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Making
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Find Your Family — Past and Present
| • Customer Adds 14,000 Names to His Family Tree |
| • Winning With Family Tree Maker |
Customer Adds 14,000 Names to His Family Tree
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I am Hans Van Landschoot from Belgium. In 1950, my Uncle Leon started researching our family name. For the next 30 years, he painstakingly collected names and dates on thousands of index cards. In 1980, two days before my wedding, Uncle Leon passed away and was buried the day after my wedding. He did leave me a beautiful legacy: his lifework, which has become my own passion. |
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About five years ago, I started to enter all of Uncle Leon's data onto my computer, starting with the basic version of Family Tree Maker software. This process took me about four years. Later I upgraded the Family Tree Maker software to newer versions that included several Family Archive CDs. These turned out to be very helpful in tracing unknown family members, especially in the U.S.
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Thanks to Uncle Leon, we knew that during the 1800s about 75 of our ancestors immigrated to the US and Canada for economic reasons. On several of the World Family Tree volumes our family name made a match. Using the FamilyFinder included with the Family Tree Maker software, I came across Van Landschoots mentioned in Uncle Leon's data, individuals on which he had limited information. One of them, Peter Landschoot (born in Belgium, 1823), even served in the American Civil War. That was a great surprise to me. |
Via the Internet, I traced addresses and phone numbers and started contacting all Van Landschoots in the US. I also started my own Web page using FamilyTreeMaker.com, hoping that other Van Landschoots would contact me. To my amazement, this is exactly what happened. One of the World Family Tree contributors, Donna Landschoot from Port Huron, Michigan, responded to my letter. Donna turned out to be the great-great-granddaughter of Peter Landschoot, the Civil War Servant. Donna had been doing her own genealogical research for 20 years and was using Family Tree Maker 14,000 Names on My Family Tree with Help from World Family Tree software as well. This made it easy for us to merge our findings. When we did, we had a perfect fit!
| Thanks to four other World Family Tree contributors I was able to add another 950 individuals to our family tree. In return, I sent them their Belgian ancestors all the way back to the 1600s. I now know I have family, not only on the North American continent, but also in other countries such as France and the Netherlands. By adding my research to the World Family Trees, it will be easier for other individuals to trace their roots in Belgium. |
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Meanwhile, I have become hooked on genealogy! This research holds so much mystery and intrigue and, because of the Internet, is so much easier. Every day, my family tree keeps growing. I now know of five branches including 14,000 names! Maybe next year I will travel to the US to meet some of my faraway relatives. And some day, I hope to organize an intercontinental family reunion!
Hans Van Landschoot, Belgium
Note
- All of our products are backed by our 90-day money-back guarantee. When you purchase any of our genealogy products, you have 90 days to determine if it's a valuable resource. If not, simply return it for a full refund, minus the shipping cost. It's that simple!
- Hans Van Landschoot's Web page with additional data, photos and marriage certificates.
Winning With Family Tree Maker
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How easy is it to win $10,000? Lori Schleinkofer can tell you. All Lori had to do was place an order with Genealogy.com, which automatically entered her in the sweepstakes. Lori's name was randomly drawn from thousands of entries and she won $10,000 cash! Congratulations to Lori, who recently received her $10,000 check. Here is her genealogy research story |
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Family trees are like puzzles put together piece by piece - a mystery to be solved. The mystery started for me about a year ago, soon after I got married, though I had always been interested in family roots. Several enterprising relatives had put together research on our family history that had been passed to me through the years. Being a newlywed, my interest in tracing my history back through the generations grew, for now I had my husband's history to discover, too. I wanted to create a keepsake to leave our children, a piece of their history.
I decided that I was going to format the research into a family book. I bought a scrapbook in which a page would be devoted to each family member. I would include each person's picture, any documentation I located, and a small family tree of the immediate relatives to show how they fit into the bigger tree.
I reviewed the information in my family history file, and got on the phone to interview relatives. Some were helpful and sent me tons of pictures and documents. I even located a cousin who had my great-great grandmother's immigration papers, complete with information on her travel from Russia to the United States. Her ship documents were from the "Baltic" of the White Star Line, the same company that built the Titanic. I also tracked down documents for some relatives: naturalization certificates, marriage licenses, and an official U.S. document of my great-grandfather's renunciation of his allegiance to the Czar of Russia.
| After a time, I hit a roadblock. I had contacted all of our relatives and had received the available information from them. I needed to do some individual research and that's where the Internet came into play. Genealogy.com and FamilyTreeMaker.com were very helpful in finding data on my husband's family. They have a distinctive surname, Schleinkofer, so it was easier to locate definitive information. When we searched Genealogy.com and FamilyTreeMaker.com, we came across Dave Schleinkofer and Diane Marie Shover, fellow researchers whose family trees overlapped our own. Because of them, we now have a copy of the Schleinkofer family crest and have fleshed out my husband's genealogy, back to the late 1700s in Germany. |
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At that point, I had not spent a penny on research, but I had uncovered more family information than I'd thought possible. My little scrapbook was overflowing and I needed better way to organize the information, so I bought Family Tree Maker software. Once I finish entering our data, I plan to submit it to the World Family Tree and the Web so that other researchers can access it. Right now, I have researched back to the point of U.S. entry on all tree branches. My next goals are to do more international research, as our family roots stretch throughout Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, England, and more. Family Tree Maker has been very helpful organizing my information, and the resources available on the Internet are extensive. Without the help of our relatives and the generous people we located through the Internet, we would have been stumped. Instead, we are well on our way to building a beautiful family history book that will be treasured by future generations.
Happy researching to all of you,
Lori Lee Karlin-Schleinkofer
Philadelphia, PA
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