A new feature on Ancestry has made it easier to celebrate the events in our ancestors' lives. On your home page, if you scroll down, you will find sections labeled "Upcoming Birthdays", "In Remembrance", and "Upcoming Anniversaries". And based on the information you have in your tree, they list your ancestors under these categories. This is so much easier for sure. I had originally started a database to keep track of special events in my ancestors' lives. My database goes a little further into the events in their lives than Ancestry, but this is still amazingly helpful.
So today, we are celebrating the Anniversary of my 3rd Great-Grandparents, Jakob Chilian (Kilian) Ilg and Magdalena Schreiber. They were married 168 years ago (1855) in Seitingen, Tuttlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. I first learned about them from my Grandma Ruth Wheeler's special date book that was passed down to her. This little book has been a treasure trove of information, helping me to trace back to my 3rd Great-Grandparents. See photo below.
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Let me tell you how I came to know the date they were married. While this date book at least gave me the names of my 3rd Great-Grandparents, it did not provide information about their marriage, and the records to prove their births and marriage were in Germany. At the time I started researching, these records were not available on Ancestry or Family Search (but they are now available). So I joined a Facebook group to help aid in my research. They turned me onto a website that could help me, based on the location information I had for my ancestors: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg.
Unfortunately, the website was in German. At the time, I didn't have an auto-translate feature on my computer to translate the website. And the records were also written in German (of course I knew that). So this was going to be fun. Time to pull up an English-German dictionary and get to work. There also wasn't a search feature for the names in these records, so since I didn't have anything to go on but names, I started with the birth record of Franz Jakob and worked backward looking for children of Jakob Ilg and Magdalena Schreiber. Once I stopped seeing entries for children, I estimated when their marriage must have been, then began paging through the marriage entries looking for Jakob and Magdalena. And lo and behold, I found them! It was a little tricky though. I will explain why in a minute. But here is their marriage information recorded in the ledger.
During their marriage, they would have ten children, including my 2nd Great-Grandfather, Franz Jakob Ilg. I wrote about him briefly in Pauline Ilg's story. Not all their children would live to adulthood. I was able to trace the births of these children (and sometimes deaths) thanks to the baptismal registers. As I said, this was how I estimated their marriage year. Although, there were a few surprises.
First, I found a child born to Magdalena who carried her last name. In her register, it was written that she was "illegitimate". But Jakob was listed as the father. Ooooh... She was born in 1849, so that gave me a place to start. I worked backward to the next child that was born in 1855. That child was NOT listed as "illegitimate" so they were married in between 1849 and 1855. I was struggling to find their entry until I looked more deeply in 1855. Katharina was born February 26, 1855, so I was looking back in 1854. Nope, they were married just weeks before Katharina was born. Double Ooooh!!
Well, at least I found their marriage register. And thanks to that, I was able to trace back another generation. I continued working on that site tracing as far back as I could go, which was a couple of generations. I even took some notes on what the headings were on the pages so I could understand what was being recorded. I was really proud of myself for locating these records. I was still new to researching when I located this record. It took a lot of time and effort, but it was so worth it. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of Jakob and Magdalena but I'm glad to have what I do have.
So Happy Anniversary to my 3rd Great-Grandparents!
