Harvesting of information - Ancestors in 52 Weeks

This year's challenge is 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks and is run by Amy Johnson Crow.

Topic Info:
You could interpret this literally and share about farmers in the family tree. You could also be figurative and share a "harvest" of information or a source that was bountiful in your research.

Honestly, this topic is a confusing one as I do have farmers in the family but they are either cow dairy farmers or sheep farmers. I only have it written down they are farmers. 

I guess you can say during the US fall and winter are the harvesting times for genealogy I found. Usually it's because the kids are back to school and everyone's routines are back into some kind of pattern along with the amount of holiday days people get off during these seasons. This usually when my "crops" I've been research starting to mature and start to be cropped. 

My great grandfather, Jules.
Credit: gailfboo

This happened last week with the Sherman family, who my Great Aunt Florence married into. I had one of her step children's ancestors contact me and ask me about information. Since then, I've been doing research into this side for him. This week and probably next, normal life will be upsetting the research, but this is a normal problem for genealogists.

Using the FAN Technique to help understand found information Instead, this week I'm going to write about how I started harvesting of information of my Belgium ancestors once I made the connection from my great grandfather Jules and his name in Belgium.  I have talked before about how I used the FAN technique to put everything together. 

In this post. I'm going to show how I used the Belgium Archives to find ancestors in the areas I knew about which led me to other areas. Then how I looked, and continue to look, up the original documents. 

Translation documents
There are 2 things which drive me nuts. One people use translation documents like they are the original documents and refer to them. Translation documents are from people who, usually on a volunteer basis, open a batch of documents and then you try and read the original documents and fill in the blanks in the software. This is done so the document can then be index into a database for searching. The problem with this, is if the person who's typing the information in either cannot read it and takes a guess or mistypes it, the searching doesn't work. The other thing is sometimes even though it looks like a clean scan, sometimes the writing is not right or the person who took the information down mistook the information the person gave. This happened on my paternal side with my great grandfather Adam.

You MUST get the original documents to ensure the information is correct. For instance, someone typed in information and when I pulled the original document, I found it was for someone else because the name and information was not what the translation was.

The other thing which drives me nuts, is when people use other people's trees as fact. I have seen so many trees which have the wrong information, and then people copy this information and it breeds like rabbits in heat. I've seen so many people have kids before they were born or continue to have kids after they had died.

You MUST check your facts and sometimes you must recheck your facts. Sometimes if I can't be 100% sure if its an ancestor, then I mark it as maybe but not definite. This way if you can prove the information, then you can accept the questioned information as fact but if not, you can just delete it as well.

Getting back to the my use of the Belgium Archives....
Once I was able to tie in my 2x great grandfather Joannes Julius Gauquie, the documents I found were a treasure trove. Next to the main birth document of Jules, it had a tiny note about his father and further information. When you flipped the page, it had his father's military records, details on his parents marriage and each parents and their parents information on where they lived.

Here's one of the documents I found using the searching technique below. This is for my 2x great grandfather. It shows his parents a where they lived and the date - all highlighted. This is in 1871. Credit: FamilySearch

Using this information, I was then able to go the the Belgium Archives and look up the areas for the same last name - Gauquie.

Next, I went looking for Desiderius to see what was available in the Belgium Archives. This was the results. 

This is Desiderius' search results. On the left is the search box. On the right results. Epoux is marriage so I clicked on it and found it was my ancestors! Credit: Belgium Archives

When I clicked on the magnifying glass, I got the following translated information. 

This backs up the information of my 2x great grandfather (top document). It gives me my 3rd great grandfather's date of birth, area, his occupation, same of his wife, and even my 4th great grandfather's name and date of death and area. I can now take this information and look it up at FamilySearch and make sure the originals back up what this document is telling me.
Credit: Belgium Archives

This is where the harvesting of information starts...and it can start to go quickly like a ball going down a steep hill.

You find out one bit of information and it gives you more and the process keeps repeating like the graph shows above.
Credit:

Then I took out blank paper and started to write down how everyone was linked and information. I also took copies of each entry I found. If I didn't know how they linked in, I still saved them, but continued to work on the links. I was using the FAN technique I discussed as above. After about a week, I had pages of information which linked and many entries from the Belgium Archives to figure out.

A section of what my FAN tree looked like as I was putting facts together. Credit J. Fitzgerald

Once I was sure I had as much linking up as I could, I then went to FamilySearch to look for the original documents to double check the information.

And you can see the by getting the original document, you also get more information. I've even found children who had died and no one had listed them at all. I'm not going to lie to you, but FamilySearch is not completely indexed, so many times you will have to go through the files page by page looking for information, which is how I came across some of those forgotten children. Sad, but true. I've also come across some documents which ancestors had signed as a witness.

This is a step by step process of finding the images on FamilySearch to search. This is due to them not being indexed, so you must go page by page.

Then you will be taken into the imagines where you can go page by page searching. 

It can lead to signatures too! 
Besides, how cool is it when you can see an ancestor's signature from the 1700s or 1800s?? Sometimes on the document, like the one above, of my 2x great grandfather, the signatures are on the side where the binding of the book are. The documents must have been binded after they were written.

However, other times they are right there and easy to read. This is my 4th great grandfather's signature about the birth of my 3rd great grandfather, Desire. This supports what was in the Belgium Archive.

Jacobus Josephus or JJ Gauquie (born 1767) has son Desiderius. JJ's signature is highlighted above. It's in French I believe.
My 4th Great Grandfather is JJ Gauquie.   Credit: FamilySearch

Which is easier to find.... Ancestors in 52 Weeks

This year's challenge is 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks and is run by Amy Johnson Crow.

Topic Info:
Not all ancestors are tough to research. This week, who has been easier to research than others?

Jimmy Sherman (I believe) taken before his death.
Credit: University of South Florida Libraries, USAF

Growing up, my mother never spoke about her side of the family. When I pressed she told me they were all dead and we didn't need them. However, once she told me about her cousin James 'Jimmy' Sherman, on the cusp of my leaving to get married, I started to get interested. After things with my marriage settled down, which took a bit of time due to the 3 fires and a wedding and moving countries, I started asking questions. My mother didn't give me much, so I had to take what I could get. 

Louis Gauquie in undated picture.
Credit: J. Gauquie

One piece of information was my maternal grandfather's name, Louis Gauquie (left). Yes, growing up I didn't know his name, but knew he was dead. (However, among my research I found he had died when I was very young.) I went researching and things started to grow.



Once I was able to pinpoint my grandfather's name and knew about the location, I started finding great aunts and uncles as he was 1 of 7 children that my great grandparents had. Then I went looking to learn more about this side of the family - who had lived only about 10 minutes away from where I mainly grew up in the Hudson Valley in New York. 

Picture of Helen Gauquie who passed away in 2014. Credit

From there I found Helen Gauquie, who had just passed away, when I did a normal search on Google. From there I was able to pinpoint Helen's children and I left a message, including contact information, on the memorial page. Before long, I was contacted by my mother's cousin, Teri, and she put me in contact with my direct cousin and uncle. My cousins and uncle I met in January/February 2019. 

Anyhow, this led me to trying to figure out the rest of the family, which was a waterfall of information when I started to find it. By waterfall, I mean, I found out a lot about my mother's aunts and uncles, and then I started to find out about their children, and so on. Once I was confident about them, I turned my sights onto my great grandparents and trying to go backwards. 

Jules Gauquie born Joannes Julius Van Rompaye Credit: Gail Boo Ancestry

I found out a bit about Jules Gauquie. About him being a farmer, helping out the fire departments, and letting kids use his pool, things along those lines. I found his obituary and found he had gave something to all his kids. However, when I started to ask my mother's cousins about him, then we started to learn things about public vs private personality. 

I had found out where Jules came from - Belgium. However, I didn't know how to go about getting the information I needed and stumbled across a website called Geneanet and their boards where you can ask questions. I asked a question and within days I had people helping and sharing where they were getting information. In fact, they found the birth entry of Jules Gauquie, who was actually born Joannes Julius Van Rompaye. This was due to the fact his father, Aloysius Hyppolitus Gauquie was chosen to be in the first Belgium military draft according to the documents behind the birth entry. These documents listed Jules' parents, grandparents and areas within Belgium. 

By this point, I was telling my cousin, who is a Gauquie, about what I had found. One of my helpers in the Geneanet website pointed me to the Belgium Archives. We all wanted some of the questions everyone started to have answered. 

My 3rd Great grandfather Desire Gauquie's entry in Belgium Archives translated.

It took me about a month working with the Belgium website to try and figure out who belongs with who in the entries, which went from Dutch, to French, to what I think is Flemish Dutch to get through the records, but thankfully the Belgium website can be translated to English. I had pages of notebooks written with people's names and information about them along with screenshots, so I could go back and reference what I had been finding.

I used what people call the FAN technique or even use the words cluster genealogy to describe it. I read about it but never had used it before but thought it would be a good use here. 

One of my many FAN sheets I've used to show connections.

Before long, I sat back and looked at what I had found and Wow! I believe I found quite a bit of the family links and where we all come from. Along the way, I was contacted by another cousin of mine who lives in Paris, France of all places. He agreed with my findings and he had gone back one more generation which isn't online. He actually went to one of the locations and into the church to find my what I think is my 7 x great grandfather dating back to the 1700s! 

This cousin's line comes off this person who had a son who went to Paris and the other stayed in Belgium. 

These trees (above) were put together by cousin Herve in 2015. Credit: H. Costille

I'm still trying to put more branches on this side of the tree, but to do this, I have to go page by page in FamilySearch looking at original documents in other languages looking for other people in the family. 

Because of how much information I had and am encompassing, I started up a few Facebook groups, one of which being the Gauquie Genealogy group, so any relations can get to know the other, share information as its a private group, and we can put this Humpty Dumpty family egg back together again. 

The chart from my 2x great grandfather Desire and the stars above are some of the business and people listed below. Credit. J. Fitzgerald

So far, because of the group, we've found connections to the Gauquie Hotel and the family who resided there, the family connection to Galloways Garage in Newburgh, NY, the family connection to Devitts in New Windsor, and the connection to the Van Rompaye Trucking Corp in Chester, NY. 

My 2x great cousin Louis Van Rompaye in front of his business in Chester, NY over 100 years ago. Credit

Of course there are still questions, but this list is starting to get smaller - Thankfully. I just need the time to sit down and go through FamilySearch for the information. 

ANZAC Day 2019

Hello everyone.

In the next few hours, it'll be ANZAC Day here in Australia. We have these every year.

A picture taken while waiting for the ceremony to begin in 2015.

We usually go into the city, but its gotten too big and crowded in the last few years, so last year we went to the service not too far from us at Bunjil Place.

Australia's use this as a time for reflection on a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand military. I use this to remember those ancestors which have fought - like Memorial Day in the USA. However, this day here is much more solemn here than what Memorial Day is the US.

Credit

On this day, I'd like to remember some of the people who fought both in the military and as civilian. You see, many people think of the soldiers, but what they don't understand is many civilians who were at home and living their lives, ended up in the middle because of the location of where they lived. 

This is people in Belgium and Poland or as many people call it the Eastern Front and the Western Front.

We had family who had farms along the purple line above from Ypres to near Verdun. My father's paternal side lived east of Luxembourg. Credit

Eastern Front in WW1. My grandmother was north of Brest Litowsk Credit

Ask yourself when you remember these types of days, do you remember the normal people who got caught in it because they just happened to live there?

View of the northern French town of Lille, photo 1914/15  

Copyright 

Josef Neubauer

WWI. Russian Poles in war zone living in ruins. The Eastern Front was more fluid than the Western Front. Armies movements over great stretches of land caused extreme civilian hardship. Ca. 1915-1917 Credit

James 'Jimmy' Sherman

Jimmy is my mother's cousin. Her Aunt Florence, her father's sister, married and had Jimmy. He was her only child, but had a few step children from her husband's first marriage. 

He's the only person within the family, that I know of, that's never returned from service. 

He was first listed as MIA and then later KIA in Italy on a training mission. 

Jimmy's wings which he gave my mother only weeks before his death. 

The official report of what happened to his aircraft. Obtained from W. Williamson. 

I always think of him this time of year still on patrol over Italy. 

Tablet in the American War Memorial in Italy from Find a Grave. Thank you to the volunteer who took this picture.

The memorial in Newburgh, NY with James J. Sherman's name on it. Credit: J. Fitzgerald

A memorial of those killed in WW1 and WW2. A close up of his name is above with the finger. Credit J. Fitzgerald

Ancestors in 52 Weeks - At Worship

This year's challenge is 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks and is run by Amy Johnson Crow.

The Topic:

Our ancestors' religious traditions can lead us to many discoveries. Have you used church/synagogue/meeting records? Do you have an ancestor who was in the clergy? Have you visited an ancestral church?

I've done past posts on religion in my family during another challenge I've taken a few years ago.

However, for this challenge, its asking different questions.

Church Records

Part of St. Patrick's Church (Credit Picture: FB Group)

I do have a few church records from Germany, Poland and Belgium, but I haven't really found too many in the US. I know one of the places, St Patrick's in Newburgh, NY, has records on myself and my siblings but I've been told their filing is so bad they can't find anything. I do know I've contacted them in the past asking for a copy of my own baptism, because I lost mine during a house fire, and never received a response.

However, I was able to get some items from Germany and Poland (thanks to a relatives and researchers who went there for me!) and in Belgium, I found these through sites like FamilySearch.

Faith or not
Earlier this year, I was asked by a cousin, if we had anyone in the family was Jewish. My response was "none that I've found - yet." Religious faiths, and if you have them or don't, don't bother me. You are the way you are by the decisions you make or the decisions of those around you before you can make your own or so that's my belief. If you believe in religion, that's fine. If not, that's fine too.

This came about on September 11, 2001. Yes, the Twin Towers. At this point, I was working with a

Image Credit

programmer at my job. We were talking about his fiance who's just arrived and how they were looking forward to their marriage and her settling in here in Australia. We've been working together for a few years, so we had a great relationship.

Then the towers were attacked. The next day, the programmer was supposed to be in, and he never came in. My mind was on the people there, due to us having first responders within the family and one of my nephews were down there in one of the World Tower Buildings. Once I found out my family was ok, although they had lost some close friends, I calmed down and was able to work my way around it.

The next day the programmer was back and I went to sit and talk to him about the program and how to maybe get past the bugs we had been working on. After about 10 minutes, I stopped because I could see he was upset. I asked him if he had someone within the Twin Towers or if he was getting treated differently. He admitted he had people who were treating him differently, but he was more upset about me. When I asked why, he said he feared I would blame HIM for what happened. I told him I knew the answer to this, but did he cause what happened to the Towers? His response was immediate and a no as I expected. I told him the answer was as expected and I held no blame but anyone who either directed or flew those airplanes into the buildings. He acknowledged that I didn't treat him any differently and thanked me. I told him it wasn't his fault. We all have bad eggs in different societies and he thanked me for being so great about it all. However, by the next morning, his manager called and talked to my manager and told her the programmer wasn't coping with the events and wouldn't be back. She wanted to make it clear we had done nothing wrong. As my manager knew of our conversation from the day before, she knew I had held no ill feelings for the programmer even though others were dealing with the Muslim faith in different ways and some weren't good.

Credit

There are bad people in all religions or non religions and in countries around the world. That's life and what we have to deal with. Not everyone is good and not everyone is bad.

Clergy
In the past, I've commented about how many people within my family are in the Clergy. It was
interesting to find these out. Some of these are below from a my cousin Jacqueline in Belgium (Thanks!).

Bertha Emma Barbara Verhaeghe known as Sister Maria Rufina

Jean Amand Verhaeghe in his office at church before his death

Picture of Oskar Verhaeghe as priest

Pic of Remi Eugene Verhaeghe as priest

Pic of Remi Leon Julien

These (above) are all gone way in the past. We do have some current clergy as well.

There are many on Vimo as well. This is one I have started to watch a few times.

Pastor Lon Ostrzycki - Bethlehem Baptist Church, Hazel Green, AL

Credit

There are others as well, but my mind has now gone blank. I do know of many of the family do teach Sunday school, play to piano/organ or helps around the church. 

Church

I do know some of the churches my family has frequented in the US due to obituaries and where they are buried. I do have a few who are buried on church grounds and for that to happen, they must have a certain amount of years with the church I believe. 

Some of the current churches are below.

This is where myself and my siblings were baptized. My Uncle John and paternal grandmother Jean held their funerals Credit

My mother's father's line (Gauquie's) have been members here since at least 1900. Credit St. Mary's Washingtonville

My great grandparents (and great aunts and uncles) can see this view when standing at their graves they are this close. I know some of my distance cousins were buried here too. We went to visit them in January 2019, and it had snowed out, but it was getting nippy, so we didn't stay long. We did take some pictures and visit. I know we missed headstones, but we will be back.

My grandparents (Gauquie) and great grandparents (Jagodzinski/a) attended here. St Francis of Assisi Catholic Church. Picture credit GoogleEarth.

My grandfather Louis Gauquie, I believe, attended church at St Mary's until he left home at an early age and settled in Newburgh. Sometime later, he started to attend this church. I do know my great aunt Genevieve Jagodzinski/Barry and great grandparents Bernice and Appolonius Jagodzinski/Barry attended here as well. I know the funerals of Louis, Bernice and Appolonius were all held here. Bernice, Appolonius, and my grandmother, Janet, all are buried in the church cemetery. 

In January 2019, I visited all the resting places of these ancestors. I never had any proof of where my grandmother was buried. However, during this visit, I found her headstone before I located her parents which were just in front of the headstone with her name on it.

I do have other churches throughout the US which holds other relatives, but I haven't visited for research - yet. One of these is Saint Columba Cemetery in Chester, New York.

The Saint Columba Church, Chester NY. Credit: GoogleEarth

What makes this so unbelievable, is one of my friends from high school, got married in this church. At this point, I wasn't doing genealogy or know any of my family history. However, I found many of the people who are my cousins (Van Rompaye's) and who married into other families (Palmer's & Fellner's) are all buried within the cemetery.

Me coming out after the church ceremony at my girlfriend's wedding at Saint Columba Church in 1995. Credit: B Fitzgerald

Part of the invitation of the wedding (picture above).

I'm wondering if my 2x great grandfather could be buried within the cemetery as well, but its something I'll have to research on my next trip over.

Visits to Cemeteries
One thing we do each time we go to the US, is visit the cemeteries of my relatives. I figure if they didn't make me, then I wouldn't be here, so why wouldn't I pay my respects?

Although, now I hold mental conversations with them while we visit telling them of what I've found and how the frustrate or how they make me proud. I'll leave you with the various pictures I took this past January/February 2019 visit below.

My great grandparents, Jules and Annie Gauquie, at St Mary's

My great aunt Mary Gauquie at St Mary's

My great uncle and aunt along with cousins at St Mary's

A cousin at St Mary's

A cousin at St Mary's (same as one at top different angle)

Me, my brother (in urn) and my grandmother at St Francis. Sorry about how bad I look.

My great grandparents, with my grandmother (their daughter in back) at St Francis.

My grandmother at Cedar Hill. 

My step grandfather at Cedar Hill.

My Uncle at Cedar Hill.

My maternal grandfather and great aunt at Calvary Cemetery