Family Record Hunter

This is one of my favorite finds from my family record hunts. Not that it was hard to find - It was actually saved by many other members of the family - but because of the first hand account of history that it provides.

I don’t know exactly where the Schwartzel family came from. I have hunches, clues, and even theories, but I haven’t found the missing link to prove where they came from, so for now we’ll stick to the facts. 

American history is romanticized as a story of immigrants. Almost every American, including myself, can trace our lineage to multiple immigrants from Germany, but getting there is always a straight path. Anglicization of our German ancestors' names poses a large but surmountable obstacle to our genealogical research. Records and indexes are filled with our English speaking ancestors butchering the spelling of foreign names. German, French, Polish, all of them.