Wordless Wednesday: William Christman Children

William Christman Children
Originally uploaded by Andrea Christman

The children of William and Margaret [Kelliher] Christman (my husband's great grandparents). We have only identified the oldest girl. We are unsure if the child to the far left is a boy or girl? The baby could possibly be my husband's grandfather. Circa 1912 in Brooklyn, New York.

The Happy Dance! Going Back One More Generation.

The theme for the 65th Carnival of Genealogy: "The Happy Dance. The Joy of Genealogy. Almost everyone has experienced it. Tell us about the first time, or the last time, or the best time. What event, what document, what special find has caused you to stand up and cheer, to go crazy with joy?

My happy dance had to be in the summer of 2002 when my husband and I went to Manhattan to research at the New York Genealogy & Biographical Society (NYGBS). Although we were members, we had never visited their library and didn't really know what to expect. We met some really nice librarians and patrons doing research and we had fun going back in all of the early directories where my husband's great great grandfather, Frederick Christmann, would appear. We knew he fought in the Civil War, and having already acquired his Pension File from NARA, we had some dates to use. We knew that he married 3 times and the dates of each marriage was recorded in this file. Frederick Christmas was born in Lahr, Germany and his wives were German.

The cool thing about this visit was that someone at the library told us that the St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church Records were on microfilm and that we should go through them to find the record of his marriages.

My husband sat at one microfilm machine and I at another and we tediously went through the rolls of film looking for Frederick. It sounds easier than it actually was. The church records were handwritten and in GERMAN!

My husband was the lucky winner, finding Frederick's second and third marriage entries. We never found his first marriage. I think we knew from the Civil War pension file that the 2nd and 3rd marriages were at St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church. We are not sure when or where the 1st marriage took place.

The records that we found provided the names of his parents, hometown and the names of each of his wives and their addressess! We also found out that his second wife, the woman my husband descends from, was a widow and we were later able to find some half-cousins from her first marriage! The marriage record for his 3rd wife, provided names for Frederick's parents.

We BOTH did the happy dance when my husband found this record and I will always remember that sense of accomplishment we both felt at the end of a very long day!

Here is the record for his second marriage. It is jam packed full of vital information. Thank goodness we had a friend in Germany to assist us with the transcription:

Frederick Christman and Eliza Eggersmann's marriage is the last one listed on this image. If you click on it, it will enlarge. They were married on August 7, 1864 in New York, New York.

Transcription/Translation:

Frederick Christmann, Wittwer [widower]; aus Lahr, Baden; 44 Jahr; 275 Mulberry Str; Schneider [tailor]; und Wittwe [widow] Elise Eggersmann; geb. [maiden name] Meier; aus Salzhausen, Hannover; 36 Jahr; Crosby Str. 35; Zeuge [witness]: David Mebold Mulberry Str. 277. Christian Zimmermann 275 Mulberry Str. (legitimiert durch C. Stollmann; Mott Str. 167) [legitimacy by C. Stollmann]

It was through his marriage to his 3rd wife that we discovered the name's of Frederick's parents. And we almost stopped when we found the record for the marriage that my husband descends from! What a mistake that would have been....

In this record, we found out his father's name was also Frederick and his mother was Salome Maaler.

This just goes to show you, you are never finished until you are finished...and that is sometimes hard to tell in genealogy!!!

Wordless Wednesday--3 Generations

3 generations  sitting on a Brooklyn stoop

September 1962

left to right: Daniel Joseph Mulhearn (1884-1973), John Christman (1957-), Tom Christman(1958-), John Francis McAllister (1903-1983)

Family Traditions~New and Old

Happy Thanksgiving!

This has got to be up there as my top beloved holiday. When I research my family, I always think about how they lived, what they ate and what kind of traditions they shared. I don't know how to separate tradition from the print records and I just love to combine the two in my research.

I have many fond memories of Thanksgiving from my childhood with our home filled with wonderful aromas, boisterous laughter and chatter, running children in and out of the house and the blare of the TV with any number of football games playing that day. I guess the maxed out senses tapping into the smell, sound, sight, taste and feel of Thanksgiving has lasted with me to adulthood because as an adult, I always try to recreate a small part of what I knew as a child and young adult.

This year, we hosted the Christman family. Bill & Alice joined us from Stuarts Draft, VA and we put them up in our guest room. John, Diane and Nick came over from Annapolis. Nick was home from his Freshman year at Towson University. Our dear friends and neighbors, Bill & Julie, came by for dessert, coffee and wine and lots and lots of laughing on overstuffed tummies.

The 28-pound turkey that Bill and Alice brought lasted several days and along with our main Thanksgiving meal, brought us turkey sandwiches, turkey leftovers, turkey soup and take-home for John & Diane! Yummmmmm yummmmm....

I dragged out family recipes, favorite cookbooks and dog-eared, old November magazine issues from Southern Living and Bon Appetite. Jerry and I had fun wandering up and down the aisles of Rodman's Disount Gourmet Grocery Store and Shopper's Food Warehouse trying to find the special ingredients of the recipes that would make up this year's menu to share with our family. This is something that we enjoy doing together and we really look forward to the times that together we can entertain our family and friends in our home.

Our menu for 2008 Thanksgiving was this:

• Turkey (a la Jerry)
• Gravy (a la Jerry)
• Celery, Apple and Walnut Dressing (old 1981 "Holiday Recipes" Cookbook) 
• Fresh Cranberry Relish
• Brown-Sugar-Glazed Sweet Potatoes with Marshmallows (Southern Living)
• Green Beans with Bacon (Kempf tradition)
• Mashed Potatoes (must have)
• Refrigerator Pan Yeast Rolls (The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook)
• Mile High Lemon Pie (Martha Stewart)
• Tiramisu (From Italian Cooking School in 1997)
• Snickerdoodles (Oma's Recipe)
• Molasses Cookies (Oma's Recipe)
• No-bake Peanut Butter Cookies (Mom)

I am blessed that my husband is a talented cook and loves to entertain and he just takes over on many kitchen duties. I love to bake and am a collector of recipes and cookbooks, so this Thanksgiving was a blend of Christman and Kempf tradition. The above reference to "Oma" is my sister-in-law's grandmother. When Oma was alive, I remember visiting her with my sister-in-law and she always had a fresh loaf of bread (or two or three) ready to give you on your way home! She was a wonderful lady and excellent cook and I enjoy using her recipes and sharing them with family and friends. I first baked the lemon meringue pie for my "Poppie" and almost ate the whole pie himself! I think of him whenever I make this recipe and now that he is no longer with us, the memory keeps him close. My grandmother (Poppie's wife) was a great cook and I remember her pies well! I stumbled upon the refrigerator rolls before I was married and made them for several Kempf Thanksgivings. They remind me of my Grandma Kempf as she made her annual "New Year's Bread" every December. It is kind of an Alsatian Kugelhopf, although we didn't realize it until Jerry and I visited Alsace, France after we married. New Year's Bread is a sweet bread with raisins and almost every family in my home town has the recipe. It is great with coffee and hot chocolate on New Year's Day!

Jerry and I feel blessed to be able to provide for our family and to have the ability to recreate new traditions for ourselves. Our Thanksgivings have blended into a holiday that reflects the both of us. We usually cannot be with my cousins, family and friends in Texas (because of the distance and hustle-and-bustle of holiday travel) and the football is not as relentless in this home. It may look, sound, smell, taste and feel a bit different from what I remember as a child, but if you pay attention to the details, there is a connection to things from our past and a  familiarity to everything we do!

Purging History

Jerry and I spent this weekend at his parents in Virginia assisting them in downsizing and preparing their home for sale for their eventual move to a retirement community near our home.

Do you know how difficult it is to go through someone else's things and make recommendations on what to keep and what not to keep? I thought it would be so easy to make my "keep," "donate," and "trash" piles, but it was much more involved than that. I was privileged to see the coat hanger that belonged to Jerry's grandfather, touch the vase that was sitting in his grandmother's room as she lay dying in his childhood home, go through a lifetime of cherished crafts (from quilting, floral arranging and sewing that Alice loved, to Bill's beloved gardening). Thankfully, Bill and Alice are able to fill in the blanks when we can't figure out why there are 15 pairs of gardening gloves (Bill couldn't find one, so he bought another pair...) or why there was 8 garbage sacks of fabric remnants (Alice used to go to an upholstery store and purchase remnants for her quilting).

This weekend was a special time for us to get know Jerry's parents a little better and appreciate what they have done through the years. It is helping me to figure out that memories lie not in things but lie within our hearts and souls and the stuff we acculumate can drag us down, if we let it. Bill & Alice were paralyzed by the overwhelming amount of things to sort through. Now I want to go through my own house and purge, purge, purge and really look at the things that I surround myself with. Are my "things" keeping me from moving forward or are they a gentle reminder of a cherished memory? A little is fine, but too much is a drag!