ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve previously profiled in “Roots & Branches” the efforts of my distant cousin Pernell Staudt to get a handle on the ancestry of one of our mutual ancestors, Anna Margaretha Gräter Lieb Staudt.I’m descended through her first husband Hans Michael Lieb and Pernell through her second husband Matthias Staudt, and was dazzled to find out some months ago that she was buried unbeknownst to me in the Bern Reformed Church’s Historic Old Graveyard, a burial ground in which I have some three dozen direct line ancestors and thought I had long tapped out finding anything new.Since then, I helped get another cousin, Cindy Cruz, in touch with Pernell and she has been going full steam ahead collecting records about Anna Margaretha and her husband Michael Lieb (Germans of this time were usually given two names, the first of which was often Hans or Johann, and typically used what we’d call their middle name in common use).Cruz went to work mining the church records that FamilySearch.org has available from Sulzdorf in Wuerttemberg, and also gave a much closer look at Michael’s will than I know I had previously.What she found there was that Michael talks about children from his first wife as well as his present wife Anna Margaretha, suggesting that he was married more than once before coming to America.She verified the marriage between Michael Lieb and Anna Margaretha Gräter in 1748 in Sulzdorf, but also found baptisms of children of Michael and his first wife Eva Catharina in 1740 and 1742.Cruz also used a transcript of the Christ Lutheran, Stouchsburg, baptismal register to show the birth of Michael and Anna Margaretha’s son Nicolaus. The transcript she used from FamilySearch is a digitized version of what was done about a century ago by P.C. Croll and William Stauffer.I was just a bit wary of the Croll / Stauffer transcript since many of the renderings of German-language church records from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries have not stood the test of time. In the case of Christ, Stouchsburg, the version done by the late Rev. Frederick S. Weiser a few decades ago is considered authoritative.But when I compared the Croll / Stauffer transcript with Weiser’s for the Lieb entries and those surrounding it, I found them to be identical (other than Croll / Stauffer put the dates; names of parents and child; and sponsors names in separate columns—while Weiser lists them in a more narrative form, probably to better reflect the arrangement of the original).I was very impressed that Cruz did not rely only on FamilySearch database entries for the German church records but also found the original church baptisms and marriages … in addition to making sure the database has transcribed the names correctly, there’s also more info in the original such as sponsors’ names.Bravo, my cousins!