Ancestors at My Kitchen Table

I just found two pairs of fourth-great grandparents and I’m pretty excited about it.

I didn’t know I was going to be able to do a lot of German research sitting right here in my kitchen at my laptop.

When we visited Germany in 2005, we took a side trip out of Regensburg to a village called Ensdorf, because my grandmother had always reported that her grandmother said she came from Ensdorf, Bavaria. The onion-shaped dome on the church among the hills was wonderful to see, but we found nothing there about my ancestors. There was nothing to find; it was the wrong place altogether.*

I couldn’t have foreseen when I gathered all the papers about this family line that so much would come to be available online. I thought, barring more trips to Germany, that I would have to spend long days sitting in the Salt Lake City Family History Library, poring over their vast microfilm collection at one of those towering machines, my head practically inside it to make out what the sometimes less-than-optimal film exposure was showing of old and faded pages of church registers and civil registers, land records and histories of towns. It’s hard to sit there, but when you pay for travel and parking to get there, you want to stay as long as possible to get as much out of the trip as you can. You develop a splitting headache and just keep going until the library closes and the staff comes around to check all around the furniture to be sure nobody’s hiding (I know they do, because I worked a few years at a branch of this library, and we had to be police as well as helpers!) to try to stay overnight and keep working. Genealogists can be a nutty bunch.

Yesterday I found out the microfilm reels for the town records I need to see are now digitized images and available online. Yay!

26 December 1817 document

In the records of the Catholic Church of St. Peter in Sankt Ingbert, Bayern, I found the marriage of my 3rd-great grandparents, Jacob Selgrad and Gertrude Schmelzer—in fact, I found two records, one dated 26 December 1817, and the other dated 13 January 1818. Since I can’t read the first one very well, I have to guess that it is a statement of intent, sort of like English banns. Nobody came forward and objected to the marriage, so it was formalized on the 13 January 1818 date.

The records combined gave me new information about Jacob and Gertrude, including their birth dates and birthplaces. The second record has the couple’s parents’ names clearly written; they are also in the first record, but the mothers’ names both disappear off the edge of the page due to fading ink, page decay, and camera lighting.

13 Jan 1818 marriage entry

Voila! A new generation found. Their parents are Peter Selgrad and Eva Bauer, and Ludwig Schmelzer and Elisabetha Kiefer. The fathers both signed the marriage document as witnesses or sponsors or something. (I should translate that Latin soon.)

I love that “armchair genealogy” is getting to be so relatively easy to do. (Pun intended.)

* It turns out that the great-great-grandmother was not the one from Ensdorf; it was the great-great grandfather instead, and his village was Endorf in Westfalen, not Bayern.