and see if they could advise him
• The other play would be the records of the Archbishopric of Bamberg that are on the European Roman Catholic records site Matricula.eu.

In both cases, it’s useful do know that Bamberg in Bavaria is a district as well as a city, so Dominguez may run into the realty that the immigrant could be from a village somewhere in the district of Bamberg rather than the city itself. 

Dominguez also told me that he’s unraveled the line of his Chilean conquistador ancestry back to Spain … but that’s a story for another day!