Thanks for the reply. I have only one official document and that is the 1870 census which shows him in Chicago. Unfortunately that document does not talk about naturalization. Do you know whether there is a site or perhaps several of them that list church baptismal records for the city of Trier around 1825 or so? I believe these would be Catholic churches. I have looked through early immigration records for when he came to this country. The only other piece of information I have is that Rochester New York is where his son lists as his(the son's) birth place. Was Rochester an immigration port, as opposed to New York City? Would a ship come up the St Lawrence riverway and landed at Rochester? ----- Original Message ---- From: kql <lenerz@worldnet.att.net> To: trier-roots@rootsweb.com Sent: Monday, January 8, 2007 8:38:44 PM Subject: Re: [TRIER-ROOTS] Finding ancestral hometowns [was Perl and Borg] Michael Young wrote: > I need some help please. The only information I have about my great > great gandather is that he was born in Trier on November 25, 1825. At > some point he immigrates to the US , settles eventually in Chicago, > Illinois, and dies April 7, 1900. Any suggestions as to how to proceed, or > where to begin? Michael, There are a lot of places one can look for an ancestor's home town. You've already checked one: his obituary. Others include: Declaration of Intent and other naturalization papers, passenger manifests, church records, military records, local histories and biographies, published genealogies, obituaries and other records of siblings, and more. While each of these may have a low probability of yielding the information you seek, that probability is still there. Examples: Of the thousands of church records I've searched, only a small fraction contained the name of the home town of the person. But if it had been my ancestor's record with the information, I would have hit the jackpot. Similarly, both passenger lists and naturalization records varied from time to time and locality to locality in the information they contained. In one 4-5 year time span in one court I searched, the forms changed several times. Fortunately, my ancestor's form was one of the ones that contained complete information on date of arrival. You don't mention any time frame your ancestor immigrated. That would be helpful in determining what records to search in this country. If he arrived in the 1850s, the passenger manifest will list only country of origin. If he arrived in the Ellis Island era (post-1892), it should list home town. You can search for the date of his immigration in a number of places: Castle Garden website http://www.castlegarden.org/search.php Castle Garden operated from 1855 to 1890, although the index on this website contains data from both before and after that time period, and lists arrivals from ports other than New York. In spite of that, the index is still incomplete. It also has no Soundex searching, so you need to search with different spelling variations. Wildcard searches are allowed. Ellis Island website http://ellisisland.org/ As with Castle Garden, Soundex searching isn't available, so search for spelling variations. Given that your gggrandfather had a rather common name, it may be difficult to determine if any hits you get from the above searches are indeed him. You'll have to check the indexes or the actual passenger list (available at Ellis Island and Ancestry websites) to determine if any of his family members are also on the ship. Ancestry.com http://ancestry.com/ This paid website contains still more indexes to passenger lists from a variety of ports, as well as images of the actual lists. You can access this site free at many public libraries and at many local Family History Centers. You should also search the census to determine which ones he appears in. That will narrow down his arrival time. The complete census is available at Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest. Many libraries subscribe to HeritageQuest, which allows patrons to search from their home computers (unlike library subscriptions to Ancestry.com). A list of libraries that offer in-home remote access to HeritageQuest is here: http://www.eogen.com/HeritageQuestOnline The 1880 census is indexed and free at FamilySearch.org: http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp Although the determination of an ancestor's origins is usually through using American sources, you can also check out the indexes to Trier area Familienbücher online: http://www.genealogienetz.de/vereine/wgff/trier/ To search all indexes at once, use Google Advanced Search and put the above URL in the "Domain" field. You might also find him in the Ortsfamilienbuch Südlicher Hochwald: http://www.online-ofb.de/hochwald/ And you can also check these user-contributed online databases: http://meta.genealogy.net/index.jsp http://www.geneanet.org/ Here are some online guides to finding ancestors' origins: http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/RG/guide/tracing_immigrant_origins.asp http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/article.aspx?article=4 http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/article.aspx?article=7 If you're just starting out in genealogy, there are some very good online guides: http://www.rootsweb.com/~rwguide/index.html http://www.arkansasresearch.com/guide.html http://www.kansasheritage.org/research/dbd/index.html http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/roots-l/genealog/genealog.fhsearch Lastly, let's not forget the public library. The best book I know of for beginning genealogists is: Morgan, George G., _How to do everything with your genealogy._ New York: McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004. Good luck! Kathy ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to TRIER-ROOTS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Michael Young wrote: > I have only one official document and that is the 1870 census which > shows him in Chicago. Unfortunately that document does not talk about > naturalization. If your gggrandfather had children in 1870, their birth states would be listed on the census. From that and their ages, you may be able to determine the earliest date he was in this country. > Do you know whether there is a site or perhaps several of them that > list church baptismal records for the city of Trier around 1825 or > so? No. Only a tiny fraction of all the records (as opposed to indexes) available for doing genealogical research are available online, and those are mostly American records via Ancestry.com. I did give you a site indexing Familienbücher for the Trier area (below). Familienbücher were largely compiled from church records, so they're the next best thing. The complete Familienbücher aren't online, just the indexes: >> Although the determination of an ancestor's origins is usually >> through using American sources, you can also check out the indexes >> to Trier area Familienbücher online: >> http://www.genealogienetz.de/vereine/wgff/trier/ To search all >> indexes at once, use Google Advanced Search and put the above URL >> in the "Domain" field. > The only other piece of information I have is that Rochester New York > is where his son lists as his(the son's) birth place. Was Rochester an > immigration port, as opposed to New York City? Would a ship come up > the St Lawrence riverway and landed at Rochester? No, they would have landed in NYC then taken one of two routes: 1. a steamer up the Hudson River to near Albany, then the Erie Canal to Rochester 2. train from NYC to Rochester Coincidently, my ancestors lived in Rochester for a few years before migrating to Wisconsin. There were several German Catholic churches there. One of the earlier ones was SS. Peter and Paul. Its church books have been microfilmed and are available through the Family History Library. Two of the three SS. P&P films are on permanent loan at my FHC, where I will be volunteering tomorrow. If you can give me the name of the person born there and date, I can look to see if his baptism is on the film. (Please respond offlist.) The other German Catholic churches in Rochester and founding dates can be found here, along with the film numbers for their records: http://www.rootsweb.com/~nymonroe/church1.htm In my research in Rochester, I found few Trierisch families; most Germans there seemed to be from Baden or Bavaria. Also check out the Monroe County USGenWeb page: http://www.rootsweb.com/~nymonroe/ If you've never been to a Family History Center or examined microfilmed records from the Family History Library, you should really look into it. They have millions of reels of microfilmed records from around the world and lend them to local Family History Centers where you can rent and view them. Get more information by checking your local phone book for a Mormon church near you. (They won't proselytize you; most of their volunteers, like me, aren't Mormon.) As much of this discussion has to do with how to do genealogical research, rather than with genealogy in the Trier area, you may be interested in another RootsWeb list on genealogy methods: http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/other/Newsgroup_Gateways/GENMTD.html Good luck! Kathy