ROOTS & BRANCHES

Tara Sewell’s email came to me last month with several interrelated questions.

First and foremost was the trouble she was having de-evolving her ancestor William Henry Sewell’s surname, which was defying her attempts to find more than a handful of records. I gave her some ideas on phonetic variants but it was when we talked about finding churches that things got really interesting.

The Sewell family settled in Fallston, Maryland (Harford County). There were a couple of other German-speaking families but identifying an ethnic German church proved difficult. There were no Lutheran or Reformed congregations in this section of Harford County—not in Fallston or Bel Air.

She was also at a disadvantage because her ancestor died before 1868 (when his widow remarried a widowed Irish neighbor) and had only been come to America sometime between 1840 and 1859.

Sewell has a genealogy discussion partner and the two of them wisely decided to use the FAN Club (“friends, associates, and neighbors) method to help and traced those other German-speaking families in the area, too.

This helped her a lot and they found burials related to the families at a St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Kingsville, in Baltimore County across the county line from Harford (there are many St. Paul’s Lutheran churches, as it turns out, and helping tell them apart is a reference about which I told her, Edna A. Kanely’s Directory of Maryland Church Records).

She also bemoaned that there were no immigration records for these German families, but when she forwarded the obituary of one of the other family patriarchs, I was able to find him (George Stiegler) arriving on an 1846 ship into Baltimore, which was consistent with information in his Baltimore Sun obit (Another tip for Sewell: Check Der Deutsche Correspondent, the German-language newspaper for Baltimore, which might have more information on these families than the English-language Sun.)

Stiegler’s obituary also listed his birthplace as Eltersdorf, Bavaria, whose Protestant records are on the German website Archion.de. It’s possible she’ll find out that her ancestor came from the same village, too.

Sewell also was trying to narrow down the origins of her ancestors, reported as “Prussia,” which unfortunately is kind of a worst-case scenario in the 1800s since Prussia constituted more than half of what became the Second German Empire in 1871 so without knowing at least the name of the Provinz (the term the Kingdom of Prussia used for its “states”), such a search is the ultimate needle in the haystack.

She should also check naturalization records for her Sewell immigrant, although the fact that he died relatively soon after arrival in this country doesn’t make this hopeful.

All in all, Sewell’s attacking her problem in all the right ways—trying to uncover as many American records as possible in the hope that one or more will open the door to a village name in Germany.