Family Portraits

Some of my favorite pieces of family history documentation are family portraits. They literally let you see the family structure at a given point in time and give you perspective on the difference in ages between generations and let you see similarities between different family members and sometimes can show you the personalities of your ancestors. Here are a few family portraits. Some from my immediate ancestry and some from collateral lines.

First we'll focus on the Panther family. First up is the family of my great-grandfather, Alois Panther:

F: Veronica, Mary, Anna
M: George, Alvin Edward (Middle), Joseph, Elizabeth
B: Leonard, Benedict (my grandfather), Frank, Aloysius, Morris

DNA Testing and Distant Cousins

The story about my great-grandmother, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Dunzinger Panther is that she was born in 1854 in New York City and after the death of her parents when she was two years old, her grandparents brought her to live with family in Burlington, Des Moines County, Iowa. I found her in the 1855 New York State Census as one of two children of Andrew and Fanny Dunzinger along with her sister Mary A. Dunzinger. It says she was born in 1854.

She's found in the 1870 US Federal Census living as a servant in Burlington in the Charles and Walburga Wagner household. I found her in the 1905 Iowa State Census where it states that she had been in Iowa for all except two years of her life.

Andrew Dunzinger is found prior to immigration to America, in Wemding, Bavaria, as is the Wagner family. So logic follows that this would mean that the family she was brought to live with would have been the Wagners.