The obituary for my great-great-grandfather Jacob Maurer says:

He leaves to mourn their loss the widow, eight children, twenty-five grandchildren and six great grandchildren, besides other relatives and friends. A sister, Mrs. Anna Ziegler, of Denver, Colorado, also survives.

For years, that was all the information I had regarding Anna Maurer.

I found an Anna Ziegler in the census, married to William Ziegler; they lived in White County for a while, then – apparently – moved to Denver. But was it Jacob Maurer’s sister, or just an unfortunate coincidence of names?

(The latter is maddeningly common among the Germans of nineteenth-century White County. They loved to re-use first names.)

I had the notion yesterday to visit the Urbana Free Library, and see what I could dig up on Anna & William Ziegler. Maybe they had some new books in the Archives that would be helpful.

I found White County Marriages, 1866-1880, by Patricia P. Davis; it’s a transcript of (a few of) the marriage registers kept in the County Clerk’s office, in the courthouse in Carmi. (These books are huge, heavy & occasionally quite filthy. Wrestling with them may be genealogically profitable, but in most other ways it’s quite unpleasant.) On page 188, I found:

April 25, 1871
William Ziegler
Anna Mower / Mowrer
Book 5, Box 8

This entry isn’t in any of the other marriage indices I’ve seen. I can’t find it in the Secretary of State’s online database, nor on Ancestry.com. Could it be that the handwriting on the actual document is so poor that later transcribers & indexers all took their best guess – and all got it wrong?

I’m keen to get a copy of Anna & William’s marriage license, but undecided as to how I might do that. I could take a vacation day, drive down to Carmi, and retrieve it myself; or I could ask the County Clerk to mail it to me. One way is faster, the other is significantly cheaper.

What to do, what to do….

Years ago, I was in the habit of spending Saturday afternoons at the Urbana Free Library, poring over the genealogy books in the Archives.

The Archives’ primary focus is Champaign County, which doesn’t help me very much: no ancestors of mine ever lived here. But their secondary focus is the rest of Illinois, and they have quite a selection of material from White County.

My note-taking started out very low-tech, with pencil & paper. Alas, my handwriting was very small, ten years ago, and my eyesight was much better. These days, my stack of scribbled notes is getting hard to read. I keep them on my desk, but don’t look at them much any more.

Later, I went electronic, pecking away at the iPaq (first) and the Axim X30 (later), each with its own folding keyboard. I created a few dozen Pocket Word documents that way, of book excerpts and random notes. But when the iPaq and X30 went away, Pocket Word went away too, and I was left with a bunch of files I couldn’t read. (Why, no, desktop Word couldn’t read Pocket Word files. Way to go, ‘softies.) Converting them to plain text was an adventure.

I had the notion this evening to get all of this (in consistent electronic form and) neatly organized, indexed and searchable. This is by no means a one-evening project, especially with all the handwritten stuff to be processed. But it’ll keep me busy, and away from Minecraft; and there may be significant information buried among the scribbles.

I’ll likely use Evernote for this, if I can figure out how their OS X app works these days. They keep redesigning the silly thing….

John Maurer was born in 1878, the eldest son of Jacob & Katherine Maurer. Around 1900, he married Rose Burkhardt – sister of Barbara Burkhardt, the mother of Barbara Felty, wife of…John’s brother Harry. Rose was also sister of Susie Burkhardt, who married John’s brother Jacob.

I digress.

I had the notion yesterday to find John & Rose in the 1940 census. This presented some unexpected mysteries.

John Maurer is listed in Burnt Prairie Township, as a lodger (with people I didn’t recognize), marital status divorced; Rose is in Carmi, as a housekeeper (again, with people I didn’t recognize), marital status widowed. They’re both the right age, and they’re the only John & Rose Maurer in White County in 1940 (so far as I know); but I’m not convinced they’re the right people.

I have no record that John & Rose ever divorced. Their obituaries (1957 and 1955, respectively) imply that they stayed married. Perhaps divorce was unmentionable in the 1950s? But if they didn’t divorce, where were they in 1940? And how does the Stolen Heifers Incident of 1932 fit into this?

I don’t suppose this will be resolved without a trip to Carmi.

Update: Numerous errors have been corrected. (I really shouldn’t try to write these things from memory.)

The 1941 edition of Polk’s City Directory for Gary, Indiana contains this entry (on page 310):

Maurer, Herschel I (Vina V) clk Ideal Grocery & Market r441 Pennsylvania

Those are my grandparents, moved up from Carmi to…do what? Look for work? Have a go at city life, instead of farming?

I should have asked my grandmother about this, or my mother.

I was curious where in Gary 441 Pennsylvania St. might be, so this evening I looked it up: it’s a few blocks east of the (now closed) Gary Public Library main branch. As with the City Methodist Church, if I’d known that when I was in Gary a few years back I might have gone to take a look.

Not that I would have seen anything. Google Maps has this:

View Larger Map

…a baseball stadium, and a parking lot. Whatever house my grandparents lived in, back in 1941, is long gone.

(Most of Gary is long gone. And most of what’s left doesn’t look too good. But that’s a story for another time.)

I’ve been slogging through my genealogical source material – 400+ documents, transcripts, etc. – and reconstituting my database (using Reunion 9, on the MacBook). After several months of intermittent effort, I still have 240+ to go.

I’m hoping to finish sometime in 2013, and then get to work on extending my research.

When people think of their ancestry, they think of a single line: usually the male line, son to father to grandfather. But that’s too limiting (not to mention a bit dismissive of one’s female ancestors): everybody has an ever-widening fan of ancestors, spreading out into the past.

(That’s not entirely true. The graph of one’s ancestors is actually diamond-shaped. The number of slots in the family tree increases geometrically with each generation, but the overall population goes down. The number of duplicates – i.e., a single individual occupying multiple slots – goes up. I’m told the maximum number of simultaneous ancestors occurs around the 14th century, at least for Europeans.)

They’re all family, no single line more so than the others.

On the other hand, there is the notion of close vs. distant relatives: the ones we see all the time – grandparents, parents, children, aunts & uncles, cousins – as opposed to the ones we just hear about, second- or third-hand. Everybody draws a circle around their part of the family tree, and thinks: this is my family. But there’s always more beyond the edges.

It’s a bit mind-stretching to encounter a third or fourth cousin and realize that to them, you are the distant relative.

I have two pictures of Jacob Maurer and his family. Eight years ago, Uncle Ivan sent me this one:

He told me it came from Richard Maurer, grandson of Harry Maurer (and thus my first cousin, once removed).

The other came from Todd Adams, who sent it to me earlier this year:

This one is curious – it’s a (slightly off-center) copy of the original, which was scanned with annotations (written on the back of an envelope).

Clearly, these are two pictures of the same family, taken not too many years apart. It looks like they were taken in the same place, too. But there are mysteries.

There may be errors in the first photo’s caption. I think #9 is more likely to be Katherine (Ziegler) Maurer, rather than Mary Ann (aka ‘Mollie’) Maurer (who later married Everett Gillihan); and I think #6 is Katherine’s mother, Katherine (Gomer) Ziegler, who is recorded in the 1900 census as living with her daughter & son-in-law.

In the second photo – who’s that holding baby Helen?

And the children’s ages seem inconsistent between the two photos. Harry and Reuben look significantly older in photo #2 vs. photo #1, but Helen doesn’t. I wonder whether Jacob & Katherine’s last child was born between the two photos, and the girls in photo #2 are mislabeled. I have two newspaper accounts from September, 1898, announcing the death of Jacob Maurer’s daughter – but neither says which Jacob Maurer (Sr. or Jr.), nor gives the girl’s name.

But if photo #2 was taken prior to September, 1898, then why isn’t Katherine (Gomer) Ziegler in it?

Contemplating on this windy Sunday morning a few distant ancestors: John Haffa, Jr.; his father, John Haffa, Sr.; his wife, Christina Bachman; and others.

Christina Bachman & John Haffa (Jr.)’s marriage license (filed September, 1883) says:

• Age next birthday, 24
• Place of birth, “Werttenberg, Germany”
• Mother’s maiden name, “Klunz”

Meanwhile, a biographical sketch of John Haffa, Jr., appearing in History of White County, Illinois (published 1883), disagrees:

• Date of birth: 17 January 1858
• Place of birth, “the eastern part of Holland”
• Mother’s maiden name, “Plune”

One must assume a number of errors for any of this to make sense. Either John made a subtraction error on his marriage license, or 1858 is a misprint. Either John wasn’t born in Wurttemberg, or the “eastern part of Holland” extends into southern Germany (where Wuerttemberg is). Either Klunz is a misspelling, or Plune is; or both; or – a remote possibility – Klunz and Plune refer to two different women.

It baffles me that both documents were created in 1883, presumably with Mr. Haffa himself as the source, yet they disagree.

Poking around the 1860 census for Crawford County, Indiana, I found this family:

James Dean, 65
Catherine Dean, 25
Harriet Dean, 19
William Dean, 16
Laban Dean, 15
Alonzo Dean, 13
Fannie M. Dean, 4
John Dean, 3
Elizabeth A. Dean, 1
Margaret Dean, 29

(That’s Jennings Township, page 31, lines 31-40.)

Of interest is young John Dean; he’s the right age to be the fella who later – much later – married my great-great-grandmother Jennie Bolerjack. But it’s not immediately obvious that he really is my great-great-grandfather.

The ages are interesting. My interpretation:

• Harriet, William, Laban & Alonzo were from James’ first marriage;
• James’s first wife (for now, a purely hypothetical woman) died, sometime after 1845;
• Sometime before 1855, James & Catherine married;
• Fannie M., John & Elizabeth were Catherine’s children with James.

But then, who’s Margaret? Catherine’s older sister?

Research continues.

On February 27, 1952, one Kenneth Lee Maurer of Detroit made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, for the hatchet murder of his mother & sister.

He was apprehended in Miami on January 8, 1953, and sent back to Detroit for trial.

I can’t find any record of the trial. Was he convicted? (Seems likely, given his confession.) Executed? (Also likely, given the crime & the era.)

I’m fairly sure Mr. Maurer is no kin of mine – only a few Maurers left White County, and (so far as I know) none of them went as far as Detroit.

Poking around Ancestry.com this morning, I found the following news item from the Anderson Daily Bulletin for Wednesday, May 31, 1967:

Seaman Drowned

Gary, Ind. (UPI) – Seaman Keith Allen Maurer, 18, drowned last week while his ship, USS Lowe, was docked for repairs at Guam, relatives near here learned Tuesday.

I am somewhat puzzled as to which relatives might have been living in or near Anderson, Indiana (midway between Indianapolis and Muncie) in 1967. Most of the family were living in Gary at the time. Possibly Uncle Ivan, who moved around a bit in the 1960s / 1970s.

P.S. To Uncle Ivan – Sam says thank you for the birthday present.