There is still time to join us for our webinar on “Preparing for Your DNA Test Results” on 4 February. Details are on our site.
Individuals can be mentioned in a newspaper long after they are dead, but usually not before they were alive. Newspaper references to Ida Sargent run from 1891 through 1994. The sixteen year old is mentioned when visiting the town of Tioga, Hancock County, Illinois, in 1891 and is mentioned in her daughter’s obituary in 1994, fifty-five years after her own death. Don’t stop looking in newspapers for someone when they die.
It does not matter how long you’ve been researching a family–new variant spellings can always pop up. Most immigrants from my Trautvetter family were 19th century immigrants to the central United States (Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri) and used mainly a handful of similar spellings (Trautvetter, Trautfetter, Troutvetter, and Troutfetter). Their name would occasionally get spelled incorrectly in a record here or there, but the members of the family used a name that sounded like “Trautfetter.” There was always a “Tr,” some vowels, a “t,” a “v” or an “f” and then “etter.” Except for a new guy I discovered. An earlier immigrant from this family settled in Massachusetts in the 1760s and used the name Trofatter after his 1767 marriage. It gets spelled several different ways–all of which […]
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