These German settlers were ethnic minorities.  In some cases, surviving records can be hard to find.  When they are there, they might be in any number of locations, formats or languages.  And as you may have witnessed with me, the history of the area, while crucial to discovering your roots, can be hard to untangle.

The SGGEE is a great organization that helps organize various record transcriptions.  They also have a large collection of maps and a great knowledge base to help understand the history of the areas involved and how to search.

They typically have a convention every year, usually in a Northern US Midwest location or in Canada’s plains.  Most often in Canada.  This year it is being held in Edmonton. The information presented and the ability to do searches on their special databases and benefit from the knowledge of the rest of the members is very tempting.  I know that if I attend, I will learn a lot and I might finally be able to wrap my mind around the Flatts, Seibs, Matschenskis, and the rest of my German ancestors.

But it is expensive.  Airfare to Edmonton is $600.  When you add in the cost of the conference, food, and hotel, I’m spending over $1000.  Is it worth $1000 to better understand my German ancestors?  I’m not so sure.  I’m starting to think that my money might be better spent doing some other vacation for now, and then maybe next year or the year after that, if the convention is held in Minnesota or something, the airfare will be cheaper and I can still get the same benefit from it as I would this year – just a year later and a little bit less expensive.

I’m really torn.  I want to learn as much as possible as soon as possible so I can share it all with my grandparents and continue to use them to help fill in more gaps.  But if I just wait a year or two, I could probably get the same benefit for less money.

What would you do?  Have you ever gone to a genealogy conference?  How has it benefited you?

Guernsey County, OH

When I moved to NYC, I drove across the US on I-80.   I-80 is a long and sometimes lonely stretch of interstate that goes through Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Being a western girl, I loved the mountains and valleys in Utah (I was born there after all) and I didn’t mind the dry and empty expanse of Wyoming. Nebraska’s pure flatness was a little unsettling since I’ve never lived on the plains and really never even spent a lot of time there. The eastern end of Nebraska leads into the rolling hills of Iowa which was lovely, and all, but it didn’t particularly strike me. Illinois and Indiana were both fine. I remember a lot of fog as I passed through.

But my favorites were Ohio and Pennsylvania. They had the mix of the gorgeous hills covered with trees, and farmland and adorable towns. I would have planted myself in either of those places and been satisfied. Yet, I continued on to NYC.

Well, I’ve since learned that I have deep ancestral roots in Ohio, and I believe in Pennsylvania as well (I know of one person born there, but her last name is one I associate with Pennsylvania, so who knows. I’m hoping to learn more someday).  My ancestors moved to Ohio at the turn of the 19th century and founded a town. My family lived there for over 120 years until my grandfather, as a small child, was sent to California to live with his father and stepmother.

Can a love of a place be genetic?   I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that I was drawn to it because of my ancestors calling to me, or perhaps there is some genetic component to the love of a particular geography that has been passed down to me for 6 generations.

Learning about my ancestors has helped me make sense of some of my own personality traits and quirks. Why I love Guernsey cows so much, why Ohio and Pennsylvania call to me, and why I have such insatiable wanderlust.  I attribute my love of Guernsey cows to my dairy farmer ancestors, particularly those from Guersney.  I’m drawn to Ohio and Pennsylvania because of the 6 (or more) generations of family that were born, lived and died there calling to me.   My wanderlust comes to me through the Flatt side of the family, where traces of my German ancestors can be found throughout Eastern Europe.  More recently, they have scattered over the entirety of the North American continent, myself included.

What else will my ancestors teach me about myself?

Green-Wood Cemetery in March 2010

I live near Green-Wood Cemetery.  Unfortunately,  I don’t have any family buried there, at least none that I’m aware of.  At best there might be distant relatives by marriage, but even that is a long shot.  Still, it is a remarkable place, so I enjoy visiting.

I’ve been there a few times and I always find something interesting.  Today I was looking for a grave for a person on a genealogy forum I frequent.  I offered to look for graves and take photos.  I tried last week and was unsucessful as the person of interest was buried in a public lot almost 100 years ago, and graves there can be difficult to find.

So today I asked the guard at the gate if there was any landmark or anything to help me out.  I showed him the map where I was headed and gave the name and exact grave number.  To my surprise, he offered to take me straight to it.

On the way there, he told me a few interesting bits of trivia about the cemetery.  Winter 2010 was a particularly tough season on the trees and many trees were lost in various storms.  One section with the oldest trees is in fact typically closed to visitors as a result.  He also told me about the difference between family lots and public lots.  He also described old public lots vs the new style of putting all of the graves all in one long row with identical shaped grave stones.  Basquiat is buried in such a grave.  The graves are all named sequentially in the line, as opposed to chronologically as they are in other parts of the cemetery, which makes finding people buried in the new public lots easier than in the old public lots.

I love the cemetery.  In the 1800s, it was a popular tourist destination and recreation area.  It seems odd to us now, but in Victorian times, people would visit cemeteries the same way we now visit municipal parks.  In fact, Green-Wood was the inspiration for Central Park and Prospect Park in NYC.  It also includes the highest point in Brooklyn and is a site of an important Revolutionary War battle, just in case you need more reasons to understand why this is such a special place.

Some people might be creeped out at the thought of 560,000 people interred beneath their feet and in the various mausoleums and catacombs.  It doesn’t bother me at all.  I know some of them have family that still remember them.  Others have left behind a legacy of import art.  Some have even changed the course of history, and it will take a while for them to be forgotten.  Still, I feel it is my duty to think of those buried there as real people who had real lives.  Some of them had long lives.  Others died young.  Others never had a chance.  It is hard when all you know is a name and a date and maybe the relationship to the people nearby.  But when I walk by, I still like to think of them as people who once walked the earth and were as real as I am now.

If you need a photograph of a grave in Green-Wood Cemetery, please let me know.  I will be happy to find it and take a photo on my next visit.

My mother’s aunt is interested in genealogy too, and she created a whole book about her mother, Mary Alice Arnoldsen.  This book has copies of various civil records – birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and so forth, along with a biography and various memories of Mary Alice written by people who knew her.  There is a section on various papers she had in her house, such as correspondence, receipts and contracts for various important life events.  A section on historical events and how they would have impacted her life was also included to help put her life in context with history.  Finally, there were many photocopies of photos, including some I’d never seen before.

My mom also had many family group sheets and photos.

Aside from being a gold mine of information about my great greatmother and other family members, it reminds me to think about what to do with all of this research.  Do I create a scrapbook?  Do I focus on one person, or a couple?    What do you do with your research?

Ukrainian landscape

When I last posted, I realized that I must have some information wrong.  I thought my ancestors were Volga Germans, but I couldn’t find their Russian Village in any list of Volga German settlements.

So, I went back to what I knew.  The ship manifest states they were from Marienka Crest, Russia.  The 1930 census said that they were from Poland.  So I got out some maps and I read more about Germans in Russia.  And that is when it hit me.  Volhynia, now mostly in Ukraine, was a region in Russia settled by Germans in the 1800s.  It was part of Russia up until WWI or thereabouts, at which time western Volhynia went to Poland and eastern Volhynia remained with Russia.

Could the Russia/Poland inconsistency in the manifest and census be due to shifting borders?  I figured before I blow the Russia/Poland off as just a transcription error or misunderstanding, I should look into it further. 

When I shifted my focus away from Volga Germans, I found the Society of German Genealogy in Eastern Europe.  Through this organization’s resources, I found the town that they most likely came from – Marinkow (and several spelling variations).  I also found other people who had researched some of the same surnames!

Unfortunately I didn’t find anything new on Adolph Flatt.  But I did find out Lydia Matschenski’s parents and siblings, and I have some clues to guide my direction in further Adoph Flatt research.  I was even provided a scan of the birth registry where Lydia Matschenski appears!

I’ll be joining the SGGEE to gain access to member only resources.  I also need to order the Adolph and Lydia Flatt naturalization and other domestic records, and exhaust more online databases and organizations for Volhynia records.  If I still fail in finding Adolph’s parents after trying all these things, I might need a more radical approach – a look at all of the families in their Volhynia village and Michigan town in order to try and find some connections there, discover family and migration patterns and hopefully find my way back to more Flatt ancestors.

If you are interested in what resources I used to determine what village they came from, you can check my Links page within my Resources.  There are many links that indicate Volga Germans or Russian Germans.  I also read up on the history of Volhynia, Prussia, Pomerania and Galicia on Wikipedia.  Ultimately, the SGGEE, their databases, mailing list and the links on their website were the most helpful to me and I would recommend that as the starting place, for anyone interested in Russian Germans but not necessarily Volga Germans.

Volga German Monument in Kansas

I grew up knowing that my great grandparents were Germans who lived in Russia and emigrated to the USA, specifically Michigan, around the turn of the century.

My first forays into genealogy took me down the path of the Volga Germans – Germans who settled along the Volga River in Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great.  However, I was also told that our family lived in what is now Ukraine, not far from Lviv or Torchyn.  In all of my Volga German research, I was never able to find a Volga German settlement there. 

So, I turned to documents from my ancestor’s lives to train and find the actual name of their village.  I looked at the ship manifest for Adoph and Lydia Flatt.  Ellisisland.org has a wonderful collection of scanned and searchable manifests, which is where I found this one.  In 1905 they came to the United States.  The manifest lists several details about them including the place of origin:  Marienkaw Crest, Russia.

So I google Marienkaw Crest, and I get nothing.  So, I started checking various Volga German websites that list Russian German settlements.  I found several that seemed similar – Marianowka, Marjanowka, Mariental, none of them seemed right.  The location was nowhere near Torchyn or it was a Catholic settlement (Adolph and Lydia were Lutheran), or something else didn’t mesh with the rest of the knowledge I had.

Either I had the name of the town wrong, or I had some other detail about their life wrong. Well, I had a few things wrong, which made it so hard to get to the bottom of it! Next I’ll talk about what I had wrong and how I finally got it right.

Galicia and Volhynia

I’m back on the trail of my Russian German ancestors.  I think figuring out where in Eastern Europe they came from before emigrating to the United States is the best thing to do at this stage.  So I’ve been researching the history of the region and I realize that earlier in my research, I may have gotten some facts wrong.  It is important to know the history of the region so that I can guide my search in the right direction.  I may have been guiding it in the wrong direction before now!

There were several German migration waves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that went into Eastern European areas.  One wave emigrated to the Volga River region and became known as Volga Germans.  Another wave settled near the Black Sea.  There were also migrations to Prussia and Volhynia.  The map above shows some of the areas in Eastern Europe where Germans settled.

Why does this matter to me?  Why can’t I just do a surname search on a database and find them no matter where they lived?  There are a number of different websites, societies and organizations that focus on different Russian German settlements.  If I join one society for Black Sea Germans, with access to their database, experts and other researchers, but it turns out that my ancestors lived in Prussia, then I have wasted time and money going down this dead end.

Well, I am closer than ever.  I think my family came from Volhynia, and I may even know the village some were born in.  Next I’ll talk about how I came to this conclusion.

The instructions are quite basic in some areas, so I skipped entire pages.  I know how to send an email and I know how to navigate the internet with a browser.  I suppose that might be helpful to someone else, but I’m very familiar with computers.

Where I did appreciate that basics approach was in the genealogy stuff.  It was helpful to a person like me to see it broken down bit by bit.  There were also a lot of helpful links, and the trial versions on the software disc were pretty cool.

Overall, I’m glad I checked this one out from the library.  Good to have read; don’t need to own.

Read more about what I learned from the talk below the jump.  The talk was on DNA and how DNA can be used to augment your genealogical research.  She talked about how testing is done (mostly cheek swabs, so don’t worry about needles or drawing blood!) and privacy (very safe).  Then she talked about the different kinds of tests you can get.

She talked most about the Y-DNA test.  This one is carried from males to males, so if you are a woman and you want this test, you will need to have a father, brother, grandfather or uncle take it for you.  This is a helpful test if you want to learn more about your surname and the ancestors along that line.

The Mitochondrial DNA test can be taken by men or women, but it is only carried on the mother’s line.  So if you take this, you will learn more about your mother’s mother’s mother’s (and so on’s) line.  Unless you get a very detailed test, this will mostly give you deep ancestry information.

Other types of tests were also touched on.

She gave several case studies and examples that explained how it was helpful.   Surname studies are one application.  If there are other families with your last name and you want to determine if you are related, a Y-DNA test might be helpful.  The Mitochondrial DNA test is mostly a deep ancestry test, but it may be helpful in certain cases, or if you end up having a rare haplotype.

I basically walked away from the talk wanting to take every kind of test there is!  I want to join a surname project, find a project for Russian Germans and Guernsey Island and just about every other location-based project I could qualify for.

A lot of the tests seem to be coming down in price while being more accurate, so it is making a lot of these types of things more affordable for people like me who want to test different people within my family (a Y-DNA test for the various male lineages, mtDNA tests for the various female lineages, etc).

I learned a lot of other things from the talk, and it was generally quite interesting.  Afterward I talked with some of the other people in attendance and I got to meet Megan in person.  I purchased the companion book to Who Do You Think You Are, and she signed that.

I haven’t read it, but Megan wrote a book on DNA testing for genealogy and she seems to know what she is talking about, so I would imagine it is pretty good.  I’m sure I’ll end up reading it at some point!  It is called Trace Your Roots with DNA.

Ellis Island

A few years ago I visited Ellis Island with my dad.  His grandparents and great grandparents came to the United States through Ellis Island or Castle Garden.  We were there all afternoon.  It was such a wonderful visit.  So educational and interesting.  We walked around in the actual processing center that our ancestors walked through.  We learned what it was like to come to the United States on a ship with a few suitcases and a few dollars, if that.   It was awe inspiring to understand their hardships.  I am who I am today because of what my ancestors did before me.  As a country that owes much of its character to immigration, it helps us understand the makeup of our nation, even if your ancestors came long before or after Ellis Island was the primary immigrant processing center.

Though I visited the inside of one of the main Ellis Island buildings, I did not get to see everything on Ellis Island.  Many of the buildings used as offices, dormitories, schools and hospitals are still in disrepair.  Save Ellis Island hopes to change that, but they are running out of money. They have a mission beyond just restoring buildings:

From their website:

The Ellis Island Institute and Conference Center, to be developed and managed by Save Ellis Island, will provide an ideal venue for civic discussion of issues that arise from the historic themes of Ellis Island having strong resonance with the public today, both nationally and internationally. Topics such as human migration, tolerance, cultural diversity, and public health will be brought to a broad audience through conferences, lectures, retreats, symposia, workshops, special exhibits, family programs, and themed festivals.

Please consider learning more about Save Ellis Island, and donate if you can.