Reflecting on 2023

It was a rough year for my Stumpf family.

My uncle passed away this year.  He was 72, but should have had a few more years.  I shared my genealogy findings with him as I went, and I think he was interested, but he never really gave any feedback.  Still, I looked forward to sharing with him the origins of the Stumpf family and what I found.  I don't know if he was well enough to read the blog post when I shared the news in January of the Stumpfs immigrating from Dörlesberg; if he did, he didn't leave a comment or reply to my email.  I hadn't seen him in a while and miss him and I'm sad knowing he's not there and there's not a visit in the future.

My dad's and uncle's cousin, whom I tracked down in Buenos Aires and had happily spoke with a few times with my husband acting as our Spanish/English translator, also passed away this year.  He was in his mid-60s.  I'm sorry we won't have any more awkward conversations, trying to compensate for the language differences.  I succeeded in making contact with him through his Facebook account a few years ago after years of wondering and searching for him.  He had been looking for my aunt and wanted to connect with his U.S. cousins.  I think he felt completely cut off from family after his mother passed away.  I think he has an estranged brother and no kids.  I hope he found some joy in connecting with us.

This year I also learned that my grandfather's half-brother was still alive.  I never found an obit for him, but couldn't have known that was because he was still alive in Canada.  His granddaughter shared a photo with a cousin, who shared it with me.  I didn't have a chance to speak with him or meet him.  I only got information through the granddaughter.  I'm sure he didn't know he had a half-brother who went to California, or a half-sister who went to Argentina.  He passed away this fall at the age of 92.  His passing just made me sad for our families.

A few other deaths of family and friends made this a rough year.  I hope 2024 doesn't follow this trend.

I made some wonderful discoveries this year, which I shared in my 10 blog posts, building on the 5 that I wrote in 2022.  From the start I said I'd post until I ran out of things to say.  I guess I still have things to say.  With the new online availability of digitized church books, I'll have more to say in 2024.  I've made my way through the villages of St. Georgen and Klek and will work on Kathreinfeld next. 

Please reach out or comment if this has been interesting or helpful to you.  If you have Stumpf ancestors from this area, let's compare info.  Thank you for taking the time to read this blog.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024.  Take care of your health, visit your doctor, get your check-ups and screenings, don't smoke, especially around little kids, and be good to your families.

A Clue! A Clue?: The Quest for Michael Stumpf Continues

In a previous blog post I located multiple pieces of potential evidence for my great-great-grandfather Michael Stumpf, who left Austria-Hungary to go to the U.S. in 1907 and whose fate is unknown.  It turns out there are a lot of Michael Stumpfs running around the early 1900s in northeast U.S! I eliminated evidence as belonging to different Michael Stumpfs, leaving only one potential clue: the 1910 North Tonawanda, Niagara County, New York census. 

I have been unsuccessful finding anything for him until...

A European Incoming Passenger List

While attending a genealogy meeting [1] with Kate Townsend presenting "Follow the Records and See Where They Go!" I became aware of a dataset called "UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960" in Ancestry.  Not expecting anything, I checked for Michael Stumpf and was rewarded with an entry!

Fig. 1. Screen grab of Ancestry's entry for Mihaele Stumpf in "U.K. and Ireland Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1920"

Here's the info:

• Ship Victorian of the Canadian Pacific Ocean Services Ltd. Steamship Line 
• Departed from St. John, New Brunswick, Canada
• Arrived in Liverpool, England on 3 Jan 1921
• Mihaele Stumpf in transit to Hungary
• Labourer / age 58 (est birth 1863) / citizen of Hungary / last permanent residence in U.S.A.
• There's a number 2 on the list after the "In Transit to Budapest, Hungary" tick marks. Does this mean anything or just a stray keystroke?

This could be my Michael.  There isn't any other data to distinguish him from other Hungarian Michael Stumpfs and since he is traveling alone, family members weren't there to be clues.  

Also on ship continuing on to Budapest is Gyorgy Surnyak, from Battonya who went to US in 1905.  Researching him did not yield any clues to Michael.

I checked the U.S. to Canada Border Crossing dataset in Ancestry, and did not find Michael there.  There's no departing passenger data on the Canadian side. There are no records for train travel in Europe or from the U.K.  I checked for newspapers in Liverpool and in St. John, New Brunswick, but didn't find any clues.

If Michael returned to Hungary in 1921, that means he:

• Spent 1907 to 1920 in the U.S., possibly including April 1910 in North Tonawanda, NY when he was unemployed.
• Spent WWI 1914 to 1919 in the U.S.
• Probably stuck because of the war
• That's 13 years.  Where was he?!!

Frustration Continues

Not quite ready to call this a success.  I'm not sure what evidence I would need to confirm it, but if I find him back in Hungary after 1921, that's a good sign it is him.

P.S. Death Notice for Michael Stumpf's Wife, Theresia Ritter! 

Someone on one of the Banat/Donauschwaben mailing lists shared about a digital archive Bibliothek des Digitalen Forums Mittel- und Osteuropa.  They have digitized and made searchable newspapers among other things. There I found the death notice for Therese Ritter in the Temesvarer Zeitung on 01 Aug 1923! [2]  It is in German:

In der Vorstadt Josefstadt ist in einer Waggonwohnung am Bahnhofe die Witwe Michael Stumpf geb. Therese Ritter im Alter von 65 Jahren gestorben.

[In the Josefstadt district, in a wagon apartment at the train station, the widow of Michael Stumpf, née Therese Ritter, 65 years of age, has died.]

A summary of the details: 

• Therese Ritter, widow of Michael Stumpf
• died on 1 Aug 1923, or maybe 31 or 30 Jul 1923?, in the Josefstadt neighborhood of Timisoara
• She lived/died in a train car apartment at the train station
• She was Roman Catholic

I didn't even know she had lived in Timisoara. Waggonwohnung am Bahnhofe is an old train carriage used as apartments.  And, a clue about Michael; he had died before Aug 1923.  ...Or, he never returned to Theresia and was assumed deceased.

Footnotes

[1] I encourage the attendance of genealogy meetings. Join your local society and attend the meetings.  You never know when you'll learn about a key resource, a new tool or technique, or just get some inspiration. Attending or watching online meetings or lectures is good too.

[2] "Todesfälle." Temesvarer Zeitung. 1 August 1923. Das Digitale Forum Mittel- und Osteuropa (DiFMOE). difmoe.eu : 2023.

Update to the Brick Wall of Johann Stumpf

I busted a brick wall!!

Background

In my third blog post, "This Side of the Brick Wall of Johann Stumpf," I lay out my journey to the brick wall of who are Johann Stumpf's parents.  I list my sources of information and what they tell me and lament the missing records that could solve my mystery.  I conclude with my best guess as to who are the parents of Johann Stumpf.

New Access to Archival Records

Snippet of map used to navigate to villages and their archive holdings in the Presentation of Church Register of the Archives of Vojvodina. Displayed in Cyrillic Serbian, lower left is Zrenjanin (Großbetschkerek); Klek is to the northeast, then Ravni Topolovac (Kathreinfeld) and Žitište (St. Georgen am Bega).

The Archives of Vojvodina has digitized the church books of the Vojvodina region, including Serbian Banat, and made them available online in their Presentation of Church Registers web portal.  You need to register to use the site and search the images, but it’s free to do so.  Also, currently, it is necessary to use their Cyrillic Serbian version, but Google Translate will put the page into English.  Oh, and I needed to turn off my touch screen capabilities in order to zoom in on the images.  The gap years still exist, but I am able to view all the pages myself and can gather all the Stumpf entries for my Database of Stumpfs in Kathreinfeld and Klek in the Banat.

Method for my Madness

In order to add Stumpf individuals to my RootsMagic database from St. Georgen, I went through all the Catholic church books available for the village, first the marriages, then the baptisms, then the deaths.  The years available for this village were roughly 1862 to 1895, with 1868-1869 and 1874-1880 missing.  I kept notes in Microsoft’s OneNote note taking program for each year I searched and the result.  I was able to construct a few families, add missing children, and connect children I had with their parents in my database.  I was also able to find the parents for Michael Rager who made an appearance in Benjamin Moore's book The Names of John Gergen (see post "A Book Review, Mike Rager & St. Louis Stumpfs").  I was pleased with myself and better understood how to navigate the website and the church books.

Getting Results

Then I moved on to Klek.  But instead of starting at 1850 and going through the books like I did for St. Georgen, I jumped to 1862 to see what was there.  I am looking for my Michael Stumpf, the son of Johann Stumpf and Katharina Hoffman, who was born around 1862 or 1863 as well as his parent’s marriage.  Katharina was from Klek, and Michael was born in Klek, but Johann is from Kathreinfeld as are Michael’s siblings, so the family settled there.  I have had researchers in Serbia look at the books a few years ago and they didn’t find him.  The solution was that Johann and Katharina must have been married and Michael born in Klek in the 1858-1861 gap years in which the church books are missing.

Well, I found no marriage in Klek for the couple in 1862 or 1863.  Jumping over to the baptisms - lo and behold, I find Michael, illegitimate son of Catharina Hoffman, born in 1863!  There he is right there!

Katharina and Johann weren’t married yet when Michael was born!!  Well, that explains why he wasn't found as the son of Johann Stumpf.

Now I’m excited and no way am I waiting.  I jump over to the Kathreinfeld church books, go to the marriage book for 1863, and bam! There they are.  And their parents are listed!!  Oh happy day!

So who are the parents of Johann Stumpf and Katarina Hoffman?  I made guesses, I looked at the families available and the known Johanns and Katarinas in the villages to puzzle out which ones were mine. 

But no, Johann’s parents listed in the marriage entry didn't make sense.  There was another Johann who married a Katharina Jenisch (another Katharina), who goes with these parents.  Could they have been two Johanns from that family? One after the other, or twins?  No, that doesn’t make sense.  I go to the marriage of the other Johann in the church book in the following year and find out he has been assigned to the wrong family in the Kathreinfeld family book!  Johann Stumpf who married Katharina Jenisch is the son of Johann Stumpf and Anna Maria Putz.

So there we have it.  My Johann is the son of Michael Stumpf and Margaretha Kollinger!  So now I can  track our exact lineage back to Melchior Stumpf who came to the Banat with his brother Jakob in 1764, and who came from Dörlesberg in Baden!

Katharina Hoffman is the daughter of Johann Hoffman and Marianna Salmon.  I thought this might be the right family for her out of the 3 eligible Katharina Hoffmans in Klek who were about the right age.  She's listed in the Lazarfeld & Klek family book [1] in her parents' family with some siblings, but the parents' parents weren't listed.  Here is my final note as I was puzzling it out: 

This is also probably the right Katharina because no decent info is given on the parents.  She'd fit right in.  :/

What's next?

I worked with limited scraps of information to puzzle out Michael's parents for 12 years, and then 5 more years for Johann's parents!  Seventeen years!? To paraphrase Inigo Montoya [2], I've been in the research business so long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life. 

Well, maybe that's an exaggeration.

My RootsMagic Stumpf database is updated, straightening out the Johanns.  I'm committed to getting the Stumpf families all sorted.  Next steps are to go through the archive's records for Klek and Kathreinfeld, scouring them for Stumpf entries.  I'll note the corrections on the CompGen wiki page for corrections to the Kathreinfeld family book as appropriate, especially the families of the two Johanns.  I'll update my Stumpfs of Kathreinfeld and Klek online database as well and perhaps some of my blog posts.

My remaining big mystery is: when and where did their son, Michael Stumpf, die? Oh, and where was he when he was in the U.S. from 1907 until either he died or returned to Europe?

Footnotes:

[1] Kühn, Josef. Familienbuch der katholischen Pfarrgemeinde Lazarfeld im Banat : und ihrer Filialen Klel (KkL.) und Jankahid (Jhd.): 1800-1834/1852. Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany: Josef Kühn und Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Veröffentlichung Banater Familienbücher, 2004.

[2] Inigo Montoya is a character in The Princess Bride. If you didn't know this, please watch the movie, it's a classic.