Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
On 30 August I was in ten circles on AncestryDNA. I’ve been removed again from the circle for Riley and Nancy (Newman) Rampley. Interestingly enough I am in the circle for Riley’s grandmother, Christianna (DeMoss) Rampley, and the circle for Nancy’s grandfather, Augusta Newman. I’m now in eight circles as of this writing: Christianna (DeMoss) Rampley (born […]
Occasionally I get asked “why” I mention errors and other issues at Ancestry.com. There is really one reason: it’s fun. Actually that is not the reason. The real reason is that I believe informed users make for better users. It really is that simple. I do not spend hours trolling a database in hopes of finding a […]
Ancestry.com announced an update of their yearbook collection. A quick search of the database indicated two things: my high school yearbook is not yet included–good. they do not read this blog–bad. Ancestry.com is also have geographic issues with this collection. I wrote a while back that their yearbook collection has incorrectly placed the yearbook from Bowen High School in the […]
The partial answer to what happened to the eight children of Erasmus and Anna Catharina Trautvetter lies in a probate case file buried in the Hancock County, Illinois, courthouse. It is a thousand miles away from where Erasmus and Anna lived their lives in the 18th and 19th centuries but was where five of their […]
I’ve been writing quite a bit about the Trautvetter family lately. Perhaps a little more than usual. A few readers think that it’s the only family I ever write about. It’s not <grin>. There’s really one reason: I’ve been working on them. I don’t schedule posts weeks or months out like some writers do. I […]
Here a Johann, there a Johann, everywhere a Johann. The problem is that they were not all really Johann and “Johann” was not really what they were called. Erasmus and Anna Catharina (Gross) Trautvetter had the following children born in Dorf Allendorf (Bad Salzungen), Thuringia, Germany, between 1791 and 1811: Johann Heinrich Trautvetter Johann Adam […]
Wilhelmine (Trautvetter) Senf Kraft is one of those people with a big gap in her life–at least when I use what I can find for her. For years I knew little about Wilhelmine. She was listed as Wilhelmine Kraft in the 1860 era estate settlement of her brother Michael Trautvetter in Hancock County, Illinois. She […]
I knew the transcription was wrong. My seventy-one year old ancestor was not living with his parents in 1910. He was not necessarily too old to have any living parents, but by 1910 his parents were actually deceased. Viewing the actual census indicated that John was a boarder in the household of William Tripp in […]
Christian Troutfetter was born Thuringen, Germany, and immigrated to the United States in the 1850s. He lived in western Hancock County, Illinois, until he moved to Thomas County, Kansas, to homestead in the 1880s. He died in Thomas County, Kansas, in 1917. Some things I have learned about research from Christian: people can live in […]
