When it comes to the Olympics, I can cheer for just about any country, since I have either ancestors or relatives on every continent (though it has been a while since my Canadian relative lived for a while in Antarctica and allowed that claim to be made). My apologies to those family members who have provided me with updated information: just about every one of these web pages could be updated, if I could fit it all in, but my health is still keeping a pretty short leash on me. I did manage to write an article on "Non-Blood Relationship Searches in Family Databases" for Genealogical Computing; click here to see the downloadable program and instructions associated with my article (which was published in GC's July/Aug/Sept 2003 issue).

Contents

• Canadian Ancestorys
• Cornish/English Ancestors
• Czech Ancestors
• Dutch Ancestors
• German Ancestors
• Scots & Scots-Irish Ancestors

Beware of Ancestry.com member family trees. Click here for more information.

Canadian Ancestors

• Johnston-Butson-Keam-Gibson Canadian History 1800's Timeline: my attempt to understand how the world looked to my Canadian ancestors as they participated in the birth of a nation (related Canadian surnames in the timeline: Wilson, Cook, Fitchett)
• "From Cornwall to Canada in 1841": Begun in January 2006, this page contains the text of a 1903 account of the 1841 migration of 600 people from Cornwall to Canada, focusing on the sailing of the "Clio" from Padstow and the journey that led the Pedlar family to Oshawa, Ontario
• Descendants of Christopher and John Gibson and of Thomas Johnston - Northern Ireland to Pickering, Ontario 1840's: Begun in June 2009, this page contains my attempt to trace all the descendants and find all the living descendants of these three related men.
• The English Corners Project: Columbus, Ontario 1830-1860 Families : Begun in August 2009, to connect all the 1830-1860 families of the Columbus area that had family connections. both in Cornwall and in Canada.

Cornish/English Ancestors

• I no longer do the Butson Family Newsletter and am pleased that David Butson in Texas is now carrying it forward on the Butson.net web pages.
• "From Cornwall to Canada in 1841": Begun in January 2006, this page contains the text of a 1903 account of the 1841 migration of 600 people from Cornwall to Canada, focusing on the sailing of the "Clio" from Padstow and the journey that led the Pedlar family to Oshawa, Ontario
• The English Corners Project: Columbus, Ontario 1830-1860 Families : Begun in August 2009, to connect all the 1830-1860 families of the Columbus area that had family connections. both in Cornwall and in Canada.

Czech Ancestors

My immigrant Czech ancestors were named Koutecky, Marek, Nevole, Subert, and Wolf. Before that I have Czech ancestors named Francé, Malypeter, Liebzeit / Librcajt, Volf, Hildman and more.

• Descendants of Peter Koutecky (Petr Koutecký): Follow this link to see his 10 children and his grandchildren. (Generations after that are omitted for privacy reasons, but he has at least 3 more generations of descendants now.) Peter's descendants are spread all across the U. S., originating from Chicago, where Peter settled and is buried.
• Koutecky Families in America: This is the overall page, of which Peter's family is just one part. I have created two very significant maps and a great deal of information about the Koutecky families of the United States and Canada.

Dutch Ancestors: I have 6 Dutch immigrant ancestors -- two families, in which both parents and their child who was my ancestor came to Michigan -- Holland and Grand Rapids.

• Boezel-Bogaerts family from Noord-Brabant: Here is my web page with the Dutch birth records of two ancestors, Boezel and Bogaerts, who emigrated to Holland, Michigan. The page is useful to see how to transcribe and translate Dutch records.
  My 5th cousin Nelline Simons has an excellent web site (in Dutch) that includes my immigrant ancestors Albert Boezel and Gerdina Bogaerts (in the family of Albert's father Jan Boezel).

• Van Wijk-Feenstra family from Friesland: I have done a good deal of research, though there is still much more data, thanks to the amazing Friesland Archives online databases -- probably the best online collection anywhere of family history records.

  Here are links to my web pages:

  • Ancestors of Grietje van Wijk
  • Jannes van Wjik's Descendants in America
  • selected Culemborg records in the search for Gerrit van Wijk (born there c. 1763).

  Here are some links to pages of cousins:

  • Walter Groen and I are descended from the same Feenstra-de Jong line (4th cousins, 1 generation removed). He has an excellent web site (in Dutch) with photos at http://www.wazamar.org/gengroen/indexgen.html.
  • Jacobus Knol and I are descended from the same van Wijk line (3rd cousins, 2 generations removed). He has a wonderful web site (in Dutch) with some photos at http://jacobusknol.nl/komof/getperson.php?personID=I332&tree=Knol. (The page in the link is for our common ancestor, Jannes van Wijk: I am descended from Jannes' son Gerrit Jannes van Wijk and Jacobus Knol from Jannes' son Tjittje Jannes van Wijk.)

• Hesse-Kassel to Hannover: Here is my page on our Faupel / Vaupel and Schaumburg families, who came to America from towns only 18 miles apart in Hesse-Kassel, Germany (Grossenenglis and Niederjossa). The page also has information on ancestors from Old Schaumburg in Niedersachsen: Gelis of Deckbergen and Hasemann, Pape, Wulf, Meyer, Heine, Wilkening, Bartels, Hartman, Tielking, Auhagen, Ebeling from Beckedorf, Luedersfeld, and the surrounding area.

• Old Schaumburg: Here is a downloadable 93K ZIP file of Haseman and related Beckedorf/Luedersfeld family groups (that unzips to 1M file "Karen GF 015.gd3"). I created the file, using GreatFamily to create a graphical tree that separates out the various families and shows their multiple inter-relationships. The bulk of the information in this file comes from Karen Rowe and her outstanding web site on this region. Someday I hope to do a similar tree with the Probsthagen families from Kurt Hitzemann's outstanding web page of the Probsthegen records, since some of the families in Beckedorf/Luedersfeld came from nearby Probsthagen/Vornhagen. It turns out that the 419 people are in 8 so-far-unrelated groups, with a few stray individuals also. I have been trying to find some means of graphically showing the complex inter-relationships of these families that lived in the same area for centuries and are thus related to each other in many different ways. So far GreatFamily is the best thing I have found. You can download GreatFamily for free and then unzip this file and open it with GreatFamily to see and navigate the trees. It is not a lot of work to do, and it is worth the effort once you see the families laid out visually. FYI, GreatFamily does a fairly good default layout, but I find that it takes a couple of hours to properly untangle all the lines into a nice visual separation. So with my health limitations right now, I am not going to be doing these very often -- but the charts are worth the work, once you can see things so niceley.
  • Probsthagen: Kurt Hitzeman (we are 9th cousins) in Illinois has done a heroic job of transcribing and pulling together into families all of the Probsthagen church vital records from 1600 to 1870, a huge job that took him years of work. The most up-to-date version on the web is his text version (click here), and he also has a GEDCOM database (click here) based on an earlier version. It took me 7 years, but in 2008 I finally completed the up-to-date database of all families in Probsthagen and the surrounding towns within that parish ... and this is the "easy" work, so that you can imagine how much effort Kurt put in to do what he has done. I did this in Legacy, which I highly recommend. But the entire database is now downloadable as a GEDCOM file which can be imported into any family history software. Click here for the web page on the Families in Probsthagen GEDCOM database.

    I eventually plan to attempt to try to undertand the complex inter-relationships of the families over the centuries. I expect to use at least these different tools to do this: My own non-blood relationship search software (click here) and Legacy Family Tree's new non-blood relationship calculator (click here for Legacy) Legacy's Relationship Report (click here for Legacy) -- NOW DONE: See immediately below Great Family's complex graphical ancestral trees (click here for Great Family and see "Old Schaumburg" below) Blood-related spouses (requires that I write a visual basic program to do the analysis) #2 - Legacy's Relationship Report The Legacy Relationship Report shows everyone in the database who has a blood relationship to or is the spouse/co-parent of a blood relative of my 4th Great Grandfather, Johann Heinrich Hasemann (1782-1861). I have placed this Probsthagen Relationship Report in a PDF file (click here to see it -- you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it). Note that in the PDF file, "wife" and "husband" include unmarried co-parents as well as married husbands and wives. The results are astonishing. My 4th Great Grandfather, Johann Heinrich Hasemann (1782-1861), is blood-related to 1,696 people, 22.3% of the 7.609 people in the database. If first-order non-blood relationships (wife or husband of blood relative) are included, then 2,272 (29.9%) are related to Johann Hinrich HASEMANN. I had expected a great deal of inter-relationship, but the reality is even greater than I had expected. Once I include the non-blood relationships (#1 on my list above), I would not be surprised to find that any one person is related to at least half of the others, on average. But that will have to wait.

  • Lindhorst: After completing the Probsthagen database, I am now working on a many-year project to enter Kurt Hitzeman's "Families in Lindhorst" records into a family history database, once again using Legacy, which I highly recommend. I hope that this project will not take me until 2015, but it very well might. So I am putting interim versions of the incomplete database (exported to a GEDCOM file) which can be downloaded and imported into any family history software. Click here for the web page on the Families in Lindhorst GEDCOM database.

  • Beckedorf: On January 1, 2009, I began the effort to create a rudimentary "Families in Beckedorf" list and family history database, once again using Legacy, which I highly recommend. There are significant limitationx to this project, but at least it has begun. Click here for the web page on the Families in Beckedorf list and GEDCOM database.

• Mecklenburg-Pomerania
  • STAACK Immigrants Spreadsheet The National Archives' Access to Archival Databases (AAD) web site has a pair of connected searchable online databases called "Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Germans to the United States, created, ca. 1977 - 2002, documenting the period 1850 - 1897". You have to search the names in one database and then use the manifest numbers found in that search to find the voyage in the other database. I have searched all of the STAACK / STAAK / STACK passengers and put them into a spreadsheet and then added the voyage information to each passenger, so that all of the information is in one place. Since it is a spreadsheet, it can easily be searched or sorted. So I made a worksheet in manifest number order and another worksheet in order of date of arrival. In both cases, I added a computed field to give the estimated birth year, and I also used horizontal borders to more easily distinguish the specific voyages (on the manifest) list and year of arrival (on the arrival date list). Click here to view and/or download the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, STAACK surnames are on white background, STACK on magenta and STAAK on yellow.
  • Untangling the Chicago KONSOER / CONSOER families I am NOT a descendant of the Konsoer families of Chicago. But the immigrant mother of one of the families was Wilhelmine Caroline STAACK, sister of my ancestor Fred STAACK. They were two of ten siblings, of whom at least six came from Spantekow to Chicago. There were at least two KONSOER families in Chicago -- and they had an inter-marriage to complicate things further. So this web page is intended to present my findings on untangling these two different Chicago Konsoer families.

Scots and Scots-Irish Ancestors

My Johnston and Gray ancestors and related Gibsons were Scots-Irish who came to Ontario County, Ontario, Canada from Northern Ireland (Ulster) in the 1840's. Due to the destruction of a great many of the public records of Ireland during the violence in 1923, I have not yet been able to trace them back from Canada to records in Ireland.

The only clue that I have is that James Gibson's 8 Sep 1870 marriage record in Pickering Township (Ontario County) gives his birthplace as Armagh, Ireland (apparently about 1839-1840). I had an exhaustive search done of all surviving Armagh registers, but no record of the family was found.

I have had Y-chromosome DNA testing done, in hopes that I might be able to link up with relatives in that way, since the paper trail is gone.

Since I have no solid documentation in Northern Ireland, I also do not know when or from where they came to Ireland from Scotland.