Throwback Thursday | Eva Fisher

In the past week I have been on a roller coaster ride of discovering lords and ladies, kings and queens, pilgrims and patriots - my epic family tree!

Going into the process, I thought I knew a lot. Meaning I could get back to the early 1800s on my dad's side of the family and always thought my heritage was predominantly German. Not so! My mom's side of the family is almost entirely from England! There are some Swiss, French, German, Dutch, Welsh, Scottish and Irish lines there too. 

Uncovering your ancestry is really a game of clue more than anything else. You've gotta be a detective, connect the dots, check and double check connections and more. On my fan chart of 16 great great grandparents, I have birth and death dates for almost all of them. Those usually help in some shape or form with finding christening dates and that leads to parents, which is what you're always trying to find. The goal is to extend the tree as far and wide as possible. My personal goal is to chart when all of my ancestors landed in the US because I believe those records are pretty strong. I've gotten back even further to kings and queens, but I think I'd like to get better at research to confirm those connections. 

So here's where I'm at now - I'm adding in the info I have - from photographs of my grandparents and their parents, aunts and uncles to birth, christening, marriage and death dates in an attempt to fill in some of those empty branches.

a never before seen (to me!) photo of my great grandma eva.

Let me give you an example. My mom's grandma, Eva B. Fisher (pictured, Right) was the daughter of Issac Edward 'Ed' Fisher and Ora C. Miltenberger... but I only had the year of great-great granny O's birth. When a record reads something like '1871-Deceased' under a person's name, i've found that it's usually a dead end. I kept looking around and I uncovered some marriage registrations for her daughters (by searching for documents tied to her husband Isaac 'Ed' Fisher (see tip four below) but the mother of the bride came up as Lea Mittenberg for one but Ora C. Miltenberger on another. Then I found a Ella L. Cripe Miltenberger and wondered if that could somehow be her.  What was Eva's mom's maiden name (and it's spelling?) and more importantly, would that lead me to the next generation - my great-great-great grandparents? A lot of old records and hand writing can be hard to decipher, or in some cases, as I believe with the US census takers, just misheard and written down incorrectly. 

In this case I had to jump off the genealogy site and just Google it. Bingo. Not only did I find Ora Miltenberger Fisher, but I was able to confirm her husband Ed, daughters (including my great grandma Eva) The site also gave me leads on the names and birth/death years of her parents. I took that info and punched it into FamilySearch, which yielded a match in the system. What was initially a dead end now took me as far back as 1620, including early American colonists! I LOVE WHEN THAT HAPPENS!

A photo of my mom posing with her grandma at my mom's high school graduation party. Eva handmade this suit as a gift for my mom (and also taught her how to sew! And yes! I know I look like a twin of my mom! 

I cannot put into words the thrill of making these discoveries. When multiple puzzle pieces add up and open a new doorway to the past - it's just that - thrilling!! Here are my suggestions and what has helped me most as I fill in my tree!

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I hope you find tracing your family roots as thrilling as I do! So many of you have watched my Instagram stories that I've posted immediately after making some sort of discovery and have remarked how excited I am. It's true!  As I carefully trace each line I hope to share more stories with you here! If you find this information helpful - please pass this page along to anyone who could benefit! And if you see some names in my posts that look familiar - please say hello! I'd love to connect with my extended family! 

A Walk Down Memory Lane

CHECK out this old timey photo including my paternal grandfather Walter (bottom right). He was the youngest son in the family and only to inherit his father's copper locks, earning him the nickname "Red". We see a little strawberry in our blonde Beatrix! 

Last Sunday morning, I woke up to a comment on my blog that hinted to having some history on my home and the original owners. What followed were half a dozen emails back and forth with a family member (hi Marilyn!) I learned a lot about my house (the original owners had a farm stand and sold apples and pears! We're growing apples and pears!!!) and piqued my interest in getting more solid details. 

My first hit was a 1940 census report from my street with a lot of names I recognize! Both of my next door neighbor's parents are on it! People stay put around here! The land we live on was in the same family back to 1870 from what I've uncovered. Such a gift to find this information as we near the one year anniversary of buying our home. We love this piece of earth so so much. But I digress! 

As for my family, I've traced my ancestry to early American colonists in some lines and as far back as 1544 in Switzerland in others (I only learned of my Swiss ancestry in the past few years!) The records are absolutely amazing! I've done this kind of research before but this time around I am yielding so much more. I'm using the LDS Family Search site and it's really good! And free! 

Like I said, I want to go even further in depth with this and I will but I'm so excited I had to put post something now. Maybe for Mother's Day you take a little time with your own moms to work on your family tree or share some stories of your grandmothers this weekend. History is so precious - and by that I mean the tales of the people who came before us - not just the family lines and birth dates.

Speaking of history and Mother's Day, last week Adam gave me the surprise of my life... we're seeing Hamilton!! In less than a month! Since I started listening to the soundtrack I have wanted to get more background so I'm reading the epic 818 page whopper by Ron Chernow. And it's the little stories, the many many little stories that color his life. 

So, long story short, I've assigned myself some homework and I want to record it here. I've been spending a lot less time on social media (guys... try it!) and spending more of my life getting in the faces of the people I love. It's awesome. Anyways, I'm going to flesh out my family tree, get some stories to go with it, organize my photos and reach out to family members for more! I've received some tips among the historians and researchers who follow my little blog and would love for more in the comments!  

Thanks guys and Happy Mother's Day to all you mamas out there! 

Top 10 Tips for Researching Your Genealogy and Family Tree

Above, the wedding party from my great grandparents Mary Katherine Stoppenhagen and Charles Werling. See more about them here!

1. Call Your Parents and ask for birthdays, marriage dates, deaths of any grandparent, aunt or uncle they can remember. These details will help you connect to the huge amount of established trees and fill in your own more quickly. 

2. Check Your Spelling! I've found that many of my German and Dutch ancestors simplified or Americanized their names after emigrating to the States. Schroeder could be Schröder or Roush could be Roesch. If you cross check a name and birthday, along with some siblings or parents, you can confirm that name change and potentially find older generations using the earlier spelling.

3. Search Nicknames or Common Names. One ancestor I had trouble with is listed alternatively as Sarah and Sally/Sallie on census records. I believe it's the same person because she has a constant birthday, listed with same husband and same children over the course of decades.  I ended up merging two different entries for the same person and I'm still working on tracking down her parents. It's not uncommon for people to go by their middle names either, so check those!

4. Use a Round About. If you're searching for someone and getting no leads, try looking up someone else in the family you've confirmed - a child or spouse, for example. Marriage licenses are great because a lot of them require the applicants to list their parents, including the mother's maiden name. 

5. Google It. In my example above I was only certain of Ora's birth and death dates when I found her headstone. She was buried near her parents, so I was able to add them into the chart (and by add I mean I matched with existing data) and a whole new branch of my tree became available. The site that's helped me a lot FindAGrave.com

6. Cross Check Ages. It took a couple of different census records for me to uncover a distant grandmother had her child at 17. Presumably no father was involved because she lived with her parents and her son, and it appears the child took his mother's last name instead of the father. But how this was entered into the tree was misleading (and a dead end!) It took me a census record listing parents, daughter and grandson (with their ages listed right next to their names) to have the aha moment. She later married and had children with another man which complicated things a bit during my searches!

7. Search with Less Information. Sometimes you just have the wrong info and if you omit that from your search, you can sometimes find the right info. Try searching without a spouse's name attached, or no birth year (especially if you're really not sure)

8. Take Notes While You Work. Because I bounce around a lot on my browser, I keep the name of the person I'm working on right in front of me written down with any dates I might want to cross check. It's also really fun to yell out BINGO! or write it next to a big breakthrough!

9. Get excited... but not too excited. If you're connected to someone who might have a really extensive family tree, say the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Joseph Smith (we share the same Mayflower ancestor - Elizabeth TIlley Howland), then your chart is basically going to take you all the way back to the Bible. (FamilySearch is a free service provided by the LDS) I stopped clicking on ancestors when I got to Jesus times (literally.. BC!) because I don't have the ability to verify that info... I'm really not sure that's even possible. So get excited, especially for all of those written records that confirm things, but don't get crazy about finding your way back to Noah or Adam and Eve (unless you want to! You do you!)

10. Take a Break. Sometimes you'll feel like you're just going in circles or frustrated with missing info. Or maybe it's already 2am and you're wondering how you stayed up so late (because it's SO FUN! That's why!) Sometimes it just pays to take a break and come back to it with fresh eyes.

BONUS: Read the actual records - many of them have been indexed so they're easy to search and read, but if you're able to decipher the handwriting or scanning quality, check out the original document! I've had to download some and pop them into Photoshop to adjust the balance/make them legible, but it's worth it! I always knew Eva was a wonderful seamstresses and worked as a cake decorator but in this record I learned at age 18 she was a telephone operator! 

Finally, it cannot go without saying how grateful I am for all of the researchers, my distant cousins and family members, whom I'll probably never know, who have updated and shared this information and connected the dots. I've probably solved two or three mysteries, but someone (many people!) set me up for success without even knowing it.  I'm doing my part by adding photos and documents (like the ones in this post!) too in hopes of weaving a tapestry of my family history.