I regularly find myself at a library for genealogy, and have since the beginning. All the genealogy how-to books said to “check your local library.” Problem was, my ancestors were not from the town I lived in, so none of their collection contained anything useful. I did pick up my first relationship chart, and began to understand 2nd and 3rd cousins, and removed, so that was worthwhile.
Next library was the Newberry, in Chicago, one Saturday with my dad. That was my first time cranking census microfilm and running into name mutilations. I still have the handwritten notebook pages from my finds (I couldn’t afford photocopies), which I should recycle, now that I have digital images.
I also learned my ancestors weren’t important enough (or didn’t have the discretionary funds!) to appear in the Manitowoc County local history or mug books. I did discover plat maps, though! While it was fun to find my great- and 2nd great-grandfathers on the maps, and to see surnames I recognized as marrying into those families, it would take forty years or so for me to appreciate the subtle clues plat maps held, especially when paired with modern satellite imagery and street views.
My biggest difficulty with libraries is:
- Finding the time to visit them,
- Not living near the libraries I do need.
I no longer live in the Chicago area; Wisconsin is even further away. Detroit, Port Huron, and Ontario (for Mike’s family) are at least as far. Yes, I could contact a library for a specific lookup request, and they would send that to me. But we all know some of the best finds come from looking through the vertical files or scanning the shelves, seeing if anything jumps out at us. Kind of like in Harry Potter, when a book floats off the shelf, or glows to be found.
You can’t ask the librarian to spend that much time on what could easily be a wild goose chase!
Still, a large enough library may have information from a different area. I was researching a cousin’s father’s line. He was part of a Busse family living in West Town, a neighborhood in Chicago. There was another Busse family a little farther west, still in Cook County, but not in Chicago. That family was firmly ensconced in the Arlington Heights/Elk Grove Village area, with streets, parks, and who knows what else, named for them. The family was huge! Their 1998 family reunion had 2500+ people attending. Could that family be related to my cousin’s?
I had no clue, but tackled it the way any OCD genealogist would: find all the records. Not online trees, records! I started with the 1930 census (most recent at the time), searching for any Busse in Cook County. That found my cousin’s, as well as the Elk Grove Busse family. It gave me a framework of families to start with.
Then I moved to the 1920 census. If I couldn’t be sure a 1920s family was the same as a 1930 family, I added them as unrelated. I had dozens of “islands.” It would be easier to merge a duplicate person, than to try to separate that person into two people, later.
Next I tackled the WWI draft registrations, because those would give me exact birth dates for a lot of the men. That became helpful when trying to match up death records and obituaries. Sometimes it confirmed a wife’s or parent’s name.
I knew I had a lot of duplicate people. There were young men connected as sons to their parents. There were men connected to a wife and children. But I couldn’t link them together! Trying to guess which William (son) was the same as a married William would have been foolhardy. Then there were the widowed Busse wives in the census records! I needed to figure out who their husband had been.
Marriage records (listing parents) were helpful with merging. An obituary listing parents and spouse and children (or siblings) also worked well. Sometimes I discovered the missing deceased husbands. The obituaries for the parents could also work, if they listed children (with spouse) and grandchildren.
So I mined the digitized Chicago area papers, and slowly (carefully!) consolidated a lot of people. I also acquired a number of married names for daughters, allowing for further research to make the tree more complete. I continued backwards with the remaining census years, and other databases.
Once I had a reasonably connected tree, based on the:
- Censuses (1850-1930)
- WWI draft registrations
- Social Security Death Index
- Illinois Death Index
- Newspaper articles and obituaries
- Whatever other databases seemed reasonable,
I still hadn’t connected my cousin’s family to the larger one. The newspaper article had mentioned a newly published book, detailing the other family from the emigrant couple, forward. I hadn’t used any online trees, but maybe it was time to “check my work” against their research? I really didn’t want to spend $35 on a book for people not related to me, so I searched WorldCat. Not surprisingly, all the libraries around Elk Grove Village had a copy, but I discovered a copy was shelved at the Indiana State Library, 10 miles from my house.
One Saturday in 2012 I headed to the state library, armed with my digital camera and my laptop. After requesting the book from the stacks, I sat down to peruse it. At 310 pages long, I certainly wasn’t going to read it all, but I paged through to see what was there. The front had ancestor trees for the immigrant couple, Johann Friedrich Busse and Hanne Friederike Katz. Several pages explained how the family emigrated from Germany, with small images of military papers, a transit pass, and a transcription of a letter back to Germany from their 3rd son, which prompted them to emigrate, also. It was helpful background information, and included their town of origin.
It continued with a descendant tree for each child, listing their children and grandchildren, followed by a brief write-up about their lives. I limited myself to only twelve photos documenting those early generations. My research had already determined my cousin’s earliest ancestors were not descendants of this immigrant couple, but I did want to confirm my research had been correct. Or at least no more wrong than the compilers of the book!
The later generations (the bulk of the pages) weren’t really a concern, because I was looking for that earlier connection. It’s entirely possible some of the descendants married into more recent generations of my Meintzer line who also lived in that area, but sometimes we need to draw a line with our research and stay out of rabbit holes.
I still haven’t made a connection between these two families, and there may not be one. House remodeling projects sidetracked me for several years, and then this blog thing, so this project ended up on a back burner. But I’ve relocated the digital images from the book (from 2 laptops earlier!), and my tree file works just fine. I need to take another look at these families.
Busse isn’t a particularly uncommon name, but the close proximity of the two families and just a feeling I have, makes me want to resolve this one way or another. If they are related, the connection is further back than Johann Friedrich—with my cousin’s line descending from a brother or cousin of his, possibly. Thanks to the book from the library, I have a location in Germany to compare to. If I can trace back farther for my cousin, to a solid ancestral town for her family, that may decide it once and for all.
Fingers crossed . . .
#52Ancestors
Christine's Genealogy Musings 