How It All Started

Let me preface this by saying I come from a very large family, most of which is close-knit, and I was lucky enough to know all four of my grandparents, two of whom are still alive and happily driving the rest of us bonkers. I'm also a history major and a polyglot, the result of growing up around other languages and being a sponge. I always loved the stories I was told about my family, and being blessed with a really good memory and a deep interest in people, I was never afraid to ask the questions and listened eagerly to the treasure trove of stories I got in response. I suppose all of this meant I was born to be an amateur genealogist, but it took something unexpected to get the actual project rolling.

In the summer of 2009, my Oma (my mother's mother) was diagnosed with colon cancer, and would be undergoing surgery. Despite the fact that she's a tough-as-nails German woman, she WAS eighty-eight and not in the best of health, so there were the obvious concerns that she might not make it through the surgery. She also has the early signs of dementia, and given that there's a limited amount of time that I know she'll remember things about her family, I made the decision to start asking questions and writing down as much as I could, so it wasn't lost. What I found was pretty amazing, and I made the decision that the resulting research would be my Christmas present to Oma and Pop-pop. It would be a scrapbook for each of them with their family history, including print-outs of the records I was finding, and the information typed up in a format easier for them to read. I figured if this didn't win me Grandchild Of The Year, nothing would.

I always knew I was named after Oma's aunt, Hannelore, but I never knew much about her. It turns out she was one of the ones who raised Oma and her brother for a time in Bohemia, and Oma still has very fond memories of her. I also never knew much about Oma's father (Gustav Beu), who left when she was rather young and went to Florida, bigamously marrying someone else without actually divorcing Oma's mother (Emma Lihl) but Oma told me about his being a captain in the German Navy before emigrating in 1914, and that his family owned a lumber mill. The only problem came in trying to get the hometowns of Oma's parents so that I could start looking. This was to prove the most time-consuming and aggravating part of the project.

To understand why this was such a problem, let me explain the history of Bohemia. Like the rest of Eastern Europe, it changed hands so many times that establishing where to start looking is dizzying.

• Prior to 1867, Bohemia was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire
• After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, it was Austrian Crown lands
• In 1918, after the end of WWI, Bohemia became part of the new Czechoslovakia
• In 1938, the Sudetenland (which includes my family's home territory) was annexed by Germany
• In 1945, the Sudetenland returned to Czechoslovakia, but the ethnic Germans were expelled
• 1989 saw the split of Czechoslovakia into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and Bohemia falls into the latter

And this is where the problems come in. The German place names no longer exist, and are only known by their Czech names. I knew Emma's village was called Neuhaus (German for 'new house'), which happens to be a very common name. There were several in Bohemia alone, and without any further clues, I was stuck. Then, a breakthrough.

I joined a German-Bohemian mailing list through Rootsweb, and made a contact that would make all the difference in my research. Aida, a native Sudeten German whose family was expelled, was able to help me narrow down which Neuhaus I was looking for, and I was able to confirm it by finding the passenger list for Emma, and finding her entire address, including that her Neuhaus was near Neudek (now Nejdek). This meant I was looking for Chaloupky, though the village was destroyed after the expulsion. The neighbouring village of Hirschentand (now Jelení, and where Hannelore lived) was my clue to finding the archives. After a year of searching, it was off to the Plzen Archives in the Czech Republic for me, or at least to their online archives. Thankfully, the Czech Republic is fantastic in regards to preserving parish records and scanning them so they can be viewed online. It proved a lifesaver for me.

Gustav was trickier. As I still haven't found the passenger list for when he emigrated, I didn't have the clue of a hometown to go on, and Oma was very insistent that he was from Westfalen (Westphalia in English). Multiple searches yielded nothing, and around the time I found Emma's hometown, I happened to ask Oma, in front of Pop-pop, whose memory is eerily good like mine, if she remembered any part of Gustav's hometown. Lo and behold, Pop-pop knew right away: Ribnitz. Oma agreed, and when I went home to look, I found him in the 1900 census almost immediately. Gustav Beu, Ribnitz, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, along with his parents, Hermann and Caroline, and his siblings. The whole project had opened wide, and I had a lot more work ahead of me.

In the meantime, I wasn't just going to focus on Oma's line, or even my mother's side of the family. Pop-pop is also of Bohemian descent, and thanks to census records, have been able to trace his family back to the 1870s. His father also left when he was young and ended up in Florida, also marrying someone else (noticing a theme here?), so he only knew his dad (Vernon Roy Clarke) was of Irish descent. It turns out Roy, as he preferred to be called, was from Bridgetown, Barbados, though finding records for him was proving difficult. The same was proving true for his mother (Mary Vanicek) and her family. Again, I was dealing with Bohemia, but without any place names at all, even the German ones. My only clue on the Vanicek side is from Mary's father, Johann (or John, or Jan), whose passenger list says he was from Písek. Písek happens to be a district as well as a city, so I was faced with having to search an entire district's worth of parish records. It was at least a clue, though, which was more than I had for Johann's wife, Marie Schiffer or Schiffert, whose parents were from Bohemia, but with no clues as to their hometown. I knew then I was in for a long, hard search.

Then, to be fair, I started on my father's Spaulding side, especially since Daddy's the one interested in history as opposed to my mother, who doesn't give a toss. Thanks to Ancestry.com, tracing back his side was a piece of cake, though it had some unexpected twists. While tracing one line back, I was coming across names of the Marcher families, most of which I was familiar with due to a minor obsession with medieval British history. This is where the history and medieval studies majors of mine come into play, because the Marches were the border between England and Wales, and always a hotspot in this time period. Most of the lords spoke Welsh as well as Norman-French (no, English wasn't the official language yet), and frequently inter-married with the Welsh princes. Being familiar with this history, I was getting more and more excited, and then, I happened upon the names Giffard and Clifford, specifically in the marriage of Maud Clifford and John Giffard. That's when my heart just about stopped, because Maud's mother was Marared ferch Llywelyn, daughter of Llywelyn Fawr, Prince of Gwynedd. Having written a paper at Penn State on the marriage between Llywelyn and Joanna, illegitimate daughter of King John of England, and how it changed the Anglo-Welsh relations and even the development of Wales as a nation, to find them in my family tree had me dancing around and shrieking like a maniac, my amazingly-tolerant fiancé watching and shaking his head. There's no way to prove Marared was the legitimate daughter of Llywelyn and Joanna, as in Welsh law, there was no difference between legitimate and illegitimate children, but the case from the documentation we do have argues that Marared was Joanna's daughter. That means I most likely add John, his brother Richard the Lionheart, and his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine to the family tree. The medievalist in me still hasn't stopped partying over that one.

Due to the records kept on the Gwynedd line, I've been able to trace it back to roughly 450 AD through Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, and the Norse kings of Dublin, though at that year, the trail mostly goes cold, as the genealogies are all unreliable from there on. Not bad, for a newbie researcher.

The real challenge was all on my mother's side, and would prove the most enlightening as well as infuriating side for me, but I'm a stereotypical Taurus. I love challenges.