When Genealogical Search Leads You Back to…Your Blog

This is Day 2 of the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018.

As I noted in my last post, I have been out of the genealogy blogging game for a while. As a result, I’m not as tuned in to family history resources as I might be. Then again, I didn’t rely on traditional sites like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage.com early on because my mother’s branch of the family tree was not yet posted on them; the family and friend hive mind helped create that branch as I was investigating my family stories.

I figured information might have been added on those sites in the intervening years, however. Just because I stopped blogging, that didn’t mean that all research ceased.

Or did it?

Going to Geni.com

I started my search for my maternal great aunt and uncle, Adolf and Bertha Schweitzer, on the Geni.com world family tree, where a great deal of information is available for free. I found this listing for Adolf:

Here is the listing for Bertha:

Very little of this was news to me — most of the information was from historic records that I had already located or knew about — except for Bertha’s hyphenated name. I’d seen nothing about any kin called “Singer”  (a name about as easy to research as Schweizer — not). So I contacted the person listed as the Geni tree’s site manager — not a family member — for further information on the couple.

He sent me the following:

It was from the Family History page of Freud’s Butcher, a page that hasn’t been updated in a while. Mea culpa.

Ah well. Back to the drawing board. But not without one important new clue.

A Note About the Picture in the Title

The Freud’s Butcher logo that you see on top of the page is an early draft of a design for this blog created by Laura E. Kelly. Since I can take no credit for it, except enthusiastic approval at every stage, I must say it’s one of the best genealogy blog designs I’ve seen. I never get tired of it, and especially love the thread of sausages.