#52Ancestors: Brick Wall

Brick Wall! If ever there was a concept every genealogist could relate to this is it. Those dead ends in our family tree languishing without the essential clues necessary to enable us to answer those fundamental questions we're all searching for such as "Who are the parents?" and "How did they get here?"

One such brick wall in my own research was my third great grandmother, Katie Thomas. For years all I really knew about her was her name and that supposedly she was born in Germany. I knew her son, my great-great grandfather, John Hubert Younker, was born in Illinois and, from the census, I was able to theorize she had likely been married previously.

Eventually, I connected with a distant cousin descended from one of the children from her first marriage. He was able to provide important details about her life in the United States before she married my great-great-great grandfather, also named John Hubert, but he didn't know anything about her life before immigrating, either.

I located the marriage of Katie and John Hubert in 1870 in Logan County, Illinois, using old-fashioned footwork, scrolling through a microfilm page-by-page. John Younker is not an entirely unique name and tracking a single man with a dearth of other clues made researching him inconclusive.

Discovering John Hubert Sr. was a veteran of the Civil War, and the subsequent pension file I ordered from the National Archives and Records Administration, provided relatively scant information but I was able to glean one essential detail from a returned envelope for Katie's pension check. Her address was crossed out and "deceased" was scrawled across the envelope. The envelope was postmarked January of 1913, giving me an approximate window for when she died, information which had eluded me thus far. Her headstone frustratingly gives only her date of birth. 

Katie didn't have it easy after her second husband, John, died in 1886. His pension file revealed she made several attempts to receive a widow's pension. So marginal was her existence in the 1900 census, all that is recorded is her last name!

I knew from earlier records that Katie had a sister Gertrude close in age who also immigrated from Germany about the same time she did, and with whom she resided in 1900. There are so many spelling variations for Younker, that as more Illinois newspapers were digitized I also made sure to regularly search Gertrude's married name, Vef, as there were fewer spellings to consider. Remember your FAN Club! Especially when researching your female ancestors. All too often the detail that smashes the brick wall comes from broadening your search! Which is exactly what happened with Katie. 

I located a social item in a newspaper mentioning a man named E. H. Thomas had visited with his aunt Gertrude Vef. Thomas!? Did another sibling -- a brother, perhaps -- also immigrate? Sure enough, researching E. H. (Elmer Herman) led to his father, Conrad. Details I was able to uncover about Conrad Thomas led me to a family tree on MyHeritage submitted by a woman located in Germany. 

Finally, I had a family for Katie. Searching Archion, the German digital archives site, led to civil records for several generations of the Thomas family. Tenacity, leveraging all the information available to me, and the addition of new digital resources all contributed to my eventual success in determining who Katie's parents were. There are still unanswered questions, when she immigrated, for example, but her story has grown to far beyond a birthdate on a headstone.

Anna Gertrude Thomas Vef (l) and Anna Catharina Thomas Kible Younker, (r) circa 1900.
Marriage record of Mrs. Catharine Kaible and John H. Yunker, 8 September 1870.

Copyright 2019 by Lisa A. Oberg, GeneaGator: Vignettes of Yesteryear. All Rights Reserved.