Genealogy Research

Ortsippenbucher

~ marestales

Do you know about this wonderful resource for German family history research called an Ortsippenbuch, or Ortsfamilienbuch? I didn’t, until about two years ago when I enrolled in the German Records Certificate program through NIGS (National Institute of Genealogical Studies), University of Toronto. If you are searching for information about  ancestor who came from Germany, and you know the region or village where they lived, you might want to check to see whether there is an Ortsippenbuch available for your region of interest. An Ortsippenbuch is a village lineage book. It is filled with wonderful information transcribed mostly from parish records and can help you reconstruct your family in Germany. Here is just one article about them from the Family Search blog (2012) which will provide a little more background.

https://familysearch.org/blog/en/ortssippenbuch-shortcut-german-family-history-research/

When I was in Salt Lake City in January for SLIG 2017, I was able to spend some time at the Family History Library. Their collection of Ortsippenbucher is amazing! I went to the catalog, found the books relating to the villages in Ostfriesland where my ancestors lived, and there they were. My ancestors’ names in black and white! It was an exciting find.

The books I searched were entitled, Die Familien der ev.-luth. Kirchengemeinde [village name]  [years covered].  These are published by Upstalsboom – Gesellschaft, a society dedicated to family and historical research in Ostfriesland. Family information I was able to find in these books included births, marriages, deaths, parents, spouses, children, occupations,and links to other family members by the numbering system used in these books. All great clues to finding original records and proving my father’s family lineage. I was even able to confirm a story my father told me when I was younger, that some of his ancestors were paper makers. The other part of that story was that there was a crest. He said it was a family crest, but it could have been a guild crest. Now to research German heraldry and guilds and uncover the rest of the story.

Family names searched: Funk, Brinkman, Knipper, Donnemorroth (a Scottish surname which became Funk(e) by marriage)

Pete & Grace

~ marestales

Pete & Grace Brinkman, my parents, were married on this day in 1938 in Worthington, Nobles County, Minnesota. Peter turned 24 that April, and Grace would turn 19 the following January. They were married in Grace’s parents’ home by a minister from the Church of Christ at about 2:20 in the the afternoon. Grace’s sister Dorothy was matron of honor, and Dorothy’s husband Melvin stood as Pete’s best man.

Newspaper clippings describing the ceremony, saved in my mother’s scrapbook, referred to the groom as Peter Ennenga, not Peter Brinkman. (Ennenga was the surname of Dad’s step-father.) However, he is recorded by his birth name on their marriage certificate and in the Nobles County marriage record book. They were still living in Worthington, Minnesota, at the time of the 1940 census, listed as Pete and Grace Ennenga once again. They moved to California by 1942, when their first daughter was born, leaving behind family and friends to make a new life for themselves. They would have two more daughters over the next ten years.

Together, they worked to bring up their three daughters in a stable and loving home–Dad an expert mechanic, Mom a proficient homemaker. Life was full of ups and downs, but they stayed together through it all, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. Pete and Grace lived together in this life for over 64 years, until my mother passed away in July, 2003, at the age of 83. He would follow her in death almost a year later, almost to the day. He was 90 years old.

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Photocopy of a page from Grace Brinkman’s scrapbook. The original scrapbook is currently in my possession.

Peter J., Part 2

~ marestales

It was 1993, maybe ’94, when I found the first records of my Brinkman ancestors. My daughter attended BYU tennis camp that summer, so I spent four days at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. It was my first trip there, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I spent hours, days even, poring over microfilm, combing through census and vital records, searching bookshelves. The dead ends were definitely frustrating, but every new bit of information I found quickly refueled my enthusiasm to keep on searching. The genealogy bug had bit me big time.

I returned from that trip loaded with documents and new information, eager to share it all with my father. Among the items were his grandfather Kobus Brinkman’s naturalization document, pages from a volume of Germans to America showing Kobus Brinkman as a passenger from Bremen with his siblings and his father arriving in New York in 1873, and an entry for Kobus Brinkman in a Sibley, Iowa death register. I was so excited to have found such treasures, but wasn’t sure whether Dad would share my enthusiasm. As it turned out, he was moderately interested, more than I expected. As I recall, these records caused him to open up a little bit. If only I had written down what he told me that day, but alas…