Two Notes ago, I wrote about Thomas Giffin of London, who gave communion pieces for the German Lutheran Church in Spotsylvania. At the time, I reported that Andreas Mielke had said that a further search for Giffin might be fruitful. He has just reported to that he did search some more, saying:
"I am happy to report that another connection has been found in the meantime. Apparently, Thomas Giffin was a business partner of merchant Hans Jacob Zollickoffer, the man from St. Gall who collected for Germanna in Europe 1719/1720 and settled in the neighborhood afterwards."
The last issue of the German Life magazine has been out for a few weeks. There is a one-page article by James M. Beidler, who submits material to the magazine on the general topic of genealogy. He writes:
"Researchers with German roots generally try first to exhaust all American record sources about an immigrant family before trying to make the leap across the Atlantic Ocean to the Old World village. And while these New World sources, naturalization records, passenger lists, tombstones, church records, etc., are frequently fruitful for finding the town of origin, there are still many more immigrants for whom no American records show the home village.
"In this case, finding the birthplace across the water can be a daunting experience, the proverbial needle in a haystack. Methodologies for dealing with the situation involve making the needle larger or the haystack smaller."
Beidler mentions using the IGI of the Latter Day Saints and the Periodical Source Index known as PERSI; however, for German-language genealogy, readers need to know about " Der Schluessel ", which literally means "the key" in German. It gives summaries of nearly one hundred periodicals. The summary indicates what surnames are mentioned in each article of each periodical. " Der Schluessel " is indexed in three ways: by subject, by surname, and by location. The Family History Library in Salt Lake City and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. each has nine volumes in book form that cover the years 1950 to 1986. The nature of the index varies in the different volumes so one must be careful.
The Family History Library has other multi-volume periodical indices and compiled genealogies available. The "
Ahnenstammkartei
" is a microfilmed card index of references to German surnames, organized by a phonetic code to account for surname spelling variants. About six million names are found on these cards.
(13 Apr 05)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.