Intro | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Resources
A Postscript

What's a GEDCOM and how do I use it? RootsWeb is an online community of genealogists -- newby-to-expert and almost all volunteer-run with an amazing amount of free information and networking available. RootsWeb's World Connect Project lets genealogists share their family tree data. The Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS; aka Mormons) runs FamilySearch.Org, a set of online resources and databases to help you find genealogical records. Social Security Death Index: when you die, and if a Social Security death benefit is paid in your name to someone, your name and some additional information get added to this Index. There's an easy form for requesting SS applications from the Social Security Administration, AND RootsWeb's version of this database allows researchers to add "Post-ems" -- little notes. I used this feature and as a result found distant cousins! If I can, you can decipher German script, by Edna Bentz German Genealogy Research Companion, by Shirley J. Riemer Lorelei Press ISBN: 0-9656761-0-2

What we knew before the trip First off, I should say that our primary reason for travelling to Germany this spring was to attend the wedding of Wolfram & Kirsten, a young couple that had lived with us in the States for a year while he studied law and she studied public relations. We (I) took this opportunity to expand the trip across the pond to do some digging into my German roots. I add the parenthetical "I" because while this was a vacation for both my husband and myself, I’m the genealogy nut in the house, and my husband has been a somewhat bemused (and patient and loving) supporter. My two-year old genealogical research efforts have relied primarily on initial information compiled by my father and especially on my second cousin Darcy who has devoted much of the last few years familiarizing herself with LDS microfilm and microfilmed census records, and teaching herself the old German script. She performs what I call the hard-core research—spending hours pouring over often badly photographed "ancient" handwriting. I, on the other hand, have subscribed to the fly-fishing approach mostly because it suits my schedule and temperament. I keep putting queries out onto the Internet and then seeing what comes back. Darcy has been significantly more successful than I at gleaning true facts, but I must say that I have achieved some surprising and often lovely success connecting with distant and heretofore unknown cousins who found a "post-em" I left on the SSDI, or who stumbled across my GEDCOM on RootsWeb’s WorldConnect project. One of these connections revealed three previously unknown generations on my mother’s side of the family. Yet while Internet research can be delightfully successful at times, it is still mostly hit-or-miss. The hits are wonderful when they happen, but there’s a lot of time in between them, and you never know when they will happen.

None of the living relatives in the Smith line had heard of either one of these two, even though Philipp Leonhard Schmidt lived down the street from his mother until her death in 1891. I only learned this recently by exploring the 1890 Buffalo City directory and mapping out addresses of different relatives. [Link to a side story on how I did this. And/or ancestry.com article on city directories.]

Darcy then managed to find Elisabetha’s & Leonhard’s marriage record (Buffalo 1848) as well as their death records, from which we learned their birth dates. Leonhard (b. 1818) was from "Baden" and Elisabetha (b. 1820) from "Rheinpfalz, Bayern."