Random Person of the Day - Paulina Eggert

Paulina Eggert was the daughter of Ernst Eggert, brother to my 3x great grandmother Marie Eggert.  This family was discussed in the post about their mother Margaretha Eggert nee Reichmann.  Paulina appears in the 1880 census in East Saginaw with her father Ernst, mother Maggie, and 5 other siblings, of whom she's the oldest.  She was born in Michigan about 1869.

Random Person of the Day - Bessie E. Smith

Bessie E. Smith was the daughter of my great great grandfather Watson, making her my great great aunt.  I've heard her name quite a bit, but I don't really have that much information about her.  She was born about 1885 in Michigan, likely in the Cadillac area.  Her parents were Watson Marshall Smith, a pioneer of the northern Michigan area originally from Indiana, and Frances Maybelle Meeker, a Michigan native who was descended from colonial settlers.  She took care of her father, Watson, in his older years.  It appears she was married at least three times.  She first married an Anthrup, as this was her name when she married Emil Schmuck in 1919 in Cadillac and they had a daughter, Betty.  She married Dan Nixon after and was living with him in the 1930 census.

Note on photos:  I don't mind if you wish to save a copy of the photos on this blog, but as most of them are original scans of personal family photos I would appreciate if you credited the source.

Bessie with her father Watson

Courtesy of Margaret Lyster.

Updates Made

I finally finished my updates to the Ancestry tree!  Bleh!  I really need to remember to update my Ancestry tree as I'm updating my own database.  Because, of course, Ancestry can't just make life easy and implement a gedcom merge capability.

I also made a couple updates to my public tree, which is a non-sourced, direct line ancestor tree I keep for DNA matching and other collaboration purposes.  If you'd like to view my public tree, it's available here.  You need an ancestry login to view it.  I'm not sure if it's viewable with a guest login or if you need a paid account, though.

Next steps for me will not be focused on new research, but rather going through some records I've been sitting on as well as the Ancestry hints I've accumulated from updating my tree, as well as double-checking the new Michigan death records I've been working with.  So it's more of a "beefing up" phase than any new research.  After that, I'd like to fill out my Higley colonial line more, as that is a well-researched line that I just need to sit down and confirm sources for.

Although not as glamorous as going back further in time, I'm looking forward to this next phase of work.  Researching siblings is very important for (a) fully documenting my family history and (b) additional clues for a family unit that may not be available when searching solely my ancestral lines.

Random Person of the Day - Arthur M. Tomlinson

I don't have much on Arthur M. Tomlinson.  He was the son of Charles William Tomlinson and Hattie Trader, Charles being the brother of my 2x great grandfather Laurence Tomlinson.  Arthur was born about 1910 in Caro, Michigan, likely in Ellington Township where he was located for the 1910 and 1920 census.  He married Jenny Albrant.  They had a son Arthur who died at birth on 1 Dec 1937.

Random Person of the Day

I'm getting close to finishing my Ancestry tree updates.  It's so painful to go through all 850+ people!  I'll need to remember to update it as I'm updating my database.  I'd rather have just uploaded a new gedcom to the site, but that would involve deleting the old tree and therefore the people I've invited to view it.

A new idea came to me for adding stories to the blog.  My source index has a list of all the people in my records/tree, each one on a different numbered row.  I'm going to use a random number generator to pick someone to write about, rerunning the generation if a living person is chosen.  I doubt I'll actually make it daily, but I think it will be a good way to introduce different stories from my tree, particularly when I'm doing clean up work or bolstering up my sources and so not really making any interesting breakthroughs.

Some of the stories will be long, others might not be more than a couple sentences, depending on the closeness to my main ancestral lines.

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Today's random person is Margaretha Sophia Christina Eggert nee Reichmann.  She was my 4x great grandmother.  Born in Germany (likely Mecklenburg-Schwerin) about 1801, she married Johann Christian Eggert likely in the early 1820s and they had 4 sons and 4 daughters.  She died on 31 Dec 1845 in the Eickelberg district of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.  In 1849 one of her daughters, Sophia Maria Johanna Eggert, died.  On 14 July 1857, her husband and 7 living children arrived in the United States and went on to Saginaw, Michigan.  Her oldest daughter, Marie, became my 3x great grandmother after marrying John C. Siems in Saginaw, also a Mecklenburg native.  The only records I have of Margaretha are her death record and mentions in her childrens' birth records and on Michigan death records.  I have no evidence the her husband Christ ever remarried or fathered more children.  It is also a mystery why they picked up and moved to the US 12 years after she passed away, although opportunities for money, work, land, and spouses were common reasons across all immigrants.

New Records!!!

I just happened to stumble on a new record collection at Family Search last week!  Behold, Michigan, Death Certificates, 1921-1952.

In the past couple weeks I've added 94 death records to my database.  Now I'm doing some mad updating of my ancestry.com tree (it's so annoying how only Family Tree Maker can sync with their online tree).  Once that's done, I plan to go back through my database and see if there are any people I've missed that should be in the new collection.  A lot of names are transcribed poorly...so some extra crafty searching might be in order.

No particular breakthroughs with the new data...yet.  But there are definitely clues lurking therein.