RootsChat.Com

Welcome to the thread MrsBuckers

Our pork butcher database has information on the Kober family:

http://surname.rootschat.com/lexicon/dbsig/index.php?dbsig_name=German+Pork+Butchers

It has John KOBER marrying Rose GANSLER in 1873. She was from Beltersrot, near Kuenzelsau in Wuerttemberg. John had a shop at 88 London Road, Sheffield at least as long as 1881-1911.

It's unlikely the Kobers were Jewish, the vast majority of pork butchers came from the area around Kuenzelsau and were predominantly Lutheran. You quite rightly point out the paradox of a Jewish pork butcher.

On a personal note, John Kober employed my aunt, Magdalena Weibrecht in 1891, just before she left for America with her future husband, Christopher Kantenwein.

Do the naturalisation papers state where John and Rose were born?

I've attached an image of the top of my present table on MS Word. As you can see some of the categories need spliting up.

I like your idea of clicking on the name for more information. My table is wider than an A4 sheet, and with other categories it would be wider. One category we could possibly do without is "Origin Country" as we are only focusing on German pork butchers.

I like the idea of having an initial screen with more basic information on. In addition to the categories you propose on this screen, we could add DOB, as many of the pork butchers have the same names, so it helps avoid confusion. Whenever I put links to a person in I always put their DOB in brackets after, although for our purposes here I just use the year rather than the specific date.

One thing that might be handy is if connecting families could have hyperlinks. My data is very person centric, so it lists who a person marries, who they work for, who works for them, who they are friends with etc. I therefore only link by people rather than families, as there are often several Schmidt families, for example, who are unrelated. If we could hyperlink all the connected people it would make it very easy to explore links, rather than typing in the names into the search, you could go straight to their file.

The idea of having a limited number of fields displayed at first would also be good for address searches, as you could see at an easy glace who was associated with the address.

If we adopted this format I guess we would need a newwebsite to host it?

I see the RootsChat system seems to do what I had envisaged. It would probably be simpler to use your system than set up a seperate one. Do we use the base in the link you posted but add in the other categories? Would it be that particular search interface with other categories added or would there be a special link to a seperate searchable database for pork butchers? I ask because a few people have had difficulty using it and if pork butchers are sharing the same interface with all searches it may lead to lots of categories that are unnecessary for other searches, for say cork cutters, who may not need "Origin Point" or "First Recorded in Britain" as a category. Hope you understand my meaning in that, it's a bit difficult to explain.

I agree that some of the fields I have specified could be split and made more specific, the places where they settled could also be split in counties, so we could bring up a list of all the pork butchers in Lancashire for instance. I also agree that we should add a contributor column.

As for format, my list is currently in a text based format (MS Word) in a column.

Just to clarify the way information is contributed. The person that enters the information, say I enter my great grandfather George Funk, and put in his details, is the only one who can edit it? What if, say, my cousin is looking and finds that George is only his English name and his real name is Johann Georg Michael and wants to change it. Would my cousin be able to do that? Or more simply if I left the "Address(es)" category blank, could someone else fill it in?

Glad to see we've got some posts so quickly. All my lot of German ancestors were pork butchers from the Hohenlohe region in Wuerttemberg, which seems to be, as Berlin-Bob has pointed out, the origin place for most German pork butchers in Britain.

I've started recording German pork butchers as I find them and adding them to a list I'm building up. I've heard the name Vogel before, as well as Falck and it's great that you have detail of where they came from, that's the hardest part to find out, so thanks Helga. There is already a very good thread devoted to pork butchers so I'll try not to go on about them here too much. Helga, do you know exactly where these pork butchers had their shops?

Also thanks to pityackafromblyth for the tip off about the Shy family, I'll look into that in more detail.