Genealogy Fascination Part 1
The Start
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been curious of my family heritage. I think it has to do with my love for history and culture in general. I’ve always enjoyed reading about obscure historical events or people, or visiting historical places, even the most minute! Reading placards with information of historical events and people that probably never thought their legacy would last is intriguing, to say the least.
To that end, I’ve always wanted to map my family history, part of me wishing to stumble upon a gilded lineage full of notable people. I didn’t foresee the rabbit hole I would soon fall into to…
Initial Family Information and the Epiphany
Growing up, I was always told that our family emigrated from Germany in the late 1800’s. Hell, our family name is Schue, so it fit to an extent. I had always thought that perhaps our family name had changed at some point in history, as the family name Schue is fairly rare. I didn’t have much other information to go off of besides the name of my grandparents, so with these few pieces in tow, I set out to begin researching potential information sources to begin.
I began with simple Google searches for sources of historical documentation within the United States, as I figured tracing the US line back as far as possible should be step one. I needed to know who my ancestors were here in order to begin tracing them back to Europe. Through my research, and much to my surprise, it seemed that Ancestry.com was one of the most definitive sources for information, as they had direct access to primary census and immigration data. They also crawled numerous newspaper sites, so between all of this, it seemed like a good start to the search. I setup my Ancestry.com account and began searching, starting with my grandfathers name.
Within a few hours, I was able to find census data for family members going back 3 generations, but ran into my first initial roadblock. The patriarch of the third generation had no credible documentation and I couldn’t figure out why. This is where my first “skill” came into play: partial name matches. It turns out that mistakes can be made when documents, such as a census, are completed by hand. Using partial name matches, I was able to find the patriarch and confirmed an earlier suspicion of mine: the family name was either changed intentionally or recorded incorrectly at some point! The patriarch’s last name was Schuh prior to immigration, but was misspelled numerous ways on numerous documents for some reason. Armed with this name, I was able to find his original immigration document to the US and complete the domestic lineage of family Schuh/Schue.
More to come in the next post…