More on Family & Rootlessness

[abbzug]

This new FB connection of my brother's is turning out to be a key first step in solving some of the family mysteries I wrote about in my last entry. The family of the Austrian woman who friended him has a couple of family-tree-type documents. And we've just discovered that her father's great-great-grandfather is none other than our own great-great-

Comments

[eve_prime]

That is so cool!

I know it's relatively easy for me to look for ancestors, since mine have mostly been in the country so long, and lots of other people have already done most of the work so it's usually just a matter of finding it. But there are a few things that I've found really useful that might work for you too. One is that you can request the death certificates of any of your relatives, and they include the person's birthplace and their parents' names. So anyone whose birthplaces or parents' names could be useful to you - like great aunts and uncles as well as grandparents - is worth getting a death certificate for. You just have to know their name and the state and decade they died in.

Also the Mormons have amazingly vast resources. Nobody had ever been able to find out anything about my great-great grandfather and his wife, who'd come from a particular tiny German village in the early 1860s, but the Mormons had parish records for that village for nearly a century. It did take a lot of my time to read through their microfilms, though. So if you get a village name, somewhere someone will probably have records of all the births, marriages, deaths, etc. for that village. Also you might still have relatives there!