Tiptoeing Through the Records: Looking at Duplicates and where it leads you

Yesterday I went to the Family History Library to do some quick research. (It lasted longer than I thought it was going to.) My first objective was to find the Logan Temple record for baptisms for the dead on April 3, 1888. In Family Tree there are 3 possible duplicates for John Ulrich Stucki. None of them are really John, but they had no birth dates or places. In looking at each record, there were baptism dates of April 3, 1888. I surmised that this was the work of John Ulrich Stucki. Whoever extracted the record did not include the date of birth or the place of birth. I though that perhaps I could find more information if I personally looked at the record. That was my primary objective.

The next thing I was looking for was a digital copy of the book “John Ulrich Stucki and his Posterity”. I looked in the on-line catalog and located the book and there was a digital copy, but it was not available on line, only at the Family History Library. I thought that I might want to make that book available to his posterity on a secure website. The reason that they do not make it available is that it contains data on living people. It is there policy not to publish that information unless they have the permission of all the people involved.

Some years ago I took that book and extracted all the information and put it into my PAF database. There are 1278 individuals and 370 marriages and 1873 citations. The data is outdated, because since the book was published in 1983 there have been many more descendants and marriages.

I was able to download the book and because they did optical character recognition it can be copied and put into a word processing program. Here is an example of cut and paste from the PDF of the book:

John Ulrich Stucki was born 8 June, 1837, in Oberneunforn,

Thurgau, Switzerland. The Canton of Thurgau borders the State of

Wuerttemberg in Germany and Lake Constance on the north. To

the southwest is the Canton of Zurich, in which Zurich, the largest

city of Switzerland, is located. John U. Stucki's father, Johannes

was born 15 July, 1806, his grandfather, Ulrich was born 14 September

1779, all were born in Oberneunforn. His mother, Elizabeth Sauter,

was born 22 August, 1804, a daughter of Felix Sauter and Elizabeth

Mueller, of Hutweilen, also in the Canton of Thurgau, a short

distance east of Oberneunforn. The Wyssmann and Mueller families

were prominently mentioned in the early history of Thurgau in 1289

and 1300. The Sauter family is mentioned in the early history of

Thurgau in 1651, and in the Canton of St. Gallen which is to the

immediate south of Thurgau as early as 1397.

This transferred over quite nicely. Of course one could just make a direct Word document of the document as well. You will notice that the above extract is not formatted to fit the page.

My thought was to extract only the history of John Ulrich and his three wives as they appear in the book and put them into the stories in Family Tree, but I will have to get some input from other members of the family to make that decision.

I was able to find the microfilm of the baptismal record and now I need to do the real research. Here is one page of the document. The film # is 177,847.