I Say Miller, You Say Muller

I'm hot on the trail of relatives on my Miller line. Charles Miller, aka Karl Müller was my great-grandfather. Sister Catherine Seaman's Bixenman family history book lists his siblings as brother Gottlieb, who was partner with a man named George Quenzer in a clothes cleaning and dying business in New York City, Annie, who married a man named Frederick Quenzer, who was involved in a clothes cleaning and dying business in New York City, Sophia, who married a man named Joseph Schmalzl, who owned a clothes cleaning business in New York City and Rika (possibly Fredrika), who married a man whose last name was Susenberger. The name of one of the brothers is unknown. There were a few Quenzer brothers involved in clothes cleaning businesses in New York at the time.

Brandstetter Descendants

I stumbled upon a hand-drawn Brandstetter family tree. It shows the descendants of Christian Brandstetter on several branches down to the 1950s. You can find the full document here: http://www.renchen.de/kultur-stadtgeschichte/stammbaum-brandstetter/

You shouldn't just take a family tree that someone else put together without supporting documentation but I went ahead and put the tree into a database so I could browse through the tree. Here is a pdf showing all of the descendants of Christian Brandstetter down to the generation of my great-grandfather, Aloys Panther.

A Trick to Find Obituaries and Newspaper Articles

I thought of a simple trick to tweak a Google search in order to help you find newspaper articles and obituaries for people of relatively uncommon surnames and especially for those with surnames that are also common words.

The trick is to search for "Mr. Surname" or "Mrs. Surname", including the quotes. Let's say you're searching for someone with the last name of Swords. Doing a Google search for just the word Swords is going to find many pages regarding the bladed weapon.