I love the colors and the crisp simplicity of the graphic theme of this blog; however, I find the fixed width of the main column limiting. I was wondering if you have any thoughts about whether you would rather have the width of the main column be wider or at least flexible for your computer monitor.
Let me know if you think it would be worth it to change the theme to get more content horizontally, rather than piling it on vertically. thanks.
Jill
Yes, I do! More than once in my conversations with others they have noted that being a genealogist is like being a detective….you gather clues, some of which will turn out to be germane and others are just so much chaff; you study the clues and assess the quality of your source and eventually, when you have enough information, you draw a conclusion. Sounds like NCIS or The Closer (sigh)! Like a detective, sometimes there is one clue (after gathering a lot of evidence) that seems to tip the scale. Other times, it is the weight of all of the evidence that leads one to a conclusion.
Last post was about a discovery of a second marriage of my great great grandmother and answering the question of whether I had enough information to say that THIS Ida Berg who married Frederick Eiler was MY Ida Berg. No piece of evidence discounted it from being her but the weight of the evidence did seem like enough to say, in fact, it was her. Some would have already said it was her.
Some of us just keep looking.
Yesterday I was filing some of the information that I had found on the trip to Freeport. I was entering information into the database of the many original sources with primary information I had found, and there it was! The tipping point! When Ida’s daughter Sophia got married at age 15 in 1862, Ida had to attest that it was with the family approval. On the marriage form of the daughter was the name Ida Eylen. Clearly not Berg and written sloppily enough that the “n” could be an “r”.
So, Ida’s mini-timeline looks like this:
The mystery to me is now: What happened to Frederick? There was no record of death in the parish records of St. John’s Presbyterian or of Silver Creek Reformed church. There was another German Reformed church in town, perhaps the death is there. Newspapers are not extant for that time period and in my culling of them that I could do, very few deaths (accidents only), no marriages and no births were entered as news.
So, the mystery continues, with a different slant. The focus is now on Frederick.
Happy Hunting!
Jill
What I have done since the last post: filed some, but not all of the information I found in Stephenson county (next up: all the land and probate records), have the very rough draft of Stephanie’s book about 90% complete and I will get it to her the end of this week. It looks pretty good! about 30+ pages and it went faster than I thought it would.
Genealogy Certification: My Personal Journal 