A Pennsylvania Dutch Genealogy
the genealogy & family research site of Kris Hocker
Have you ever wondered what is included in an intestate probate record? Part Five of Vita Brevis’ probate record series starts their coverage of intestate records. Take a look.
This post covers Letters of Administration and the Administration Bond. Up next: the appointment of appraisers and the inventory.
The birth of race-based slavery in America from an excerpt of Peter Wood’s Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America.
Good news. FamilySearch is adding new features to their site this month. A new thumbnail gallery is being added to the fill-screen image view and new icons are being added to the catalog which will indicate if films have been indexed or digitized online or still need to be ordered as films from the FHL.
Check out this post on the FamilySearch site for the details!
Last week a highway construction worker in a small Pennsylvania town made a grim discovery with links to a deadly pandemic that killed millions around the globe nearly a century ago… According to the Pottsville Republican-Herald, approximately 17,000 residents in the region around Schuylkill Haven fell ill. Close to 1,500 of them died, leaving as many as 3,000 children orphaned.
Where did Philadelphian men go when they wanted to drink and socialize in the 1700s? This blog post—A Pinch of History: The Philadelphia Tavern—
from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania seeks to answer that question.
Are you a fan of Scrivener? Do you use it for your writing projects? Would you be interested in using it to write your blog posts? Here’s an article discussing how to use Scrivener as a complete blogging system.
Looking for some of the sources used in Our Daily Bread, German Village Life, 1500-1850, I found the Reviews in History website. While books reviews may not be an ideal source, I was able to pick up several nuggets of information from reviews of books by Sheilagh Ogilvie. Obviously, the book itself would be a better source—or the original documents referenced in the work—but when you can’t get the book (or can’t afford it; some of these textbooks are expensive!)—a discussion of the content may provide some valuable information you might otherwise not have found. For instance, I learned that “Women could work in guilded occupations only if they were the wife of a master or if they were a guild master’s widow, and had inherited his guild licence.”1 This provided a possible source of income for the widow of my ancestor—a shoemaker in his village—and explained one reason why she might have been able to wait several years to remarry, even with a household of young children.
The New England Historical Genealogical Society is digitizing city directories and adding them to their Digital Library & Archive. A recent post on their site Vita Brevis explains the benefits of adding this record type to your go-to research sources.
Was your ancestor too poor to trace them in historical records? Quick Tips over at Evidence Explained offers some insight and suggestions for searching for that elusive, not-too-wealthy ancestor.
Are you a member of the Mennonite Bachman or Schnebly family? You can help save a piece of family history.
A Bible, printed in 1536 by Froschauer in Switzerland, that includes genealogical information for the Bachman family of Saucon, an inscription from Hans Jacob Schnebelli (1696), and a bookplate for Matthias Schnebelli (1708) needs mending and cleaning. You can donate money to help the Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville, Pennsylvania fund this project through the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts. According to the site, this Bible is considered one of Pennsylvania’s top 10 endangered artifacts.
The Bible was originally owned by the Schnebellis of Switzerland, then Alsace, then Ibersheimer hoff in the Palatinate. It was transferred to Maria Schnebelli and her husband Johan Georg Bachman who immigrated by 1727 and settled in what is now Coopersburg, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Watch the video for more information on this item and its history.