ROOTS & BRANCHES

“Does this give the names of the people? Or is that the place they were from?” asked a visitor to the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania’s library recently.
She had a couple of pages of data clipped from the family Bible that were written in German cursive script, found in a Lutheran church in Philadelphia.
“No,” I said, emitting a good-natured chuckle. “The first words on those lines are ‘Vater’ and ‘Mutter’—giving dates without names, not first, last or middle.”
Vater and Mutter, of course, are the German-language words for father and mother, so in and of themselves, they were not going to be terribly helpful. There were dates from the 19th century for the unnamed parents and then a list of birth dates for 10 of what could be presumed to be their children.
Thankfully, there was an additional page from the family Bible with some additional information that gave the birth and death dates of Wilhelm Flinsbach on Dec. 13, 1863, and June 22, 1914, as well as his wife (identified by her married name Rosa Flinsbach, born March 28, 1871, and died Jan. 25, 1915), and births of three of their children in the 1890s.
Crucially, a birth date on the “Mutter and Vater” page for a child Rosina matched Rosa’s on the additional page, establishing that this was her family … but what was the family’s surname?
Well, that took a bit of digging through additional records.
First up was searching for Wilhelm and Rosa’s marriage in Ancestry.com’s “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., Marriage Index, 1885–1951,” and a potential hit was found in 1892 for William Flinsbeck and Rosa Goll, but searches for families named Goll who might fit the first names from the “Mutter and Vater” page came up dry (A later search for the actual marriage license turned up the fact that Goll was Rosa’s first married name and that her previous husband had died Nov. 23, 1891).
Next was looking at another Ancestry databsse, “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., Death Certificates Index, 1803–1915.” This indicated Rosa’s maiden surname was Schleyer but didn’t reveal further information about her parents.
Another hit from the Philly death certificates database for a John George Schleyer who died in 1899 that matched an entry on the “Mutter and Vater” page identified the parents as “John and Margarett Shleyer,” a phonetic match for Schleyer.
After researching U.S. Census returns and looking further at the “Mutter and Vater” page, it was evident that the father was said to have died in Kitzingen in Bavaria in 1884, and that his widow and children came to America later in the 1880s.
All in all, this “solve” seemed to be a great finish from a standing start. The visitor who brought the Bible hopes to find a Flinsbach or Schleyer family who wants the material.