@Flominator Back in the day, over three decades ago, Friedrich Wollmershäuser lectured here in Southern California at the #ImmigrantGenSoc. I wasn’t a member back then and so missed all that. But we have saved flyers from those times, and maybe even some of the handouts or transcripts….

#ImmigrantGenSoc library is moving forward in three ways:
1. Adding Germanic items to the collection
2. Purging holdings that don’t relate to our strength
3. (Finally) updating the catalog to represent what’s actually on the shelves.

We’re exchanging items with the library of the Southern California #Genealogy Soc, two miles from us, which also needs to maximize available space. Much of their Germanic stuff wasn’t seeing any usage, just as our non-Germanic and lesser US areas weren’t… Win!!

@Flominator Yes, the #ImmigrantGenSoc owns several volumes! I had a 90-year-old society member make one last visit in hopes of finding the name of her female immigrant ancestor, to Gasconade County MO on the Missouri River in 19th century. She’d searched every county record with no luck. I had recently received MO volumes, and found the husband. Couple had traveled for a baptism, and pastor THERE had recorded the woman’s name AND birthplace. These two came from nearby villages, of course!

Have completed a week of non-stop exploration of KB records of Perleberg on Archion, 1644 to early 19th c. Two families, Knüppelholtz (oder Knippelholtz) & Tieffenbrunn, dominated the Schwarz= u. Schönfärber trade there, and it was fascinating to attempt to trace them through four generations. Found that my 5th GGM was briefly md. into the former family before marrying my Gädicke GGF in 1737. Isn’t #Genealogy fun? But today I have to return to updating the #ImmigrantGenSoc catalog. Yawn!

#52Ancestors - Week 21 - Brick Wall

I must say that every brick wall I have ever encountered has been solved by going AROUND it.

I've spent years trying to find the Prussian birth town of my Pomeranians including hitting that wall over and over. By the time Friedrich Wilhelm was Fred in Oklahoma, little German was left.

The answer? In the records of the small library of the #IGS #ImmigrantGenSoc in Burbank, CA and with the help of a generous fellow genealogist name of Gordon Seyffert!

Feeling a small amount of success with my creation of Koevenig-7 for #WikiTree today, using the Eldon L. Knuth Memorial Collection of the #ImmigrantGenSoc. Eldon himself was Koevenig-6, and earlier I had created starter Koevenig bios 2 through 5 for his ancestors. But who was Koevenig-1? Having now organized Eldon’s files, it was easy to find out. And because Eldon had worked with another’s research I had good material for a sourced profile of Koevenig-1’s father. This makes it worthwhile!

Only now finished processing the KOEVENIG portion of the Eldon Knuth Collection of the #ImmigrantGenSoc for eventual creation/improvement of #WikiTree entries. 87 folders remain, organized by Ahnentafel numbers and descendant subdivisions keyed to the ancestral couples. The great advantage of working with Eldon's files is that in so many cases he has made photocopies of the original records he used, so that sourcing should be accurate. A portion of the effort involved a database for tracking.

I've just returned from the #ImmigrantGenSoc Library, where I have begun to catalog books and other additions to the Eldon Knuth Collection. The Becker geb. Bückmann mother of his adoptive mother was born in 1863 in Harpstedt, her Bückmann father was born in Bockstedt in 1823, and his father in Duveneck in 1779. Thus a significant portion of Eldon's genealogical interest lay outside of Mecklenburg and Saarland, and I'm setting aside a separate shelf, including Twistringen & Heiligenloh items.

What's going on here is, I hope, a win-win-win. #Wikitree pedigrees get extended by a generation. Eldon Knuth (Koevenig-6) and his 30 years of research are saved from the dumpster and live on to be shared with others. And I grow as a genealogist as I work in new families -- one of mine also coming from this "Griese Gegend" region of Mecklenburg where the Collection centers. My May issue of the #ImmigrantGenSoc newsletter treats this extensively! Maybe some I help join IGS?? #Genealogy

But my work didn't end there. Working with the #ImmigrantGenSoc Eldon L. Knuth Collection, I came across a "Busacker" folder and looked for #WikiTree matches on earliest generations. Bingo! Busacker-16 & wife Ahrendt-61 were a match, but #16 had no parents. So I created Busacker-20 & Toeten-1, and sourced it all. But in reading the birth record image in the file, Ahrendt's given name is clearly "different" -- not the Franz Schubert marriage registers version. Made change anyway. #Genealogy

The Toot by Martin James@heritage family about Ancestry's "click and collect" feature and its dangers (which I just boosted) is an important warning for #ImmigrantGenSoc members and others. I have cursed this feature myself, as it has resulted through the carelessness of a distant relative in Ancestry's ThruLines feature trying to tell me that a man with a similar name in Berlin to my Saxony ancestor (with a decidedly local occupation) has to be one and the same with my guy.
#Genealogy

The hard work that lies ahead for the #ImmigrantGenSoc -- chiefly for yours truly! -- is to reorganize what were correspondence files keyed to the name of another researcher to now a family or families that were the focus of the research. In this way it becomes possible for someone with a specific name/family of interest to quickly determine if our Knuth Collection might assist in extending a pedigree further, or in identifying possible DNA distant relatives. The challenge is open to all....

The motivating factor for both Dr. Knuth of the #ImmigrantGenSoc and his German colleagues was the knowledge that so many Mecklenburgers had emigrated to America, and that many of those had come to NE Iowa. There, marriages continued within families identified with the "home region." As a result it was often possible to distantly relate any one German-American in Clayton County, Iowa with another "random" German-American from the main German churches. Only the records were needed to do this!

So at the #ImmigrantGenSoc we now have church book info for browsing from, in particular, Eldena, Gorlosen, and Conow. By 2002, the Knuth-Gödecke cooperative effort had enlisted others in Germany as well (working in Schwerin archives), and our Dr. Knuth was also reading and copying filmed KB records from the West LA Family History Library to share as needed with German colleagues. Because what we have is taken from film, Archion's digitized KBs may be better. Yet what we have is free to all.

The #ImmigrantGenSoc now has something it did not have before: indexes to and photocopies of filmed German church records for one particular small district. And here I am referencing the heart of the "Griese Gegend" in what was the southwestern part of the former grandduchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. In the late '90s, Dr. Knuth began to correspond with a professional acquaintance who worked in Hamburg for Daimler-Benz Aerospace, Rolf Gödecke. Their mutual interest was in sharing filmed KB info.

For two weeks now, I've been processing for my #ImmigrantGenSoc the books and correspondence and research summaries of the late Eldon Knuth. I brought to my house 13 boxes of file folders alone -- of which I'm now only part way through the fifth box. He kept everything from his prolific correspondence, and now most of it is unneeded. I do save whatever might explain his research direction(s), the sources of his conclusions, and commentary about his published writings and his presentations.

part 3 of autobio statement of Eldon Knuth:
"...immigration, in Iowa, California and Mecklenburg. I am an active member of the Immigrant Genealogical Society, a group which emphasizes researches on German immigrants. Hence, although I am no longer fluent in Platt, I can handle Hochdeutsch quite comfortably -- and use it nearly daily. My need for Platt is only occasional."
Now the #ImmigrantGenSoc holds his research papers and his books in an Eldon L. Knuth Memorial Collection. Visits welcome

What's on my mind today is a brief autobiographical statement by the late Eldon Knuth (#Wikitree = Koevenig-6) in which he mentions his #ImmigrantGenSoc membership. It is in an email sent 10/6/02 to Robert L. Stockman in Alto, MI, author of a Plattdeutsche Wörterbuch ("Platt Düütsch") and "North Germany to North America," both of which impressed Dr. Knuth. In the email, Eldon is responding to Bob's opening line in an undated letter: I hope you're not a professor of linguistics. More to come.

It has been slightly over a month since former #ImmigrantGenSoc board member Eldon L. Knuth passed on, at age 97 at his home in Thousand Oaks, California. He was one of our #genealogy greats, having been awarded the Fritz-Reuter Medal by the Landsmannschaft Mecklenburg for his work in discovering the identity of "Jürnjakob Swehn." His profile is at #Wikitree as Knuth-294, where his obituary (just published in our society's April 2023 Newsletter) may be read.

Just now reading the words of a friend, I am impressed by his vision:

“Ein Projekt im Rahmen der Digitalen Transformation … die Zukunft gestalten ….
— Genealogie ist keine bloße Ahnenforschung, sondern (weltweite!) Verwandtenforschung….”
or, “A project within the framework of digital transformation … to shape the future ….
— genealogy is no mere ancestor research, but research for relatives (worldwide!)….”

Sounds almost like DNA research? 🤔
#Genealogy #ImmigrantGenSoc