ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column summarized what the publicly available U.S. Census enumerations had to say about my longest-lived ancestor, great-great-grandfather Wellington B. Machmer.

At the end I noted that it surprised me that his occupation was never listed as mason, even though I’ve been told credible family stories about him working as a stone mason on various jobs (and that newspaper mentions also support the family stories).

Which put the rusty gears of my mind in motion. How often do we only have “half the story” when we do our genealogy only from public records? Or when we don’t interrogate those family stories closely enough?

An example from records involves religion. Records from churches and pastors are especially important in the era before civil registrations of births, marriages and deaths came into vogue.

And German civil registries are obliging enough in many cases to indicate the religion of the individuals mentioned in these records (of course, it helps quite a bit that in Germany there were relatively few denominations compared to the United States, in which it seems just about every third person formed their own church).

But what about when the religion is not stated explicitly? It’s wise to cast your net as widely as possible to catch all the records of the family. I’ll admit that when I made my first searches of German church records, I made the assumption that my ancestors would be Protestants, just as they were in America. This turned out not to always be the case.

As far as specific family stories, even the “craziest” ones often have a kernel of accuracy. The art is finding that accurate kernel amidst what might be an otherwise blighted ear.

Some years ago, I had an interest in the Kreiser family of Lebanon County. The family put great stock in a writeup about the family in a county biographical history book.

A huge amount of the information in that book was wrong and I had primary source records proving it. It didn’t matter to them—they didn’t understand how to weigh such evidence.

If I had it to do over again, I would come in an analyze what that writeup got correct (and “why” those items should be given credence) rather than starting with what was wrong.

Speaking of why, a lot of people are interested in the motivations of ancestors—the “why?” question—for example, why did they come to America?

In some of my lectures on German immigration, I feature a list of reasons why people made those moves. They are based in overall reality, but they can’t tell you the “why” specifically.

In some rare instances, immigrants’ writings give their reasons and describe their voyages, but these are relatively few and far between.

 So, we’re stuck with “half a loaf” many times. What to do about it? Well, that’s next week’s column.