20 May 2013

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.

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