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 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.