A Sea of Koewler's

When I was still teaching school, I had a bad habit of grabbing free time at home to do research, but not record any of what I found.  If I was lucky enough to find something, I would usually print it out and eventually file it away in the proper file folder for the day when I would actually have time to enter it into my family tree.  Well, now that I am no longer working, I have discovered that I have amassed a ton of information that needs not only to be organized, but analyzed as well.

After the discovery of my great great grandfather, Anton Koewler's, death, I decided to go through my collection of Koewler information.  It's been several weeks now and I am still drowning in a sea of Koewler's!  I have a binder system for the family with each family unit having a section.  When one of the children marries, a separate section for that new family is created.  What started as a one inch binder with a few sections has turned into the need for a larger binder and many more index pages!

I have found that this was one prolific family!!  I have found them where they started in Germany and where they ended up in Brown County, Ohio.  From there, they settled in all parts of this country - Minnesota, Indiana, California and all places in between!  What I considered to be a fairly uncommon name, a Google search for Koewler brings up 62,300 results and from what I've looked at, all of them are names of people!  It's pretty mind-boggling to think that the majority of these people are, in someway, probably related to me, however distantly.      

Slowly, but surely, my pile of data, which consists of birth records, death certificates, newspaper articles, and census listings, is getting shorter while my knowledge of this part of my family is growing in leaps and bounds.  If you're interested in some of what I've discovered, jump on over to my family blog site, Family Lifetimes, or leave me a comment.  I'll be happy to share what I have and maybe you can help clear up some of my "which George, Henry, or Henrietta Koewler is that" mysteries that I'm setting aside in a whole new pile for later.  Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure there is a countertop somewhere under all this paper!