Genealogy Brick Wall: The Case of an Ancestor's Hidden Identity- Part 3

Continued from Part 2…

That was a lot of surprises and secrets I had found so far! My next step was to search the names of his parents, or for his birth in Wiesbaden, Germany, where he was from. I could not find any such records for any of them. By just googling his parents' names online together with descendants of in front, with the specific area of where they were from, I had found a tree; it was not on ancestry.com or another popular site, but on Geneanet, and in Swedish. This person had a tree with a woman with the same first and last name as my great grandfather’s mother that was married to someone with the same first name as my great grandfather’s father, from the same exact place in Germany, and married about the time that his parents may have married. The last name of her spouse did not match up though, and she had no children listed for them. This was the ONLY lead I had found at the time for his parents. I had tried contacting the owner of the tree, but she had not been on there in at least 10 years.

My next step was to then build a tree with that couple and try to find all their children. I remember my father saying that his grandmother had told him that my great grandfather had multiple middle names and had remembered a few of them. I had found they had a son born to them that had six names, and a couple of those names matched up with what my great grandmother had remembered. That particular son of theirs was born the same year and on the same day as my great grandfather, but off by one month. My great grandfather was born in July, as told and recorded on his documents here in the United States, and the baptismal record for this strongly suspected person showed he was born in June. His first name did not match up either, but one of his middle names was the German form of Frank, which was the name of my great grandfather. My father didn't think I had the right person, and he had insisted that my great grandfather’s last name was Schmidt, the German form of Smith. I went by my hunch that I had indeed found the right person, not to mention that the last name of the person I had found was given to my great uncle as his middle name. It had also been told that my grandmother and her siblings had been named after her father’s siblings, in which this person had siblings with the same names. This newly found last name had now been the official search criteria, along with his name here in the states.

Stayed tuned for part 4, as there are quite a few more secrets to unveil! 😉

Follow my other posts on Genealogy Brick Wall: The Case of an Ancestor's Hidden Identity below, and read about more brick wall cases in Genealogy Brick Wall Cases:
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Genealogy Brick Wall the Case of an Ancestors Hidden Identity- Part 1: Here
Genealogy Brick Wall the Case of an Ancestors Hidden Identity- Part 2: Here
Genealogy Brick Wall the Case of an Ancestors Hidden Identity- Part 4: Here

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