Swiss Research Resources Part II – Where Oh Where is my Ancestor’s Record?

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In my blog posting of June 9, 2012, I wrote about my first steps in finding information on my Swiss German great great grandfather, Johannes (John) Ulrich Kreis who was born in Switzerland. I followed the advice of many genealogists to exhaust all US records before I attempted to “cross the Atlantic.”  I ended the post with the announcement that I had contacted the State Archives of the Canton of Thurgau to request information.

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While I waited for a response from the State Archives, I checked the web for more information on how to do research in Switzerland. I found a very helpful website of the Swiss Society of Genealogical Studies. The section with information for those who wish research their Swiss ancestors starts with this caveat: Doing research in Switzerland differs from researching in other countries. There are several reasons for this. Genealogical records can be stored differently depending upon when and where the record was created and whether the record was religious or civil.

City Hall, Basel, Switzerland, wikimedia.org

A date to remember is that before 1876 all birth, marriage and death records were recorded by priests/ministers. No civil record collection was in place.  So records created before 1876 were in churches but have been sent to the State Archives of each canton. The archivesonline project  gives a list of state archives for many of the cantons.

Records created after 1876 fall into the challenging category. There is no one way of organizing these records; instead each canton handles their records in their own way. Some records are in the State Archives and some are in the civil registry offices. A listing of the civil registry offices 

can be found online.

Another challenge facing researchers as they hunt for records is the Swiss idea of citizenship. The main form of citizenship in Switzerland is local. Local citizenship is where a person’s forebears were born, and that can be back to the 17^th century. It is in the local area where the records for your family will be found, no matter if later generations moved to another canton. In other words, your ancestor may have been born in one place, but his/her family records may be in another.

The third challenge to finding records are the data privacy laws (this is a rough English translation) in Switzerland. Records in the civil registry offices fall under these privacy laws. Anyone wishing to use these records must first apply for permission from the civil registry office in the target canton. The researcher must be able to demonstrate a direct relationship to the ancestor in the records.

In addition to understanding  that finding  records is challenging, it is important to realize that archival staff does not do research for you. And because the older records are in German, French, Italian or Latin and can be very difficult to read because of old handwriting styles, it is almost a given that you need to hire a professional researcher.

I received a response from the State Archives of Thurgau. Basically the information I received is what I covered above. The State Archives also included a list of some Swiss professional researchers with their contact information. And this is what really helped me. I wrote to one of the researchers who lives in Thurgau, my target canton. I was very fortunate to have found her as she had worked at the State Archives of Thurgau.

For additional help in locating professional assistance nationally or internationally, Lisa Alzo, in her webinar “Back to Your Roots:Planning a Successful Heritage Research Trip” suggests checking ethnic genealogical society sites to find researchers, country guides or translators.

In my post of November 5, 2011, I gave some suggestions on how to work with a research professional. When you work with a professional outside the US, additional factors must be considered. A potential challenge is language. Does the person offering services that could help you speak English? Unless you speak the language from the target country, you may need to hire only English speakers or use a translator. When I hired the Swiss researcher, I found that although she wrote in English and could speak English, she preferred using German to explain complex points. This worked for me as my husband is a German speaker. In addition to the suggestions that Lisa Alzo gave in her webinar, another place to find German translators is the Germanic Genealogy Society.

Logo of Western Union, wikimedia

Another factor to pay attention to in hiring people from other countries is   method of payment. You can send a wire transfer through Western Union or through your bank. Be careful to investigate either option carefully before going forward.

To summarize, the goal of this post was to provide some basic information about how and where to find birth, marriage and death records in Switzerland. Privacy laws have been enacted in Switzerland that affect the ability of the researcher to look at records created since 1900. The handwriting and language of early Swiss records present challenges to the English speaking researcher and finding a local person with experience in dealing with these documents is recommended. But if you keep these points in mind, the possibility of finding wonderful information about your Swiss ancestors makes the search most worthwhile even if there are some hurdles to overcome.

Categories: genealogy education, genealogy professional

First Steps to Prepare for a Research Trip to Chicago

The first thing I do when planning a research trip is to identify the sites (libraries, courthouses, cemeteries, etc.) I want to visit. My first step in creating a schedule of visitation is to consult the websites of each venue to find out the days open and operating hours. Instead of merely making a list of sites and operating times, I put the information on a calendar. To find a calendar that is fillable, I went to Microsoft office templates. I like the visual picture this gives me, and it serves as the first step in planning my itinerary.

 Then I want to check google maps to further block out my trip – I used this tool to see which sites are close to each other, which places are outliers and might require more travel time, etc. I can then pencil in the order in which I might visit certain sites.

My next step is to fill out a Repository Checklist for each site that I plan to visit. I found this gem of a tool, created by Brenda Leyndyke, on her blog, “Journey to the Past,” which anyone is permitted to use. For each site I jot down basic information (parking information, telephone number, types of holdings etc.) on my checklist. Here is an example of my checklist for the Newberry Library:

RESEARCH  REPOSITORY CHECKLIST REPOSITORY:  The Newberry Library
Address/Directions	60 West Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610 312-943-9090
Admission Cost	none
Contact Information	Reference and Genealogy Services Section Autumn Mather, Reference Services Librarian, Reference Team Leader mathera@newberry.org, (312) 255-3675 Grace Dumelle, Genealogy and Local History Library Assistant dumelleg@newberry.org, (312) 255-3530
Food	(see attached sheet)
Holidays Closed	Labor Day: Saturday, Sept 1 and Monday, Sept 3
Hours	Monday, Reading Rooms closed; Tuesday – Friday, open 9-5; Saturday – open 9-1 Tour the library Saturdays 10:30 am and Thursdays 3:00 pm
Parking	(See attached sheet)
Parking Costs	(See attached sheet)
Photocopy Costs	Each exposure $.40. Manuscript collections $1.00 per folder.
Photocopy Policy	Newberry staff makes all photocopies. 30 pgs only from any given volume or manuscript collection. Can’t be photocopied: newspapers, telephone directories, materials that don’t fit in confines of copier (11 by 7 maximum)
Research Restrictions	Lockers are available on the first floor to store items not allowed in Reading Rooms. (See attached sheet)
Special Information	Must obtain a Reader’s Card before using services (see attached sheet)
Website	http://www.newberry.org/visit

Used by permission of Brenda Leyndyke from her blog, “Journey to the Past” 10/2011

  If you keep these checklists by day of visit in a 3-ring binder, you will easily be able to locate pertinent details for the day’s travels. As you enjoy your breakfast, you will be very happy to have all the necessary information at your fingertips to get you where you want to be.

My next step in getting ready to visit Chicago was to search google.com for books on how/where to conduct genealogical research in this city. I found two on amazon.com that looked especially helpful and were available in inexpensive used copies in good condition.

The first book is Finding Your Chicago Ancestors by Grace DuMelle.  Ms. Dumelle is a librarian at the Newberry Library, specializing in genealogy and Chicago history. Part I of the book is organized around nine questions that you might ask yourself about your target ancestor’s life from place of birth to family members to addresses and date of death. Then for each question, Ms. DuMelle suggests types of records that might hold the answers. I’ve really taken to heart her advice on p. 15: “All of the sources for genealogical research mentioned so far are fallible.” So often, we find different dates for the same event in an ancestor’s life on different documents. This just means we have more work to do.

The second part of Finding Your Chicago Ancestors is called “Practical Advice”, and my favorite section is Chapter 14: “What to Expect at Chicago-Area Research Facilities.” Not only does Ms. DuMelle mention the top sites to research but she provides you a dress rehearsal before your visit: photographs of each facility and descriptions of holdings and services. Since the book was published in 2005, you will want to check each facility website for any changes or additions.

The second book that I found very useful is Chicago &Cook County: A Guide to Research by  Loretto Dennis Szucs who among her other qualifications worked at the National Archives -- Great Lakes Region. The main organizational rubric is by record type or record repository. Since I am researching my Irish Catholic Carney/Kearney line in Chicago, I found a particular list very helpful: “Chicago Catholic Parishes to 1875” pgs. 139-140 in Section 11 “Church and Religious Records.”

From http://www.explorechicago.org

Because Chicago was known for its neighborhoods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and still is today), it’s helpful to know the area(s) where your ancestors lived. For example, I have been told that the South Chicago Irish and the North Chicago Irish remained on their own side of the Madison Street boundary. Section 12 of Ms. Szucs book “Communities and Neighborhoods in Chicago” provides a good introduction to this subject.

So let’s go over the first steps in planning a successful research trip. Once you have mapped out the operating days and hours of the sites you plan to visit, you can start formulating an itinerary for your trip. I suggest putting a Research Repositories Checklist for each site you plan to visit as the first thing in your trip binder. The next step is reading up on the cities or towns you plan to visit. I began with the internet and found two great books on Chicago on amazon.com. Of course, a visit to the website of each research site is a must to find the most up-to-date information.

Categories: genealogy education, genealogy tools, genealogy professional, research terms

Eliminate to Isolate

Does this sound familiar? I have an ancestor, my great, great grandfather with a very common name, John Carney/Kearney, and I have found very few records that can link the right “John Carney/Kearney,” out of the many wrong ones, to me. The first record I have is my great grandmother’s, Mary Carney Kreis Lauer, second marriage license application, where she lists her father as “John Carney” and her mother as “Mary Duffy.” No other identifying facts are given such as his address, occupation, or birth date. However, in the 1900 Chicago US Census, Mary gives her parents’ birth places as Ireland.

The second, and last, record that I have is a baptism certificate for Patrick William Kearney from 1877, born to “John Kearney” and “Mary Duffy.” One clue is that Patrick was baptized in St. Patrick’s Church in Chicago. He died only two years later and was buried in Calvary Cemetery near Chicago.

For the past several months, I have been looking at addresses and occupations for “John Carneys”, using the Chicago city directories online and trying to match these to the 1870 and 1880 Chicago US census documents, using Ancestry.com (fee-based) and HeritageQuest.com (can be used for free at home through most local libraries.) My non-strategy or haphazard approach has been to take each case individually, record my findings on a separate sheet of paper and place the sheets in a file folder. In between, I work on other lines.

Just yesterday, I realized that I need to have one place (instead of a pile) to record my findings so that I can really “see” what I have. Strategy # 1 -- create a spreadsheet/chart. I started with the 1870 Chicago US Census. In the HeritageQuest.com US census search window, when you search on a name in a particular state, a page comes up with all the appearances of that name in the different counties in the state. Here is what HeritageQuest shows for Cook County:

Because no addresses are given on the 1870 census, I decided to combine the census information with the city directory addresses – strategy # 2. Since “John Carney” is such a common name, there are six listed in the 1870 directory! I faced quite a hurdle. But I decided to look at the census page to check out if there were neighbors listed who had more unusual names. Then I might find their addresses to correlate with the “John Carney” on the same census page – strategy # 3. 

With this backdoor technique, I was only able to find one address for one “John Carney” in the 1870 census – Wallace St. Even though I found some very unusual names of neighbors of different “John Carneys”, these names didn’t appear in the directory.

Although I only had one address for the “John Carneys” under investigation, I could still use the 1870 census to differentiate among the seven listed. I used the variables of age, marriage partner and name of children as eliminators. I was looking for men who were old enough (and too old) to have fathered my great grandmother in 1876. I used age 20 - 40 as the age range, which gave a birth year of 1836-1856. Using this strategy, I eliminated 3 men, leaving me 4 possibilities, but I knew the address of only one of them – Wallace St. I needed to go forward to the next census in 1880 where addresses were given.

By 1880, there were many more “John Carneys” in Chicago, 26 to be exact, but only 9 were born in Ireland. And 12 “John Carneys” appeared in the 1880 city directory. By using the same variables that I used in the 1870 elimination process, I was able to come up with 4 candidates from the census. But only one of the four target addresses appeared in the 1880 city directory –3558 Wallace St. While I could eliminate 5 of the 11 remaining listings using the census records, I was left with six to add to my list of possibilities!

But I am undaunted. I know I am closer to identifying my John Carney than I was before. And that is worth the three days of work this project took.

Categories: census, genealogy professional, genealogy education, genealogy tools, research terms

Revisit, Review, Rethink – the 3 R’s for all your genealogical research

Genealogy is an art and a science. You spend time searching out bits of information like a scientist. Then, like an artist, you arrange these bits together to tell the story of an ancestor.

If you are like me, you have many family files (electronic and paper) where you store documentation. You may also work on a couple of family lines at once (even though many genealogical gurus suggest concentrating on one line at a time). And if you have been interested in your family history for a while, your research been going on for several years.

 Over the years, we genealogists collect evidence about our ancestors’ lives, but this process often happens in dribs and drabs. We may find a birth record for someone one year and nothing else for two years. Then suddenly a death record for that person appears on a database. This is the time to revisit our family file. Take time to reread and review everything that we have found on this ancestor. We may see connections in view of the new information on the death record. As we rethink any conclusions, beliefs, theories that we have made before on this person’s life in view of this new information, several things may happen. We may discard part or all of a former belief or we may find new evidence that solidifies a theory we hoped was true.

So, the first reason for the 3 R’s is that genealogical research is an on-going process with new information showing up at anytime that is then added to the cumulative file.

The second reason to revisit, review and rethink our family information is a fact of the human brain. It seems that no matter how closely we study records that we find, we often miss some fact or another. And on the second, third or fourth reading (spread out over time), a piece of information will suddenly jump out at us that we have overlooked before. Or something we have read over and over will take on a new significance due to some new record we have found.

A big part of genealogical research is consulting online databases, such as FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com, to name two of the largest and most commonly used. These databases are not static; new additions are regularly being added to the collections. An example is the 1940 US Census that has just been released and will be added. This ever evolving nature of databases is the third reason for the 3 R’s – we need to revisit and review the genealogical record collections for each of our ancestral lines in order to be sure we don’t miss new information. We need to rethink our search parameters. Who knows what exciting family facts we can uncover. This is what happened to me recently.

I have searched Ancestry.com for information on my paternal great, great grandfather, John Kreis several times over the years. I have searched under “John Kreis” and just “Kreis” in the general search window. I have located John in several census records and in a naturalization record. I learned that he was born in Switzerland but I have not yet found what village/town he was from.

 In my post of 2/1/2012 I discussed looking at old Swiss birth records in FamilySearch.org for men named “Johannes Ulrich Kreis” (which is my John’s original German name) and discovering that all of these men were born in the Thurgau District of Switzerland. This gave me the idea that my great, great grandfather was likely born there also. But I needed more documentation. What about military records?

In the past, I searched on Ancestry under military records and found a WWI draft registration card for John’s son, Henry Kreis, who was my great grandfather, but not a card for John Kreis. Here is where the rethinking comes in. Why not try a search for a WWI draft card under a different parameter? What about widening the search for any man with the last name of Kreis and the birth place of Switzerland? Maybe I could find a cousin/uncle of my John whose records might have more detail than John's. Maybe I could find the district or even village in Switzerland where the Kreises came from.

Back to Ancestry.com. On the search tab on the first screen, I moved my mouse to “search.” On the drop-down menu, I chose “military.” At the bottom of the next screen, I clicked on “US WWI Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18.”  When the search screen came up, I put only “Kreis” in the “Last Name” field and “Switzerland” in the “Birthplace” field.

 “George Kreis” appeared at the top of a long list. He was from “Hoboken, Hudson County, New Jersey.” Now this was interesting. My John Kreis had lived in Essex County, NJ which is adjacent to Hudson. When I clicked on the name “George Kreis”, his draft card came up. His place of birth was Switzerland with a district given! It was St. Gallen. A look at a Swiss map showed St. Gallen (SG) to be the district next to Thurgau (TG). 

Permission to copy granted under Free Software Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Swiss_cantons_brown.png

I decided to do some more digging in the Ancestry Swiss databases.   This led me to the Swiss Overseas Emigration, 1910-1953 database and this is where I struck gold. I found the emigration card for George Kreis and on this document was written the Swiss village where he was born. It was Neukirch in the Thurgau District! His last place of residence before he emigrated was St. Gallen.

So now I had a person to research who shared a surname with my ancestor, who lived in the same area of NJ, and who was born in the area of Switzerland where I theorized my ancestor came from. This new and crucial information led to another discovery – a living Kreis who descended from George. I will discuss this outcome in a later post.

I had a whole new avenue to pursue because I followed the 3 R’s of genealogical research: revisit, review, and rethink. Try it and see the benefits for yourself.

Categories:  census, document types, genealogy professional

What Keeps Us Going

I know that you, like me, have met non-genealogists who ask, “How do you keep going? Why don’t you ever give up on an ancestor who seems impossible to find? How many years can you spend looking for someone?”

Well, psychology may give us the answer. My friend, Anne Gomertz from Gastonia, NC, who is a librarian, tech wizard and expert genealogist, used the term “intermittent reinforcement”  to describe what keeps us in the genealogy game. 

How I put this phenomenon in the context of genealogy is that while we go along, doing our diligent research, including:  searching for documents, analyzing  possible relationships, tracing migration trails, scrutinizing maps, searching for living relatives, to name just a few activities we do, we sometimes actually FIND something!

We may get reinforcement for our continuing research efforts in the form of identifying the parents of our target ancestor and even his full name from a record we never knew existed. This happened to me when a genealogical friend found Henry Kreis’ baptismal record in an on-line index. I ordered the microfilm from the Family History Center. The copy is barely legible, so I transcribed it:

Now I knew both Henry's and his parents' full German names. I could use his parents' names to search on passenger records. Before I was searching under "John Kreis" (since that was the only name I had) and found no one that seemed to match. But when he immigrated, he was probably using his German name.

Or we may finally locate our ancestor in a census under an entirely different name – either s/he started going by a middle name or the spelling of the surname was so far off that we had overlooked it all the hundreds of times that we looked at the document before or a newly found living relative tells us she heard a family story that Henry Kreis went to CA in 1929. With that information, I searched for "Kreis" in the 1930 Los Angeles, CA census. And I found: 

Was this my Henry using the name "John"? The birth date is close, the birth place matches and his parents birth places match.

Or a friend and fellow genealogist, sitting by you in a Family History Library looking at the 1920 Essex County, NJ census, figures out the first married name of the head of household that John Kries is living in, and you then immediately recognize her as the character witness in Henry Kreis' first divorce trial.

Or a researcher sends us an obituary with the name of a living relative who turns out to be the grand daughter by this second wife, Henrietta, of my great grandfather! 

Locating a living relative is a wonderful break for a genealogist. But, a word to the wise is important here. Genealogy is all about our relationship with our ancestors. However, a relationship with people who are no longer on this earth is quite different from a relationship with a living person.

When you meet a new person through your genealogical research, you need to follow the same rules of social interaction that govern other meetings. In our zeal to gain information from our new contact, we may be tempted to “hurry” through the initial “getting to know you” stage.

But we do the person and ourselves a disservice if we fall into this trap. Taking the time to really learn about someone can be its own reward. After all, we all yearn to “know” our ancestors. Why miss the chance to “know” our living relations?

When we take the time to build trust by exchanging personal background information and sharing knowledge we have discovered about our shared family lines, we may make discoveries, solve long standing puzzles, or just make a new friend. 

I have just started to build a relationship with J.D. As she is the granddaughter of Henry Kreis and I am his great granddaughter, we are first cousins once removed. J.D. is in her 80s still living in Essex County, NJ where Henry Kreis and his second wife lived in the early 1900s. J.D. was quite surprised to hear from me as she didn’t know I even existed.

 I first called about two weeks before Thanksgiving. It was a momentous contact for me as she is the only person I know who actually had first hand knowledge of Henry Kreis through her mother and other family members. J.D. told me several facts that I didn’t know. She is the person who told me that Henry went to California in 1929. And she reported that Henrietta divorced Henry. When I later requested the divorce record from Tom Ankner, the researcher I was working with in NJ, I saw that the circumstances of the divorce -- non-support, abandonment, and abuse – were eerily similar to the ones that caused Mary Carney, Henry’s first wife, to file for divorce.

So one of my questions had been answered by J.D.’s information. I had wondered why Henry was living apart from his wife in the 1920 census even though Henrietta identified herself as his wife on that same census. Sometimes documents can’t tell the whole story.

But J.D. had a surprise of her own for me. She casually mentioned that her mother had left her a trunk full of photos, including one of John Kreis, and his immigration papers!!

Now, I could hardly breathe. Other genealogists, the very lucky ones, have come across these “trunks” filled with artifacts. But my family’s records seemed to have disappeared. I had often complained about this to my genealogy friends.

I had to remind myself that J.D. didn’t know me and probably wouldn’t want me barging in on her and grabbing that trunk! So, I just thanked her for the information and said that I would send her the documents that I had collected about our ancestors.

But this one interaction with J.D. was sufficient to keep me going for many months to come. I would make more calls to her and hope to gain her trust.

I think of these occurrences as miracles, but I know that they come from building a genealogical community and sharing information, from regularly searching for documents, from working with professional researchers, and from never giving up!

Taken by Szani Uherkovich April 19, 2010 Crocus neapolitanus Used by permission.

Categories: genealogy professional

How to Find a Professional Researcher and What are the Rules of the Game?

Before you begin looking for someone to work with you on a family history project, you need to be sure that you have all the information that you have gathered on this subject ready to give to the researcher. This will prevent such things as a researcher sending you a document that you already have. For more information on what to share with someone who will be working with you, please see this article from Ancestry Magazine called “Hiring a Professional Genealogist”. 

Now that you have your materials prepared, the next step is to actually find a researcher. Like other things in life, one of the best ways to find a person to perform a service for you is to ask friends and neighbors whom they would recommend. But in genealogy we often need to find someone in another state or even another country. Word of mouth may not be available here.

When I began looking for outside help, I used the internet to check if there was a local genealogy society in the town/area I was interested in. That is how I found Ellen Gammon (see 10/18/11 post). Another place to look for researcher listings is public library websites. And of course you can put a request on a message board or mailing list. The article, “When to Hire a Professional Genealogist” from genealogy.com, gives a great list of national and international organizations that provide names of researchers.

When you find a person that has expertise in your target area, you are ready to begin the contracting process. This will involve some back and forth communication. First, you need to have a scope of work. What exactly do you want the researcher to look for? What is the time frame in which you want the work accomplished? What is the format of the work: are you expecting just documents or do you want a report with an analysis of findings? This part of the process is covered in more depth in an article from familysearch.com called “Hiring a Professional Researcher” (see Step 5 “Make an Agreement”). 

All of this said, research is not cut and dried. Surprising things happen along the way that may affect the course of the search. It is important to understand that you and the researcher are engaged in a journey. When the researcher digs up a document, you will react to its contents. You may learn something that causes

you to turn the search in a new direction. I asked Tom Ankner, the NJ-based researcher I introduced in my 10/18/11 post, to visit Hollywood Cemetery in Newark, Essex, NJ to find the grave of Henrietta Hausmann Williams Kreis, Henry Kreis’ second wife. He found a surprise – a Charles Hanaman (variant of Hausmann) was buried in the same grave! Who was he? By reading tombstone, Tom saw that Charles was Henrietta’s brother. This led to new questions. Where was Henry buried? Why wasn’t he buried with Henrietta?

You need to find out what the researcher charges and decide the maximum amount you want to pay. Many factors go into how much a researcher charges such as the experience of the person, their professional credentials, the market rate, the work you want done, and many more. For more information on this topic and for tips on how to control costs, please see the “How Genealogists are Paid” section of “Hiring a Professional Researcher”. 

In conclusion, as a result of working with professional researchers, I have seen my ancestor knowledge grow by leaps and bounds. With careful preparation including time spent on choosing the “right” researcher for your project, having your background materials ready to share, having a scope of work, and being open to surprising twists and turns in the journey, I believe that you will profit much from this partnership.

Categories: genealogy professional, research terms