Researching in a native country is hard. Researching in Germany? Even harder. When every family in town shares a surname and all the sons are Johann Christoph or Gerhard, and all the daughters are Maria or Margarethe, how do we distinguish among them? What are the tools we can use to figure out which Johann Christoph is mine?
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Great webinar! Very informative & interesting! Judy is the best! Thank you!
Very helpful — I have a German family where the first name of every boy is Jakob, another where they’re all Johann. Although this would be typical of Catholic naming (girls all have Maria as first name), these families were Lutheran. Almost all of these kids went by their second name. And then there is my Jakob Friedrich, also know as Friederich, Fritz and Fred.
I have the problem of sorting out men of the same name on several of my lines and one on my husband’s line. I had a real mess with my German family. It took some real looking and searching (thank goodness for a cousin who lived 20 miles from the town with the church where everyone was Christened, Married, and Buried) I had figured out which family I was looking for then she went and was able to look at all the church’s books and find several more generations.
I really liked how she separated the people by using various software with identity factor lists, and using dates of children, marriages etc. I have to do that for my tree to separate 2 men having the same name in the same town during the American Revolution.
Her speaking and diction were very clear. I have three ancestors in three generations with the same name so this will encourage me to check other factors more carefully.
I really liked the “discombobulation” description of what conundrums same names give us as researchers.
Always love hearing from Judy. She entertains as she instructs, and always provides great information about tools and methodology. Her case study from her own ancestors was an illustration of putting it all together, and I like how she encouraged us that we, too, can do this.
I love this!! I also have German ancestors who had the habit of naming their children with very similar sometimes the same name. I love that she provided tools to help with the translations of found documents. I have some I can try right now. I use excel a lot when documenting (or trying to document) my people, I works well to narrow the scope, but I need the other tools to help get to the correct conclusion or assumption. Thank you so much.