One of my maternal 2nd great-grandfathers was Edward Gottlieb Geyer (1834-1911). He was my maternal grandmother Elsie Almeta Seibel Jordan’s grandfather, through Elsie’s mother Jenny Cecilia Geyer Seibel. Edward Geyer was born in Saxony, Germany and came to the United States at the age of 8 in 1842, when he…
Category: <span>Jordan – Seibel</span>
Following up on a post regarding the story of my maternal DeCamp ancestors, I have found some important family tree clues through a new feature on the familysearch.org website. Their full text search lets you search huge numbers of hand written (as well as typed) documents in their collections. The…
Returning to the Gray and DeCamp branches of my maternal grandfather’s family tree, I was recently reminded of John DeCamp and Susannah Gray, my 5th great-grandparents. According to an 1874 newspaper obituary of their son George DeCamp Sr., John and Susannah lived in Winchester, Virginia in the early 1770s, and…
One of my grandfather’s first cousins was Robert Gere Vosler (1904-1968) of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Before entering the navy in 1942, Robert worked as a musician, touring the northeast and mid-west of the United States, playing the trumpet and saxophone with the dance band The Keystone Serenaders. He enlisted in…
In honor of the approach of Halloween, I’ll look at the only story of an accused witch that I’ve found in my family tree. On my maternal grandfather’s side of the family, the DeCamp family of New Jersey and Western Pennsylvania go back to colonial era Quakers on Long Island,…
The Carte de Visite was a type of photograph popular during the Civil War in the United States, mainly because it was relatively inexpensive to produce. It came in particularly handy for those with friends and family serving in the war, as they were produced in multiples and could be…
I have written about my Vosler relatives of Western Pennsylvania, including the physician David Clair Vosler who died during the influenza pandemic at the end of World War 1. David Clair’s only child was son Robert Gere Vosler (1904-1968). Robert Gere lost his father at age 14, and was sent…
One of my maternal 3rd great grandfathers was Christian Geyer, who was born in 1795 in Germany and immigrated to Ohio with his large family in 1842. My 2nd great grandfather was his son Edward. Edward had two brothers named Ernest and Gustavus, who both had an important notation next…
I’ve written before about trying to determine if old family stories, passed down over a century or more, are completely true, only partly true, or just made-up wishful thinking. The question of a possible ancestral relationship on my mother’s family tree to the US president James Monroe (1758-1831) has been…
Going back to the 1600s on my maternal grandfather’s tree, I’ve traced back to Laurens Jansen De Camp (about 1645-1719), a Huguenot who came to New Amsterdam in the 1660s. In the New World, he married Aeltje Mandeville, a Dutch woman born about 1657 in Holland. Aeltje’s father was Yellis…