There are Benefits to Cleaning Out Your Basement

Under my living room I have a little storage space, about 3 feet high, running the full length and width of the room (13' x 24').  Nearly 1,000 cubic feet of dry inside storage space. Packed full. There are all sorts of things we have put in there - never to be seen again.   Along with an admirable collection of dust and debris, there are lamps, suitcases, old pillows and bedspreads, knickknacks, my old comic collection, one new car tire, an inflatable boat [anybody want an inflatable boat?],  and dozens of boxes of books and papers.  Somewhere in there, I knew, I had some old papers I had shipped up from my grandmother’s house in Christiansted, but where?  It seemed like less trouble going to all the way to St Croix to look through the collection at Whim than to tackle that beast of a storage area.

Well, Monday was a holiday for me but not for my wife, so I figured I’d surprise her and spend my day off cleaning out and organizing the years of junk, rather than “chillaxing” in front of the TV like most sensible people.  Since the ceiling is 3' high and I'm 6' 1", it was pretty cramped, and I'm still quite sore, but it was worth it. Not only did I complete a task we’ve been putting off for years, but I found that box of old papers. That night, I started going through them and made quite a find: the Royal Appointment of my great grandfather, Christian Andreas Conrad, to the office of Toldskontrølor (Comptroller of Customs) of St Croix in 1907.

Timeline Pedigree

Some time ago I ran across a novel approach for displaying ancestor timelines on the ProGenealogists blog.  In their November 10, 2011 post Timeline Pedigree Charts, they describe a way to build a timeline in Excel that gives a visual representation of the pedigree chart with a little timeline thrown in.  While it takes a little planning it’s well worth it and really helps put your ancestors in context.

Captain Conrad–More from Flensburg



Drawing of the Tidselholt, 1844

Today I received some wonderful documents from the Flensburg archive.  As I wrote in Captain Christian Andreas Conrad (1802-1875), I have been in contact with a kind soul in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany who has done some research for me in the Flensburg archives.  Earlier we located the records of my great-great grandfather, Christian Andreas Conrad and are seeing what other information about him, or his family, we can find.

Captain Christian Andreas Conrad (1802-1875)

A couple of weeks ago my great great grandfather, C. A. Conrad, was a complete mystery to me.  I had been looking for who he was and where he came from since I began my family research.  He appeared in no census and owned no property.  Occasionally I would find a tempting piece of information, but nothing to tell me where to look next. Then I found a document with the missing piece of information: He was from Flensburg (A Burgherbrief Brings Down a Brick Wall). Once I knew where to look I found him in a census.  Then a friend in Copenhagen suggested that I contact Cay-Erik Geipel in Flensburg, who graciously found quite a bit of information in his resources and the Flensburg archives.  Over the last couple of weeks we pieced together a rather full account of him, and discovered some rather unexpected details of his “other” family, in Flensburg.

A Burgherbrief Brings Down a Brick Wall

Sometimes all it takes is a single document, a single word, to provide the key to breaking down a brick wall that has stood firm to all assaults.  This week I made progress on one of my very first brick walls that has haunted me since I started researching my family history.  This wall was my 2nd great grandfather, the Conrad from Denmark.

Claudina’s Poem: “On the Loss of the Titanic”

As this is the centenary of the loss of the RMS Titanic, I thought it fitting to post a contemporaneous poem on the tragedy by my great aunt, Claudina Marie Conrad (b. 1887).  Claudina was born, lived, and died in Christiansted, St Croix.  I never met her, as she died before I was born, but by all accounts she was a fairly prolific poet.
 
Claudina collected some of her works into a volume entitled “Carnations for Mother’s Day”, although it was never published.  Among the poems is one that she wrote within days of hearing of the Titanic disaster in 1912. 

A Little Genealogical Serendipity

One of the fun things about genealogy research is the tendency of the stars lining up where you least expect.  I had one of those events this week.  It was so unlikely that I thought I’d share.  A 100 year old letter in Denmark helped me identify who was in a 100 year old picture I got from my grandmother’s house in St Croix, of a family in New Jersey, featuring a guest from St Croix.  Confused?  We’ll sort it out.

Profile: Mary Conrad Simonsen

One of the reasons I wanted to start a family history blog was to share my research on my family.  This week, as a result of my post “I Found My Great-Great Grandfather” I made contact with a cousin who gave me critical information to track one of my relatives, Mary Conrad,  and pointed me to another cousin, who was a descendent of Mary’s. As luck would have it, when I went through the boxes I described in “Treasures from Mom’s House”, I found pictures of Mary Conrad.  I figured this would be a wonderful opportunity to share the information I have on her and where it came from.  I thought my new found relatives would appreciate seeing it too.

Treasures from Mom’s House

My grandmother Olga was something of a packrat.  When I was little we visited her in her house on Strand St. in Christiansted.  She had all kinds of stuff around, papers, knickknacks, odds, ends, everything a little boy could want.  She used to tell me she had a “Curiosity Shoppe”.  When she died, it took two trips to the island to sort things into what to ship, what to give away, and what to donate.  Fortunately, my mother kept the photos.  Boxes of them. That was 25 years ago.  Last night, we opened the boxes…

 

Blogging for Cousins

Genealogy is a fascinating hobby.  Sometimes it is a scene from Indiana Jones (the dusty library scenes, not the grabbing artifacts from tombs and running from Nazis scenes), sometimes it is solving a mystery like on CSI.  It satisfies my inner nerd, collecting and analyzing data, citing sources, and compiling detailed histories of my family.  It helps me figure out “Who Do I Think I Am?”  But the greatest part is finding out that you have a whole lot more family somewhere in the world. 

I Found My Great-Great Grandfather

Today I made a great find at the Family History Center.  I located my 2nd great grandfather. This was a brick wall that I have been struggling with virtually from Day 1 of my genealogical journey.  I got started on this hobby (obsession) by chancing across an on-line database, the Danish Demographic Database (Dansk Demografisk Database).  This is a free searchable database of Danish censuses and church records.   They have a link to the St. Croix Census records on their site.  By querying this I found my grandfather (Ludvig Conrad), great grandfather (Christian Andreas Conrad), and his mother (Sophia Andersen).   No father.  No Conrad. I searched the VISHA database and Ancestry.com. Try as I might, I couldn’t locate a Conrad to be the source of that family name.  No Conrad appeared in any census that would fit.