The last note mentioned some upcoming conferences; this note will discuss a recent one the meeting of the Pennsylvania Chapter of Palatines to America (PalAm) in late April. There was only one speaker, Mrs. Trudy Schenk who is a native-born German who has lived many years in the US. She works at the FHL in Salt Lake City, apparently at the help desk for German research. She has heard the common research problem of "Where did my ancestor come from?" again and again.
Throughout her talks, she emphasized, "Association is a major key." If you can put your ancestor into a bin with known people from known sources, then concentrate your searching on that area. If you know the passenger list for the ship that the ancestor came on, check the names of the people who are close to the ancestor on the list. Surnames can be compared to the distribution of the surnames in Germany today. First names are some clues also, as many first names are unique to a region. The spelling of many of these is a clue also. Henrich is a northern spelling, Heinrich is a southern spelling. [I asked her if she has published a book with the implications of first name spellings and she said that there was not enough time in the day.] Examples of variant spellings are Baltzer for Balthasar, Jerg for Georg, Uli for Ulrich, Filip for Philipp, and Heini for Heinrich.
There are two categories of records that are important, the church records and the civil records. The church records are tedious. In the civil records, there have been many compilations of emigration records in recent decades. She named many of these books, as yet unfilmed, which are in the FHL library. Among the authors are Burgert, Jones, Krebs, Hacker, Yoder, Muggenthaler, and Gieg. The only problem with emigration records is that many people left secretly without permission. [In response to my question about the meaning of "they left in the night", which was used to describe the departure the Gemmingen folk in 1717, she said that was a code phrase meaning they left without permission.] The church records may have notations of departure from a village without there being a civil permission as in this example.
In Wuerttemberg, many of the emigrants did apply for permission to leave and many of these records have been preserved. Many have been microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, but they are a jumbled up collection of papers that are not indexed. Mrs. Schenk and Ruth Froelke have undertaken to read through such documents and publish the information in the form of indexes for the public's benefit. Though tedious, there are interesting tidbits about the immigrants such as "the parish is paying money to send this man to America." Probably this individual was a financial and perhaps a moral burden on the parish.
If you searching for an ancestor and you are in Salt Lake City, look up Trudy Schenk. She may have some good help for you. Probably she is very busy.
(06 May 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.