I'm happy to host this tax day open thread for GFHC. Really this group has motivated me to do a significant amount of work on my own family's history. I already have found things that my long-researching uncle had not (nice to stand on the shoulders of those family historians who hand their work down to us).
My searches have been rewarded with discoveries of documents the family had not seen, stories that we had not known, at least 2 Revolutionary War vets, one pauper, one trip on the Oregon Trail and then around South America to NYC, then to Illinois and many branches's surnames name spelling changes over the course of the 1800s.
I'll introduce you to some of my family after the jump.
These are some of my grandparents. This is the line of the family I've spent my time on so far. I knew them better, because my other grandparents died when I was young. I think this picture below might have been their wedding day in 1931 or. Their names were Verne & Florence and they got married on Friday the 13th. It was lucky for them, they were married 60 years.
Verne's family has been here for a very long time, I have traced 2 branches of his family back from me to my gggggg-grandfathers, my uncle another back to my 5g-grandfather. He has at least 2 (and likely more) Revolutionary War vets for gggg-grandfathers. His ancestors were farmers for generations and so was he. His people moved west early and were pioneers in both Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, and Illinois (maybe Oregon). Their families were big, as farm families were back then. This is my grandfather as a baby, with his mother (Bessie) and her mother (Jane--I have her watch). All of these people were born in Illinois.
This is my grandmother's family. I know less about her family, so I am anxious to push forward on this side. This photo, like the one above, has 3 generations. This is one of the treasures I have found on my search. I just had to share it, since without this group I wouldn't have found it. My grandmother's (Florence) face is hidden by the rip. She is the little girl in the front on the left in bare feet. Her grandmother (Ottelia) is over her shoulder to the left. Ottelia's husband (Albert) is the tall man on the right. My great grandparents are together in the middle. He is the fourth man from the right with the hat on (John), and his wife is next to him (Flora).
Ottelia and Albert were from Prussia. On the census they said Germany, when asked. They were from small towns near Gdansk/Danzig (as someone in this group graciously found for me). Here is a ship's manifest from Ottelia's passage. She came over with her daughter, and two people who share her maiden name, Swinke. I am not sure who they are. It is a brick wall for me, until I can get some films. I have not been able to locate these two people after 1882 in the U.S. Censuses with certainty. There were some that were in Cook County, but that did not ring true with what I know about my family--namely that they farmed. I also have not found Albert's passage records. Here are Ottelia's, She is Ottelie Fuhrwerk, daughter, Trude (lower 1/3 of second page). the two passeners above them are the Swinkes, Caronlina & Ferd. I seem to remember talking with my grandmother about her memory of her grandparents going back to visit, or someone died and they went back. I thought perhaps her mother had died, and she went back and brought her sister and father back with her. Then I found someone who suggests (online) that a Carolina who was Ottelia's mother came over too (and died in IL) but that would mean that the ages are incorrect on the manifest and have been transposed for the Swinkes, or there are more Swinkes than her parents to consider (e.g., this is an uncle Ferd.), etc. I NEED THOSE FILMS! This is, by the way the first family branch of these two grandparents that I found born outside the U.S.
So along with getting our gab on, would some of you pros talk me through some strategies to unravel this? I really need to get to a cemetery in central Illinois and check out the Carolina Swinke tombstone/order death records, etc. There are many possibilities and I don't want to make assumptions. There could be two Carolinas--mother & daughter or cousins...Help! (I even checked out a book called the Family Tree Problem Solver).