Skip to main content

Name Game




Ever since I received my AncestryDNA results and discovered my Turkish/Persian/Caucasus ethnicity and – even more surprising – my LACK of Central European ethnicity,  I’ve made a concerted effort to look further into the lives of my immigrant ancestors and their lives across the ocean.  Most of my time until recently has been tracing family roots on American soil; diving into international genealogy is a completely new ball game.  My first experience with international research was working through my husband’s Norwegian family history…and involved learning new terms in a new language (words like church, parish, baptism, marriage, death, etc.).  It also involved in-depth geography lessons, advancing my understanding of migration, patronymic naming systems, and even digging into common routes of immigration from Norway to the United States.  Thanks to Google Translator, I have been able to use the wonderfully-detailed Norwegian Archives website to locate relatives in Norwegian census records and church records.  I say it all the time –but thank GOODNESS for the internet!!

As I mentioned in the previous post on the Daniel Frederick Miller family, I’ve spent a little time trying to locate Mr. Miller’s father and mother in immigration passenger lists.  No such luck.  Some US census records show they arrived in 1862, some in 1865.  In a document from my grandfather, he wrote that he believed one or two of Daniels’ siblings were born in Germany; one was believed to have been born en route.  No such luck in my research!

Until yesterday!  What’s in a name, anyway?  I’ve guessed that the family patriarch, George Miller, changed their last name from Mueller to Miller upon settling in Ohio/Kentucky.  I’ve searched high and low given the facts I knew from my grandfather and other records I’ve found.  Yesterday’s EUREKA moment was finding the family in the Castle Garden index for 3 August 1865!  A little background on Castle Garden from their website:


CastleGarden.org is an educational project of The Battery Conservancy. This free site offers access to an extraordinary database of information on 11 million immigrants from 1820 through 1892, the year Ellis Island opened. More than 100 million Americans can trace their ancestors to this early immigration period.  Castle Garden, today known as Castle Clinton National Monument, is the major landmark within The Battery, the 25 acre waterfront park at the tip of Manhattan. From 1855 to 1890, the Castle was America's first official immigration center, a pioneering collaboration of New York State and New York City.
After finding George Miller/Muller's widow living in Cincinnati's 29th ward in the 1900 US Federal Census, an entry that indicated her immigration to the United States in 1866, I decided to focus my search within a few years of 1866.  Guess what?  I found them!!  AND...not only did I find parents George and Magdalena Mueller, I discovered that my grandfather's grandfather, Daniel Frederick Miller, was indeed born in Germany!  Young Friederich was only 9 months old upon arrival in New York.  I have often wondered about the name "Daniel", since it was obvious he was called "Fritz" or "Fred" most of his life.  I wonder if "Daniel" was added after living in the US for some particular reason?  Here is a snippet of their passenger entry in the Castle Garden database:


Here, you can see the following family members:

George Mueller (1837-?)
Maria Magdalena (Dick) Mueller (1835-?)
Maria Mueller (1858-?)
George Mueller/Miller, Jr. (1860-?)
Kathrina (1861-?)*...this index may have been transcribed erroneously, since I know "Katie" was born around 1861.  It's also not possible that she was 1 at the same time her brother was 9 months old.
Friedrich Mueller/Miller (1865-1954)

According to the record, the family left their home in Baden (I knew this was their hometown from other documents), traveled to Antwerp, and sailed on the ship "S/S Energie" from Antwerp to New York.  They arrived on 3 August 1865.

A few oddities: in all US Census records, Daniel Fred Miller's (Friedrich listed above) is shown to have been born in Ohio  Also, this record is from 1865 instead of 1866.  On his grave marker and in census documents, Daniel Fred's birthday is listed as November 1865.  BUT - if he was 9 months in August 1865 upon arrival in the US, the math works that he was actually born in November of 1864.  These are some quirks that do not totally discredit my belief that the above is their immigration record.  Often, census-takers were quoted incorrect dates or even transcribed information incorrectly.  I've learned not to take such errors as gospel truth and look instead for other correlations, as I've done above.

SO - this sheds new light on the Miller family's arrival.  Not just two...but four children were in fact born in Germany.  As you can see from the many ?? listed above, I have further work to do to establish death dates in Ohio.  Still a work in progress!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pay It Forward

A bit of joy for my Friday! Our mail delivery within our little military community here in Sicily is so.very.sloooooow.  What makes it maddening is that it can be a combination of super-fast and super-slow...so no one seems to balk at the trend of inconsistency.  Maybe I complain enough for everyone :). I'm in the middle of a few genealogical mysteries - one of them being the family origins of a Mr. Joseph W. Daly, a paternal great-grandfather of my husband.  Like most of the challenging parts of our tree, I hit a wall with Joseph a few months back and promptly put him aside when something a little more lucrative came along.  For sake of ease.  Now, we meet again.  For this one, I even consulted a few curious friends.  I felt like maybe I wasn't searching deep enough or with the right "keywords" online or in my genealogy search engines.  Some researchers have favored methodologies for searching, and I felt I needed to branch out.  One friend immediately suggest

Col. John Powell (1752-1826): Lanesborough, MA

My research lately is leading me down a Massachusetts rabbit trail of sorts.  Having spent the majority of my life in the Deep South, little did I know that I had such roots in New England!  One of my favorite parts of family history research is taking time to learn about locales that are completely new to me...familiarizing myself with geography, culture, and historical aspects of that particular town/state/country. For context, today's ancestor is my 6th great-grandfather through my mother's father's paternal grandmother's side of the family :).  Papa's grandmother was a MEAD, and Col. John Powell (1752) is connected through that branch of the tree. Col. Powell is one of four patriots connected to the MEAD side of our family.  While digging through newspaper archives in GenealogyBank.com this week, I located the following mortuary notice from The Sun in Pittsfield, MA: John POWELL married Lois CURTIS (1753-1838) on 20 November 1755 in Berkshire County, Ma

Maritime Monday

Instead of jumping right into the multi-generational tradition of service in the US Navy among my husband's relatives (would have been too obvious?  No?)...I'll kick off the first of my "Maritime Monday" posts with a nod at one of my several German immigrant ancestors.  Ship travel?  Check!   On 18 Septemer 1868, my 3rd great-grandfather Anselmus Ostholthoff arrived in New York aboard the German steam ship "Smidt" after a trans-Atlantic journey from Andervenne, Germany.  His traveling companions - wife Maria Anna (Toepke) Ostholthoff, their eldest son Johan Gerhard (2 years), and daughter Anna Maria (9 months). The following snippet from their arrival documentation [1] indicates that Anselmus ("Selmus") was a farmer from Andervenne.  His stated destination after New York: Virgina.  This is curious to me, because I have record of Anselmus living in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1870 [2] .  At this point, Mr. Ostholthoff is no longer working as a farmer