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Success online rarely means being able to download your family tree in its entirety. Success is finding a rare book owned by a volunteer, or having a distant relative e-mail you, or seeing an obituary from 1972. Here are my successes. If you have had a success online, let me know and I will add your story here!Volunteers on HelplistsMy ancestress was quite a mystery to me. Although I had a picture and her maiden name, little else was easily available. In the 1900 Federal Census, a young man named Willie Trouch/Trouck (the handwriting was a bit hard to read) was listed as her husband's stepson. This child indicated that she had a previous husband who probably was named Trouch/Trouck. Her death certificate gave no indication of this marriage and no one in the family knew anything about it.While perusing the GenWeb page for Wright County, Minnesota, I discovered that a gentleman owned a book about the history of the county. An e-mail to him, asking for anything about Minerva or "Trouch", yielded the most extraordinary story. Newspaper accounts told of a local man named Herman Trauch who murdered his neighbor with a butcher knife after the neighbor's cow wandered into Herman's fields. Additionally, census records showed that Minerva and Herman had both been born in Wisconsin and lived there during the first years of their marriage. About a year after Herman's trial (I haven't learned his sentence yet), Minerva married my ancestor. Minerva's early history and her parents remain a challenge for me, but I have a much better idea of where to look and an interesting story to tell at the dinner table! Vital Records IndexSince GenWeb pages are constantly updated and more information is going online nearly daily, I went back to the Sherburne County GenWeb page recently. I knew from census records that Minerva lived there after marrying her second husband. The Sherburne County Historical Society (linked from the GenWeb page) now has the marriage index online. Looking through the 1883 index, I found the following entry:PIPPEN, Oliver TROUCK, Minerva 12/28/1883 While the surnames are spelled a bit differently, this marriage is almost certainly my Minerva Trouch and Oliver Pippin. (As with any typed extract from handwritten documents, some letters can be misread. Es and Is, or Ks and Hs are close enough to be reasonably assumed to be the same. Even if these differences are not typos, surname spellings are never set in stone.) The Sherburne County Historical Society's page also lists the fee and address for obtaining a copy of the registrar's record. I'm hopeful that this record may contain their parents' names. Contacting RelativesOne surname of mine is very rare. ALBAITIS, which is Lithuanian, occurs less than 10 times in the Social Security Death Index. Searching on 4-11, I found someone with this surname. (The e-mail I sent is provided in the relatives article.) Her husband turned out to be a second cousin of mine and we are now in regular contact.Posting QueriesSurname queries (discussed in the surname article) can yield results months after they are posted. Again, with the Albaitis family, I posted a query on the GenWeb county page for their county. A kind woman with access to old obituaries looked up my surnames. Then she e-mailed the obituaries she found. The one for my ggrandfather said that he had spent some time in Pennsylvania.This was the missing piece I needed! I knew they had landed in New York, and were in Michigan by 1923, but had yet to find them in the 1920 Federal Census. Now I had a great lead. So, I hired a researcher I found online. Online ResearchersWith the information I had received above, I e-mailed a researcher to lookup Albaitis in the 1920 Soundex for Pennsylvania. Sure enough, there they were! Along with them were two other Albaitis families. While I have yet to connect to them, I believe them to be cousins of my ggrandfather.Of course, I then hired the researcher to send the actual census pages (and the ones before and after) on which my families appeared. Send in your success story!Have you had an online success? Let me know and I'll add it to the page. E-mail at Diane Boettcher boettcher@usa.com and use "Success Story" as the subject line. |
