Re: Looking for Grandfathers family
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In reply to:
Re: Looking for Grandfathers family
George Brooks 1/18/10
Hi George,
Happy New Year!Hope all is well.I completely understand your frustration when you find conflicting info like that.Usually when I get one question answered, I find two new ones!
I’m pretty confident we’ve got the correct George Brooks connected to the Blumenstetters.I’d like to give you guest access to my Ancestry.com family tree, I’ll do it in a few minutes so look for the email.This way you can see first hand the information I’ve gathered and determine for yourself if we’re going in the right direction.
I’ll outline what findings I have and we can compare them to what you have to see if everything jives.Please understand that this is far from exact science.We deal with miss-spellings, miss-interpretations, and general mistakes that create a few records that look like they belong together but with subtle differences.
I’ve seen the Mathilda Messner / Karl Blumenstetter records before and have come to accept that they are our people.
First, the marriage certificate that I have for Mathilda and Charles shows Mathilda’s Maiden name as Mosfner.Marriage records are usually the cornerstone of research since it’s usually as accurate and clear as possible.More importantly, it shows Charles as Chas on the first page and Carl on the second page.I’ve gone to some genealogy group meetings at libraries and book stores.I learned there that it’s not uncommon for first names to be different in different locations.That’s why we see Charles = Chas = Carl.It also means that Carl can easily become Karl through interpretation or misspelling by people writing the records.
Also, all census records I have for Charles, Mathilda, George and the other Blumenstetters generally match the dates and locations we’re looking at.George definitely lived in the same location as the other Blumenstetters based on the 1900 census record.His dates line up, meaning the date of birth matches the other records we have for him and the date of birth records for Charles and Mathilda on the 1900 census match other records including the marriage license.So although Blumenstetter is missing a T and some of the childrens names are shortened/wrong (Anthony = Thomas and Madeline = Lena) all the other records line up so the probability is pretty high that it’s our people.
Also, most of George’s other records, Passport application, marriage record and census data matches what I have for him and says the probability he’s our guy is pretty high.You can see all this data first hand on Ancestry.com, it’s pretty impressive.
Personally, after seeing his picture, there’s no doubt in my mind he’s our guy.The Blumenstetters of that generation had some pretty common features, ears, hairline, smile that make them pretty similar.I’d be surprised if we’re barking up the wrong tree!
I’d love to learn more about George Brooks during his England period.If your sister has any information or would like to see the ancestry.com tree, I’d be happy to share.Hope this helped and I’d love to continue growing the tree with information we all find that would shed light on our past.Thanks for the time and let me know what you think.
- Dave