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12 Genealogy Lessons I Learned in 2024

Wow! Last blog of 2024 and what a year it’s been.

The best thing about genealogy is that you are constantly learning and growing. No one can know about every record set, historical period, or nuances of language over the years. Today I’m reflecting on some of the A-Ha moments I had this year:

AI has been the biggest game changer in my life. I use ChatGPT almost daily now and occasionally with Claude and others. It saves time and helps me think outside the box to solve problems.
Realizing that the Viking Pagans held on to their symbolism after converting to Roman Catholicism was amazing to me. Who would have thought the church would have allowed it? Even more surprising is that the pagan baptismal fonts are still used today by the Lutherans.
I also didn’t know that grapes don’t grow in Sweden so the Vikings traveled in the summer to the Mediterranean to buy wine. My family had vineyards there so maybe they bought Zinfadel from them. Always been a small world, right?!
Had no idea when the potato famine hit Ireland it also affected crops in Europe, hence many from the French German Palatine area migrated to the U.S. at that time.
While researching Ohio River pirates for an upcoming presentation, I learned that one of the most notorious, James Mason, got a Spanish passport because President Benjamin Harrison had given him a recommendation. Dear Ben’s sister had married the honorable brother of James Mason. Just goes to show you how different siblings can be even back in the day.
Did you know that identity theft occurred in the 1890s? It did and I’m still working on solving that one!
My husband is constantly kidding me about being a princess (which I’m not) because I’ve now seen the family castles in Croatia, Germany, and Great Britain. People are so worried about being safe today but it’s no different than in the past– we just don’t have a moat around our houses anymore.
I didn’t realize that there were jobs for lawyers regarding keeping a person’s coat of arms protected. Who would have thought that would still be needed today?!
Every time I look at my cats I just can’t get over their ethnicity and I wonder which ancestor in my husband and my past was adopted by my cat’s ancestors. Yeah, it’s weird, I know!
A good reminder that there is someone out there who knows the answer to whatever question you might ask and you just have to be persistent and patient to get the answer. I finally found a knowledgeable person who knew how to read old German script AND understood the cultural heritage. I needed to find someone who had both these skills to understand one little ole word in a 1834 newspaper article written in German in Cincinnati, Ohio. He learned that the custom had been brought over to the US which was also news to him. Collaborating with others helps us get the info we need and in turn, we help them gain insights.
Loved the easy peesy way to do genealogy in French villages – take a walk and look above the doors of the houses. Back then they engraved the date the house was built and who the owners were. I was able to quickly find my ancestral homes.
I am reminded almost weekly of how much our life has changed since the pandemic. Zoom seems to have been around forever but I didn’t use it before 2019. Makes me wonder what’s next on the horizon.

That’s one new thought for each month of 2024. Can’t wait to discover more new and exciting ideas next year.

As usual, I’ll be taking off next week and will be back in January with my top ten blog list from 2024. Have a wonderful holiday and I’ll blog with you soon!

Photo Memories

I bet with the approaching holidays you and your loved ones will be taking loads of pictures! Back in the day, it was exciting to get the film developed. Sort of like reliving the same experience over. Now, I take so many photos that I use my cell camera for mundane tasks. What is the name of that weed or is it a native flower? Snap it and check and app. Love that item in a store but aren’t sure the price is right. Click the pic and then look for it elsewhere.

Although these new uses for a camera are wonderful, they aren’t if we are treating the important photos we take carelessly. Do you ever save your phone photos? If so, where?

Here’s what I’ve been doing since Google Photo lost some of my pictures several years ago. I now have my photos saved to a different Cloud. That way, I can remove them from my phone. Why do I do that? Because I’ve had phone accidents where I couldn’t retrieve data, and I don’t want my precious photo memories gone forever.

When my kids were young, I was a scrapbooker and I saved the best of the best by including them with a story of the event. It took a lot of time, but it was fun. I’m not sure it was worth it, though, as I’ve passed them on to my adult kids who have no space for them. One is in boxes in an attic and the other complained about having to move them twice this year while doing renovations. Those, too, ended up in the attic for a while. Sigh.

During the pandemic one of my kids gave me a photo album that can only hold one picture on each page. The idea was to only save a small amount of the very best photos from my overseas travels. I was pining to travel, and this was a way to get me to relive what I had done and plan for what was to come. And oh boy, did travel come! In the past year and a half, I’ve visited Germany twice, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, France, and Canada.

The weather outside is frightfully cold so I’ve ordered two more albums and will spend my time indoors reliving those memories by printing from my printer using photo paper and affixing those special pics into the book. They really are genealogical treasures as on my travels I always make time for family research.

The beauty of these albums is that they don’t take up much space and I’ll be passing on to future generations my findings as I write a sentence or two of what the location is about. Next week I’ll be writing about my most memorable learning experiences this year. It will be my last post of the year.

Cooking Up Memories

Do you get out your favorite family recipes during this time of year? Cookie recipes always remind me of my mom who once worked in a bakery. We’d spend the Saturday after Thanksgiving making batches of our favorites to share with family and friends – Mexican Wedding Cookies, Kolaches, Swedish Oatmeal Cookies, Chocolate Chip, Holiday Many Way (peanut butter/nut/sugar), and my favorite to get creative with – cookie cutter sugar cookies. One year I painted them like stained glass with food coloring. Other times I iced them with different color frosting. Mom would make those first so I’d stay out of the way decorating while she zipped through making the rest.

Perhaps your cookie recipes are getting a tad frayed. Batter stains, greasy fingers, and age aren’t kind to those old recipe cards. About 20 years ago, when my kids were starting to cook on their own in the kitchen, I retyped our favorite recipes into size 12 font so that my older eyes could read them easily. Once done, I made a decorative cover from card stock and took it to Office Depot to have it GBC bound. My kids still rely on that book but we’ve accumulated so many new recipes over the years that I decided it was time for an updated version.

I scanned the old book to my computer and have added new favorites. Instead of printing, I just share Google Docs with my kids. I keep a laptop in my kitchen so it’s easy for me to find the desired recipe and bring it up while I prepare the meal. The recipes have been shared so if one system fails there is a backup. No killing trees or clutter from another book. Since I store in the cloud, I can even look up ingredients needed when I’m at the grocery store. No excuses not to cook up some love!

Pet DNA

I honestly never thought I’d be blogging about my pet’s DNA. I laughed when Ancestry.com came out with their DNA test kits for dogs. At the time, I thought it was just a dumb idea.

If you’ve ever attended my lectures you might have heard me say that I’m a mutt. That’s a dog with no definable breed or heritage. Um, that would be me. I’m often dog-tired after spending too much time doing genealogy research and no matter what the ethnicity estimates report about my ancestry, they often get updated as my people were everywhere!

I am leery of people who boast that their heritage is purely from one location. Brings to my mind Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, and Harry Potter. To be clear, I like Harry Potter; I just don’t like people who think they are superior because of their pure blood lineage.

While my husband and I were in Great Britain one of my adult kids decided to perform DNA swabs of my two elderly cats as a pre-Christmas gift.

Upon my return, when I was informed about the testing, I had a hard time not rolling my eyes. I would not have spent money on that. Both of my cats were found at schools my husband and I used to work at. The oldest, Charlie, was born to feral parents and I only have him because a cold hearted employee ordered one of the clerical staff to snatch him and his two siblings from their mother so her two kids could play with them over summer break. This mean individual was told that they were too young, not yet weaned, and that their mother would reject them if she changed her mind of keeping the cats. She didn’t care and at the end of the day when her husband came to pick up the kids he said he wasn’t taking the flea infested kittens home. Well, duh! They had flea because they were born and reared outside. She told the clerical staff to call the county animal shelter. The shelter employee arrived and announced that all three would be euthanized unless we could also provide the mother since they were not weaned. That was impossible since she was feral and he only gave us an hour. The psychologist and I took the kittens home, I took two and she took one. We always thought Charlie was part Maine coon because like his daddy who used to terrorize the children walking to after care through he woods, he was a big boy. We also thought he might have come from Puerto Rico because he only quieted when we played that type of music and he loved hot sauce. In hindsight, I should have realized he was born in a Hispanic neighborhood and his mom must have eaten a lot of Mr. Empanada’s food during her pregnancy. Unfortunately, Charlie’s sister, Ginger, disappeared when we went to one of our children’s college graduations; a neighbor was supposed to be watching them. Ginger slipped out and was never seen again. She was small and orange, like her mom.

Parker was found in the second floor hallway of the school my husband where my husband worked. Likely a middle school kid had brought him in a backpack and he somehow escaped during the day. As a counselor, my husband was called to do something about the cat. That something was get him milk from the cafeteria since he was emaciated and bring him home. He looks a little like a Siamese but we had no idea of where he had originated.

I was good with what we suspected about their heritage. I love them for who they are and not where their ancestors came from.

I really didn’t expect any big surprises when we got their DNA results but my family and I had the biggest laugh as the cat’s DNA matched regions of the world where our ancestors had once lived. Go figure!

Charlie is mostly Siberian with a touch of Norwegian and Persian. The Siberians are big and poor Charlie was always on a diet as our vets thought he was just too heavy. Nope, he was always in the normal range for his ancestry. (Going to use this during my next annual physical.) Charlie became diabetic earlier this year; that also goes with his majority breed. I was happy to share these results with our current vet.

Parker was primarily Norwegian but also of a California breed and some Egyptian Mau. No Siamese! The Egyptian explains why he had spots in his younger years. The Norwegian explains his quirky personality. If you hold him he drops to dead weight. He also loves to pretend he’s afraid of his shadow and runs from it, then looks at you with sad eyes wanting you to pick him up. Yes, he has us humans trained.

The Californian part, though, really made sense. Parker was probably born in Florida where there was an air force base in close proximity to where he was found. I suspect a military family brought one of his parents with them when they relocated to Florida.

My husband is 75% Swedish, I wouldn’t doubt that his ancestors once had Norwegian cats in their household. My mtDNA does cross through Persia and I have half that is eastern European. Charlie has always been closest to me. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that those cats we saw in my family’s villages in Croatia were very distant cousins of Charlie. Likewise, those Swedish cats we saw in April could also be related distantly to Parker. Very weird in a fun way!

2024 Holiday Gift Guide

The season is just about upon us and now is the time to think of a special gift to give to your genealogist-enthused loved one or for yourself:

The Flower Letters is an interesting gift I received for Mother’s Day – it’s a gift that lasts all year. Every two weeks the recipient will receive a snail mail letter about a historical fictional mystery. The letter is written in cursive, quite decorative, and includes additional items about the info contained in the letter, such as postcards, calling cards, maps, etc. For further education, some words are written in red, and for more information, the reader can go to the online website to learn about the topic. Currently, the company is having a fall sale so take advantage of this unique opportunity. This is a wonderful gift, especially if you are tying it in with an ancestral region.

2. Is travel in your loved one’s future plans? If so, it might be a surprise to learn that travel isn’t quite what it used to be. Lost luggage is happening more frequently so here is a way to find it quick – GPS Trackers. There are many out there so identify first if your loved one has an Android or Apple. I use one of my kid’s Apple trackers when we travel and it is peace of mind knowing that my bags can be found anywhere in the world.

3. If you want to avoid lost luggage entirely, do what we do for trips of less than two weeks – simply get a duffel bag to carry on. I highly recommend a duffel bag instead of a rolling smaller bag as lately, airlines are making you check in those roller bags at the gate. Never thought to put a tracker into a bag I was carrying but it was needed. I have since switched to a duffel. They never take those, they can be crammed under the front seat of even the tiniest planes, and your belongings stay with you.

4. BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS! Here’s a list of my top 6 must haves:

Griffeth, Bill. Strangers No More – This is a sequel to his memoir, A Stranger in My Genes.

Hanson, Anne. Buried Secrets: Looking for Frank and Ida – This family’s brick wall was eventually gotten over and could help if you are stumped, too.

Jones, jr. Henry Z. Psychic Roots and More Psychic Roots – These are two books by the same author – You Can read my review here and here. If your genealogist is having strange and unusual finds this might be just what they need to understand them.

Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Evidence Explained. 4th Edition – Revised must have

Shamblin, Rebecca. Building a Legacy – You can read my review here. For those interested in preserving and sharing their researched and sourced family tree.

Shamblin, Rebecca. Leaving a Legacy – You can read my review here. This is a must if you are planning on writing a family history book in the upcoming year.

5. Here’s a gift to give to yourself if you are age 65+ – a FREE membership to the National Genealogical Society. See if you qualify for membership through Grouper.

6. Had to laugh at a recent drawing that was held in Indy for the Indiana State Library’s Fall Genealogical Conference. The giveaway that got the most Ooohs and Ahhs was a lighted magnifying glass. Older eyes can all use this and not just for genealogy. I absolutely hate the writing on food labels that keep shrinking (or maybe it is my eyes?). More than one is nice – one to keep at home and one for the road trips to archives.

7. You’ll probably think this is dumb but it’s so important – pencils. Yep, those number twos are still used by especially beginner genealogists who are keeping records as hard copies. A big eraser also goes a long way. Personally, I prefer to digitize but I understand not everyone does that. I also like engineering pencils as I don’t have the mess of a pencil sharpener and I can take them into archives that don’t allow pens with no issues of trying to find a sharpener.

8. Add to your Walmart cart the 15-Pack Blank Family Tree Charts. It’s a deal at only $14.99!

9. If your genealogist is into cemetery visits, create a cemetery to-go kit. Walmart even has an incomplete (IMHO) kit for $35.95. Add a bucket, a spray bottle, and some gardening shears to cut the grass/weeds around the stone. Include garden gloves and bug spray as well. If you want to go all out then also add a kneeler pad.

10. Your Time – seriously, just listen to what your family genealogist has discovered. Who knows, you might even get interested?!

Research Tips and Tricks Part 2

Last week I blogged about how I make connections. No matter where in the world you are researching, you need connections to help you find information that is not readily available.

My recent trip to France and Germany really drove home the point for me that NOT EVERYTHING IS ONLINE!

Today, we’ll be finding out how you can find out what is not online.

If you’ve made connections in the locale where you are researching then all you have to do is contact the person and ask.

I’m serious, it’s that simple.

If you have a well sourced public tree, write about your ancestor and stay abreast of tech you will make family connections. Contacting DNA matches is also helpful. You will also want to make professional connections of people that may or may not be related to you, too.

Academia.edu has been a good way to connect with historians that have insight into a place I don’t have expertise in. Last week, I mentioned APG and LinkedIn.

Why you need to connect with all of these folks is because there is no one all knowing human who can answer your question, “Where is the land records for someone who lived in Ulmet in the Pfalz in 1701?”

As Judy Russell often says the answer is, “It depends” and the Palatinate is one of those places that it truly does.

Records are sometimes found in the likely places:

The Mayors Office in Mietsheim and Uttenhoffen, France for birth and marriage
A Kusel archive for military records

But sometimes they are found in places you would never know to look for them:

A 6th cousin’s personal photo collection
In the home of a descendant of the first mayor after the 30 year war ended in a small German village
A tour guide
A small local museum with no website
The mid 1600s home of an archivist for a small village and a religious denomination

I’m not trying to be coy by excluding specifics of where I found records; I’m trying to explain that records are not always digitized and widely available.

I tried to impress upon the need for people holding private records to digitize their holdings but many were afraid that a larger archive would swoop in and demand their collection. You might think that would be a good thing but the problem is that many archives are making it extremely difficult for folks to access their holdings. From Sweden to Croatia I’ve heard – “all our records are available online at FamilySearch.” No, they aren’t.

FamilySearch has yet to get back with me on when those Croatian State Archive records will be available. I re-emailed a contact who requested I do so after a face to face meeting in Boston in September and I’ve yet to get a response. Since the records aren’t available online, I had to do boots on the ground last year to get them.

Sweden insists all are on Arkivdigital, yet the company I hired, Minnesota Swede, was able to find church records that were not available on Arkivdigital. These were in history books held at the local church that contained information about the ancestor we were researching. A renter in a home built by one of the ancestors had done extensive research on who had once lived in the home he summered in and provided us with a wealth of knowledge we would not have found on Arkivdigital.

I was sent back and forth from a library to an archive in Stratford-on-Avon, England in my search for records on my Arden ancestor. Someone has something but what it is I never discovered. If I had made a contact before arriving I would bet that I would have found the answer.

Without the help of two genealogists in Germany I would never have been able to find the following:

My Leininger ancestors had a castle but were not nobles. The name was originally spelled Leiningen. The males were not looked on favorably by the neighbors who stormed the castle. The second castle storming ended well because of Eva Leiningen who invited the unhappy folks inside and fed them (does sound like something my grandmothers would have done). Although the museum was closed, actually the whole village closes between noon and 2 daily, my contact had gotten the info when they were open.
The Leiningens were associates of the Frankensteins of Mary Shelley fame. The Frankenstein at the time Shelley wrote was an alchemist.
In France, Leininger is spelled Linange. So, another hint to look for other records thanks to the Mayor’s Clerk sharing this tidbit with me.
1701 land records, wills, 1823-1829 school records, and photos that are kept in a home in a wooden “filing” cabinet made in 1699 by the men of a village who wrote in their town charter that a man from eight different families will always be assigned to go to the descendent of the first mayor’s home to retrieve a drawer (2 men per drawer) to safety if needed. Today, that could be a climate change threat as they do have flooding in the area but when the edict was made it was in case the 30 year war came back.
A local man who leads tours to South America who happened to know that I was related to a group who settled there in the early 1800s. Those were two lines I had never researched because I couldn’t find records. South America would not have been a place I would have thought that two single sisters would have emigrated to during that time period.
The archivist provided a behind the scene tour of his community and shared with me church records beginning in 1538 that contained a scam then going around hitting churches. Who knew?!
A local genealogist was conducting oral histories on the oldest village residents and upon visiting noticed pictures on the wall that looked vaguely familiar. When he asked he was informed they were from a family reunion held in northeast Indiana. The genealogist knew I was from that area and mentioned my name. This led me to having lunch with a 6th cousin who had even more pictures to share with me.
By my online connections and attending various conferences, I met a professional genealogist from the region who knew I was coming for a visit. We arranged to meet for dinner as he just happened to be staying close to where I was to attend a genealogy conference. During dinner I met with other attendees and discovered that we are related. One connection leads to another!

When you travel, make sure you have a list of your ancestors who were from the location, along with the dates that they lived there. This will help you readily share info with those you meet. Keep your tree online so that you can pull it up from anywhere, anytime. This helps in looking for a shared ancestor and then identifying how you are related to your new acquaintance. Putting genealogists heads together is a wonderful way to find those records you didn’t even know existed.

Genealogy Research Tips and Tricks Part 1

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Since coming back from my travels to France and Germany I’ve had a number of inquiries as to how I make the connections that I do. Here’s the answer and you can do this for yourself! Honestly, today’s blog isn’t just of value for those researching the Palatinate, it’s a tip for researching every area of the world!

First, I make my personal tree public online in a variety of locations (Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, Geneanet.com). By public, my personal info is not being shared but my deceased ancestor info is. I believe that it’s important to share all of my finds so that there is a record somewhere. Unfortunately, records can be lost or destroyed easily so the more places that my information is available WITH SOURCES OF WHERE I FOUND THE ORIGINAL, the more likely that it will help a future generation in pursuing their own lines.

The sourcing is extremely important because it allows others to go back to that source and validate my information. Many online trees do not provide their sources which leads to the thinking that no one should use online family trees because they aren’t accurate. That thinking is incorrect – we should look at all available sources as some may give a hint. That hint can be helpful, meaning it will lead you to verify the info is correct or it will lead you to prove it is wrong. I just completed a client report where the client’s great grandfather was reported to have his wife and mother with the identical name and dates. Obviously, this was not correct but more than half of all trees online showed this info. Why? Because they copied from each other without validating sources.

It was not hard to discover how the problem arose – the great grandfather’s death certificate info gave his wife’s name as her given name and her married name. Under mother, the informant provided the woman’s maiden name. The informant was a daughter. She was giving her mother’s maiden name but that’s not what the form was asking for – it was asking for her father’s mother’s maiden name. In times of grief, people often give inaccurate info and this was the case. Just because info is provided on a governmental document does not make it correct!

Definitely learn more about how to analyze and the types of sources that can be consulted by reading the Board for Certification of Genealogists, Genealogy Standards, fiftieth-anniversary edition (Nashville, TN: Ancestry, 2014).

When you have a public well sourced tree widely available you will make more connections.

Another way I make connections is through my writing. The more places I have my work published, the more widely I have spread the word about an ancestor. This increased the odds that a family member will find me. Where do I get my writing published? I blog weekly on my website and through blogspot.com, which is free. Since blogspot is a Google product, my topics rise to the top of Google’s search engine which leads to even more hits when someone is searching for a surname. I also publish in journals and magazines that focus on the location where my ancestors once lived. I’ve even published an eBook and sell it at a very low cost because I’m trying to get the word out and make connections.

I also stay abreast of new technology – I use open.ai’s ChatGPT and link it to my website. This allows anyone who is using that company’s AI to receive current info on the surnames I’m researching. I’ve blogged in the past about using the Whova conference app to make connections and that, too, has been helpful.

One additional important piece of tech is to make sure that you keep the same email or at least, if you do change it, you forward from your old email to your new address. That way, people will always be able to find you.

I am not a Facebook fan but I have used it to make connections, too. LinkedIn helps with making connections with professionals around the globe, as does the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG). I would not have discovered my serendipity connections without using both LinkedIn and APG.

Obviously, the easier you are to find the more connections you will make. Online tools – technology – writing are all the initial ways I make connections.

Next week, I’ll be drilling down on the connections I have made to help you discover where your hard to find documents in the Palatinate might reside.

Putting Your Trust in Genealogy At Heart

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Dear Readers,

Several of you have let me know that you were concerned about accessing my website, GenealogyAtHeart.com, because you received a popup that said my site was not secure.

The popup was a result of my website’s SSL Certificate expiring. I had used a credit card that had been updated with an expiration date that wasn’t changed on my hosting site. Therefore, the hosting site did not renew the certificate that validates my site is secure.

I first realized this was an issue when I was traveling in Great Britain. I was home for a week before attending a conference in Boston and tried to get the certificate reinstated, however, I erred by going to the content management system (CMS) I use instead of the hosting agent.

I purchased a new certificate from the CMS which said it would take 72 hours to activate. I realized when I was in Boston it had not worked. The company wanted my sign on and password which I was reluctant to provide for several reasons – they were not responsive as it took me 4 emails over 4 days to get a response which was that their business hours are 12 hours different from where I live so they couldn’t respond via a chat or phone call. I asked for my money back which they gave me.

I then tried two other companies but those didn’t work either.

Now that I’ve returned from France and Great Britain I began again to try to get the certificate reissued. I reached out to the Transitional Genealogy Forum and because of two kind posters there, was able to understand that I was seeking the certificate from the wrong entity.

On Friday, I purchased a new certificate. I received an email back with the instructions to reinstall and I have completed that.

Got to love technology because I’m still not seeing that it is operational, though I did receive an email that I could display the above logo on my website since the certificate was issued. You can verify that by going to the company link under the logo.

I have also emailed the company to try to determine why the warning is still showing when trying to access my website. Hopefully, there will be a resolution this week.

You may be wondering what an SSL Certificate is – it stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a protocol that encrypts and then authenticates data over the internet. This enabled secure communication.

As a blogger, I’m providing one-way communication. I write and you read, however, I do have an option to “Leave a Comment.”

I also have a Specials to Share page where I publicize items that I find that my readers might be interested in. I do not take any money through my website but you would want to only use a website that did have an SSL Certificate if you were paying for items.

While I await the fix to my SSL tech issue, if you are hesitant to visit my website, you may also read my blogs at genealogyatheart.blogspot.com.

Thanks for your understanding.

A Little German Synchronicity

I’m back from my travels to France and Germany where I spent a week researching my husband and my ancestry in the Alsace-Lorraine region. I’m going to conclude my October series on synchronicity with another weird encounter that happened to me in a castle.

A little back story is needed to fully appreciate this odd encounter…

I’ve always known I was part German. My maiden name was Leininger so it was a no brainer figuring the ethnicity out. However, names alone don’t tell the whole story and the region from where my German ancestors once lived was fraught with turmoil for generations. I recently learned that some of it was from within the community – noble vs. peasants, but it also occurred with outsiders invading, such as during the 30 year war and Napoleon.

My paternal side never spoke about their heritage. Perhaps because it was too painful to recall or because they just weren’t great communicators. When my first child was born I asked my dad for genealogical info to put in the baby book and got the response, “When I’m dead, you’ll get the book.” My response, “Book, what book? Why do I have to wait ‘til your dead?”

He then informed me that he had two books that had been written by a family member about the Leiningers, which were also once known as Leiningen, and didn’t want to give me the books as he still referred to them occasionally. Like I wrote earlier, not great communicators!

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the books when he died as my stepmother refused to give them to me. I offered to pay for her time packing them and shipping but she said she didn’t have the time to do it. I turned to the internet and did receive an electronic copy of the first book from the author who was stationed in Germany at the time. Five years after my father’s death, when I stopped at my stepmother’s home after burying my mother, she produced the books and several photo albums.

The genealogies were not sourced and had a lot of errors. In fact, the second book was basically a fix it for the first as so many relatives had written to correct the wrong info. I used the book to do a surname study through “My Main Tree” on Ancestry.com as there were several lines mentioned that didn’t connect. This was before DNA.

I was not in contact with any close family members as it wasn’t a family that maintained ties. I don’t read or write German and with work, family, and other commitments, put the German research aside. Someday, I thought, I’d go back to it.

Someday became a year ago in June when I made a post on Whova, a conference app, asking if anyone had any info about the following surnames: Bollenbacher, Harbaugh, Kable, Kettering, Kuhn, Leininger, Mahler. One man from Germany responded and I’ve blogged about his help previously here and here.

Gerhard was the first family member I ever met on any of those surnames outside of my dad, grandfather, two aunts and three first cousins who were Leiningers. There are pictures of me with a great aunt but I don’t recall much as I was just 3 when the visit occurred.

Gerhard introduced me to two other conference attendees that were Kettingers. None of us were close (7^th cousins). While doing research last spring in Germany, Gerhard happened to meet a 96 year old woman named Irma who was providing Gerhard with an oral history of her town, Bedesbach. Gerhard noticed a photo on the wall in her living room and inquired about it. She told Gerhard it was taken in the 1980s when she had attended a Bollenbacher family reunion in northeastern Indiana. Gerhard told her about me as he had looked at my tree and knew I was descended from the Bollenbachers. She asked him to get in touch with me and check on people she had visited in Indiana. I blogged about that meeting here.

Something told me it was time to visit the Palatinate and see what I could find about my ancestors’ lives there. With Gerhard’s help after reviewing the little info I had found about them, my husband and I traveled to Frankfurt and then by car to the region of interest.

Within an hour and a half of landing, I was taken to what had once been a castle of a noble Leiningen. That’s me at the top and I do have a story to share but am saving that for another time. Rita, a friend of Gerhard’s what was accompanying us, told me that the next castle from the Leiningens were the Frankensteins, of Mary Shelley fame. One of them had been an alchemist. Perfect family info to learn on a fall October day!

Gerhard had a surprise for me every day and I’ll be blogging about the hints and tricks that I learned in researching this area beginning next week.

The creepy part of the story, however, occurred on a Saturday night. Gerhard took us to a castle that supposedly was not associated with my family. We were going to have dinner with a group of attendees at a genealogical conference that was being held there that weekend. Another genealogist that I have worked with, Roland Geiger, was putting the conference on and thought it would be a good idea if we stopped by.

Remember, I don’t read, speak or UNDERSTAND much German but I wanted to see Roland so I was game. There were six chairs at each table in the dining room. Gerhard, Rita, my husband, Roland, and I took five of the seats. An attendee decided to join us. We had a nice dinner and then moved up to the bar area where more mingling was to occur. The tables there only sat four so Gerhard, Rita, my husband and I filled up a table. The woman that had joined us at dinner had some questions for me about genealogy practices so we pulled up another chair. On her iPad she brought up her Wiki Tree. I told her I don’t use that because my tree is too large to upload to them and I don’t have time to do it piecemeal. She explained that she prefers Wiki Tree to other companies because of the sources that are found on the trees. I can’t disagree with her but I wanted to show her how well sourced my Ancestry.com tree was. She brought it up on her iPad. I showed her my dad and grandfather’s info, then decided to show her the pedigree view. That’s when it got creepy.

Alesandra-Brigitte became very quiet and just stared at the tree. I encouraged her to click on any of the names to see the details. She blinked, looked at me seriously and said, “I’m a Bollenbacher, too.”

In seconds, we discovered we are 6^th cousins. I told her I would be meeting another 6^th cousin who was 96 the next day for lunch. She had no knowledge of the other woman who lived close to her.

So, by just dropping by for dinner at a castle in the middle of nowhere I connected with a distant family member who I was able to help connect with another family member that lived close to her. Simply amazing!

I only regret that I didn’t have more time to talk to other attendees as I suspect I was related to most of them.

Genealogy is both weird and wonderful! On this Halloween, I hope the spirits enable you to make some meaningful family connections.

October Coincidence

In June I had the pleasure of meeting two of my Bollenbacher cousins, we are fifth cousins once removed. I had never met any family on this paternal line and how the meeting came about is rather strange.

I’ve previously blogged and lectured about the benefits of using the Whova Conference app to meet a cousin from Germany, Gerhard Hoh. In the spring, Gerhard visited a small town near his home in Germany to interview a 96 year old resident who happened to be a Bollenbacher. He knew, from looking at my public online tree, that I had Bollenbacher lineage.

When Gerhard entered the woman’s home he noticed several photos on the wall and he inquired about them. They had been taken in the 1970s at a family reunion in Northeastern Indiana. Gerhard informed his hostess that he had met a cousin in that area last June who was also a Bollenbacher. The woman kindly provided Gerhard with the addresses of two cousins she had met when she attended the reunion and requested that I connect with them.

I was heading for Sweden the following day so I put off the letter writing until I returned in May. I provided information on how I had received their address and my email address. I received a snail mail response with their email address and a desire for us to meet in person. After several back and forth to find a convenient date, my husband and I made the one hour drive to my “new” cousin’s home.

We spent a lovely afternoon sharing genealogical finds but we were stymied on how we were related. I didn’t have them in my tree nor did they know anything about me, other than an odd coincidence. One of my cousins had brought her husband and he happened to be a farmer. I mentioned some of my other paternal lines and he asked for more information about my Leininger family. I told him the story of my immigrant three times great grandparents Jean “John” and Marie Marguerithe Gass Leininger who had built a home across Ohio-Indiana state lines in the 1840s. I also mentioned that Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) had farmed the adjoining farm. The farmer was surprised as most people don’t know who owned the land 175+ years ago. Turns out, the farmer has been working those fields for most of his adult life.

This was the first for me – meeting a person that was connected today to the old family homestead. I have gone to visit old city and country homes of my ancestors around the world to meet the current inhabitants but I’ve never met someone who just happened to be accompanying someone else that had a tie to my ancestral past.

I was able to hear that the wheat crop he had just sold, earliest in his whole career, had turned out well. My grandfather and father also grew wheat. I then shared that one of my adult kids had farmed wheat for the first time and on Father’s Day, threshed and milled it, then made a mug cake of it for my husband. That farming gene runs deep in my lines! Social media did the trick for me in connecting with my family’s past.

Hope you’ve enjoyed my Creepy October series. Next week I’ll conclude the series with an unbelievable Bollenbacher connection I made last Saturday while I was in Germany researching.