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.