Katharina Reichert

Over the past little while we've had some success doing family history work, and I thought it would be a good idea to chronicle some of the things that we've learned.  Hopefully it will inspire you to give it a try!

Wayne received a phone call from his brother asking if we could have a combined family night to try and help his son find some family names to take to the temple on their next youth baptism trip.  It would have been easier if we lived a bit closer, but thanks to technology we were able to bridge the 1300 miles without traveling!

Since I wanted this to be successful, I decided I should do some advance planning, and I started by staring at our lovely genealogy chart.  

I had to get a bit closer, and I decided to focus on Wayne's Dad's side since we've been working on his Mom's side for the past couple of years.

This is a nine-generation chart, and thanks to the efforts of our aunts and great-aunts, a lot of it has been filled in.  However, I noticed one gap in the 8th generation and that's where I decided to start.  (Yes, the chart is fading and needs to be re-done, but it still works for now.)

The "dead-end" was at Katharina Reichert, Wayne's great-great-great grandmother on the Youkstetter side.  Family records state she was born in Germany in 1796.  I plugged that information into the search field at familysearch.org and found a link showing her marriage to Johann Friedrich Speidel in 1823.  That was exciting!  Thank you, thank you, thank you to whoever indexed the Germany marriage records!  Even more exciting was the fact that her parents were listed:

     bride's father's name:     Gottlieb Friederich Reichert

     bride's mother's name:     Margaretha Barbara Schwab

In addition, I discovered the marriage records for several more of Friedrich's brothers and sisters, with the parents of their spouses listed.  A couple of them were already in NewFamilySearch, but several weren't, and so during our family night that evening, we repeated the search process and our nephew entered the new information while we walked him through the steps.  It was a productive two hours, and he reached his goal of finding family names to take to the temple.  (Okay, so some of them are in-laws of in-laws, but I love all of my in-laws and consider them family.  Besides, we're ALL going to be linked together before this is finished.)

Of course, now we have two new "dead-ends" so the work isn't done yet, but it's so gratifying to feel like we're making progress!