ROOTS & BRANCHES

In case you wonder what type of communications that your “Roots & Branches” columnist likes to receive, let me share one with you that shows someone going about genealogy in a credible, methodological fashion as well as needing some guidance going on from there.

The e-mail came from Tess Byers in Johnstown. She attached “three census records, two obituaries, and two pictures” relating to her Byers immigrant and his son.

“The census records are dated 1910, 1930, and 1940 and show information about my great-grandfather, Joseph Caspar/Casper Byers,” she wrote.  “The two obituaries are for Joseph and his father, Vincent Byers. I don’t know if the pictures will be helpful to you, but they are of Joseph and Vincent.

Tess had a few more observations, but let’s unpack what she’s done so far before getting to those.

First of all, you know someone’s on the right track when they start with the U.S. Census, because it’s inarguable the federal census gets more people on their way than any other record group, simply because of its consistency: Taken every years since 1790 and open to the public for research through 1940.

Newspaper obituaries are another key tool for genealogists since most of them, starting roughly around 1900, offered information about origins and parents of the deceased as well as surviving relatives and descendants. Obits are a crucial “generation connectors.”

The photos weren’t helpful to me since that’s not an area of genealogy that I’ve studied, but there are techniques to date the photos if they have not been otherwise pigeonholed to a certain time.

“Now my main questions are about pinpointing where they originated from because, as you will see, the census data seems to change from Germany to Austria,” Tess wrote. “I would also like to figure out why they immigrated to Pennsylvania and if the Byers Family goes further than Germany/Austria or if they moved there from somewhere else.”

She was right to be confused by the conflicting data; in this case, it’s likely the “Germany” and “Austria” confusion comes from conflating language and nationality, since they speak German in Austria (Another confusion was shown in Vincent’s obituary: It notes his birthplace as “Australia”—which is so common that Austria has developed tourist campaigns around noting that there are no kangaroos in Austria).

Now that Tess has covered some of the basics, here’s a starter set of possible records that might help her go further:

• Seek naturalization records for the immigrant – this was usually a two-step process and could be done on either the county or federal level. Start with the county courthouse to see if they have Vincent’s papers. It may well give his exact date of arrival, port of departure from Europe and other information.
• Look at church records of baptism, marriage and burial – any one of these for the immigrant or immigrant’s children may reveal a precise European village of origin.
• Also mine the marriage licenses at the county courthouse (which may also be online at FamilySearch.org. Marriages of the immigrant’s children may also yield information about the parents, too.
• Research passenger arrival and embarkation lists (which can all be found on Ancestry.com) since they might pinpoint European origins.