Success!!!!

or I found them!!

I have been searching endlessly for my great-great-grandmother's family, who came to America from Germany when she was a baby.  I knew the approximate date (around 1859), I knew the Americanized versions of their names (her father was listed in an 1860 census as Christopher Young, his wife as Catherine), the names and approximate ages of the three children that they'd emigrated with but kept spinning my wheels and getting nowhere.  Using the transcribed ship's manifests of ships arriving in the US from Germany (http://immigrantships.net/bremenproj/bremenproject.html), I searched all the ships arriving from Germany in 1858 and 1859, all to no avail.

I don't know what made me give up on trying to locate the ship they came in on but after going through ship's manifests again tonight, I decided to take a different approach.  I went back to Family Search (https://familysearch.org/), and browsed through to the German resources.  It's easy to miss this option on the landing page because the search boxes are featured so prominantely but if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you can browse geographically.  Once I got to Germany, I selected the records for German births and took the name of my great-great-grandmother's brother as the least likely to have changed a lot.  Let's face it, Wilhelm may become William, but Phillip pretty much stays Phillip. 

Since I knew his approximate date of birth, I narrowed it down and almost immediately hit on Phillip Jung, born on Jan 1, 1856 (I had an approximate date of 1855) to Christoph Jung and Katharina Knauf.  I opened a new tab and searched with just the last name of Young with parents Christoph Jung and Katharina Knauf and there they all were.  Wilhelm, Phillip, and Elisabeth (who I had spelled Elizabeth), all born at pretty much when I had them in my records.  I had Elisabeth as being born on 15 Dec 1858 and her christening record listed 13 Dec 1957, which explains the discrepancy in her age in the 1860 census.  She was listed as being 2 and would have only been a year and a half if she had been born in December of 1858.  I also discovered that there had been an older brother, Andreas, born in Feb. 1849.  Since I knew he wasn't listed as being enumerated with the family in 1860, I did a search for him and discovered he died in Jan. 1850.  Poor little guy didn't even make his first birthday.

With this information, I was able to dig deeper and found the marriage date for Christoph and Katharina in 1847.  That information also netted me both sets of their parents - Konrad Jung and Anna Elisabetha Hofmann for Christoph and Jacob Knauf and Elisabetha Steiz for Katharina.  I was so happy and excited to find this information, I literally had tears of joy running down my face.  This particular branch on my tree had me completely blocked.  I had everyone else on that particular offshoot (my paternal grandmother's side) traced back a generation beyond Christopher and Catherine.  Now I've filled that in and feel like I can, once again, move forward.  I think I might be ready to tackle my paternal grandfather's side now!  My goal is to get all four grandparents to at least that level before continuing onward.

Battling Passenger Lists

I took time off today from indexing the 1940 US Census (mainly for Iowa, although I've done other states) and Ohio Marriage Records to scan through several hundreds of pages of New York Passenger Lists.  I'm still trying to locate when my 3rd great-grandfather and his family, including my 2nd great-grandmother, arrived in this country from Germany.  I know it was 1959, as my 2nd great-grandmother was born in 1858, in Germany, and I found them in the 1860 US census.  Since she was born in Dec., I decided to start at the end of 1859 and work backwards.  I've made it back to Nov. 12 without discovering them.  I did discover, however, that it seems like a lot of people from Ireland, Scotand, and Great Britain arrived between then and Dec. 31.

Searching various passenger lists by variations on the name Young (Jung, Junge, Yung, Yunge, etc.) for 1859 has thus far gotten me nowhere, which is why I've resorted to scanning the images.  I have basic ages and my research thus far has lead me to believe that they all emigrated together as a family.  So I'm scanning passenger lists, focusing on the ages of the passengers, looking for children under the age of 10, which is what the family group consisted of at that time.  Hopefully, I'll eventually be successful.  I now that not all immigrants came in through New York but the vast majority of them did so it seemed a logical starting point.

In other news, I find that I'm really enjoying the indexing I've been doing.  So far, I haven't come across anyone that I "know" but I'm finding it really interesting to see the various family groupings. The age differences in marriages can be fascinating.  Here's a couple where the husband is 15 years older than the wife and here's a couple where the wife is a decade older than the husband.  I also find it interesting when someone is listed as married but their spouse is not listed at the same address.  I've also encountered a couple of different "households" where the occupants were all listed as Partners, usually at least 3 or 4.  I haven't qute figured that one out yet.