There are many sources where I have gotten information which have been surprising to me. I got a copy of a letter written by my great grandfather in Michigan in 1891 from a distant relative in Sweden that I found through DNA matches. In the letter my great grandfather informs his parents that his 23 year old brother had fallen through the ice and drowned two days after Christmas. I already knew about his tragic death, but getting a copy of the letter was an exciting discovery!
mina kära föräldrar och bröder och vänner (my dear parents and brothers and friends) You can see what I will tell you even before you open the letter. Your son and my brother Karl Holmqvist is resting in his grave for the first night tonight. he went out on the lake the evening 27 december with some of his friends to skate.
Another unusual source was a old church register found in a town more than 100 miles from home.My sister and I decided to taken a trip to the town our grandfather first lived in when he immigrated from Sweden to Michigan in the 1880s. We visited the library and genealogical society. Then we ended up stopping at a church that had its roots from a Swedish Baptist Church which had some old church registers on a shelf in their library. We found our great grandfather’s name as well as our great grandmother’s name and the dates they were baptized!
I have also unexpectedly found several obituaries of ancestors in newspapers of previous residences. One was a newspaper from the hometown of my great grandmother which was in a different state where she had not lived for 40 years!. I also found an obituary of a great grandfather in a newspaper where he had not lived almost 40 years. I would never have thought to look in towns where ancestors had lived so many years prior to death.
But I think my most unusual source was an old Dutch Bible my mom picked up at an estate sale more than 30 years ago. She bought the Bible for $10. She saw the name “Peter Telder” written on one of the front pages and remembered my dad’s grandfather Martin Telder had a brother Peter so she bought it. What she didn’t realize, and what I figured out more than 20 years after my mom passed away, is she actually bought the Dutch Bible my 2nd great grandparents had brought over from the Netherlands with them in 1867.
Peter, being the oldest child, had inherited the Bible from his mother when she passed away in 1923. When Peter died in 1940, the Bible was passed down to his son Adrian. Adrian died in 1969 and his wife in 1989 which is when the Bible ended up in an estate sale. In the front cover of the Bible is Peter’s father’s name “G. Telder”. And in Peter’s mother’s handwriting are the names of all their children and their places and dates of birth. And Peter’s mother Alberdina also recorded all the times she had read through that Dutch Bible from the years 1906 until 1920 when she was 89 years old.
Old church registers from the late 1800s found in a town more than 100 miles from home, obituaries found in newspapers where the deceased has not lived for 40 years, and an ancestor’s Dutch Bible brought to America more than 100 years ago found at an Estate sale are just a few of the unusual sources where I have unearthed fascinating discoveries about my ancestors.
Ancestors Across the Ages 