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!

Don't Rely On the Index

I believe in sharing, especially when it comes to genealogy!  I own two excellent Brown County, Ohio resources, Beer's 1883 History of Brown County and Carl Thompson's Historical Collections of Brown County, that have helped me a great deal in researching my family so if I read a message on the RootsWeb Brown County Ohio board asking for help with a surname, I usually take the time to check the index in my books and then reply with any information I find.   

A plea for help last week taught me a lesson that I should have known all along.  Do not trust an index!  I was helping someone who was looking for members of the Dodson family in Brown County, R.H. and Samuel, to be exact.  I grabbed my Historical Collections of Brown County book and immediately turned to the index.  Scanning the appropriate page, my eyes fell upon three page numbers for R.H. Dodson, but failed to find Samuel even listed.  

I hit the reply button so I could begin typing the information found on the pages, hoping that this would be a help to the message writer.  The first two pages had references to R. H. being a minister of two churches in the Ripley area.  When I turned to the last indexed page number and scanned the page looking for the mention of R.H., I was surprised to see him listed as the father in a wonderfully biographical obituary for his son, Samuel!  

How did the indexer miss that?  A whole separate obituary that occupied the bottom third and part of the following page in the book!  I'm the last person to criticize someone who took the time to list the surnames in an index so I would be able to find them, but this really has made me wonder what other tidbits of information indexes in reference books are missing.  I don't have time to sit and read each and every page of these very thick county histories and other historical books that I am lucky enough to own, but I do believe that I will now begin reading a page or two each week in hopes of finding what someone else might have missed.  Maybe I'll be lucky enough to stumble upon something equally fantastic as the obituary for Samuel seemed to me.

As for replying to pleas for help, I will continue to share my resources as I hope others will continue to do for me, but I will now keep in mind that, while a huge help, indexes aren't perfect.  I guess there really is nothing like being able to actually see and read a resource with my own eyes.  Lesson learned!