Online databases seem to be growing exponentially, and not just on pay sites like Ancestry.com. One of my biggest discoveries of late came almost by accident on FamilySearch.org, and the lead came from a podcast.
I spend 90 minutes in the car every day commuting to and from work, so podcasts are an essential part of my daily life. Most of my favorites revolve around true crime (My Favorite Murder, Casefile), food (Gastropod, Milk Street Radio, Munchies), or pop culture (Pop Culture Happy Hour). I would love to add a family history podcast to the mix, and I've sampled a lot of them. I just haven't found the right one yet.
Often the first thing I look at when trying to find a podcast is how long it is. That sounds terrible, as length does not equate to quality, but I'm a pragmatist. My one-way commute is 45 minutes. I want an episode that will run at least that long so I'm not left fumbling to switch episodes midway home.
A lot of the genealogy podcasts are much shorter than that, maybe 10-20 minutes. Others that are longer just don't interest me. That's the tricky thing about family history. It's an intensely personal pursuit. If you have a podcast that talks about research in New England, but your roots go back to Germany in the 1870s, then you're left with an "appreciation" for that podcast, but not a desire to listen to it.
One day I was sampling one of the shorter podcasts, one that promised kind of a weekly digest of new things available for researchers. I'd love to give them a proper shout out here, but I'm sorry to say I didn't add them to my regular podcast list and I don't remember the name! Perhaps later I'll look it up again and add an addendum to this post. The one episode I listened too mentioned the addition of new German records on Family Search. I have used FamilySearch.org many times, but not for a while, as I had run out of new things to discover. This podcast, however, piqued my interest. As soon as I could get to a computer I went hunting.
I have a lot of German roots, and my own last name has been one of the hardest to research, primarily because of spelling changes in the mid-19th Century (from Stäcker to Staker) and other geographical conundrums previously explained in this blog. Through church records sent from Germany I was able to locate my great-great grandfather and his two sisters, but what happened to those sisters remained unknown. I had the married name of one, and I knew in 1910 my great-great grandfather, Henry, returned to Germany to visit them both. The church archivists, however, could not come up with death dates.
Then along came FamilySearch.org! One of the new records eluded to in that podcast were civil records for Kreis Steinberg, the region of Germany where a lot of the Stäcker family was located. It took almost no time at all after a a few queries to locate the first, then the second sister in civil death records. This led to the husband of the youngest sister, and the identification of two children.
Now, I make it a habit of checking every week to see what new records have been added to FamilySearch.org. There are still a lot of questions on that side of the family, and I'm hoping one week the new records added will be the puzzle pieces I've been looking for.
P.S. I'm open to good genealogy podcast recommendations if anyone has one.
