Never underestimate what another pair of eyes can find.
Every 6 months or so I upload my family tree to ancestry.com. This time I shared it with a couple dozen family members. One of my cousins poked around the tree, pointed out a couple of obvious errors, and did some searching on his own. He unlocked an important discovery.
My great-grandfather on my mother's side, Arthur Burke, married Margaret Ogilvie de Guehery. Family lore had it that the de Guehery family escaped the French Revolution to Germany, then went to Canada, and then the United States.
Last year sometime, while searching familysearch.org I found a marriage record for Margaret de Guehery's parents, Marion Cuthbert and Emanuel de Guehery. It listed Emanuel's parents as Rudolph and Goddlibien de Guehery. More searching turned up nothing else on Rudolph and Goddlibien, including Goddlibien's last name.
This is where my cousin's searching comes in.
He thinks to do a search of google books. And finds this interesting snippet:
My great-great-great-grandfather, Rudolph de Guehery, was born abt 1820 in Dresden, Germany. My great-great-great grandmother was Gottlieben Mack.
There looks like there could be more.
So I email the Ontario Genealogical Society, where this snippet was published, to see if there was a way to find more information from wherever this snippet came from.
The OGS reply with more: Gottlieben Mack was born in 1838 in Mendelsheim, Wuerttenberg, Germany and that Rudolph and Gottlieben emigrated to Canada via Hamburg, Germany. Rudolph died in 1889 in Petawawa, Ontario. Gottlieben died in 1922 in Ebenezer, NY.
They also gave me the name of the person who posted this entry in the "Families" newsletter more than 20 years ago. That's the topic of the next post.