#romamarygrace

Grandpa Siegel & His Cars

November 5th marked the 135th birthday of Carl Christian Siegel, my maternal grandfather.  To celebrate I wanted to highlight one of the things I have noticed while digitizing family photos- grandpa liked cars!  There are many photos of Grandpa and his family with cars so I thought I would share a few today.  Not being a connoisseur of old cars, I haven’t identified most so if you can recognize the make and model or have a memory related to it, shout it out in the comments.  But first a little history behind automobiles….

A Year of Firsts

One of the first rules of genealogy, long neglected by genealogists is to write down your own stories.  On this German Unity Day, as falling leaves and temperatures finally reach Alabama, memories of my Year of Firsts, thirty (!) years ago flood my mind. But the beginning of the story, like so many tales, requires me to go back a year earlier when I was in the spring of my fourth year of undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri in Columbia. A wanderlust had invaded my soul at an early age, but financial and academic limitations made me believe I could not afford to study abroad during my undergraduate days. As I was talking to my advisor and German mentor, Dr. Dennis Mueller, I mentioned I had dreamed of going to Germany for many years. He looked at me rather quizzically and said simply “why don’t you?”

A Nearly Forgotten Cemetery

How do you find a cemetery record that is not online at FindAGrave, BillionGraves or any other online database?  Look it up in a book!  Our ancestors were traced and recorded by amateur and professional genealogists for generations before us and often we are lucky enough to spot their footsteps and follow their lead.

City directories: Just boring phone phonebooks?

Genealogists know that city directories are not simply phone books, rather that these resources were created for businesses to get access to customers and vice versa.  They are genealogy gold ready to be mined!  Ralph L. Polk, the most widely known publisher, began his business with 1872 Evansville, IN directory, listing the names and addresses of all residents of the town.  Early Polk directories included a variety of information useful to genealogists including county courts, stage lines, steamboat companies, count residents on rural routes, and other detailed information on the locality.

The German Empire and German Americans

On this day in 1871 the Deutsches Reich, or German Empire, was proclaimed from a group of 26 disparate entities. My ancestors hailed from the western side of the Prussian empire near Coblenz, the Duchy of Nassau, the Kingdom of Hanover, and the Electorate of Hessen.  Lately, I’ve been researching the 1920s, German immigration to the U.S., prohibition, and WWI.  Most of my ancestors emigrated prior to unification and therefore, I don’t believe they ever identified with the German Empire as their homeland. 

Scroll to Top