Category: Lucky Find

Photos from family

I have not posted in a while, I’ve been crazy busy with work lately. But some updates are in order…

I am currently working in ProGen, a 12 month online study program working through the Professional Genealogy textbook. It’s like a college course on becoming a professional genealogist. I am in the group ProGen 37 as this is the 37th class that has worked through the book. So far, it is fascinating to learn about other people and what they are up to and what their goals are. This next month we will get busy with some research techniques. So glad I’m doing this!

I met with some cousins down south in San Diego a couple of weeks ago. I’ll keep them private as I didn’t ask permission to tell the public their names. They provided me with some photos from their personal collection, and I can scan them all and return the photos at a later date! When I do, I plan on including a burned CD or a USB jump drive of all the photos in a digital copy for them. That’s just a thank you to them for borrowing the photos for scanning. Some of these photos include my dad when he was a tiny tot more than 70 years ago! And photos of ancestors that died more than 100 years ago.

These cousins are technically my 2nd cousins, their mom and my dad are 1st cousins.

Building a home server to store all the photos and docs I have for genealogy, as well as all the personal and business stuff I have. That has been taking some time also. But so glad I have a home server. Extra storage for digital files, automatic backup of my wife’s and my own personal PCs, it’s great. Personal research has had to go on the back burner for now as life takes over. But I will return soon, including the photo scanning I’ve already started!

All for now, greetings to all.

Mark Cross

Lucky Find: Behrman family tree to Passenger List

My great grandmother Frieda Behrman Cross hand wrote a family tree years ago. I somehow got a copy of it. I think she may have written out the family tree from memory. She may have used an old Family Bible as a resource, but if so, no one knows where that Family Bible was, or where it is today.

Of course, there were no sources. It was just a list of families, mother and father with children, for several generations.

But the Lucky Find was this; she wrote when her father’s family immigrated to America. She was born in America, and so was a natural born US Citizen. But her father sailed to America when he was only 6 years old, when the family all came together. She wrote the year of immigration as 1857. Somehow, the family had forgotten about this nice little fact. We knew German ancestors were part of our family tree, but who came to America and when? No one knew.

Great grandma Frieda wrote the family all together, which would have been her grandparents, her father and his siblings, as coming to America in 1857. That’s the only detail I had.

I did a search online, and on ancestry I found this little gem: the family sailed to America from Germany and arrived on 3 Oct. 1857.

NYM237_179-0243

[Ancestry.com, New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 (Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010), Ancestry.com, Year: 1857; Arrival: New York, New York; Microfilm Serial: M237, 1820-1897; Microfilm Roll: Roll 179; Line: 38; List Number: 1173.]

And there we are, beginning on line 38, we get the listing of the same family that great grandma wrote in her family tree. Line 38 is Johann Behrmann, also known as John, Frieda’s grandfather, and a few lines below at the age of 6 is another Johann Behrmann, the father of Frieda, born in 1851 and so 6 years old in 1857.

They left Hanover, Germany, and their point of departure by sea was Bremen, Germany, and they arrived in New York on 3 Oct. 1857 aboard the Adonis, quite a name for a ship! With a little searching online, I can find other information about the Adonis here. A few years later, the Adonis was shipwrecked with a shipment of coal. Thankfully, my ancestors were safe in America by then! There is also an online site with a list of German immigrants and the ship they sailed on! Much more information can be found with some online searches!

Great grandma’s family tree was a little gem, that contained a Lucky Find. Her simple fact of immigration in 1857 lead to finding a passenger list, information about the ship, which verifies her fact with documented sources, and their hometown of Hanover in Germany.

I love these types of Lucky Finds!

What is a “Lucky Find” and what do I do with it?

On this site, I’ll use the term Lucky Find several times. We all have them. It could be a little fact in the family tree that great grandma wrote from memory, that everyone else in the family has forgotten about. It could be a clue in a photo, when examined closer, that leads to a big discovery. It could be connecting with a cousin who is a DNA match, and they have information about an entire branch of the family tree that you are missing.

A Lucky Find is some seemingly small clue or fact that leads you to a bigger find. It may be coincidence, or your lucky stars. It doesn’t matter what brought it to us, what matters is what we do with it once we come across it.

I have a series on this blog called Lucky Find about some of the Lucky Finds I have come across that have helped me in my research. Luck Find is a tag word, and can also be used in the search box for this site. Read them, they’re lots of fun!

And you can let me know what Lucky Finds you have also come across!