Too Busy To Post

I have neglected to post what I have been doing, so I will give a brief account.

Report on ordinances that our family has accomplished in 2016.

Initiatory and Endowment 32

Sealings to Parents 17

Couple Sealings 2

Baptism and Confirmation 163

Initiatory 35 (separate from above)

Endowment 9 (separate from above)

There are probably more, but I didn’t keep and accurate record.

Altgelt Stoltz file

See the May post for the Altgelt Family Tree

When I was in Germany 1997-2000, I put together a file in PAF, which I named Altgelt Frankfurt. I received some documents from Beverly Bennett, a descendant of Alexander Scoby Standley.  It was a mimeographed copy of a genealogy written by Axel Altgelt who lived in Buenos Aries.  His family emigrated to Argentina and then he came back and looked at the records.  The document was called Die Nachkommen des Johannes Altgelt Statschöffen zu Siegen.  A link to this document that I edited and placed on his record in Family Tree is provided here. The document contains photos that we took when we visited the area as well as the original document.  Axel went back to Germany in 1937-38 to collect this information. Appended to this document is a Descendancy chart that I prepared from the data entered into  PAF showing the connection to Alexander Scoby Standley  and Philinda Upson his wife who were the great grandparents of my grandmother Mary Ellen Kerr Gee.  Also in this PAF file are the Stoltz family from Germany who married into the Altgelt line in America.  The name Altgelt was changed to Outcalt, Outcault, Altcelt, Outcelt, Outgelt and variations of that spelling when they came to America. The Stoltz family name changed as well to Stults, Stolts, Schulz and variations as well.  With the help of Family Tree, I have been able to add names for ordinance work on both these lines.  

When working on adding sources to this line one day, I came across a name on Find A Grave.  The information was there, but no photo of the grave as is sometimes the case.  Being curious I look at the submitter and there was an e-mail address.  I sent an e-mail and it got me in touch with Andrew Outcalt.  He is also a descendant of the Altgelts of Siegen.  He and I have corresponded and he gave me access to his site on Ancestry.com of 24.000+ individuals.  In addition he sent me 196 pages of genealogy written in Spanish by Carlos Altgelt.  Carlos was born in Argentina and is now living in Michigan.  He wrote a book entitled “The Boy Who Never Grew Up”.  I saw a copy of the book when we visited Barbara Bennett in Preston, Idaho.  I have tried to get a copy, but it is out of print.  Andrew Outcalt sent me a file with some excerpts from the book and gave me Carlos’ e-mail address.  I have communicated with him.

I have been going through this information and comparing it with Family Tree and entering the data into my Ancestral Quest database. This database has 2,615 individuals and 857 marriages at the present time. My plan is to go through the data and add to my database and compare with Family Tree. This takes time.

There are Altgelt families that emigrated from Germany to Argentina, Uruguay, and the United States.  The earliest Altgelt is Henne Altgelt born in 1404.  There were bakers and priests (Lutheran) and even one Catholic bishop of Mainz, Germany as well a governor of the state of Illinois (John Peter Altgeld).

Butlers (the medieval kind)

I have been reviewing the Butlers of St. Brides (Sir John Butler 1285) and his posterity that lived in Dunraven Castle and updating the information in Family Tree and my database.

There are records on Family Tree that I have corrected on Thomas Lamrock Butler and his wife Dinah David.

Bailey

Because Penelope Bailey was not married in the church to Joseph Brown the pastor would not christen the children with the surname of Brown and they were christened with the name Bailey.  Thus, the children on my records have the middle name of Brown and the surname of Bailey.  They apparently kept that Brown Bailey even after they moved to Utah, but it did not go more than three generations.

John Smith and Phebe Gee

I have been working on the descendents of this couple. Phebe is a descendant of Solomon Gee and Deborah Huntley.  In recent investigation and comparing with Family Tree I have been able to add individuals to this database and straighten out the records on Family Tree. There was one child of this couple that I was missing in my data.  By corresponding with Jan Byg she gave me the name (Serena/Syrena Smith) and there are three records for her in Family Tree, but none list her parents, so now we can connect the daughter and have her sealed to her parents.

Descendants of Solomon Gee and his first wife Susannah Clark

I have been going down the descendancy tree along the Powers line.  Susannah only had one child Sarah and she married James Douglas.  They had a daughter Phebe who married Nicholas Powers.  One of their children was Reverend Aaron Powers who was a Methodist Episcopal minister. He later joined the Mormon Church but became dissatisfied and joined the Missionary Baptists where he remained until his death. In Politics, Aaron was a Democrat up to the time of the Abe Lincoln nomination for president. He then switched to being a Republican.

I added a number of individuals both to Family Tree and to my database. There are 12,858 individuals in this file with 4,281 marriages. 

Descendants of Lysander Gee

I keep finding new individuals who are related to Lysander.  This file is separate from Solomon’s although it contains some of the same individuals. There are 5,598 individuals and 2,361 marriages.  I did a study and found that 20% of his descendants were either not members of the church or had had their ordinances done posthumously. Who says that all the work is done for those of pioneer ancestry?

John Ulrich Stucki

Great grandfather Stucki hired Julius Billeter to research the Stucki family in Zürich and the neighboring cantons in Switzerland.  I put all these in my Stucki database.

In addition I have a Teilungsrechnung (a document detailing the distribution of the estate of a relative Frau Elise Götz - Brack, born in 1881).  She left quite an inheritance.  My mother got 38.80 Swiss Francs. I took all these names and put them in a spreadsheet with the ID from Family Tree.  I sent the results to a cousin Afton Bartlett who works in the Family History Library.  There were a few individuals that were not in Family Tree.  They will need to have their ordinance work done.

I have printed and bound the following documents.

Solomon Gee Descendants one Generation

Letters from Laurence to Alice 1958

Letters from Hawaii 1984-1985 from Pearl Gee

Surname Gee in my database

The Gee-Crouch families

The Ancestors and the Children of John Wright Clark and Myrtie Julia Cowen

John Wright Clark and Myrtie Julia Cowen and their Family

Descendants of John William Trussell

Journal of Marion Joseph Kerr 1892

Donated the missionary Journals on CD of William Erastus Gee and Robert H Skelton to the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU.

Anna and Verena Stucki in Family Tree

Anna Stucki and Verena Stucki have records that needed attention on Family Tree. 

Click Here for the link to Evernote.

More Stucki and allied Families on Family Tree

In going through Julius Billiter's records, I am trying to merge the duplicates and add individuals not in Family Tree.

Margaretha Stucki married Heinrich Wiesmann.

Click Here for the records I put on Evernote.

Moser and Stucki on Family Tree

In working on Family Tree I try to clean up records.  Some of these require merging to get one correct record. Here is an illustration:

Click Here

I am testing a way to put screen shots on my blog and this is an experiment.

Cousins by the dozens

Cousins by the dozens

I recently have been working on Lysander Gee's descendents from my database of 5000+ individuals and have found a number of individuals who need ordinance work done. One of them was the ancestor of my third cousin once removed on my father's side who is married to my first cousin on my mother's side, so I did some searching and found a number of ordinances that needed to be done. 

I then went to my fathers side and found Elmo Cunningham Gee who was married to three wives and placed sources on his record and his wife's record. I was able to do this with my iPad while I was watching a ballgame during the halftime and timeouts. I was able to accomplish this while still watching the ball game. I also placed sources on Lillian Lucy Christiansen and Gladwyn Marie Mickelson's records.

I reserved some ordinance work and emailed my third cousin once removed and ask her if she would be interested in doing the ordinance work for those people, because they were in her direct ancestral line, not mine. She responded that she would be interested and that they were going to the temple this next month, so I sent her, by email, the family ordinance requests that I had reserved and now she has them in her possession and can have the ordinance work done. 

I will not document here the names of everyone that I found.  I will have to be more careful in documenting them in the future, but they will be noted in Family Tree with my name as the author on the sources and ordinance reservations.

Stuck on the Stuckis

I have been blogging mostly about my father's side of my family. I also have been working on the maternal side as well. This post will be about a document that I have had in my possession for quite a number of years. I initially tried to enter the data into a PAF file, but did not understand the relationships, so I put it aside. The document concerned the distribution of money to heirs of a widow in Switzerland. My mother and her siblings received a small amount of money. Thus the document was found in my parents file cabinet and came into my possession.

Since my great grandfather was dead as well as my grandfather Stucki, the inheritance fell to my mother and her living siblings as the remaining heirs.

Eliza Stucki, my great grandfather Stucki's sister and her son were also named in the document.

Eliza and her son Fred (Frederick) have a history in the book John Ulrich Stucki and his descendants. The birth dates were the same in both documents so I knew we had the same people. I added the history of Elisa and Fred as stories to their records.

Fred was born to an unmarried mother in Colmar Alsace Loraine and was later sealed to his grandparents posthumously.  In his patriarchal blessing the name of his biological father was named.  In Family Tree this name is missing and his grandparents are listed as his parents. This needs to be changed to reflect the real parents. I added the following as a discussion on Fred’s record.

This is a duplicate of K2HJ-Q8M and cannot be merged at this time. He was the illegitimate son of Elise Stucki and came to America with his mother. He was in the war and suffered "shell shock" and was hospitalized in the Veterans Hospital in American Lake, Washington and died there. He never married as far as I am aware.

I also added the following as discussion: Fred, her son, was born February 14, 1890, in Colmar, Alsace Lorraine, France/Germany[1]. Eliza never married, Fred's Patriarchal Blessing given in Paris, Idaho, December 23, 1898, by Patriarch Hugh Findaly lists his birthplace as Colmar, Alsace Lorraine, Germany, and his father as Jacob Thorni Stucki.

I also found Fred in the 1910, 1930 and 1940 US census and added these as sources to his record.

I need to remove the marriage of Maria Elisa Stucki to Hans Konrad Lichti since this was only a sealing and occurred after the death of Hans and before the death of Elisa.  This will then open up the parentage of Fred to allow Jacob Thorni Stucki to be added as his father with the explanation that the parents were never married.

In looking for a logical match for Jacob/Jakob Stucki there was a Jakob Stucki born 17 May 1859 in Neunforn, Thurgau, Switzerland.  This will require a lot of research to determine if this is the correct Jakob.  This Jakob is not listed as having any spouse and the date of death is not found.

I do have poor photos of Elisa and Fred that I will add to Family Tree.  I hope that someone can come up with some better ones.

Fred has two records, which can only be merged by Family Search.  This is my next project.

There are many more records which can be edited and families combined with the information found in the document from the bank in Switzerland now that I know how to read it.

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[1]  From Wikipedia:”Under the German Empire of 1871-1918, the territory constituted the Reichsland or Imperial Province of Elsass-Lothringen. The area was administered directly by the imperial government in Berlin and was granted some measure of autonomy in 1911. This included its constitution and state assembly, its own flag, and the Elsässisches Fahnenlied as its anthem.”

The region is now (2013) in France and has been since it was taken away from Germany after they lost World War II.

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.

 

And so now down to the real research.  If I find the information that I was looking for there are ordinances to be performed.

Where do I store all this infromation?

I want to be able to link sources to the records in family tree. It is easy to add a story if it is in word processing format, such as Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Word Pad, or an e-mail, but trying to attach a PDF file to stories, does not work.  There is, however, a workaround that I found out about when I went to the Roots Tech conference.  One can put in a URL to a website and then the individual who wants to look at the document can block, copy and paste the URL into the browser and be directed to a website with the PDF file.  That necessitates having the PDF file on a website.

I have a website for the Lysander Gee family. I also have one for photos of the Salmon Gee descendants. In addition I have one for the ward family history class. I did not want to put information on the ancestors of my mother, Pearl Stucki, on the Gee website.  This caused me to ponder and ask, where do I store all this information?  

The answer was to create another website.  So I did and here is the link:  I got out of my comfort zone with this one, but it worked out reasonably well 

I am in the process of adding files from my computer to the website as you can see.  The problem that I encountered was that some URLs are so long that they do not work well in Stories in Family Tree. Also I found by experimentation that if the URL is entered in as a link that it comes up a a string of ****** and is of no use at all.  If you leave of the HTTP// or WWW from the beginning of the URL and if it is short, then copy and paste into the browser works.

Here is an illustration. Click the Link.  You will see how I added the entire 600+ page journal of my Great Grandfather John Ulrich Stucki as a link to his record in Stories.  There may come a time when PDF files can be added directly to Family Tree, but this is the best way that I have come up to circumvent the problem.

The URL for his PDF journal was too long,so I had to just add the URL to the Stucki page, which was much shorter. I assume that people will be smart enough to go the the file if I direct them in an understandable manner.    

So much for now.