An Illegal Operation

First, a word of warning. If you cannot stand reading about controversial topics, unpleasant events, tragedy and death, I'll ask that you stop reading now. This post is about the death of my grandmother's sister. I knew she died young and I had heard rumors about the cause. Someone recently posted newspaper articles about the trial that followed, which confirms what I had heard was the truth. Someone posted about her death in the West Point, Iowa community Facebook group a few years ago and another person commented that they had "heard about her". I commented that I had also heard the rumor but that I would not comment about rumors or mention what they entailed. Now that these articles are out there and the rumor has been proven true, I will post about it, as unpleasant circumstance as it is.

A Cousin on Groucho Marx - You Bet Your Life

I had heard that my third cousin once removed, Louis Menke, was on Groucho Marx's show You Bet Your Life several decades ago. That's all I had heard about it. Nothing about what it was about. I just figured it was a game show and that's as far as it went. Then someone posted on the West Point, Iowa Facebook page a newspaper article written around the time of the show. It is quite entertaining in that it was said that Louis Menke was never out-talked by anyone. Apparently, Groucho Marx heard about this and had to invite him onto the show.

Missouri Death Certificates 1909-1969

The Missouri Secretary of State web site has a searchable database of images of death certificates for the state of Missouri from 1910 -1969. It can be found at https://s1.sos.mo.gov/Records/Archives/ArchivesMvc/ . If you have anyone in your family tree that died in the State of Missouri between these years, I encourage you to search the database. Over a period of a few days, I searched my genealogy database for anyone that died in Missouri during these years. I didn't find every one of them but I did find 58, from just about every branch of my family tree. Several of these gave me new information such as parents, spouses and death dates that I didn't have before. Some causes of death I saw were burned due to a child playing with fire, to typhus, to electrocution.

Menke Extended Family Photos

I missed my normal second blog post last month. I'm sorry! I have, for nearly seven years, posted at least two blog posts every single month. Last month, I was incredibly busy with work and family and could not come up with any ideas for a second blog post. So, I apologize for falling down on the job. Even now, I'm having a difficult time finding a subject to post about. I've made no progress in finding anything new for a while. This morning, I logged in to Family Search and looked at the alerts Family Search provided for my extended family. I don't normally spend much time looking at these alerts but today I did. There were a few photos posted of my extended Menke family, including some from my "long lost" Menke family that ended up in Nuckolls County, Nebraska. I've never had any photos of this branch of the family, so I thought this would make a good post.

Family Heirlooms

Linda Stufflebean at Empty Branches on the Family Tree followed Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun prompt of "What Family Heirlooms Did You Inherit or Obtain?" That's a great idea. I'll join in! Now that I've taken an inventory of my heirlooms, I can count myself lucky that I have so many nice items passed down in my family. My brothers and sisters have other items. My sister has my grandmother's baptismal certificate. My brother has my father's Navy uniform and other military items. A cousin has my grandmother's teapot cookie jar that her homemade cookies would wait approximately 10 seconds before being eaten by some of her grandchildren.

Mapping My Ancestral Origins

I know Ancestry has the "DNA Story", which maps the movement of your DNA through history, but to me it's pretty broad and general. I wanted to get a better visualization of where my ancestors originated, all in one or two images. I started thinking of where each branch of the family was from and I realized there were only two general areas of origin for my ancestors and really only a handful of specific areas. I wondered if a couple of maps could illustrate their origins. This makes a great challenge! Map all of your ancestral branches to the location you have as their origins.

Johann Diedrich Menke's Death Record

I've heard the family stories about the Menke family's voyage to America since I was a child. The story is that my great-grandfather was a young boy when he came to America with his parents and his father died on the voyage and was buried at sea. I had never found anything to document this. I only had the fact that I found my great-grandfather's baptismal record and his parent's marriage record in Germany, and the fact that his mother remarried in Iowa. I posted a photo of my great-grandfather on Instagram, taken on his 90th birthday, noting that the photo was taken in 1954.

Johan Anton "August" Menke on his 90th birthday. He came to America when he was six years old.

Lee County, Iowa Obituaries

When I was in southeast Iowa in June, I spent an entire day at the Fort Madison public library genealogy room. While there, I printed out over 100 obituaries. I've been able to connect all except a few to my family tree. Here are the ones I found most important to my genealogy.

First, and most important, is the obituary of my great-grandmother, Mary Ann Kelly Doran.

 

I find it amazing that I haven't had obituaries for close relatives of mine and I don't realize it until I find them!

More Diaries Scanned

During my latest trip to Iowa, I was able to scan in every page of three of my grandmother, Elizabeth Menke Panther's diaries. This is my mother's mother. These were from the years 1968, 1973 and 1977. Now that I'm home, I working on getting the pdfs created with these scans turned into jpg files and cropping them down to the individual pages. While cropping them, I'm scanning them for important events. I know I'm not catching all of them this time through. I'll look through them more thoroughly once I get them organized. Still, a couple of very important events leaped out at me from 1968. Add in the fact that this was 50 years ago and these take on greater significance.

Iowa Family History Trip

I took a drive to southeast Iowa this week to scan in few photos and see what else I could find. To say this trip was a success would be an understatement.
In this post, I showed a poor photocopy of an old German military photo that was handed down in a family of "in-laws" to the Panther family. I sat down with owner of this photo, my second cousin who is also a family genealogist, and two descendants of the Clementine Panther / Joseph Eibes line. The distant cousin whose house we met at is a sweet 85 year old woman who obviously has been having some worsening Alzheimer-like symptoms in the past couple of months. While she had to introduce me to her brother sitting at the table a half dozen times and ask my name another half dozen times, her enthusiasm was infectious.

Deceiving DNA Test Results

A new DNA match appeared for me the other day. I recognized the name as someone I already had in my database. He is my fourth cousin on my mother's side. He's also descended from my great-great-great-grandparents, Johan Herm Theodore Menke and Maria Catharina Schirren, from Schwagstorf, Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, Germany. Family Tree DNA estimated him to be my 2nd to 4th cousin, so the estimate lines up. I started looking at some of our common matches and since he's more closely related to my mother, I brought up their common matches. That's when I noticed. Family Tree DNA estimates that my mother and this fourth cousin of mine are 5th to distant cousins. How can this be? Unless he's related to me on my father's side, which would be a complete surprise, this doesn't make any sense.

Homes for the Holidays

How many ancestral homes do you have photos of? How many are still standing? I collected photos of all of the known homes from my family's history. As far as I know, all of these homes are still standing except one.

First up is the house in Columbus, Nebraska that I and my siblings grew up in. This is the house my mother lived in until she passed.

It has been sold to a family friend and I understand his young daughter loves her new home.

Autobiography of Agnes Panther Miller

My sister called me and said she had a box of Mom's stuff for me. I went over and found a small box of things that she thought I'd like. I thanked her and we talked about some of the papers I had recently digitized. I mentioned that if she ran across any additional paperwork or photos, she should let me know. I'd scan them in and return them to her.

She went and found a spiral notebook and handed it to me. She asked me to scan it in but she would like it back. I opened it and saw an amazing thing. It was a short autobiography, handwritten by my mother to her two oldest grandsons in about 1990. These were the only two grandchildren that had been born by that time. It appears she wrote it up for them but then stashed it in a drawer. I don't know if she forgot about it or was unhappy with the way it turned out.

I gladly took it and got it scanned in that same day, all 13 pages. Thirteen pages doesn't sound like a lot but for one person to write it out longhand, that's pretty impressive. There is no real new genealogical information and the information about her grandfather, Aloys Panther wasn't correct. She said he came through New York when he actually came through New Orleans. Regardless, it provides more detail about her early life that I didn't have.

Photos - More than First Meets the Eye

Of  course, everyone loves old photos. At first glance, they're pictures of your ancestors. Your mother's family, a family gathering at some special occasion. You figure out who's in them and when it was taken and add them to your database. How often do you go back and look at them? I mean really look. In your mind, look at them as if you've never seen them before. Look in the background, at the expression on people's faces, at things that are not the focus of the picture. Do this and it's possible you can figure out things that were really going on. Here are few examples from my collection.

Scanning Photos

After Mom's funeral, I volunteered to take her photo albums and boxes of photos, scan them in to the computer so all of her children could have a copy. Finally, after nearly four months, I finished scanning in over 1400 photos. Then I purchased six USB thumb drives, copied the photos onto them, along with a copy of my genealogy database and all documents associated with my genealogy work. While I don't expect all of my brothers and sisters to be interested in browsing the family tree, if all they have to do is hold on to a thumb drive, they won't mind acting as my emergency backup. Never forget to back up your data and put it at a location away from your main computer.

I've already posted some interesting photos from her collection. Here are a few more that I found interesting.

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

Re-examine What You Have and What You Need

Not sure what to do next in your genealogical research? I know I was recently at the point that I kept reaching dead-ends. I couldn't break through a couple of genealogical brick walls and was making no progress. So what to do now? Rather than continue to hammer away at these impenetrable walls, I looked at my direct ancestors and the documentation I had for them. Surprisingly, there were several basic documents I didn't have. For example, I didn't have the 1920, 1930 and 1940 US Federal Census pages for several of them. Realizing this, I went to Family Search, and browsed through their home town, page by page, in order to find their entries.

To to this, go to Family Search, go to Search and click Records

 

Surnames - Why Your Ancestors' Names Were Not What You Think They Should Be

I got to thinking about surnames and how many of the surnames of my ancestors did not follow the rule of children taking their father's last name and daughters changing theirs to their husband's last name when they get married. Because they didn't follow this rule, both of my grandmothers had last names other than what they would have been had their ancestors strictly followed this rule. Here is a list of the surnames that did not follow this rule and an explanation of how this happened.

It wasn't changed at Ellis Island - My great-grandfather, Carl Müller, and his brothers and sisters were all born with the surname of Müller. Previous family histories said that it was changed to Miller at Ellis Island or that he gave them the wrong name because he was hiding from the German military. While he may or may not have been hiding from the military, we know that his name change was not because of this and it certainly wasn't changed at Ellis Island.

My Full Ancestral Tree

I realized that while I've been posting about all the various family surnames, I've never posted my entire tree. My links page contains a link to my Rootsweb database and you can browse my entire tree that way. Here are links to my ancestors in this database and screenshots showing my ancestry.

First is the ancestry of my father, John Anthony Miller. I've recently made a breakthrough on his Miller line and you'll be hearing more about that in the coming weeks and months. For now, I've documented his Miller line back to his great-great-great-grandfather. This branch will be expanding soon.

In Honor of Facial Hair

It is now "No Shave November", where men choose to do away with their razor and grow a manly beard. In honor of this month dedicated to not shaving. this post is dedicated to the facial hair of my ancestors. The style of mustaches and beards, I'm confident, is a sign of the time and location your ancestors lived. I wish I could say I was an expert at the styles of facial hair of various times and locations, but all I can do is post the photos of my grandfathers of varying degrees of "great" as samples.