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.