“Family Archaeologist” explores a century of family letters, diaries, and artifacts, and how they illuminate history and our shared humanity. To get an overview of the blog, click: “Welcome to Family Archaeologist”
LATEST BLOG POSTS
Travel Tuesday-Transylvania Sights & Family Secrets
Welcome to the first post for “Travel Tuesday.” I plan to use Tuesdays to highlight the roots-finding trip my brothers and I made to Transylvania, Romania, in September, 2007. I’ve suggested this topic to Genea-bloggers as another possible prompt to which others may wish to contribute about genealogy research trips they have taken, and/or to highlight [...]
German Mojo Defeats Cryptic Cursive
portion of my Grandfather’s letter to view cryptic cursive Cryptic cursive was the number one barrier that held a century of letters hostage. The second, less daunting, but still real barrier, was the language, German. […]
Ancestor Approved, Surprises, and Sharing Award
Recently I’ve received the Ancestor Approved Award from Nancy at My Ancestors and Me. Thank you so much for making Family Archaeologist one of your choices. My hope is to create a link to all of our ancestors’ experiences, and our common humanity, through the words expressed in the diaries, letters, and documents I’m sharing. This award [...]
Landing the Dream
January 11, 2011, is the 100th anniversary of Josef Gärtz, my paternal grandfather, arriving in America, losing the umlaut over the “ä” and becoming Gartz. My guess is that he didn’t record his first impressions because he was too excited and overwhelmed upon landing to be scribbling in his diary. So without his words to guide [...]
Mystery Writing
While Josef makes his way across the Atlantic to America in early January, 1911, I thought I’d use his “travel time” to fill you all in on some details of this family archaeologist’s dig. First–a little more about the unreadable letters, diaries and documents. 21, 16, 4, 23, 24, 2 … Who needs Numerical Order? Boxes [...]
Atlantic Crossing in Winter
Friedrich der Grosse from NorwayHeritage.com Crossing the North Atlantic in the heart of winter was a grueling experience, as Josef reports in his diary. The first and second days were fine, but the other ten days we had very stormy weather so that not a single person remained healthy or found any joy or [...]
Out to Sea
12/30/1910—First page of letter from Josef to Lisi on F. Missler stationery Once Josef arrived in Bremen, and his path to America seemed clear, he wrote to Lisi. Not only had Friedrich Missler, probably Bremen’s most successful ticket agent, given thousands of passengers a brown, canvas wallet like the one in which I found Josef’s [...]
Threats to the Dream—Vienna to Bremen
Josef wrote both in his diary and to Lisi about his terror atop the train from Pressburg (Bratislava) to Vienna, one corroborating the other, but each using slightly different language. In the diary he wrote: I thought the sharp wind would throw me under the fast train like a piece of paper, but I held tight until we [...]
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