« Reply #9 on: Sunday 29 October 17 16:28 GMT (UK) »
Hi Rena,
Thanks for the further information regarding first names. That is very interesting.
Eventually when I work out how to do so, I will have to track down church records on the family and see what they reveal.
I am not sure if my great grandfather was a first child otherwise I could have made a guess that his grandfather may have been named Paul.
Family lore states he was one of many children but you just never know. This is the first step in the journey for me. Now I need to dig deeper and work out the next step!
Regards,
Phil
When you eventually need to look through micro films of Saxony church records, the online familysearch website library has a list of films they own - enter the village name in "keywords" and everything about that village turns up. Also if you look at the familysearch website it shows that there are some family history research centres in Australia where you can hire the films giving "people counts" (census) and church records quite cheaply and run off any images for a modest price. If your family village didn't have a church you need to look at a map to decide which one they would have walked to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_in_AustraliaI had an advantage over you in that I knew all the names of my gt. grandfather's children before i began researching my family history. Armed with this knowledge I wrote to the local village Lutheran church in Germany, gave my gt.grandfather's known name of Herman (which was nothing like the three he was baptised with = Franz Jacob Henning FLAMME) plus all his children's names and said I believed the parents would be Henry and Sophia and asked them to look. The earlier generation was indeed Henry and Sophia. In that letter I asked what their cost would be - they insisted it was free but I sent money anyway and in return they sent me some beautiful photos of the village. As I'd mostly forgotten my simple schoolgirl German, My letter was written in simple English with German translation which I obtained by using Google's language tools. If you know which Australian church the first generation Australians were baptised in, you can get a good idea of the names of the earlier generation left behind in Germany.
In earlier years most people migrated to foreign places where they had a contact, either with a family member or somebody in the village had relatives there. (It's different now due to knowledge gained via computers, etc.) It might pay you to see if any other Aussie in your State is researching the two surnames you're interested in. I see your ancestor had a collection of mouth organs, which would hint that he might have travelled with a band of Hannovarian musicians. This is what my ancestor did and I latched onto a chap researching a totally different surname but whose ancestors did the same thing and ended up in the same English town as mine. We exchanged family stories and a couple of years down the line we eventually discovered a German village link which led to a maternal blood link.
Good luck.
Aberdeen: Findlay-Shirras,McCarthy: MidLothian: Mason,Telford,Darling,Cruikshanks,Bennett,Sime, Bell: Lanarks:Crum, Brown, MacKenzie,Cameron, Glen, Millar; Ross: Urray:Mackenzie: Moray: Findlay; Marshall/Marischell: Perthshire: Brown Ferguson: Wales: McCarthy, Thomas: England: Almond, Askin, Dodson, Well(es). Harrison, Maw, McCarthy, Munford, Pye, Shearing, Smith, Smythe, Speight, Strike, Wallis/Wallace, Ward, Wells;Germany: Flamme,Ehlers, Bielstein, Germer, Mohlm, Reupke
