One of my favorite online resources for French records is Archives de la Moselle. Many of my Schmitt ancestors hail from the village of Hellimer in Moselle, Lorraine, France. Records for Hellimer are free (!) and available online from 1737 to 1791. When I want to see records from the period after 1791, I visit my local Family History Center. Which is…
Reading vital records written in a foreign language can be challenging. But we genealogists quickly become proficient at locating family names even among words that are otherwise illegible. I’ll come back to this record later to really transcribe and translate it. But I wanted to share it with you today, since Pierre Ferdinand Schmitt was…
My French 4th great-grandparents were married on this day 210 years ago. This is their marriage record, written in Hellimer, Moselle, Lorraine, France on the 16th of January 1804. Transcription and translation are below. “Mariage de François Schmitt et de Elisabeth Grosse Du vingt cinq Nivôse an Douze de la République, acte de mariage de François Schmitt cultivateur…
How many names are in your tree? How far back have you gone? If you’ve ever told anybody that you are climbing your family tree, chances are you’ve heard these questions more than once. The answer I’d like to give? Ugh. Why? Because I’m not a collector of names and dates; I collect stories. Some…
Ah, wedded bliss. Not always the case in my family tree: My great-grandmother divorced her first husband and gave away their three children. A few years later Esther Ingeborg CLARIN married Charles Fredrick OTTO in Chicago, Cook, Illinois. I located their 10 Sept 1918 marriage certificate on familysearch.org where Esther’s name was indexed as Esther Kerien Wamgel…
Happy August birthday to my incredibly wonderful husband and to our beautiful granddaughter, to my sister, my paternal grandfather, my uncle Bob, my cousin Bill, my grand-uncle Bud, and my first cousin once removed Faith. Birthdays among my (possibly) German Clarkes: A second great grand-aunt Zora E CLARKE was born in Maryland on the 19th of August…
where2look4ancestors 