New Family - Descendants of Mary Amelia Rickards

     I just got the most wonderful email today. Let me start by saying, the whole reason I started this blog was to not only get stories out about my family but to hopefully get in touch with long lost family. And that is exactly what has happened. The email was from a descendant of Mary Amelia Louis nee Rickards, daughter of Capt. Joseph Henry Rickards. This is the first contact we have had with them. I've been in contact with other descendants, but everyone always asked the same thing. Has anyone been in touch with the Louis family? Now we have!
     I can not tell you how excited I am. I actually scared my husband when I received the email. I screamed and flailed my arms around. He looked at me like I was crazy and asked if I was ok. Then he mimicked how I looked when I received the email. I'm glad he wasn't video tapping haha! Once I explained the reason for my excitement, he completely understood. He knows how much I pour into my research and how long I've been trying to get in touch with family.
     So now from here we get to compare notes, share info and introduce ourselves to all of our new extended family. Every day the world is getting smaller and smaller and our family keeps growing bigger and bigger. This keeps up, I may need to plan a reunion in the future. Oh, gracious... that's quite a daunting thought. One thing at a time.
     So I want to encourage you all. If you are considering writing your own blog about your family history, do it! Absolutely do it! You never know who you might get in touch with. My blog has been active for a few years now, but now family is starting to come out of the woodwork. So do it! Get your stories out there! You just might find long-lost cousins!

Week 39: Map It Out

     Do you have a family that moved around a lot? Have you ever wondered how close in proximity your family lines lived to each other? Are you trying to locate what possible church they would have attended? These are questions I have asked myself when it came to my family. And the only way to answer them was to "Map It Out". That is this week's prompt for the 52 Ancestors Challenge.
     My family's roots are deep in St. Louis. I've traced the majority of the lines back to the time they immigrated. On my mom's side of the family, we have the Ilg Family, Buer Family, and the Helfrich Family. They all lived in the same area of St. Louis, the Carondelet area, from around the 1890s-1945. Some of them moved quite a bit but still remained in the Carondelet area. When I started documenting the addresses for all the families, I started noticing familiar names. So I started comparing the addresses on the maps and lo and behold, they were all within a few streets of each other for years. For some of them, I was having a hard time locating records, so I wanted to look at the churches they went to. Thanks to the advice from my Aunt Patty Fuchs, she told me if I knew their religion, look for the closest church to their residence that was the same religion. That led me to St. Boniface Catholic Church. Even though the church is closed, the St. Louis County Library headquarters had many records from them. I was able to find baptismal records, birth records, death records, and marriage records.
     As you can see from my examples, mapping out the addresses helped me answer the questions at the beginning of this post and many more. I learned a lot more about my family than I ever knew before. I even took the time to drive the area that they used to live in. Most of it has been redeveloped over the years, but there were some that were still original.
     I still wanted to take a map and plot the different addresses all together so I could actually visualize all the different residences along with places of employment, churches, and other important addresses. It was during this time, I came across a video put out by Family History Fanatics featuring Melissa Finley from Boundless Genealogy. She explained how you could use Google Maps to place points on the map to represent the different addresses. See the videos below:



Thanks to Melissa, I was able to create my own map. This was exactly what I was looking for. Now I have a visual to go with my research. Even though the area has changed, I was able to look at old maps to pinpoint the exact location. After going through all the addresses I had, verifying through census records and city directories along with other sources, I created my own map. It's not done yet, but here is the work in progress.

So have you taken the steps to map out your family's residences?

Week 38: Cousins

A cousin is a relative with whom a person shares one or more common ancestors. In the general sense, cousins are two or more generations away from any common ancestor, thus distinguishing a cousin from an ancestor, descendant, sibling, aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew. - Definition from ISOGG Wiki.

     I am a little behind on posting for my 52 Ancestors prompts. I've been working on something really big with a few other genealogists called Project Genealogy. It is a YouTube series brought to you by genealogists discussing different topics as they relate to genealogy research. It will be released on October 4th. So if you haven't yet, subscribe to my YouTube Channel so you don't miss it.

     So as you could have guessed from the above definition, this week's prompt was Cousins. They are usually the first friends we have in our lives. On my dad's side of the family, I grew up with lots of cousins. My dad is the oldest of nine kids, so yeah the family started growing very quickly. From my Papa, we are up to five generations of the Fuchs family. Wow! That's a lot of cousins! Sometimes it's hard to keep track of who is related to whom. I just know, they are my cousin haha!
     With the growing popularity of DNA and many tracing their family lines, people are learning they have more cousins than they ever thought possible. Figuring out who you are related two is more tricky though than just saying 1st cousin, 2nd cousin, etc, which is what I've been saying all my life. Apparently, that's wrong! Oops!
     Thanks to many genealogists, there are tons of charts and explanations out there describing the correct relationships when it comes to our cousins. Thanks to the International Society of Genetic Genealogy Wiki website, we have a better understanding of cousins and how we are related to them. The chart below is from their page and can be used to help us better understand how we are connected to our cousins. Click on the image to make it bigger

According to their page, there is actually a mathematical way to determine the relationship between you and your cousins. I can hear my daughter groaning now, "No, not math!" haha! Here are some examples taken right from their page:

Example 1: If person one's great-great-great-grandfather is person two's grandfather, then person one's "number" is 4 (great + great + great + grand = 4) and person two's "number" is 1 (grand = 1). The smaller of the two numbers is the degree of cousinship. The two people in this example are first cousins. The difference between the two people's "numbers" is the degree of removal. In this case, the two people are thrice (4 − 1 = 3) removed, making them first cousins three times removed.

Example 2: If someone's great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4) is another person's great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + grand = 4), then the two people are 4th cousins. There is no degree of removal because they are on the same generational level (4 − 4 = 0).

Example 3: If one person's great-grandparent (great + grand = 2) is a second person's great-great-great-great-great-grandparent (great + great + great + great + great + grand = 6), then the two are second cousins four times removed. The first person's "number" (2) is the lower, making them second cousins. The difference between the two numbers is 4 (6 − 2 = 4), which is the degree of removal (generational difference). ISOGG Wiki

As much as I love math, I think I will just stick to using the chart. For more information on the different cousin relationships, please visit their webpage: isogg.org/wiki/Cousin
I will close this blog post with a most recent picture of all of my Fuchs cousins. This was taken at Christmas last year (2018). And we are still growing...

Week: 37: Mistake

     "Oops!" Something said quite often when we make a mistake. We've all done it. Mistakes happen most often when you are doing something new: a new job, a new position, a new hobby, a new lesson, etc. And if you're like me, you've made your fair share of mistakes when it comes to your research. Especially in the beginning. The more you work on it though, the better you get and the fewer mistakes you make. Although you may become an expert in your field, there are still mistakes that happen. We don't mean to do it, but that's why they call it mistakes.
     Thinking over my own research, I think about the mistakes I personally made. I've attached wrong people to my tree, added a source that didn't below, made an incorrect assumption, just to name a few. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make in your life, as long as you learn from them. Here are a few mistakes I've made and the lessons I have learned from them.
     When I began my research in 2012, I assumed most trees on Ancestry were correct and treated them as reliable sources. I would add information without even checking whether it was accurate. I can hear some of you now. "What?! Are you insane?!" Yes, I was. Naive and insane. And as you could have guessed, it caused a lot of trouble in the beginning. I have since sorted out most of the mess. I still run across a couple I missed now and then. Just the other day, I found one. I had attached a spouse to someone that didn't belong. I attached it because others had it attached. Many in fact. So since "many" people had it, I assumed it was correct. Yeah, no. So I have since removed that spouse. Others have yet another spouse attached, but I have yet to find any proof, so I have not added that spouse. I have learned to check my sources first.
     Another mistake I made was attaching a source to my ancestor that actually did not fit. It was suggested as a hint, and I did look over it and saw the ancestor's name, so I assumed it was correct. Once again, nope. I had gone back over my research later and determined it did not match my ancestor. The years did not match up. I wouldn't have found that out without reading the source word for word and looking at the dates. That particular source was a will and written about 50 years before the birth of my ancestor. So now when I get a hint for a source, I read every word of that source and check it against the data I know is correct. (I know you are probably thinking rookie, but hey I'm learning.)
     The last mistake I will discuss (although not the last I will ever make) is making assumptions. That has come back to bite me in the butt many times. I make assumptions from my own personal point of view and forget to consider what my ancestors may have been going through. I forget to consider the time period. I forget to consider history. I forget that my ancestor is human. I forget that my ancestors also make mistakes. So when tracing their lives and trying to find records, I was going by what I personally thought should be the truth. That wasn't always the case. Once I stopped limiting myself by my own thoughts and feelings, I started finding more answers to questions I had. Their lives were their lives, just like my life is my life. Mistakes I make today will probably make some of my descendants scratch their heads, but they were mine to make based on my life experiences.
     Like I said, these aren't the only mistakes I have made, nor will they be the last ones. I just hope to continue to learn from them. Remember that when you come across someone else's tree that has mistakes. They are only human and are probably learning as they go as well. What are some mistakes you have made in your research?

Week 36: School Days

     Most everyone in the genealogy community knew about Ancestry making their Yearbook collection available for free this past Labor Day Weekend. People were sharing their photos, relatives photos, random photos, etc. It was great to see!
     I decided to see if I could track down parents & their siblings' yearbooks to save their Senior (or last year they were in school) year pictures. On my side of the family, it was definitely helpful that almost everyone went to the same school: Northwest High School (NHS) in House Springs, Missouri. Only a couple of spouses went to different schools. I was also in luck that NHS had so many yearbooks uploaded. Even to the point, I could find my cousins!
     So I started with my dad's side of the family. Including him, there are nine children and then seven spouses. Dad is the oldest, graduating in 1961 and it goes from there. I found all the siblings & almost all the spouses. After that, I looked for my mom's side. Including her, there are four children. She is the only one to graduate high school, so locating my Uncles was near impossible. Uncle Jerry dropped out his senior year, so I was able to find his junior year photo & his first wife's photo. Uncle Les barely attended high school so I couldn't find one for him & Uncle Howard dropped out in eighth grade.

     It was so fascinating going through my family's yearbooks & getting a glimpse into their lives; their past. It was especially fun finding their photos. I've grown up knowing my Uncles looking a certain way, whether beards, mustaches, hair on their head, etc. So it is fascinating seeing them look so different. Below are all the photos I found of my family. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Whose pictures did you find??