Adventures in Genealogy ~ part 2

After my boost in confidence and excitement of actually finding family members while at the history center, I came home and tried it on my own.  I sat down at my computer and didn't get very far when I realized that in order to see a bunch of documents I needed an account with ancestry.  Bug!  Then I realized that there really was something magic about the history center because I couldn't make any progress for 3 days.  I kept looking up the same documents over and over and not finding any new ones or any new leads.  Some of my ancestors seemed to drop from outer space with no link to them.  I did make a very important discovery in those fruitless days however.  I realized that the actual census documents contained much more information than I was looking for at first.  I was finding other relatives that lived on the same street further down the document or in-laws living down the street.  Jackpot.  I also started making sure that I marked down on my documentation somewhere occupations.  I found that a lot of my relatives worked in the same places or same fields as each other or that is how spouses met etc..  It really does tell a lot about a person and helps you to link people that may not have a common relative at the time, but you put them aside because they had the same occupation in the same town so somewhere down the line they are most likely related.

I was feeling pretty deflated at my lack of success and decided to just wait until I could get back to the magic at the HC.  I was going to color my hair before an appointment that I had, but before I made my way up the stairs I had a thought hit me.  I had been looking for any traces of a relative by the name of Tobias Witman.  I couldn't find anything.  When you do a search it comes up with a couple of different spelling options that you can browse through but I could only find a couple of documents and no parents or siblings.  Well, this thought hit me to try Toby Whitman.  So when I walked past the office I decided to sit down and try it.  I was going to limit my time on this probable dead end, but give it one last try.  I included the h in the last name knowing that plenty of people spelled my name incorrectly and that at some point we probably dropped the "h."  Well this opened a few new things.  The other thing that gave me tons of information is that from the new search I was able to find out the death of his Son who is my grandfather so I used that to refine a google search and came up with tons of indexed obituaries with that family line.  From this site I was also able to find lots of my great grandmothers line as well.  I have no idea how I ended up on this site because all the obituaries were from PA even though I hadn't included that in my search.  What really blew my mind was to find out that it was a really small community in this area and there were a few families in my line that just kept marrying each other.  Now I'm trying to sift through to see if all of them fit, if they are cousins, or just exactly how it all shakes out.  Her line was one were they had 11 or so kids and the husbands married a couple of times probably due to the death of their spouse.  It is an intricate puzzle for sure.  The obituaries also gave lots of back stories and some cool information.  I haven't made the connection yet to one of the Witmans that shot his own father in the stomach over an altercation in 1942.

Needless to say my obsession was rekindled with a little success.  The work is daunting, lonely and extremely time consuming.  I find myself getting annoyed that my kids want dinner or I need to stop to run an errand.  Don't be surprised if in a couple of years I am in some dark hobbit cave with stacks of potential family names and my highlighter.  My kids think I am a weirdo whenever I tell them, "hey guess what cool thing I learned today."  It is usually met with an eye roll and a you're weird.  My desk looks like an explosion went off and I have folders and folders of information that I can connect directly to me and other things that I am waiting for a connection to be made.  The nice thing about my family is that once the lines came over from Germany and landed in PA generations stayed put and didn't move.  My father and his 2 brothers seem to be the only ones who left PA.  My next thing to overcome is focusing on one line at a time instead of going off in too many directions at once.  I found Witmans in Germany spelled a couple of different ways dating back to the 1600's, but the records are sparse with information.  I haven't even started my Moms line yet. Oi vey!

I have a couple of favorite must haves for taking on such a work.  My mechanical pencil.  Get a good one.  It keeps a nice sharp point that makes writing small very easy.  I also love sharpies for all the extra information that I write down on census copies that I print out, especially when I find other relatives that I wasn't specifically looking for on the same document.  I use different colors so that I can add other years to it.  For example if my original is a 1900 census I add the 1910 information to the same sheet in a different color and then add another color for the 1920 census.  This helps me cut down on printing reams and reams of paper.  I also can't live without my highlighter.  It is another must have.  You need a nice big stack of blank pedigree charts and family group records.  If you get ahold of 1 of each, just make your own copies.  You need a 3 ring binder, some sheet protectors and some file folders and of course a computer.  Now you can be a crazy genealogy hobbit too :0)