I'm back! It's been a busy, sometimes insane, several years since my last blog entry here. I'm still teaching in the Genealogy Studies Program at Boston University's Center for Professional Education, but I'm also focusing on completing and writing up research on my own ancestors.
One of my current projects is documenting the parents of my immigrant great-great-grandfather Jacob Knieper of Illerich, Germany, and Maple Grove Township in Saginaw County, Michigan. Most online trees assign the wrong parents to Jacob, so I decided to set the record straight. I'll be writing more about that in future entries here, so watch this space. 😉
Illerich is one of a cluster of villages set back from the Moselle River by maybe a couple of miles. The records of the Catholic churches there have been microfilmed and now are digitized and can be viewed on FamilySearch.org; search the site's catalog by town name to view them. In addition to parish records, there's a register of families, a familienbuch, compiled from records of Illerich and some of the other villages. This is the first time I've had the pleasure of drawing on this type of resource for my own family's history.
As I first started working in the familienbuch, I made myself a reference sheet (by the way, if your German is better than mine and you see any errors in my labels here, let me know!):
Family of Jakob Krämer and A[nna] Maria Ürschfeld of Illerich, my 4 x great-grandparents
Source: Pfarrkirche St. Vinzenz (Saint Vincent Catholic Parish, Illerich, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany), “Familien-Buch der Pfarrei Illerich beginnend mit dem Jahre 1613,” page 193, family of Jakob Krämer and A[nna] Maria Ürschfeld; FHL microfilm 583680; image viewed 13 Dec. 2017 on https://www.familysearch.org/, access via Search > Catalog, search by microfilm number; image 103.
Sometimes my projects end up on a back burner for a while, and reference sheets ("cheat sheets") save me time when I pick up the work again.
Because the information in this familienbuch is compiled from other sources, I hunt down the original entries (for example, baptismal records) and double-check names and dates and places and relationships. Even careful record-keepers can get confused when there are multiple people of about the same age with the same name.
The familienbuch entry above notes that Jacob and Anna Maria married on 31 October 1797. Here's the entry in the Illerich Roman Catholic parish marriage records. Spelling of their surnames varies in the records!
Source: Pfarrkirche St. Vinzenz (Saint Vincent Catholic Parish, Illerich, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany), marriage register 1848–1926, p. 286, Jacobus Kremer and Anna Maria Urschfeld; FHL microfilm 583680; image viewed 23 Dec. 2017 on https://www.familysearch.org/, access via Search > Catalog, search by microfilm number; image 152.
