Those Places Thursday: Going Global

http://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/3856492622/


Being from the United States with Dutch ancestry, I was delighted to find a blogger from the Netherlands (Peter's Blog) via Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings blog a while back. It reminded me of the time I had a project that went global in the early days of computer-assisted genealogy research.

I had been working on my family line of Kiel and gotten back to Harm Hendrik Kiel (1808-1891) and his wife Hendericka J. Siegers. I did this the “old-fashioned” way by requesting copies of death certificates and researching cemetery records on-site. (See my post here about my cemetery research on the Kiel family).

In 1997, I got in touch with a gentleman via an internet posting on rootsweb.com. I lived in Florida at the time and he lived in California, clear on the other side of the coast. We corresponded several times by email as he was also descended from a Kiel family of Grand Rapids, MI. Although I felt it was very possible that we had the same family, we couldn’t quite make a connection with the information on hand. He descended from a Lammert Kiel who was born in 1821. He could also go back several more generations from there, but Harm was my earliest known Kiel ancestor. I made it a research goal to see if I could find records that connected my Harm Kiel with his Kiel ancestor.

First I had to locate records from the Netherlands. Luckily, I was able to go through the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and obtain microfilmed copies of records from the Netherlands that would assist me. These records were in Dutch, so I got online and posted a note on a newsgroup board that was dedicated to genealogy in the Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg area. I asked for help in translating the records I had. I received an offer from a transplanted Dutchwoman in South Africa. She graciously translated the records I needed regarding Harm and noted that it was pretty brave of him to start a new life in a foreign country at the age of 60 during a time when one didn’t know much about the rest of the world since there was no television, radio or internet. I had not thought about it much, but her experience of living in a foreign country provided her with a different outlook on it.

And what would this Grandfather Kiel have thought about the way I took only a few weeks to traverse the globe via technology to discover that he and Lammert Kiel were brothers and were grandsons of Steffan Jans Kijl and Renske Harms Clasens who were married 24 April 1750 in Wedde, Groningen, Netherlands. He might have thought it magical for me to have transcended both time and space to gain this knowledge. 
Location: Groningen, The Netherlands

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bannerman Family Mystery

Image
Among the many old photographs originally in my grandfather's possession, there is one that has haunted me and has remained a mystery all these years. The photograph is of three children with their names and ages typeset at the bottom of the photograph. “William, 10 years, Robert 8, and Maggie Bennerman, 4 Years Old.” Who were they? My grandfather was not able to identify them, though his memory was remarkably sharp and accurate until his death at the age of 96. I first noticed this picture and the others that my grandfather had in 1989 when I embarked on the adventure of genealogy. Since then I have traced all of my father's ancestors at least back to the early 1800s (and a lot beyond). But I never ran into the Bennerman name, anywhere. Not as ancestors of mine, not even as neighbors. I am lucky enough to even have a name to match the faces in the photograph in the first place. Early in my research, I visited the Tampa stake of the LDS church and I mentioned the Bennerman na
Read more

Friday Faces from the Past: Moorefield

Image
I am perusing through old photographs from my paternal grandparents side these days. In essence, I have been visiting Kentucky although really only in my mind. Things like this come and go in spurts. I have not looked at the research I have done on these lines in a number of years but every now and them something draws me back. What pulled me this time was an email from a gentleman who saw a photograph on my blog that was taken by Randolph in Cadiz, Kentucky (see the photo here ). This gentleman informed me that he and another local historian were doing research on this photographer who did work in Cadiz from about 1893 to 1913. He wanted to know if I would share an electronic copy of the photograph and also asked if I had anymore photographs taken by Randolph. I hunted around and found one more. This is a photograph identified by my grandfather as "My daddy's first cousin [John Willis Watts], Otis Moorefield." Otis Moorefield (1875-1958) Until I put the two tog
Read more

COG: The Love of Reading

Life is funny sometimes, wouldn’t you agree? I sit here this evening checking out my blogger dashboard and find Jasia’s post about reading for the Carnival Of Genealogy . Ah, reading! One of my absolute favorite pastimes. And Jasia wants to know my family’s history of reading? How ironic that on the third anniversary of my father’s death, I am asked that question, for he was influential in the development of my love of reading. Furthermore, I was in a training at work today and we were asked to discuss characteristics about our fathers that we would like to keep, toss, or add in reference to their values, beliefs, etc. One of the items I listed in the “keep” column was his emphasis on the importance of reading and education. My mother tells the story that my father had heard that reading to your child was a good thing, so he instructed my mother to read to me every night. (Until I was about eight, he was often away because of his Navy service.) He purchased several books for me,
Read more