My January 31 posting
actually drew a response… I have a reader??
Arlene Schroeder Miles Feb 9, 2007
You
did a wonderful job, telling "his"tory. I have been working on
collecting my ancestors for some time now and have hit the perverbial brick
wall. I would appreciate any tips and information you care to share.
Arlene
AgingChild Feb 9, 2007
Hi,
Arlene!
First
off, I'm very new to this blogging business… with an inner (b)logjam just
waiting to spill out all over the net. Anyway, I'm not sure this comment will
go directly to you or not… so let's try.
(A
couple snickerable coincidences in your comment: a) the Schroeder name; and b)
the "brick wall". My family's last name is from the German equivalent
to "Shield"; our family crest indeed features a shield, plus knight's
helmet, double-headed imperial eagle… and a brick wall at the bottom!)
I'm
not sure, though, that I can be of much general help; I'd have next to nothing
if I didn't have that family-history book I was crowing about last week. I'm
sure you've done the usual: interrogate your oldest-living blood-relatives,
write for copies of old birth, death, and wedding certificates, visit family
graveyards, collect family documents and letters, etc. This would call for at
least a good smattering of German (French would help too; it was used a lot among
the German nobility).
Felix
von Schroeder did a stupendous research-job; that book was the culmination of a
lifetime's work, from what I gather — besides the requisite heavy-duty
"networking" with relatives — much of his research involved digging
through centuries of church record-books, city records (municipal German
equivalents to deeds-registrar offices, etc.), and so on.
Trying
to follow that same line of inquiry in the US would run you out of names much
closer to the present. So you might have to make some connections overseas —
though with the internet, that's exponentially easier. I've seen sites with
lists (and photos) of gravestones, as just one example.
"Schroeder",
like "Shield", is very common, unfortunately, so there'll be a lot of
misleads, too. Do you want me, maybe, to at least chart out for you von
Schroeder's ancestors named von Schroeder, and see if there's a backward
convergence? A quick glance shows that the last generations previous to him
lived in what for a time (later on) were Communist East Germany and
Soviet-occupied Latvia.
Felix
von Schroeder was born in 1912 near Munich (and died sometime in the mid- to
late 1990s, according to a common relative in Germany), and in that book does
not provide any information on whether he or his sister had married (and if so,
to whom), and descendants, etc. This they kept private. Their middle brother
(1914-43) died in World War II.
It's
possible that wider information on his generation, and the two or three
following his, is in the first volume (which I don't think any non-Schroeders
got); but without those details, I can't help make any connections between your
family and his, if they diverged within the last century.
Please
let me know if you'd like some more Schroeder information; at the least I could
pull together a roughed-out tree. But I haven't bothered to take a look into
his paternal line, other than back up through his paternal grandmother, who was
my great-grandfather's younger sister. So I don't have a translation beyond one
I'd wing if needed.
Good
luck, and le' me know!
AgingChild
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