Month: December 2016

Charting the Immigration Path

Charts are always helpful. Between the early 1860s and 1903, nineteen descendants of Jurgen Ehmen Tonjes (1778 Wrisse-1850 Wrisse) and Frauke Eilers (1780 Holtrop, Ostfriesland-1857 Wrisse) immigrated from Wrisse, Ostfriesland, Germany. Immigration began with their adult children Tonjes Jurgen Ehmen (1805 Wrisse-1864 Illinois, USA) and Antje Jurgens (Ehmen) Albers (1811 Wrisse-1896 New Mexico) and their […]

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Everything I Needed to Know About Genealogy I Learned from My Ostfriesens

Today’s Genealogy Tip of the Day, “Build Your Skills By Learning More on a Done Family” was necessarily short so I’ve decided to expand more on it here. Generalizing is fraught with the potential for exceptions and errors, but we’ll go ahead and trudge on anyway. One of the challenges with pre-1850 American research (especially outside of […]

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Books On My Shelf

For those who have asked, this is a partial list of genealogical references on my bookshelf. I’ll update it with others as I create the links, but I’m only going to add books that I personally have experience with and that I actually use. There are other good books out there, but I only mention […]

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Old Enough to Serve, But He Enlisted

Sometimes looking for one thing leads to realizations that have never been made. Some background: Tonjes Ehmen  and Schwantje Ehmen were the parents of John, Willm, and Jurgen Ehmen and Antje (Ehmen) Sievers. Tonjes’ children were all living in Adams County, Illinois, during the Civil War era. Their exact dates of immigration are not currently […]

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My Name Is Not Spelled Eman & I Have Learned English

Variant spellings are the bane of the genealogist’s existence. Often common sense and a little thought given to how a name was pronounced will answer the problem. It’s still helpful though when a relative provides some direct evidence they were aware of their name being spelled incorrectly. That’s exactly what William Ehmen did in March […]

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