Back in the ‘90’s I met, through genealogy research my dad’s second cousin, who lived in Rochester, NY. Well actually I found his brother first, who told me his sibling in Rochester was their family researcher. So the sibling and I have shared research over the years. I must say, he probably has gotten more done and more accomplished than I did, especially after I got my master’s degree and started working full time.
Wagner is our common line and being German means the surname was occupation derived and therefore sometimes harder to track down. In other words, all of the people named Wagner are not necessarily related to each other.
If your descendant came from “landed gentry” where the name eventually traces back to some land that was bestowed, then more than likely those descendants with that surname are all related. They all tie back together at some point. But occupation derived surnames are different.
Anyway, I’m getting off track.
My cousin, Don, had written one time telling me he had found our Wagner’s place of origin in Germany, as well as finding the immigrants naturalization and citizenship records.
Well, now honey! (Use a southern drawl here.) There comes a time in one’s life that things don’t work like they once did, or fit together like they had. And that includes my ole’ brain! So, in recent years, I couldn’t remember the name of the town he had told me.
Flash forward to yesterday! I was cleaning house (yes, it was a rare day!), and decided I needed to sort through one of my endless “piles”! I discovered I had quite a stack of genealogy papers. So I sat down on the floor and began sorting, writing the surname at the top right corner. That way I can file them away, all at one time and know where they go without having to sort them again.
There it was – a map from expedia.com that I had printed out with Dirmingen identified on the paper. I KNEW I had it somewhere. I just wish I could find things in my brain a little bit easier. It’s a lot of work to have to clean house in order to find some information you stashed away somewhere!!! But my brain is getting too much fog up there, or maybe getting to many things crammed in there by now, and it’s hard to keep track of it all!
What are the lessons to be learned from this? I always like to have “a teaching moment” come out of what I write; some reason for telling you all my stories. I can think of a few, some I like better than others. See what you think:
- Never Give Up?
- Keep on the Look out?
- File things away the first time?
- Clean house more often?