ROOTS & BRANCHES

I celebrated a major find in last week’s “Roots & Branches” column that came courtesy of a newspaper obituary pinpointing the burial place of Lebanon County immigrant Johann Daub.

This was pretty important to me, since when I was more of a greenhorn genealogist in the 1990s, I had merely guessed in which cemetery to put a memorial tombstone sponsored by the Daub Family Reunion.

Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any mystery that gets solved in genealogy that doesn’t present another one.

In the case of Johann Daub (who I’ve always wondered if I should use one or two n’s for … his obituary is a vote for one n), the detailed-for-its-time obituary gave me some information that contradicted my carefully plotted German ancestry of Johan back through nearly a century and a half of the Siegen Protestant church registers.

It gave him an age of 72 years, 5 months and 5 days, which when subtracted from the reported death date of Aug. 15, 1807, works out as March 10, 1735.

The problem with that? I was quite confident Johan Daub was born Nov. 26, 1733, according to his baptismal record.

Could I have made a wrong turn when I spent a couple of weeks scrolling through microfilms of the Siegen records some 30 years ago? There were, admittedly, many (many!) Daubs.

You can bet that the same day I received the copy of the obituary, I was up on my attic rummaging through my Daub files for the one marked “German Church Abstracts.”

First, I found an old dot-matrix printout in which I had put the Daubs of Siegen and Eiserfeld (the small nearby town in which Johan’s family resided) into family groups, eyeballing for the birth of any child matching the March 10, 1735, date—but finding none.

Then I went to FamilySearch, since the records of Siegen are now digitized and available online, scrolling through the images of actual baptismal book to see if I had flat out missed a baptism. But, no, there was nary an additional Daub to be found for any date in 1735.

Death records are usually less accurate when it comes to distant dates reported in it since the person in best position to know isn’t available for comment. That’s likely the answer.

I’ve moved on to asking where Johan first lived in America? He and his family arrived in 1763 in Philadelphia and bought his first and only land in Bethel Township, Lebanon County, in 1771.

In between those dates, his children’s baptisms are found at the Reformed Church in Schaefferstown (Heidelberg Township, Lebanon County). In the record of a child Johan sponsored, his residence is Lebanon Township, Heidelberg’s western neighbor.

Tax lists confirm him as an “inmate” (meaning a married renter) in Lebanon Township. There are maps of the original property owners of what’s now South Lebanon Township. Next course of study!