ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s column ended with that frequent rejoinder to do more research, in this case on the Strunck family from the German town of Sprendlingen.

Diligent readers of the column will recall I had researched the Struncks in the early 2000s, and that the Sprendlingen Protestant church registers were a mess of ink splotches.

I had always wondered whether a better examination of the church records might yield more facts about the family, who are the forebears of Anna Elisabetha Strunck Hiester, my mother’s immigrant surname ancestor Johann Jost Hiester’s wife. She was the daughter of 1744 immigrant Weymar Strunck and Anna Katharina Schnell.

As mentioned in last week’s column, I found an additional marriage for Anna Elisabetha’s great-great-grandfather Adam Strunck in 1580 by using the lightening controls on the German Protestant church records supersite Archion.de.

So, every one of the few free chances I got during the last week, I went back to those Sprendlingen records to see if I could add more dates and people to my Strunck family.

While the lightening controls on Archion are a godsend, they have to be applied to the digital images separately for each page. Plus the cataloguing of the order of the types of records (baptisms, marriages, etc.) doesn’t always match the relative of the digital film.

Still and all, I was delighted to find the baptism of Adam Strunck’s son Melchior recorded as Feb. 16, 1606; previously I’d had only the date of his Nov. 23, 1626, first marriage.

In addition, I found baptisms of a number of siblings of my direct-line Strunck ancestors.

Repeat the mantra: More to research!

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“Genealogy Tip of the Day” blogger Michael John Neill will take the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania’s virtual stage at 7 p.m. Aug. 18 for a free Third Thursday webinar titled “Unburying Funeral Home Records,” which is a discussion of the records typically kept by funeral homes, determining if the home is still in existence, and finding where the records of the home may be presently located.

This is a complicated and underused resource by genealogists that often can make up for the lack or tombstone (or even burial in these days of more cremations!)

 Neill has a master’s degree in mathematics and was on the math faculty of Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Illinois, for thirty years.

His research interests include, methodology, land records, the immigrant experience, chain migration, and researching female ancestors. For the past two years, he’s been a regular (along with your “Roots & Branches” columnist) on Shamele Jordon’s podcast “Genealogy Quick Start.”

GSP’s live Third Thursday webinars are free to all but members have the opportunity to view a recording of the event.

To register, go to the GSP website’s “Program and Events” tab at the URL, https://genpa.org/programs-and-events/