Once I discovered that my 3rd great-grandmother Rhuby (featured in one of the podcasts) and several of her siblings were married by Reverend Eliphalet Steele of the Paris Religious Society in the 1790s, it brought up so many questions. Who was the first family member in Paris? Why Paris? Did they have a connection to Steele? How did they get there? What was life like for them?
 
Luckily the Paris Historical Society in Clayville, Oneida County, New York was there to help. They are a small dedicated group housed in a former church that keeps the history of the area alive. They have a wealth of information on the early days of  Paris including the Paris Religious Society. One of the unique aspects of the group is how they are documenting their history. There is a member who writes children’s books about how people lived while another does intricate watercolor paintings of local sites.
 
One of the challenges of upstate New York research is the changes in government jurisdictions as the counties and towns evolved. Paris is one of those areas. It was part of Herkimer County until 1798 when Oneida County was formed. However, the town of Sangerfield formed from Paris in 1795, became part of Chenango County in 1798 ,and then joined Oneida County in 1804. Recognizing when these changes occurred clears up some questions on where to look for records. My ancestor might not have moved as often as I thought, it looks like it was the names of the city and county that changed!
 
Visiting the historical society to review their materials and receiving their help is free. However, how can one pass up adding to the donations collected in an actual wooden ballot box from the early days?

Chalmette, Louisiana is the home of both the Chalmette Battlefield and the adjoining Chalmette National Cemetery.  While the battlefield is known as the site of the 1812 Battle of New Orleans, the cemetery is mainly associated with the Civil War. 

My visit was to the grave of my ancestor, Private Dewit Hulbert of the New York 2nd Cavalry, from Turin, Lewis County, New York. He was wounded in action in Alexandria, Louisiana and died six weeks later in a New Orleans hospital. He lies in a small, peaceful cemetery with graves on both sides of the one tree lined road that cuts through the center of the area separated from the world by a five foot brick wall.

Hulbert was one of many soldiers documented by the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). The USSC was a private humanitarian organization whose duties of caring for the health and well being of Union soldiers was created by federal legislation 18 June 1861. As part of their mission they collected:

• Hospital records including administrative correspondence, registers, lists of deaths, burials, and prisoners of war as well as files on individual soldiers including letters from relatives, friends, military and hospital staff;
• Claim files for pensions, back pay, county, rations, seamen’s prize money and other monies owed to the individual by the federal government. Files may contain letters, affidavits proving marriages, births or deaths, and applicable correspondence.
• Camp inspection reports, supply records and correspondence;
• Contributions or donations made by local communities.

Those records are now part of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&B) collection housed at the New York Public Library in New York City. Rather than detailed indexes collection guides are the key to the types of records that exist, how they are arranged and what they contain (http://archives.nypl.org/mss/3101). Spending the time to understand what is available is well worth it! There is a good chance you will find information on how your ancestor lived and or died.
 
Most records are not digitized and may be viewed on-site at the Archives and Manuscripts department at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Access to these records do require a request from and a valid library card although non-residents may be issued a temporary three month card. 
 
More information about the USSC holdings may be found at https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/knowledgebase/newly-accessible-civil-war-era-resource-nypl’s-united-states-sanitary-commission.

The Benton County Historical Society in Sauk Rapid, Minnesota is a phenomenal resource for research! Not only has the Executive Director, Mary Ostby, acquired an impressive amount of original material, she has built a data base that provides her and her volunteers easy access to a majority of the information.

This organization has gone further than collecting newspapers, city directories, family histories, photographs, maps, cemetery registrations and local artifacts.  It is possible through their holdings to compile a more complete picture of people in the area and how they lived.  Acquisitions include county plat maps, land records, tax assessments, probate documents, and police records. But it doesn’t stop there. The local paper mill was a large employer that when the plant was closed provided company records including payrolls to the society. There are the original membership records for the Sportsman’s Club, church histories, high school yearbooks, an area history written by a local citizen and much more.

The Benton County Historical Society was a good place to learn about who lived in my ancestor’s neighborhoods, where they worked and shopped, as well as how they spent their free time. It was here that I learned that it was my 2nd great-grandfather, not my great-grandfather, that emigrated from Prussia to the United States and that the stories that everyone that lived “on the hill” were related, really were.  I also found my great-grandfather had a brother who died young tragically in an accident working a lathe at the local sawmill.  County records helped complete a picture of a popular young man whose death devasted his parents and resulted in a lawsuit that was eventually denied at the Minnesota Supreme Court. This is just one of the many stories to be found when records exist that go beyond where one was born, who they married, and where they died.
​

Once I discovered ancestors that had emigrated from Kurkau, Prussia, I started looking for their birth, marriage, and death records. I had some luck on Ancestry and FamilySearch, although many record entries were missing and there were numerous indexing errors. The real “finds” happened when I accessed the Polish government web site that displays digital images of the original city and church records in German. It required a little effort, but once I understood how it was organized and how to translate a few German words, I did not need to understand Polish to be rewarded with more information. I was able to find their parents, children that died before emigration, siblings, in-laws that also emigrated to the same town in America, and much more.
 
The following steps might seem overwhelming, but taken one by one they are not difficult. If you give them a try, you too, could learn more about your family! 
 
Steps for accessing Prussian city and church records:

• Determine the church diocese for a town or village using the Meyers Gazetteer https://www.meyersgaz.org  
  • Enter the village name
  • A page appears showing the town and the government entities in which in belongs; click on the name for further detail about the village
  • Underneath the village name is a menu bar; click on Ecclesiastical. A page appears that provides the parishes by denomination for that village
  • Access the website for Archiwum Panstowowe W Olsztyme Archiwum Panstowowe W Olsztynie   (http://olsztyn.ap.gov.pl/baza/wynik.php)
  • Do a “find” for the church diocese name; it should take you to all of the entries for that diocese.
  • The title for each volume is in German. (Google Translate, https://translate.google.com, is one site that can be used to translate the titles.) The years the records cover are in the right hand column.  Note: There is an alphabetical index by year (Alphabetisches Nahmen Verzeichniss zu Kirchenbücher).  However, I found entries in the records that I did not find in the index.
  • Once a volume is selected it is possible to click on the page number. If the page is not known, it is possible to use the “trial and error” method of page selection remembering that they are organized chronologically within the church diocese, not by town.
  • If you need help understanding the German entries a good free tutorial on how to interpret the records as well as number of commonly used words may be found on FamilySearch: (https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/German_Genealogical_Word_List).

   One of the places that provided information to tell Thresa’s story, which is featured in the first podcast, was the Stearns History Museum in St. Cloud, Minnesota.  (Fortunately, they were open “by appointment” while other organizations were closed during Corvid.).

​Searching through their records provided much of the information that allowed us to piece together Thresa’s life in St. Cloud.  Church records recorded family life, newspaper archives told of family events, Sanborn maps provided a description of her house and the other buildings in the neighborhood, local maps provided a picture of the town (including trolley routes), city directories showed year by year who lived where…and with whom, business and industry files told the importance of specific businesses to Thresa’s everyday life, and family files provided information about her friends and those with whom she did business.  
​
So, a big thank you to Jessica and Steve in the Research Department who helped us discover more about Thresa! And a gentle reminder not to overlook all the resources local organizations have to offer.