Recently in Genealogy Category
For the last couple months, I've been working on-and-off on an ancestry chart for the upcoming Mohr family reunion next month. All of my genealogy data is in Reunion, which excels at making great-looking charts. After some waffling, I've decided to make a chart that includes all direct-line ancestors and their siblings, but excludes more distant relatives. This seems to give a nice balance between size and completeness. (When I tried creating an "all-relatives" chart, Reunion told me it was going to be 187 feet wide.)
Even so, getting a chart this size formatted just right is quite an undertaking. I've found a place that specializes in printing large genealogy charts (and does so much cheaper than Kinko's), but I decided I wanted to see a rough draft first. So last week I printed the chart on the laser printer and taped the sheets together to make this:
Wow. It's 28 feet long and a little less than three feet wide. The chart includes 634 individuals and covers 21 generations (or would if I hadn't left off the row of sheets at the bottom that include my generation—not enough floor space!). The earliest ancestor on the chart was born 684 years ago, around the same time the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan and just a decade before the start of the Hundred Years War.
Now I'm in the process of adding interesting tidbits to the chart—things that go beyond the facts of birth and death. I think the end result will be pretty cool.
At long last, I have put our family history information back online. I took our old information down several years ago because I had no easy way to limit the amount of information shown for living individuals. I've since switched to much more capable genealogy publishing system called The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding, or just TNG.
Not only can TNG automatically hide the personal details of living people, it also allows me to selectively reveal the hidden information to people with accounts on the system. It can generate great looking pedigree charts, descendancy reports, timelines and a lot more. The whole site is dynamic, too, so you can easily find, for example, all the people in the database born in Chicago around 1900. You can even change the language of the interface!
I still have some work to do to tweak the look of the site to my liking, but it's perfectly usable now. So, without further ago, I give you:
Enjoy. If you're a family member and want an account, let me know.
And just like that, my week of research in Salt Lake City is nearly through. I'll be over at The Library again tomorrow, then it's back home to Seattle. I had a huge list of things to work on while here and I've barely scratched the surface. It's just so time consuming. Until this morning, I had spent all my time with just two microfilms from a single Swedish parish.
The picture above is the title page from Volume 1 of the Silte churchbooks. Silte, a small town on the island of Gotland in Sweden, was the birthplace of my great grandparents: Hans Hansson and Johanna Katrina Kristina Cederlund. Over the past couple days, I've found their birth and marriage records as well as those for their siblings, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. Hans' side of the family is full of farmers (he was a blacksmith). Hanna, on the other hand, comes from a long line of schoolmasters and parish clerks.
Oh, and there was one more surprise. I've managed to confirm something I'd stumbled on a couple months ago. My great-aunt Miemie, whose legal name here in Amerika was Vera Hanson, was born Agnes Henny Sevira Hansson. Agnes? Who knew?
This afternoon, I finally managed to move on to some other topics. Most notably, I found the Danish birth records for my great great grandfather, Heinrich Frederik Ludwig Mohr. That means I also discovered his parents: Jochim Hinrich Mohr and Emma Oline Marie Cathrine Petersen. Jochim was a switchman on the Sjaelland Railroad. Cool. I wonder what I'll discover tomorrow.
Has it really been more than three months since we posted something here? I guess so. Well, we'll change that...
Next week, I'm heading to Salt Lake City for a week of genealogical research at the LDS Family History Library. A decade or so ago, I put a lot of work into researching my ancestry, but since then I've only managed a few little spurts of work every now and then. A couple months ago, I started getting more serious again and it's been quite an experience.
A decade ago, the Internet was a much much smaller place. There were a few good genealogy mailing lists, some resources on AOL and CompuServe (unavailable to non-subscribers), and a handful of websites. I can't remember a single primary source that was available online back then. Genealogical research was all about long hours with a microfilm reader at the National Archives, Family History Library, or any number of other repositories. That's still a part of the story, of course, and that's why I'll be in Salt Lake City next week, but vast amounts of data are now available on the Internet.
Today, companies like Ancestry.com have all of the public US census images digitized and available online (along with much more); The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation has a searchable database of US immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, complete with digitized ship's manifests; and sites like The Danish Emigration Archive and TRESOAR at the Frisian Historical and Literary Center make old-world records just as easily accessible as those here in the US.
So what has all of this meant to me? Without leaving home, I've discovered tons of information about my ancestry (and a little about Kathy's). Some of it is unverified (thus the SLC trip), but nonetheless it's pretty impressive. This picture shows an overview of Henry's ancestry as I knew it a couple months ago and as I know it today. Henry is the box of the far left, with earlier generations trailing off to the right.
Cool. Assuming for the moment it's all correct, that brings one branch of my family tree back to 1323 and quite a few back into the 15th Century. One of my 13th great uncles was Pier Gerlofs Donia, better known as Grutte Pier or Pierius Magnus, a Pirate (!) and Friesian folk hero. In another branch, my 10th Great Grandfather was Konrad Klinge, who was pastor at the reformed church in Thuine (now in Westphalia, Germany) before being forced out during the counter-reformation in 1606. Hmm, I have the sudden urge to learn about the 30 Years War.
So, anyway, I'll be in Utah next week trying to break through a few dead ends and verify what I already have. It will be the first time I've been out-of-town without Henry and Kathy since Henry was born, which will be strange. They've been away without me, but not visa versa.
