September 1998

9/9

Received a couple interesting email notes in the past few days. Some are inquiring about the newspaper articles that Ingeborg Höld told me about. Others were about June and my experiences this summer in southern Germany. (These pages are getting read fairly widely.) There was a message on the B-W message board that was apprehensive about the language problem in visiting the area. One of the responses seemed to indicate that it was worse that they thought, because the Schwabish dialect is so different. I responded and told of our enjoyable experiences, and that there was no language problem for us.

One of the messages sent to me made specific reference to one of my ancestors, Maria Magdalene Allshouse, mother of Susannah Lessig who was the wife of Frederick Christian Held, my Ggrandfather. There appears to be some confusion in the Allshouse research community in this area.

Some time ago I responded to a call for people to enter US Census data into computer format for the GenWeb Project. I volunteered for the 1800-1810-1820 Armstrong Co, PA censuses. I now have a hard copy of the actual censuses, compliments of SK Publishing. Since someone had already developed an index for each (included), it is an easy matter to look up specific entries. However, the data are not really very good, since basically the only data given are the name of the head of household and household counts of Free White Males and Free White Females in age brackets.

9/10

Received an email from another cousin, Barbara (Barb) Dimarco, in the Jacob Held line. She is the daughter of Dolores (Held) Yost. She sent me some more data for their part of the family tree. She also indicated that her mother is on the net, so I've added her too.

I added a new page to this webpage: a list of the family email addresses. Not all are researchers, but most are interested in the family genealogy.

9/16

Was at my local LDS FHC today. All of the microfilm readers were full, but a computer was available. So I captured the microfilm catalog entries for a couple more towns of interest to us: Tennenbach (where there was a reference to "der Helt von Marpach" in the 1200s), Marbach (an old town near Biesingen), and Schalkstetten (where the Blyholders may have come from). While I was there I decided to look at the IGI - International Genealogical Index© file which contains listings of births, marriages, and deaths. Much to my surprise I found old Hans Held and Anna Saltzmann listed as the parents of two children: Johannes b: 1663 and Michael b: 1666. Both of these Held children had Ordinances, meaning someone had them baptized in the LDS Church posthumously. This also means there is probably a family tree in the LDS Ancestry© file. The IGI© CDs were dated 28 Feb 1993, which makes the Ordinances over 5 years ago. I will try to find who was researching that part of the family. They baptized one of the Michaels that died, and not the later Michael that is our direct decendant.

9/17

Just had to go see if there was an LDS Ancestry© entry for old Hans Held and Anna Saltzmann. Sure enough, someone had entered another part of the Held family that ended at the same place that I'm stuck right now. I captured 5 generations of this family down from Hans and Anna. All of these Helds had Ordinances written for them. I've ordered the microfilm where the actual Ordinances are shown to see who it was and if possibly they are still alive. These data are not listed in the IGI© or Ancestry© files. The date range on the Ordinaces in that microfilm was 1924-1956, so they were written at least 42 years ago. From the data that are presented they were submitted at the main temple in Salt Lake City. By the way, this arm of the family also had Bosserts, but so far I've not found a connection to our Christina Held's grandmother from the Mönsheim area. When June and I were in the area last July, I notices several Bosserts in the cemetery at Öfingen and wondered about any connection. I also checked the Ancestry© file for any Wanners and found at least one that is in our line.

Many of these Held entries in the IGI© and Ancestry© files were listed as born or married in Villingen and Donaueschingen, sometimes with Biesingen, Sunthausen, Oberbaldingen, or Öfingen preceeding and sometimes without. Ingeborg Höld is researching Villingen. I must find if some of these Held listings are also there or if the researcher simply put in a close larger city instead of the actual village for reference.

I must now check the top of each ancestral line of J.D. & C. Held to see how many other ancestors have already been researched.

Made a minor change to the lead page today. Did you notice? You may have to do a reload.

9/24

Been spending a lot of time trying to make families out of the LDS IGI data. These data are not family sheets. They are individual birth records (with parents), marriage records, and death records, basically the data as entered in the old church books. To make families out of them you must merge all of the common parents together, plus maybe a wedding record. If you're lucky the parents also have at least an estimate for their birthdates, otherwise you must create one.

The merge feature in Family Tree Maker does not merge without a lot of coaxing. For the more part, the parents must be merged manually. In many cases a birth date was not entered, only a christening date. It would have been nice to have a merge engine that would have helped do some of these things. I started with 5481 Helds parents and spouses and I'm now down to 4758 and still have a long way to go.

9/25

ATTENTION Held decendants of Frederick Christian Held and Susannah Amanda Lessig (and John David Held and Susie Edna Riggle). If you or any of your children are interested in becoming a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) or Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) you have no less than two (or three) ancestors who were soldiers in the American Revolutionary Army: Henry Allshouse and Johann Christian Lessig both Susannah Amanda Lessig's Ggrandfathers (John David's GGgrandfathers) and Bernhard Bauman (Bowman) Susie Edna's GGgrandfather. All you need to do is find what research has been substantiated to date and tie into those data with substantiating information.

9/26

It appears that my last years sumittal of the Held family in Germany finally made it to a Broderbund's World Family Trees CD. WFT Volume 26 Tree#976 seems to have my data on it. I submitted that about a year ago when there were only about 10 volumes published. If I knew it would have taken this long I could have sent an update that has much better data. My data now probably has 3 times the entries and much more complete dates and places. I will try a submittor request just to make sure it's mine.

Broderbund still has a major problem with their Internet Family Finder search engine. In my FTM web page I currently have 18 Michael Helds. Their IFF search engine cannot find even one of them. I've complained to the FTM rep on the FTMtech message board and have gotten no response. How many other hits on how many other names is it missing. There is no excuse for not finding names on their own webpages. They may be excluded from sending their search robots to many places, but they should be able to search their own pages.

9/27

It turns out that it is our Held ancestor data is on World Family Tree Volume 26 Tree#976. HOWEVER, Broderbund has improperly identified someone else as the submitter. I called the person and he assures me that he had no Helds in the database he submitted. I will continue to press BB-WFT to straighten out the problem. I suspect that there are a lot of wrongly identified submitters.

Link to October 1998