{"id":6349,"date":"2017-04-03T07:36:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T13:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=6349"},"modified":"2017-04-02T21:35:25","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T03:35:25","slug":"latest-family-history-non-discoveries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/04\/latest-family-history-non-discoveries.html","title":{"rendered":"My latest family history (non-)discoveries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AEllis_island_1902.jpg;<\/p>\n

Not long ago, I wrote about my discovery that the answer to all our family questions<\/a> was seemingly waiting to be uncovered at the St. Louis County Public Library genealogy department.<\/p>\n

And, over the weekend, as a small trip during the kids\u2019 spring break, we drove down to St. Louis, and spent some time looking at microfilm, to find . . .<\/p>\n

nothing.<\/p>\n

No evidence of church membership, baptisms, confirmations, or marriages, at what was supposedly the family church for generations.<\/p>\n

All we found were gravestones, at a visit later on to the family cemetery, Friedens Cemetery.<\/p>\n

So on the drive back (and, to answer your question, no, we didn\u2019t just look at the microfilm and come back; we had a proper tourist visit), we brainstormed.<\/p>\n

What we knew was this:<\/p>\n

Emile Schwartz married Wilhelm Wittkoetter in 1885, promptly gave birth to two daughters, and he died two years later, before the second child was even born.<\/p>\n

She then married Edward Debush, had 4 more daughters, two of whom died as infants, and then he himself died in 1897.<\/p>\n

One of those daughters, Amelia, then married Richard Stapleton, gave birth to a son who died in infancy in 1910, and a daughter, my grandmother, in 1913. \u00a0Then Richard died in 1917. \u00a0She eventually remarried, to Oscar Kostedt, gave birth to another died-in-infancy child and two more children who lived to old age.<\/p>\n

In the cemetery we found graves for, in one section:<\/p>\n