After Thirty Years I Have Found Bernard

[re-posted with some additions from 22 April 2014 as we migrate old content to the new blog]

I’ve searched for my mother’s immigrant ancestors in passenger manifests for over thirty years. All of her families immigrated to the United States from Ostfriesland, Germany between the 1850s and 1883. Most of them have been found on passengers lists arriving through either New York or New Orleans.

Today I think I’ve located another one: Bernard Dirks. Bernard was a native of Etzel, Ostfriesland, Germany who settled near Coatsburg in Adams County, Illinois, where he died in the 1910s. I really didn’t “need” his passenger list, as his origins in Germany have been well documented. But it was a missing piece of the puzzle and one never knows what additional information may surface on a manifest.

Bernard’s two census enumerations where immigration information is provided both indicate an arrival year of 1852:

• 1910  US Federal Census, Honey Creek Township, Enumeration District 12, sheet 4B
• 1900 US Federal Census, Honey Creek Township, Enumeration District 109, Sheet 6B

The consistency suggests that the same person provided the same information–it’s not a guarantee that the year is correct. But at least the years are consistent.

After some additional time spent with wildcard searching at Ancestry.com I discovered a “Bernard Dirks” having arrived in New York in July of 1852. This was the only reasonably close match that I was able to locate performing a wildcard search with vowels replaced by wildcard operators.