Liesel's Family History Finds

Welcome back! I'm excited to share this breakthrough in my search for my Polish ancestors' town(s) of origin in Poland. I found them! The Novaks (Nowaks)! The Siedlec clue was what really broke it all open (see Series Post #3 for those details). But of course there are quite a few Siedlec/Siedlce towns in Poland. Most are in the state of Poznan (Posen). I wasn't sure to which parish Siedlec would have belonged, and there are hundreds or thousands of pages of church books to search if you can't narrow it to a specific parish and year. Thankfully, though, there is an amazing searchable resource of transcribed marriages, called the Poznan Project. It's a massive volunteer effort to transcribe all of the civil and church marriage records for the region of Posen/Poznan from 1800-1899. Because Nowak is such a common Polish surname, it's very hard to confirm the identity of a single person based solely on a birth record unless you have a lot of corroborating details. H

Hello and welcome back!  I just made what I think may be a breakthrough in identifying Mary Novak's town of origin in Poland. If you haven't read the previous 2 posts in the series, I would recommend starting there for the background. I finally found the ship's manifest listing Bruno Novak and his wife and children, and with extensive FAN Club (friends, associates and neighbors) research was able to confirm that it is, in fact, the correct family. On that ship's manifest it says the town of most recent residence prior to immigration was . . . wait for it . . . sort of illegible. 😂 But, with some help from the Meyers Gazetteer and creative asterisk wild card searching, plus analyzing the other examples of handwriting by the same recorder on that page, I am fairly confident that the town name was: Siedlec, in Posen, Prussian Poland. Ship's Manifest for the Noordam (sp?), sailing from Rotterdam to New York City in April 1905. You may remember that the only other docum

It's finally here! April 1, 2022 - Release day for the 1950 U.S. Census by the National Archives. Lots of us who do genealogy and family history are pretty excited, myself included. One of the reasons I've been looking forward to this census is because my grandma, (Arlene) Dolores Vrana, was missing on the 1940 census. Her whole family is listed, right where they should be, and even though she would have been 5 years old, she wasn't recorded. So today, I used the NARA website:  https://1950census.archives.gov/ to try to find her. I thought she lived in Carmichaels, Greene County, Pennsylvania. Carmichaels is a pretty small town, and the enumeration district maps for 1950 showed that the whole town was included in one district. I went straight to that file, and paged through every sheet. And...no Vranas. I was pretty disappointed, but NARA has a rudimentary index available, which was created with computer technology.  Other sites (Ancestry/FamilySearch) are partnering to us

Welcome back! I've recently spent time researching my Holloway direct-line ancestors, who were Quakers in America back to Colonial times. My great-grandfather, Basil Russell Holloway, was a United Brethren Church minister and a farmer in Henry County and Huntington, Indiana. But he came from a long line of Quaker ancestors, stretching back into Ohio, Virginia, and New Jersey. Quaker records are detailed, many are transcribed and digitized, and because Quakers recorded each time a person or family moved from one "meeting" to another, it can be easier to follow families across the country through time than with some other groups.  Here's the line I've confirmed so far for the Holloways (in green, with other lines and spouses in blue): From the East to Ohio George Holloway was born in Burlington, New Jersey in the early 1700s. George and his wife, Ruth Wood, had a son named Asa Holloway, who married Abigail Wright and eventually moved to Virginia, participating in th

Welcome back! Today I'm sharing a little bit of what I know about one of my earliest Pennsylvania ancestors, my 3rd-great-grandfather, George Perl (Pirl). George Perl, my 3rd-great-grandfather on my mother's side, was born in 1806 in Salt Lick Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. According to later census records, both of his parents were also born in Pennsylvania, but I have never been able to find any records revealing their names. George Perl married Elizabeth Grim (maiden name tentative) and they had nine children. George was a farmer, and by 1872 owned a farm in Springfield Township, as shown on this map (as with many families, the surname spelling changed from record to record over the years, eventually settling firmly on Pirl, but here is it shown as "Pearl"). I'm confident this is the correct family, because the neighbors' names match names found in the censuses as well. Map accessed from US Gen Web Archives:  springfd.jpg (1800×1500) (usgwarchives.