In October, I started telling the story of one of my immigrant families: the Peters. My purpose was to find additional details about this family and their immigration, but I ended up tracing them back to Germany! I also broke through a “brick wall” and found their parents, too! This post is a summary of that discovery with links to the posts I shared as I traced this immigrant family. Custom Map Created by My Dad At some point, I heard a lecture or podcast about finding your ancestor’s ship arrival in a New York newspaper. And, that is where...
I spent hours looking for the baptismal record of my great, great, great grandmother, Henriette Maria Magdalena Bünger. I believed she was born on July 15, 1817 in the present day state of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in Germany. I knew her father’s name from her marriage record, Johann David Bünger, but I could NOT find her. I was trying every trick I knew. Then, I remembered MyHeritage and how it had helped me with another German family. I went to the site and put in Henriette’s name. Immediately, I found her on someone’s tree! It not only had her parents full names and dates,...
In the U.S., most of my ancestors were farmers. But, my newly found German ancestors had a variety of occupations. As I tried to locate the birth family of my 3rd great grandfather, Joachim Peters, using his father’s occupation as a “keyword” helped me find the correct family. Mecklenburg-Schwerin, where the Peters family lived, did not take many censuses. In fact, the only ones I’m aware of are for the years 1704, 1751, 1819, 1867, 1890, and 1900. Since the family emigrated in 1859 and Joachim was born about 1815, the only useful census would be 1819. However, the 1867...
Although I didn’t get a word by word translation, volunteers at the Facebook group “Genealogy Translations” helped me to translate the marriage record of Joachim Carl Otto Peters and Henriette Maria Magdalena Bünger, my third great grandparents who would later immigrate to America. Ancestry.com, Germany, Lutheran Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1519-1969 (Lehi: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016), online database,marriage record of Joachim Carl Otto Peters and Henriette Maria Magdalena Bünger, 21, July 1843, Dobbertin, Mecklenburg, page 12, item 49. The page this entry was found on was for 1843. The first column shows the date which both the translator and Ancestry...
I started researching our family in 1998, and my dad’s aunt, Beulah, had probably researched several decades before that time. But, discovering the full name of my third great grandparents earlier this week – Joachim Carl Otto Peters and Henriette Mary Magdalena Bünger – busted a hole in our brick wall. Now, it is falling down. [Read part 1 and part 2.] Yesterday morning, I found the marriage record of Joachim and Henriette. It shows the Peters family was from Bergfeld, which is one of the pieces of information I’d learned on Monday. And, most excitingly, the marriage record includes...
I’ve done a few of Randy Seaver’s “Saturday Night Genealogy Fun” challenges over at Genea-Musings. This week’s challenge is about your father’s mother’s paternal lines. 1) What was your father’s mother’s name? My grandmother’s maiden name was Hazel Lucille Peters. At the end of her life, she lived with my aunt & uncle who lived in the same town as I. She had almost white hair and, as a young child, I thought that was just her hair color. So, when I received a doll with white hair, I named her Hazel. She died when I was only 5 and...
