When it comes to the Olympics, I can cheer for just about any country, since I have either ancestors or relatives on every continent (though it has been a while since my Canadian relative lived for a while in Antarctica and allowed that claim to be made). My apologies to those family members who have provided me with updated information: just about every one of these web pages could be updated, if I could fit it all in, but my health is still keeping a pretty short leash on me. I did manage to write an article on "Non-Blood Relationship Searches in Family Databases" for Genealogical Computing; click here to see the downloadable program and instructions associated with my article (which was published in GC's July/Aug/Sept 2003 issue).

• Cornish/English Ancestors:
  • I no longer do the Butson Family Newsletter and am pleased that David Butson in Texas is now carrying it forward on the Butson.net web pages.
  • "From Cornwall to Canada in 1841": Begun in January 2006, this page contains the text of a 1903 account of the 1841 migration of 600 people from Cornwall to Canada, focusing on the sailing of the "Clio" from Padstow and the journey that led the Pedlar family to Oshawa, Ontario

• Canadian Ancestors:
  • Johnston-Butson-Keam-Gibson Canadian History 1800's Timeline: my attempt to understand how the world looked to my Canadian ancestors as they participated in the birth of a nation (related Canadian surnames in the timeline: Wilson, Cook, Fitchett)
  • "From Cornwall to Canada in 1841": Begun in January 2006, this page contains the text of a 1903 account of the 1841 migration of 600 people from Cornwall to Canada, focusing on the sailing of the "Clio" from Padstow and the journey that led the Pedlar family to Oshawa, Ontario

• German Ancestors: I have 4 German immigrant ancestors and at least 2 more that I am tracing through marital relations: Hesse-Kassel, Old Schaumburg (area SW of Hannover), and Mecklenburg-Pomerania.
  • Hesse-Kassel: Here is my page on our Faupel / Vaupel and Schaumburg families, who came to America from towns only 18 miles apart in Hesse-Kassel, Germany (Grossenenglis and Niederjossa). The page also has information on ancestors from Old Schaumburg in Niedersachsen: Gelis of Deckbergen and Hasemann, Pape, Wulf, Meyer, Heine, Wilkening, Bartels, Hartman, Tielking, Auhagen, Ebeling from Beckedorf, Luedersfeld, and the surrounding area.

  • Probsthagen: Kurt Hitzemann (we are 10th cousins) in Illinois has done a heroic job of transcribing and pulling together into families all of the Probsthagen church vital records from 1600 to 1870, a huge job that took him years of work. The most up-to-date version on the web is his text version (click here), and he also has a GEDCOM database (click here) based on an earlier version. I have been, as my health and other commitments allow, updating the GEDCOM (not available anywhere yet) from Kurt's more recent text file. I am about 40% done and expect to take all of 2004 -- or more -- to finish ... and this is the "easy" work, so that you can imagine how much effort Kurt put in to do what he has done. I am doing this in Legacy, which I highly recommend.

    Once I am done, I plan to attempt to try to undertand the complex inter-relationships of the families over the centuries. I expect to use at least 3 different tools to do this:

    1. My own non-blood relationship search software (click here)
    2. Legacy's Relationship Report (click here for Legacy)
    3. Great Family's complex graphical ancestral trees (click here for Great Family and see "Old Schaumburg" below)

    Though I am not yet done, I have created a Legacy Relationship Report to show everyone in the database who has a blood relationship to or is the spouse/co-parent of a blood relative of my 4th Great Grandfather, Johann Heinrich Hasemann (1782-1861). I have placed this Probsthagen Relationship Report in a PDF file (click here to see it -- you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it). The results are astonishing: he is related to 961 people, 16.2% of the 5,925 people now in the database (as of 2004-02-12). I had expected a great deal of inter-relationship, but the reality is even greater than I had expected. Once I include the non-blood relationships, I would not be surprised to find that any one person is related to at least half of the others, on average. But that will have to wait, since it is still going to take a very long time just to finish updating the database, before I begin any serious analysis. (NOTE: In the PDF file, "wife" and "husband" include unmarried co-parents as well as married husbands and wives.)

  • Old Schaumburg: Here is a downloadable 93K ZIP file of Haseman and related Beckedorf/Luedersfeld family groups (that unzips to 1M file "Karen GF 015.gd3"). I created the file, using GreatFamily to create a graphical tree that separates out the various families and shows their multiple inter-relationships. The bulk of the information in this file comes from Karen Rowe and her outstanding web site on this region. Someday I hope to do a similar tree with the Probsthagen families from Kurt Hitzemann's outstanding web page of the Probsthegen records, since some of the families in Beckedorf/Luedersfeld came from nearby Probsthagen/Vornhagen. It turns out that the 419 people are in 8 so-far-unrelated groups, with a few stray individuals also. I have been trying to find some means of graphically showing the complex inter-relationships of these families that lived in the same area for centuries and are thus related to each other in many different ways. So far GreatFamily is the best thing I have found. You can download GreatFamily for free and then unzip this file and open it with GreatFamily to see and navigate the trees. It is not a lot of work to do, and it is worth the effort once you see the families laid out visually. FYI, GreatFamily does a fairly good default layout, but I find that it takes a couple of hours to properly untangle all the lines into a nice visual separation. So with my health limitations right now, I am not going to be doing these very often -- but the charts are worth the work, once you can see things so niceley.

• Dutch Ancestors: I have 6 Dutch immigrant ancestors -- two families, in which both parents and their child who was my ancestor came to Michigan -- Holland and Grand Rapids.
  • Boezel-Bogaerts family from Noord-Brabant: Here is my web page with the Dutch birth records of two ancestors, Boezel and Bogaerts, who emigrated to Holland, Michigan. The page is useful to see how to transcribe and translate Dutch records.
    My 5th cousin Nelline Simons has an excellent web site (in Dutch) that includes my immigrant ancestors Albert Boezel and Gerdina Bogaerts (in the family of Albert's father Jan Boezel).

  • Van Wijk-Feenstra family from Friesland: I have done a good deal of research, though there is still much more data, thanks to the amazing Friesland Archives online databases -- probably the best online collection anywhere of family history records. Click on the link to see my "Ancestors of Grietje van Wijk" web page.

    Here are some links to pages of cousins or of my own.

    • Walter Groen and I are descended from the same Feenstra-de Jong line (4th cousins, 1 generation removed). He has an excellent web site (in Dutch) with photos at http://www.wazamar.org/gengroen/indexgen.html.
    • Jacobus Knol and I are descended from the same van Wijk line (3rd cousins, 2 generations removed). He has a wonderful web site (in Dutch) with some photos at http://jacobusknol.nl/komof/getperson.php?personID=I332&tree=Knol. (The page in the link is for our common ancestor, Jannes van Wijk: I am descended from son Gerrit and Jacobus Knol from daughter Tjittje Jannes van Wijk.)
    • Here is my web page of selected Culemborg records in the search for Gerrit van Wijk (born there c. 1763).

• My Other Ancestors: I also have Scots and Scots-Irish (at least one branch from Armagh) and Bohemian (Czech) ancestry and some ancestors were Canadian citizens, but they'll all have to wait for their own pages.