My Trails into the Past

I am working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I’m looking forward to writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. I had to deal with a foreign language early in my genealogy research because my father’s paternal side is German. My father’s maternal side is Irish, but so far those records have been in English. I studied German four years in high school and four quarters in college, so I wasn’t afraid to research in German records. Though once I found them, I didn’t realize the lettering would be so difficult to read! I lucked out in knowing where to look in German records. The marriage between my great-grandparents, Johan Anton Hork and Julia Ann Sievert, gave the birthplace of Johan Anton as Oberhundem, Kreis (county) Olpe, Westfalen. It is important to know the name of the village in order to find local records. The F...

I have recently returned from a twelve day vacation to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, Mitchell, South Dakota, and Stanton-Red Oak, Iowa. Conference In Minneapolis, I attended the three-day International Germanic Genealogy Conference hosted by the local society, Germanic Genealogy Society. This was the first conference and in 2019, our local society, Sacramento German Genealogy Society, will be the hosts! I met lots of genealogists from around the country and the world. Especially exciting was meeting in person, Ursula Krause from Berlin. Some of the classes I attended: “Finding Your Ancestors in German Directories” – Ursula C. Krause “World War I Era U.S. Alien Registrations” – Paula Stuart-Warren “Meyers Orts Gazetteer” – Fritz Juengling “Die Pfalz: Understanding and Researching in Palatine Records” – Richard Haberstroh “Baltimore: The Golden Door for Immigrants” – Debra A Hoffman “Pioneers and Colonists: Background of Germans in Eastern Europe” – James Beidler The conf...