ROOTS & BRANCHES

As you’ll be reading this, I’m just getting back from an extended stay in Salt Lake City.

My “good reason” was to be one of the presenters at the Foundation for East European Family History Studies conference, but let’s face it the “real” reason was doing research at the FamilySearch Library, both for clients and myself.

As noted in last week’s “Roots & Branches,” I descend from two lines in the multi-immigrant Kerschner family of Langensebold in Hesse. Researching in Salt Lake gave me the chance to revisit the work that had been done on these families beginning in the 1980s by looking at a family association journal called Kershner Kinfolk that the library has on microfiche.

While I didn’t have any new finds per se, I liked seeing how the journal labeled female ancestors of mine related to individuals in both my Kershner lines. I had tried to articulate this in last week’s column but I like the way the Kinfolk editor described her better.

These are Gertraud Dietrich Schuffert Kirschner and her daughter Anna Elisabeth Schuffert: “Anna Elisabeth married the younger brother of her stepfather, the second husband of her mother Gertraud.” I’m a descendant of both Anna Elisabeth and her husband Martin Kirschner (that’s the younger brother of her stepfather, for those keeping score), and also of Gertraud and Johannes Kirschner’s son Johan Georg. One big, happy family, I suppose!

What wasn’t on my agenda for Salt Lake originally was researching another double line of mine, the Trautmanns of that southwestern German town Schriesheim, the same village of the Himmelbergers in last week’s column.

The Trautmanns had been well researched for a massive family history by Eric Troutman some years ago, but I took his book off the shelf just to reacquaint myself with it. In it the Trautmanns are researched into the 1500s, but I realized that some ancestors might have been “left on the table” in the maternal lines.

The immigrant ancestral couple for the Trautmanns was Johannes (1713–1764) and his wife Eva Elisabetha Bauer (1716–1794). Eva Elisabetha’s marriage record identified her father as Philip Bauer but that was as far as anyone seems to have gone.

So I delved into the online registers and books available at the FamilySearch Library for villages north of Schriesheim and found the Bauer family there.

Philip Bauer’s parents were identified as Martin Bauer and Anna Barbara Schröder of the village of Groβsachsen and their marriage found in the adjoining parish of Hohensachsen—dated to 1669!—and identifying a further generation as Cristophell Bauer, my newest nine-times-great-grandfather.

It gave me much validation to go to FamilySearch’s master Family Tree and find that these individuals hadn’t previously been added. What a wonderful discovery to make … and share!