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Wednesday, June 8, 2011

What I Learned Wednesday: 8 June 2011

The past week has been a week of happy dances big and small.

The big happy dance was for the two New York death certificates that arrived in the mail for my husband’s great-great grandparents, Julius Koehl and Josephine Lochner. Josephine’s record did not have much new information except for her cause of death exact age at death, which I can use to calculate her date of birth (correctly, I hope), but Julius’ death certificate was a goldmine: both parents’ names, the town where Julius was born (Meisenheim), cause of death, and exact age at death. The difference in the amount of information on the certificates was due to the different times at which they died, Josephine in 1895 and Julius in 1907; more questions had been added to the form by the time Julius died.

Soon after that I received an e-mail from Betty Lou Benjamin, Fichtelmann Finder Extraordinaire, who had sent off for burial information on a “mystery Fichtelmann” in the Fichtelmann family burial plot. It turns out the person interred in the grave was not a Fichtelmann, but rather Catherine “Sharer,” mostly likely the mother of Katharina/Katy Scherer, John A. Fichtelmann’s second wife and my husband’s great-great grandmother. No maiden name was provided and we do not know who her husband was, but this is still something to go on (her age was also provided). So two of my husband’s family lines have been taken back to the great-great-greats.

I have also come across a few items that have led to me to learn the fates of some of the children in the Brinlee lines. One of the lines is the family of Thomas Belase and Lela Sarah Jones, who lived in Coalgate, Oklahoma. The 1930 census entries for this family are interesting - for the states of birth of Thomas and his parents, the entries indicate Oklahoma, Mixed blood, Choctaw - and the exact same information is listed for his children. The same information is listed for the husband (Clyde Mowdy) and children of Sarah’s daughter Grace by her first husband, Joel Jasper Carlton.

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