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<blockquote data-quote="donna723" data-source="post: 411850" data-attributes="member: 1883"><p>Lisa, I've found that out! I've been trying to fill in some of the missing information on my mother side and I've found lots of mistakes in other people's trees. Some of these people doing the research are very distant relatives but the people they're researching are family members I knew as a child. It gets very, very complicated. My maternal grandmother was the second-youngest of eleven children, although all the older ones were dead by the time we came along. Some people have some of them listed twice - once under their real names and once under a nickname, like they were two different people! You can access all the old census records but that gets confusing too. They were all handwritten, and there's a lot of errors. My maternal great grandmother's name was Katherine but some records have her as "Catherine" or "Caterina" or "Katie" and unless you search on the right one, you won't find her. My paternal grandmother was Mary Margaret but some census records have her as "Mayme" or "Mamie" which is what everybody called her. A lot of these ancestors a few generations back were German immigrants and the German names on the early records were eventually Americanized - lots of "Heinrichs" that morphed into "Henrys". And all the men seem to use only about ten names in different combinations, and it wasn't unusual for them to give the same first name to more than one of their children! One GGgrandmother was married to a man named Gerhard in Germany and had several children, then when he died, she married his younger brother, who was <em>also</em> named Gerhard, and had several more children - and named two of them "Gerhard"!! Try figuring that one out! It's fascinating but a little sad too and you can really tell how different their lives were from ours. Families were very large and almost all of them lost one or more of their children in infancy. I knew that my paternal grandmother had two older brothers but I never knew that when she was five, she lost a seven year old sister and an infant brother to diptheria and that my father had been named for this lost baby brother. A lot of the women died in childbirth and the men quickly remarried to have someone to care for the children, then had more children, so a lot of them are only half-siblings, or some of the children were farmed out to various relatives to raise when the mother died and it's hard to track them down on the records. Very sad really.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="donna723, post: 411850, member: 1883"] Lisa, I've found that out! I've been trying to fill in some of the missing information on my mother side and I've found lots of mistakes in other people's trees. Some of these people doing the research are very distant relatives but the people they're researching are family members I knew as a child. It gets very, very complicated. My maternal grandmother was the second-youngest of eleven children, although all the older ones were dead by the time we came along. Some people have some of them listed twice - once under their real names and once under a nickname, like they were two different people! You can access all the old census records but that gets confusing too. They were all handwritten, and there's a lot of errors. My maternal great grandmother's name was Katherine but some records have her as "Catherine" or "Caterina" or "Katie" and unless you search on the right one, you won't find her. My paternal grandmother was Mary Margaret but some census records have her as "Mayme" or "Mamie" which is what everybody called her. A lot of these ancestors a few generations back were German immigrants and the German names on the early records were eventually Americanized - lots of "Heinrichs" that morphed into "Henrys". And all the men seem to use only about ten names in different combinations, and it wasn't unusual for them to give the same first name to more than one of their children! One GGgrandmother was married to a man named Gerhard in Germany and had several children, then when he died, she married his younger brother, who was [I]also[/I] named Gerhard, and had several more children - and named two of them "Gerhard"!! Try figuring that one out! It's fascinating but a little sad too and you can really tell how different their lives were from ours. Families were very large and almost all of them lost one or more of their children in infancy. I knew that my paternal grandmother had two older brothers but I never knew that when she was five, she lost a seven year old sister and an infant brother to diptheria and that my father had been named for this lost baby brother. A lot of the women died in childbirth and the men quickly remarried to have someone to care for the children, then had more children, so a lot of them are only half-siblings, or some of the children were farmed out to various relatives to raise when the mother died and it's hard to track them down on the records. Very sad really. [/QUOTE]
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