The saga continues…
Norwegian Words of the Day
Father-Far
Mother-Mor
Parents-Forældre
Hi friends! Welcome to another addition of how I found my immigrant ancestor part 2. As stated in my last post, I found an immigration document that I suspected was Johanna’s, but I wasn’t sure without other documents to verify that one. A good genealogist does her best to have multiple documents supporting one event such as a birth, marriage, or death. Therefore, I needed more documents to support this was the correct Johanna that came to America through Canada.
I turned to Ancestry.com once again, but this time I went to the Search tab then the Birth, Marriage, Death tab. I put her information in and up popped a findagrave.com document. Now if you’re new to genealogy, this site is a collection of graves all over the U.S. placed there by ordinary people who collect the information from cemeteries and other places. I have also found Newspaper obituaries on this site from people who transcribe them from the original newspapers. This site is great to get lots of new information about your ancestor; however, the information is usually copied from an original place or document. Therefore, it’s not as reliable because it can contain errors. The common practice among genealogists is to collect the information from findagrave.com and then go find the original source to verify that the information is correct before adding it to your pedigree chart.
Back to my find, Findagrave.com showed a headstone of a Johanna Krogh Hirsch with a birth date of 20 June 1894 and a death date of 17 Aug 1934. She was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in St. Edwards, Boone County, Nebraska. Then a little further down it lists other family members attached to Johanna. It showed spouses as John H. Webb (1888-1919), Jacob Fredrick Hirsch (1881-1961). It also showed her children as Kenneth B Webb (1917-1940) and Gertrude Webb Rosencrantz (1918-2005). All of this information fits what I’ve already gathered on Johanna and with family lore. In addition, it gives me new information about her birth and death. Now I can go find her original death record in Nebraska.
I just want to mention that whoever put her death information into findagrave did it incorrectly. The actual headstone states her death date as 1935 not 1934 as stated on the site. There’s an example of how information can be put in incorrectly. Therefore, going to the source, which was the headstone in this case, helped us to verify other documents.
Why do I want to find her death record as the next step? It’s because those records give more information than just her death date and place. They can give parent’s names, spouses, birth dates and places, marriage dates and places, and cause of death, etc. A death record can help us with our ultimate goal to find any information that will link us to her immigrant document.
I now had to go to the Nebraska state records to find out how to get her original death record. Each state is different in how they store their vital records. Nebraska has a state website http://dhhs.ne.gov/publichealth/Pages/vitalrecords.aspxthat will get you in the right spot to search for a vital record for Nebraska. So just see what your state requires for obtaining vital records. FamilySearch also has articles on each state and resources on how to research them. In addition, FamilySearchWiki has articles about when the records were kept for each state. For example, the Nebraska article lists the only known date was for marriage records, which started in 1871. There’s no known start date for birth and death records. So get as much information as you can about how your state stored their vital records. The information you need will vary greatly from state to state.
I found out for Johanna that I had to request a paper copy of her death record. They don’t have many vital records online. Therefore, I had to pay money and send in ID to get her death record. It took about 4-6 weeks to get her record. I was very happy when it showed up in the mail. In this process, I did some math and guessed that her marriages to both of her husbands were also in Nebraska and probably in the same county. So I wouldn’t recommend this, but I went ahead and paid for them to search for marriage records for Johanna. Next time I would want to spend a little more time to get accurate dates before I would spend money on a guess. This guess paid off, though, because they found both marriage records for Johanna. So I will share those records next time on my search for my immigrant ancestor.
Thanks for reading and happy hunting!
Tiffany