So many of these prompts have been too open-ended for me, and only by trying to consign myself to one family branch a week of my tree have I been able to come up with ideas for these posts. This is definitely one of those posts. I have so many fabulous records I could talk about, but in the end, I've settled on one that's not so much a record, but a hand written tree I had a copy of almost from the beginning.
My great-grandfather Holger's family stayed well connected through my childhood. Even to the point where my great-aunt held a yearly family gathering in her town of Idylwild in California. So I met many of my grandmother's close and distant cousins as well as other relations over the years. So their father's father's line is very well connected, even back in Denmark where they came from. Their father's mother's line, on the other hand, petered out after a few generations when I first received it, ending in a woman whose name I always had recorded as Oertha. I'd always thought it a bit odd, but as I searched, I found Oerthas here and there, so I figured it was a Scandinavian name, and chalked it up to that. But I never managed to get past that part of my tree. My third-great grandfather, Jørgen Larsen, was her son, which is an unfortunately common name in Denmark, so I despaired of ever getting further back.
Then, in the early 2000s, I made friends with several people online who were from Denmark, and still living there. I was pleased to tell them about my family, and how my grandmother was Danish, like them, even though she was born in the US. From time to time, they would help me out with that branch of the family, and with translations of the documents I found. Then, one day, I was nudging at Oertha again, and asked one of them if they'd ever heard the name before. We talked for a bit, and ended up focusing on Jørgan instead--which is what led to the breakthrough. We found the church book where his birth was recorded. And listed his parents' names as Lars Andersen and Birthe Marie Sørensdatter.
It's not uncommon to get a name transcribed wrong when it comes to genealogy and family history, so I went back to my documents to see where the info had come from. I looked through several versions of the family tree to see how it was originally written, only to discover that "Oertha" had been handwritten at the very top of the page, so the top of the B in Birthe had been cut off, and with the handwriting had quickly turned into an O.
Because of this find, I have now gotten several more generations back on this line. So the lesson here? Just because it's always been listed that way on your family tree, don't take it for granted. Always question everything, because you never know where that info came from until you look into it. Especially when you're stuck there. Usually brick walls in your family tree come about because something was written down wrong somewhere. Come at it from a different angle to see if new information comes up. You never know what you might find.
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