Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Newly Discovered Ancestors

I was in the library in Cutchogue the other night and noticed that the computers were displaying an announcement that the library was a subscriber to Ancestory.com. I had some time to kill, so decided to give it a spin by looking up my mother’s paternal family.

My grandfather was mum on much of the family history of his father’s side of the family. Apparently they were merchants in Queens, NYC and lost their means during the Depression and his side of the family was left out in the cold for the most part.

The wonders of the internet and the US Census of 1900, 1880 and 1870 gave me the family from my great-grandfather to his great-grandfather, who was born in 1823 in a place listed as “Baden.” The trouble is that I don’t know which Baden they are referring to. I find a Baden, Austria and a German state of Baden-Wurttemberg. In either case, it definitively proves that the name is Germanic instead of Portuguese which is the typical roots for that particular surname.

I also found another name line that I will have to explore. The name of one of the wives was Maggie Tiemann, which is another German name, but I don’t know anything about it. Ah, the research can be endless.

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