Piecing together one’s family history is like piecing together a puzzle depicting a landscape. As you fit pieces of blue sky together, you sometimes find you have pieced together a portion of sky from another puzzle, and you have to toss it out. Other times, you’re left uncertain whether the pieces you’ve fit together are part of your puzzle or not.
I’ve encountered a few pieces that may or may not fit my Fritz family history puzzle.
Homestead (newspaper, Des Moines, Iowa); Thursday, March 02, 1905; Page 34
William Shea and Gertrude Cornelius Fritz married. They had two daughters: Allie M. and Edna H. Shea. I hadn’t expected to ever know their middle names, but thanks to William’s livestock, I was able to learn what that M. stands for.
A cousin I’ve been in contact with sent me the following earlier today:
I already knew when George Fritz and Birdie Fowler married, but found it interesting to see another Fritz on there. I’ve already accounted for all the Fritzes in my line from around there (assuming George’s uncle Johann Josef didn’t marry and have children before he was murdered).
So, this W.D. Fritz is an unrelated Fritz, right? I have reason to wonder.
This photograph is a mystery. It was (to my understanding) in the possession of Gertrude Alice /Fritz/ Brinton, who passed away in 1993.
The FamilySearch.org California, County Marriages, 1850-1952 has been updated recently, and now it finally includes the marriage of my maternal grandparents.
I’ve been reading up on my first cousin, four times removed, Albert Levi Fritz. He was born in 1877, and he died following a bad fall in 1903. Looking over his siblings, I noted they all passed away in the 1950′s and 60′s. And all his nephews and nieces passed away by the 1980′s and 90′s.
That’s kind of depressing to think about, somehow. At the same time, it makes me feel all the more that I must continue my recent project of writing a Fritz history book.
As I worked my way through reading a few genealogy blogs, I found one that had a lot of text at the very top, about payday loans and small cash loans. It was clearly not intended to be there. If you use WordPress for your blogging platform, here are a few things to help out on watching for and dealing with a spam hack.
I found a newspaper mention of a Fritz Harper Abernathy during a Google search while looking for information on people from my family tree. I strongly believe he’s part of my tree, but I haven’t yet found that conclusive evidence. Here’s what I do have.
In my Children of Austria posting, I listed out the siblings of my third great grandfather, Benedict Fritz, from a book profiling the residents of Wapello County, Iowa. The biography had incorrect information (such as stating Benedict was from Tyrol rather than Lech, Austria), and mysteries (mentioning Benedict was one of seven children, but only naming five and mentioning a sixth).
Recently, I found an index of probates from the Land Vorarlberg web site, which provides a more accurate look into the family’s names.