American Ponders Helped Me Find My Ancestors! (Finally something NOT a scam!)

[karen J]

This is soooo cool!

We checked our email the other day and discovered a message from someone who was searching for their ancestors. As it turns out, they found this thread from 2006:
http://www.americanponders.com/forum/index.php?topic=249.msg2336#msg2336

More specifically, this post by me:
http://www.americanponders.com/forum/index.php?topic=249.msg2336#msg2336:

Interesting. I love reading about everyone's ancestry. I have often wondered about the "six degrees of separation" theory and how it may relate to the folks here on the forum. Maybe some of us are even distantly related and don't even know it.  Cool

Krista, my hubby's father was an accomplished organist as well, and was taught by a famous person who used to play at St Paul's in London, and then his father or brother made Jenn pianos. We'd like to research that side of the family more. I would love the opprotunity to go to England and visit cemetaries and churches. Someday! Kevin's mother's side is interesting, her tree goes back hundreds of years.

My brother has done an amazing amount of research on my ancestry. He's been to England several times, and finally got to go to East Germany after the wall came down. He hit a dead end in Gotha, 1844. So if anyone knows anyone related to Johann Drescher or Marth Weibezahl just give us a ring!
As far as the English side goes, there are lots of pretty common names- like Brown, Bulmer, Wilkinson, Hyde, Allen, Dunne, Hall, Clark, Hind, Palmer, Mowbray, Fitzgerald, Fenton, Lloyd, and Jenn.

Actually, he played at "All Hallows", not St Paul's.

2006! We are so tickled. Kevin re-subscribed to Ancestry.com to hopefully get more information. We'd been unsuccessful there before, but due to the help of this new connection we discovered a wealth of information. We were able to get several generations back. We've been able to go back to approximately 1735- 1803 with a great deal of accuracy.

The thing is, maybe we could have done it with Ancestry.com.... maybe not. What we really needed was a real HUMAN connection. And believe it or not, it was through American Ponders!!!!!

So happy and Sooo endlessly grateful to Jerry and Sean. It's a tough time for all of us, but this is a shining light of happiness amidst economic doom. Thanks!

[karen J]

P.S.: I can only imagine how many google pages this guy had to root through to find that 2006 post- he was probably attempting to search for Jenn Pianos when he came across that.  We then were contacted by a distant cousin, also researching the line, and everything is matching up.

This is the coolest thing ever! However, my daughter has lots of grand, great grand, great great grandfathers named "Joseph". 

[Jerry]

Good to hear.  One never knows! It is a small world!

[KatFish]

Neat! 

[tootsie]

Can just imagine all the wonderful smiles you have now
Tootsie

[tinkster]

that is to cool.. I gotta tell ya my story about finding ancesors....

Cousin visiting from florida, she loves old cemeteries.. we drove out in the mid of nowhere two hours.  looking at old graves, one has a pill bottle tapped to the tombstone.  We argued aruond us. they didnt wanna bother, was sacred, I said obviously somebody wanted it opened and read,  so I did.  They were from texas, looking for the wife and kids of so and so who had passed away, they stated his wife had remarried, they didnt know here name and that they had 4 kids a few other details.. etc etc... it was the woman that had married my uncle after her husband had passed.  He had a small inheritance and they had been trying to find him for years.  What were the odds that someone she knew would be in the middle of knowhere to find and even open that pill bottle


tink

[KatFish]

Cool Tink!

[Esther]

That is so interesting----both stories.

I have tried and so have some of my family but the farthest they can go back, goes to a town  hall in Sweden that burned in the 1800s and all the records too.

[karen J]

What a cool story, Tink!

Esther, yes that's a big problem. So many churches, town halls, & the like were destroyed in Europe during WWII.

My brother got to go to Goethe after the wall came down. He found this church, and the pastor let him browse through the church records. That was a dead end for the family research, but the weird thing was that the pastor served tea while my brother was perusing a book that was at least 400 years old.  He was like "I better not spill any of this tea!".