Scattered Seeds

  • WHY WAS WILLIAM IN WAUTOMA AND HENRY IN NORTH DAKOTA?

    It was October 2023, when my research question changed again: Why was William in Wautoma and Henry in North Dakota? Did they get separated or what?

    What I did find out from research at this point including comparing censuses for both is that, first, William arrived in Wisconsin in 1870 without Henry.  Henry arrived in 1900, not in Wisconsin, but in Canada. Henry then crossed over the Canadian-Wisconsin border to live in North Dakota.  

    It appeared that William and Henry didn’t have any contact over the years.  Henry wasn’t mentioned as one of William’s children in William’s obituary nor was he mentioned in obituaries of William’s children as a sibling.  

    I wondered if the intent was for Henry to join William and the rest of the family years later for some unknown good reason or if they somehow lost contact with each other.  I examined vital records and other documents.  I couldn’t find anything useful to make any sense.

    I moved on to making connections with second cousins who I got to know over time from Ancestry and then via Facebook.  I created a private Facebook group for both first and second cousins for collaboration.  Some cousins were told Henry came through Ellis Island before arriving in North Dakota.  Others didn’t know Henry well enough, having been too young to know more than what their parents told them.  

    Family history books may have existed, I was told, but they were either sold or stolen.  Anyone who knew anything was dead.

    I circled back to looking at DNA matches on Ancestry.  I wanted to give ThruLines a chance to work with a DNA tree I created for William and Ottilie.  I had only one DNA match connection to Ottilie and none for William.  Shared matches of my cousins didn’t include this match or any matches for that matter for either William or Ottilie.

    I went back to “doing the genealogy” by studying locations of where William and Henry lived before arriving in the United States.  William was part of the German immigrant group known as Prussian Netzelanders based on a book compiled by genealogist Brian A. Podoll, C.G.R.S.  This group settled in the Wautoma area.  

    One of my cousins indicated he thought Henry’s origins were Prussian, but I could not find any evidence to validate this thought.  Henry’s naturalization documents indicated that he was not born in a location under Prussian authority at the time of his birth.  Far from it.  Census records for Henry showed Henry didn’t come from Prussia either.

  • WHO WERE HENRY’S PARENTS?

    For years my paternal first cousins got nowhere with attempts of identifying with validation who the parents were of a great-grandfather I will identify as Henry.  I was up for the challenge and began with looking at family trees created by DNA match first cousins in July 2023. I began with the research question: Who were Henry’s parents?

    I had no clue at the time as to what Henry’s country of origin was for certain. What I could find in the form of Social Security and naturalization documents didn’t match up to one cousin’s thought that it was “somewhere in Germany – the Mecklenburg-Schwerin area.” 

    A number of family trees on Ancestry.com identified his parents as William and Ottilie. My research question by September 2023 changed: Were William (aka Wilhelm) and Ottillie Henry’s parents? I also was curious as to where family tree owners got the idea that this couple were his parents. No one seemed to know.

    I was interested in going back to William and Ottilie’s origins before they emigrated to the Wautoma, Wisconsin, area where they married, lived and died.  The research process started with locating the couple’s obituaries to get some idea who their children were.  

    I was able to get this information both online (Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, FamilySearch to name a few) and through a library from the Wautoma area.  The librarian was very helpful in locating obituaries that GenealogyBank.com didn’t have, including those of the couple’s children.

    I recorded my findings on family group sheets, hourglass charts and Google Drive documents and spreadsheets, citing sources along the way.  But, the information from obituaries for William and some of his children didn’t really add up.