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. But there are so many different lines that it is impossible for me to keep up to date with every one of them. But gradually, all that I have gathered is being incorporated into these pages and my trees on Ancestry.com which are my master copies.

Contents

• Canadian Ancestors
• Cornish and English Ancestors
• Czech Ancestors
• Dutch Ancestors
• German Ancestors
• Scottish & Scots-Irish Ancestors
• My children's Mexican Ancestors
• Genealogical Computing Topics

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

• 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 Search for Sarah, Wife of Henry Butson: Finding Sarah's maiden name and family is one of the two toughest nuts that I have yet to crack in my family history research. This web page summarizes what I know about her and what records I have researched.
• 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.
• St. Blazey Families - I am gradually working my way through the 1813-1835 (plus or minus a few years) parish registers of St. Blazey, Cornwall, putting them into a database/tree. See the Cornwall section below for the status or click the link to go to the web page about the project. Many of these same families also appear in my English Corners Project (see above).

• Early Butson Research -- The link is to the introductory page. These are a group of web pages that combine the research of John Butson and Wesley Johnston on early Butson family history. (This is all new as of 16 April 2011.)
• 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.
• St. Blazey Families - I am gradually working my way through the 1813-1835 (plus or minus a few years) parish registers of St. Blazey, Cornwall, putting them into a database/tree. The baptisms book (3 Jan 1813 - 1 Dec 1829) and marriage book (12 Apr 1813 - 25 Oct 1834) are now completed. The burial book is completed for 1813-1830 and still in progress. There are thus far 3,801 people in 914 families. Many of these same families also appear in my English Corners Project (see above under Canada).

• Koutecky - Mine came from Modrejovice (Rakovník) but there is much more here.
  • 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.
• Nevole - Mine came from Čáslav
  • Nevole Families of Čáslav, Bohemia My Nevole ancestors and their relatives -- includes link to page of other Čáslav area families that came to America
  • Čáslav to America - an incomplete list of links to other immigrants to the US who came from Čáslav
• Marek and Wolf - Marek origin not yet known; Wolf from Luzce (5 miles north of Karlstejn castle)
  • Josef Marek & Marie Wolf Origins - I know that Marie was born in Luzce, but I do not yet know where Josef was from. This page compiles what I have found about them and their children in Bohemia.
  • The Very Black Sheep of our Marek Family - Josef Marek's namesake grandson, the first child of his son Emil, viciously and brutally beat and tortured 78-year-old Joseph Osborne to death on October 20, 1915, at 78th and Woodlawn. And the younger Joseph was only 16 when he did this.
  • Pre-1900 Czech Marek families of Chicago - I am descended from Josef Marek (c 1820-30 Dec 1890) and Marie Wolf (c 1826-27 Apr 1896). There were many Marek families in Chicago before 1900, and this page is an attempt to find the connections that may have existed between them.
• Subrt/Subert - Mine came from Trebiz to Hresice to Msecke Zehrovice
  • (no web pages yet)
• Chicago's Grand Crossing Czech Community - This will be a reconstruction of the Czech community in Chicago's Grand Crossing neighborhood (key cross streets were 79th and Cottage Grove) that began in the 1890's. Work is still in the early stages, but there is much of value already.
• My web page on where and how to find Czech (and Moravian) church records on the web.

• 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-Pommerania
  • STAACK - The 10 siblings from Spantekow and Rebelow to Chicago and area Click here for my entry on the Ancestry.com STAACK board about my ancestor Fred Staack and his nine siblings. All were baptized at the parish church at Spantekow, in what is now the far northeast corner of Germany. I have traced almost all of them to Chicago and to Iroquois County, south of Chicago. And I was very surprised to find that the last two, my Fred and his sister Bertha, were brought to Chicago by their widowed mother, who I had not previously known had come to Chicago (I still don't know anything about her life and death in Chicago). I may eventually have my own web page on them, but for now I am using Ancestry's board. Be sure to read the updates and not just the original message, since I found more information after posting the original message.
  • 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.
  • Kreis Anklam Church Record Images This is a web page that grew out of my own research trip to Greifswald and out of the Kreis Anklam Cousins Yahoo! Group, as a way of pooling the images that we have of records from Kreis Anklam churches.
  • Spantekow and Rebelow Videos On June 29, 2011, I visited Rebelow and Spantekow and made three videos. Click on the links below to see them (MP4 files). These are all large files, as indicated.
    • Driving through Rebelow (677MB): It was like going back in a time machine. The town does not seem to have changed much since they left in the 1880's.
    • Rebelow Cemetery Grave Stones (532MB): I am not sure when Rebelow came to have its own church, maybe about 1900. It is my understanding that they all went to the church in Spantekow. Rather than take still photos of each stone, it was faster to just walk through the cemetery with my flip video camera, though some stones may be harder to read. It was a balance of time and completeness and accuracy.
    • Spantekow Cemetery Grave Stones (1.2GB): The Spantekow cemetery is much larger than the Rebelow cemetery. (We were also able to go into the church, where there are three burial slabs in the aisle floor. I have still photos of those which I will eventually post.
  • 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.

• Josie Elizalde Family
• Manuel de Leon Ancestors

• May 1984: Blood Relationship Searches in Genealogical Databases
• July 2003: Non-blood Relationship Searches
  • Click here for a link to the article on Ancestry.com's "Genealogical Computing" archive. (Ancestry bought GC after my 1984 article. So Ancestry does not have the earliest issues in their archive.)
  • Click here to see the downloadable program and instructions associated with my article, although these are now obsolete since after my article all of the top genealogical database software products now include both blood and non-blood relationship searches.

Re-designing GEDCOM

I am particularly distressed by the failure of the genealogical computing community to deal with the complete re-design of the GEDCOM database format. GEDCOM is really two things in one:

1. It is a database design.
2. And it is a means of transferring databases, preferably without loss of information, either to another database of one's own or of someone else or to create a web page.

The second aspect really depends on the first: the design of the database is the most fundamental aspect of GEDCOM.

The reality is that the database design of GEDCOM is based on the limitations of the technology of the early 1980's -- almost 30 years ago. The resulting design sacrificed the principles of good database design (especially third normal form) in order to make things work within the limits of the technology of that time. We all did our database designs that way in those days: we had to live within the limits of the technology, or our systems would not work, no matter how perfectly their design followed good database design principles. So we de-normalized and made things work. Various commercial genealogical computing products have added features on top of the GEDCOM design, but the fundamental flaws of the underlying GEDCOM design doom any on-going add-on efforts to frustration and also violate the transferability of the information that is the second goal of GEDCOM.

But that was then and this is now. Those days and their severe technological limitations are gone. And yet we are still using essentially the GEDCOM database design that was developed for the technology of the 1980's. And we are paying for it in ways that we should no longer have to. Until there is a fundamental redesign of the GEDCOM database structure, we will continue to be unable to exploit modern technology fully for what it can do for genealogical computing, and we will continue to be unable to share our databases fully, without significant loss of information, especially of added media.

So I have put together a web page that addresses the topic in detail. Click here to see my GEDCOM redesign web page.

Fall 2011 addendum: I have begun contributing to the Better GEDCOM project, which I hope will become the independent standards body for GEDCOM and all things related to it (e.g. standardized place name hierarchies over the course of time, standardized handling of fuzzy dates, etc.). So I am no longer going to add to my own web page.