From Brick Wall to Beautiful Mosaic….Pieces falling into place!

Alonzo Sedlock

 I have always heard about “breaking down brick walls” which sounds great, but then in reality if you break down a brick wall you have lots of pieces of brick and mortar strewn about. That seems like a big mess. And in my case, it has been! But then, I never thought beyond this image of a mess. What happens to all of the pieces? 

Well, after last night and today, I know what lays beyond this messy yard…it turns out that all of those little brick pieces get recombined into a beautiful mosaic!

A New Cousin

Yesterday, I began correspondence with a cousin that matched with my sister only 8 cM. For people not well-versed in DNA, this is barely connected, it could technically be as close as 3rd cousins, but it is more likely to be 7th cousins or farther (on average you will match 14 cM with a 7th cousin).

(From: https://pngtree.com/freepng/the-brick-wall-breaks-through_8413483.html)

Image from DNAPainter Shared cM Project by Blaine Bettinger, 2000

Why did he reach out to me? Well, it turns out that when I broke through my brick wall of Alonzo Sedlock and added two more generations to my tree three weeks ago in Salt Lake (remember the Slovakian baptisms, marriages, and deaths I found extending beyond my Alonzo Sedlock brick wall?), a name jumped out to him…Kerekes!

We talked for 2.5 hours (!!!) comparing notes and learning about his family tree and we could have talked for several more! His paternal grandparents were both Hungarian/Slovakian and he has a rich history of researching the area and could pronounce all of the town names and even knew how close they were to one another. He is also a professional researcher (not genealogy, but court/records), so he knows where to quickly look to find things. 

During the call, we were able to piece together how we are related, turns out that we are 5th cousins 1x removed (5C1R) through the common couple, Georgius Kerekes (1754-1810) and Maria Fedor (1759-?) and he helped me to find the connections for several other DNA matches that I hadn’t been able to figure out.

Let's go back to how I began chipping away at the brick wall.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Piece #1: My father knew that Alonzo Sedlock’s mother’s name was Elizabeth Kristof Barath. This has always been a stumbling block for me because where did the Sedlock come from? And why the Barath? And was Kristof a maiden name or another marriage? I had so many questions!

Piece #2: About 7 years ago, I came across Alonzo’s WW2 Draft Registration and he listed Stephen Leonard Barath as a brother! Okay, he had (presumably) a half-brother and Elizabeth married a man with the last name of Barath.

Piece #3: About 5 years ago, a genealogy angel posted on Elisabeth’s Find-a-grave site her obituary!! Imagine my surprise when I found out that Elisabeth had 3 children and Alonzo had a full-older sister, Eleanor Sedlock. It also said that she came to the US 30 years prior (~1889) and that she was the daughter of “Mr. and Mrs. John Kristoff”. Equipped with Elisabeth’s death date and location, I then found her will, which also named her estranged husband, Gabriel Barath. But still, where does the Sedlock come in?

Piece #4: Over the past 5 years, with DNA, I have found 10 people who are all related to a Frank Christoff in Clearfield County, PA and who share DNA with my dad ranging from 38 cM to 102 cM. The colorized photo is Frank’s family in around 1901. Frank and his wife had 10 children and I have identified descendants for 6 of these children that share DNA with my dad. 

Frank Christoff and Susanna Hajnal and children, ~1901

Piece #5: According to the Ancestry Trees out there, Frank was born in 1849 in Hungary to a Stephen Peter Kiss Christoff (1832-1902) and Maria Hajnal (1835-1913). They had no children identified that were born in 1855, so maybe Frank was Elizabeth’s brother and these were her parents? But if so, why didn’t she live in Clearfield with ALL of the other children? And if Frank is their son, why was the next child born in 1856 and every other child after was born in 2-3 year intervals? And was Maria really just 14 when Frank was born, that was young for them even at that time?

Piece #6: DNA is powerful and it is also tricky! There are so many possibilities and with “close” DNA there are still lots of possibilities. (I’ve shown here a wonderful tool from DNAPainter in which you input the cM match and it spits out the likelihood for the type of relationship.) 

Piece #7: DNAPainter also has another amazing tool called WATO (What are the odds?). For this tool, you enter in a family tree and include the cM for each relative you know in the tree. It produces various hypotheses and calculates the Odds for each. So, in this case, I entered in Frank and all of his children and the 10 people with their cM that match my dad. I then add in my great-great-grandmother through my grandmother on the tree somewhere and it spits out a tree with all of the possible locations for where my DAD would be placed. The most likely option isn’t always the best, but that’s where you use genealogy to discount some of the possibilities. You don’t need to actually read this graphic, I just wanted to show you the tree and the tan rectangles are the known cousins with their DNA fit into the tree. The blue rectangles are all of the possibilities for where my dad “could” fall and the little green bit has a number that shows the ODDS. The larger the number the more likely the outcome. I have put a rectangle around the 4 most likely outcomes with the red arrow pointing to it.  These 4 paths rely on Elisabeth being a full-sister with Frank.

Brick Wall Busters: In Salt Lake, 

• I managed to find Stephen Kiss Kristoff and Maria Hajnal’s marriage record. They were married Jan 15, 1855, six years after Frank was born and just over a year before their first child, Stephen. 

• I found the baptismal records for all but one of their children and for that child, I found her marriage record which names Stephen and Maria as her parents. 

• I found the baptismal record for “my” Elisabeth which names her parents, Janos Kristof and Theresia Kotsis. Her parents were married November 25, 1839 and their first of six children (I found) was born 1841. There were NO Frank’s (Ferenc)  among the children but there was a Istvan (Steven) who was baptized May 18, 1849.

• I wrote down every single Kristof baptism and marriage I could find at this church for about 50 years…this is a lot and a lot of little paper sheets (each sheet is a couple and their children) In all of the baptisms, I found ONE Ferencz and he was born in 1843.

The Mosaic..putting the pieces back together

My new cousin was intrigued and he was in agreement with my emerging theory…Frank’s given name was not Frank, it was Istvan and that he is the brother to my Elisabeth.

So what did he do? He found the death certificate for a Steven Christoff in Clearfield County, PA! The birth date lines up with BOTH Istvan (Elisabeth’s brother) and Frank Christoff. The death date mirror’s the death date that the Ancestry trees have for Frank. The parents listed are “J?o Christoff” and “Tressa Cortosaf”. Which seems consistent with Janos (John) Kristof and Theresia Kotsis.

This morning I did a search of all of the probates/wills/death certificates for Clearfield County in an around the 1919 date. I found NO Frank Christoff’s but I did find the index to Frank’s wife’s estate in 1920. It is not available on-line, so I guess a trip is in order to Clearfield County, PA. This death certificate doesn't prove my theory, I need to somehow show that Steven married Susanna or somewhere that indicates that Steven went by Frank. (Yes, I did look for an obituary and didn't find one for him in the newspapers.)

I did also write a note to Christoff cousin, who still lives in Clearfield who descends from Frank and asked if he or his father recalled if Frank was ever called Steven. He doesn’t know but suggested writing to the Christoff Facebook page. He has an 100 year old great-aunt who might remember something. He also invited me to look him up if I wanted to see where the Frank Christoff’s settled. I'm thinking April might be a good month to go to Clearfield. :)

Here's where the pieces come together. It’s really hard to tell in photos, but don’t you think  that Alonzo looks a lot like his “uncle”, Frank?

Frank is the man sitting

 

Young Alonzo and older Alonzo.

Location, Location, Location!!

 My dad has always told me about “location, location, location” being so important when considering buying a home. I never realized how this applied to family history before my week with Ancestor Seekers!

During my “dream genealogy vacation” with Ancestor Seekers, they helped me break through one of my massive brick walls, Alonzo Sedlock, but also flesh out some mysteries and open opportunities with two other lines. The resources available through FamilySearch.org are incredible, but you need to know where to look. The resource that became my friend was the Catalog Search by “Place”. They have all sorts of ways to get to the information, but I found searching by place was truly a gold mine.

Directories in the US

Directories of towns and counties popped up in the mid- to-late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States. If you have family in the US–and you know where they were–you can search through Directories to fill in gaps between censuses and also provide some insight. I searched for Directories in Houghton County, Michigan for my Leach family. Unfortunately the Directories available through Family Search only go back to 1895, so I wasn’t going to find H. E. Leach, but his son, Edward James and his wife, Florence Mary Stoddard Leach (my great-grandmother) located there in the 1910s and I found them!! 

There are a couple of things important to note. Much of the holdings are digitized, but if you see something that looks like a “reel” (an old fashioned movie reel) that means that it is ONLY available on microfilm in the Library. There are MILLIONS (truly) of films there that they are working on digitally providing. It is truly awe-inspiring to see how they are arranged in long-tall cabinets. They are arranged numerically in rows and rows of cabinets. It’s a good thing that I’m tall, because the reel I wanted would not have been accessible to someone under 5’7” without a stool!

In the 1912 Directory, I found out that my great-grandfather had started a business called Getchell & Leach, with a man named Morton C Getchell. I had never heard this name before, so I guess I have a little more research to do about the FAN Club. It was also interesting to see that they had their business in the storefront in the new Elks Building in Hancock, Michigan. What fascinating things you can learn and all of this helps to piece together a story about their lives! 

Church Records!!

So, my major breakthrough came about because of knowing the church that my brickwall’s mother (Alonzo’s mother) was from! In my last Blog entry, I shared the translation of a genealogy angel through the Austro-Hungarian Community on FamilySearch in which she identified that “received a dismissal from the parson of Felső-Novaj. It took some searching, but I figured out where this church was located and with it was able to identify Alonzo’s grandparents AND great-grandparents!!

How does this work? Well, using the same method as I applied to the Directories, you go to FamilySearch.org and choose the catalog. This time, I entered in “Hungary, Abauj-Torna” (which is like the county where the church is located). Then chose “places within” and you can plainly see the community! It was interesting to note that the church was outside the community they lived in, but I’m thinking it was because it was the Catholic Church closest.

Like I have been taught in my genealogy coursework, work backwards! That means you start with what you know about the current generations and work back. 

• In this case, once I found the marriage record for my great-grandmother  Erzsébet Szabó Kristof, I looked for her baptism. This will identify her parents. 

(There are other things to mine from these as well. Note that it gave their house number in Garadna and also the witnesses. These witnesses also often provide clues because they are family members or close friends.)

• Then look for sibling baptisms every year or so before her baptism. Once you go for several years without a birth, you can safely look for the marriage about 1 year before the earliest sibling. 

• Finding the marriage record often includes the age of the individuals at the time of the wedding, which provides you with an approximate window of time for their baptism.

• Then repeat with each parent.

• As long as the family stayed put in the same location, you can easily go back generations!!

The trick really is the location! And finding their place of worship. Prior to national records, the places of worship were the ones recording life events.

"Ask! And you shall find!”

 For most people, the idea of sitting in a library building for 10-12 hours a day peering at multiple computer screens and walking less than a block from their hotel to eat out of a mini-refrigerator and vending machines for a week is not their idea of a vacation. But for me, this was an AMAZING vacation and so worth the investment!!

I spent an entire week with Ancestor Seekers and I can’t tell you how much I think it was worth it!! You can see how they describe the “Dream Vacation” here.

I can’t tell you how much I learned in the week! Not only about my family and finding resources to help me find family, but also about researching, in general. One of the biggest take-aways was learning to ASK for help and ASK for things from archives. Let me share two examples.

Asking for help from Archivists

On my first day, when working with Malia (one of the senior researchers at Ancestor Seekers), I shared with her my “brick wall” of my great-grandfather Henry Edward Leach who just appears in the Upper Peninsula in 1880 Census and I can find no records of him prior to 1880. His census, his marriage, record, son’s birth record, and other things pointed me to England for his birth, but I have looked (really hard!) for his death record hoping to learn more but I just can’t find it recorded anywhere. I just received his probate records the week before from the Michigan Archives–very interesting and cool information–but beside providing me the information that he died at home in Houghton County, Michigan on June 15, 1892, there was nothing about parents or a birth location.

Malia asked if I had his obituary and I said that I did not and that the newspapers from the Houghton County area are not yet digitized anywhere accessible to me right now. She then said, “Well, have you asked the archivist where the newspapers are available?” Well, no!! I’m not sure why not, I just hadn’t thought to ask for that!! So, I promptly wrote an email to the archivist, Emily (she has already done some other searching for me, so I already had her email) and within 45 minutes, she sent me the following email:

Emily Schwiebert

Feb 21 2023, 02:56pm via System

Good afternoon, Lynn--

Thank you for your email. I am doing well and hope you are, too. 

I would be happy to see if an obituary exists for H.E. Leach. The surviving newspapers from the Copper Country (both in our holdings and elsewhere) from the 1890s are sparse for unclear reasons: both earlier and later eras tend to be more robust. However, I believe we may have a title on microfilm that covers 1892. 

Preliminarily, it appears that a brief report of his death appeared in the Daily Mining Journal of Marquette, which is available from the Peter White Public Library through the UPLINK service. You can review the death notice on page 7 of the document at the following link: June 16, 1892 Daily Mining Journal. 

I'll consult our holdings to see if more is available from papers closer to home and follow up with the results one way or another, hopefully by the end of this week or the beginning of the next. If you have any questions in the meantime, please don't hesitate to email or call.

All best,

Emily Schwiebert

Wow!! I was speechless and so excited. Not that this bit of newspaper told me exactly what I wanted to know, but it gave me important information that is going to help me move forward. (The date of his birth is in conflict with other data, so while Obituaries provide information, take them with a grain of salt because the people reporting this information sometimes don’t know the accurate information.) Since it said that he had been with the company from nearly their beginning, I was able to look up the history of the Hecla & Calumet Mining Company and determine that he had been in Houghton County since at least 1872 and had been working there for 20 years. Also, while I knew he was active in the Odd Fellows, it helped me to understand that he was fairly involved in the organization and might provide me another lead and opportunities.

Emily also did consult her resources and found a couple more articles about H.E. Leach (including the announcement of his wedding to Flora Elizabeth Croft of which I had seen a transcription but not the original). 

What a find, and all I had to do was ASK!!

Now, I will give some advice….when asking an archivist for information, be specific! You need to know dates and people and exactly what you are looking for. They are busy people and don’t have lots of time to do your legwork, but they do WANT to help. And always say “Thank you” especially since you never know when you will have the opportunity to ask for something else. 🙂

Asking help from Communities

Did you know that most countries/regions of the world have Communities created within FamilySearch.org? Nope, me neither!! Well, Heidi–another Ancestor Seeker researcher helped me with this one. She could read some Hungarian and Slovakian, but when I found the marriage record for my great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather (parents of Alonzo Sedlock, my other major brick wall), she suggested that I post it to the Austrio-Hungarian Group in Communities.

So, I did. And within 2 hours, I had a translation! 

Hello-

I'm wondering if anyone can read and translate the entry in the marriage record of my gg-grandparents? It's from 1874 under the column about any impediments in the marriage banns. Thank you!

• Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭

• February 24

• Announced twice, have dispensation for 3rd announcement. The girl received a dismissal from the parson of Felső-Novaj.

Yeah, Googletranslate was not going to provide me this!! This bit of translation was the KEY to unlocking so much more about Alonzo's family!! By learning about Felső-Novaj, I found the church which holds all of the baptismal, marriage, and death records for the Kristoff (Alonzo's mother's) family.

I went on to use the community several more times during the week. The Community was amazing and everyone wants to help each other. As my daughters would say, “10 out of 10”, definitely will keep on using!

And I will be doing a lot more ASKing!!

National Archives–St. Louis

 I finally figured out what records I could find at a National Archives and hit the jackpot! 

Background

The National Archives can be a robust source of genealogical information, but its primary purpose is to hold the records for government work and as such they organize their records much differently from how a family historian tends to think and work. Before investigating, I highly recommend watching Lisa Louise Cooke’s Elevenses with Lisa Show–episode 40 “How to Search the U.S. National Archives Online Catalog for Genealogy” from January 21, 2021. 

My Find

As I was planning my 6-week trip, I was hoping to make use of one of the National Archives on my way out to Salt Lake City. I had originally thought that the Kansas City National Archives was my destination but I learned that the Naturalization Records I was looking for were not at this National Archives (they are in the DC Archives, so I will hopefully hit it on my way back to home.). 

I switched gears and learned that the National Archives in St. Louis is the site for all of the military records for discharged soldiers (among other things). My grandfather, Walter Elliott Tubbs, was a career military soldier and retired in September 1960. His Compiled Military Service Record (CMSR) would be there. CMSR are available to anyone 62 years after the soldier was discharged, although you need to know their Service #, Social Security #, their birth and death dates, and the names of their parents.

I was lucky, if I had been doing this trip last year at this same time, his records would not have been available! I was doubly lucky because there was a devastating fire in the St. Louis Archives (a photo display of the historic event is in the lobby). Unfortunately 80% of the military records of soldiers discharged between 1812 and January 1, 1960 were lost or destroyed! 

The archivists were fascinated by my grandfather’s records because they are among the first that they’ve seen that were fully in tact and have been released!! I spent hours photographing and scanning his file which was several inches thick. There were lots of duplicates, this is typical since these files are collection of ALL records for a soldier and the Army is very good at documenting and sending copies to various offices.

The archivists were also very interested in seeing the photographs of my grandfather included in the file. They said that it was atypical to have full length photos included and said that I was very lucky!

I knew my grandfather well, since he lived until I was in my mid-20s and I spent every summer just two houses away from my grandparents. I have very fond memories of him. While he was loud and opinionated and might be seen as gruff, he was a total mushball and cared deeply about people. I remember him always looking out on the lake and if he ever saw any boat in distress, he was the first one to head out to help! He rarely talked about his experience in the military, I heard more about his teaching days after he retired from the military. He served through WW2 landing on Normandy (D-Day+1) and was on the “clean up” crew in Germany at a concentration camp. It’s not surprising that he didn’t want to talk about what he had seen.

Someone recently asked me what was the most interesting or “best” part of the file. While I haven’t had time to fully digest what I found, it was really wonderful to read some of his officer evaluation reports. I laughed, and cried, because they had captured his personality and his essence so consistently with what I remember about him. Like this one:

“Strong, temperamental mannered. A strict military commander who is physically able to perform his duties in time of war. His personal habits are the very best. He is neat, punctual and very aggressive. Has a good sense of humor. Excels in self-confidence and drive. Inclined to be stubborn in dealing with superiors, but not to a degree that it would affect his overall efficiency. I have informed this office of his weaknesses her noted and he is attempting to correct them.

A very fine officer, rather hot-headed and set in his way, however, has gone along well with command decision which has not fully coincided with his thoughts on the subject.”

So very glad that I made this stop and look forward to really diving into the records in the months to come.

The Practical

You really need to read the National Archives website. If you find that records of your loved ones can be found there, then you MUST schedule an appointment at least a week in advance, and there is paperwork that you will need to fill out ahead of time (Application to Research), along with taking an on-line orientation about how to properly interact with the archival materials. For example, every time I came across a staple, I had to take the portion of the file that I was working on up to the desk where the attendant would carefully remove each staple. They keep a watchful eye over you as you are reviewing the materials since it’s important that you keep everything in the same order and in the same condition that you found it.

They were, however, extremely kind and helpful and I could tell that they wanted me to have a good experience. It was surprising to me, but all of the other researchers in the library were actually employed to be there. They had fancy equipment and clearly knew the workers. Overall, it was a fascinating experience!