Found a useful site on my ancestor Robert Ayars (1640-1719).  The Ayars Family Historical Association doesn’t look like it’s been updated recently but it has this page with a thorough discussion on the sources that document Robert Ayars’ life. Very interesting and I’ll be bookmarking it for later study:
http://www.ayars.com/sources/sources.html

This week I am going to highlight someone who is not really related to me, but I am fascinated by the name. Maria Sara Knieriemen was the wife of my first cousin five times removed. (My computer program, TMG, figured that out for me). I had never heard of this name before, so when her marriage to David Horneff on January 7, 1845 showed up in my genealogy this week, I thought I would look into it.

Like many names, Knieriemen has many variant spellings. The Knierman DNA Surname project includes these variants in their project: Knearem, Knerien, Kniereman, Knieriemen, Knierim, Knierinm, Knierman, Knireman, Nearman, Niermann. In their description of the origin they state: “The German word Knerem is defined as a shoemakers’ strap or stirrup, a cobbler, Knieriemen.”

A search on Knieriemen also brought up the Ancestry surname page. They didn’t have a meaning for Knieriemen, but they did have some other statistics. In 1920, there weren’t very many Knieriemen households in the United States, with 3 each in Ohio and Indiana, 2 in New Jersey and 1 in Maryland. Places of origin gathered from the New York Passengers Lists shows they were from Germany. In the United States in 1880 they were farmers, and there was one Cobanus Knieriemen who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

Maria Sara Knieriemen was born about 1818 and was the daughter of Conrad Knieriemen and Katharina Albrecht. She married David Horneff in Otterberg, Bavaria.

People do genealogy for a lot of different reasons. They enjoy collecting family stories. They want to discover where they come from. They love the feeling of being connected to history.
I like filling in names. It’s a bit of an obsession for me. There’s nothing I hate worse than seeing ‘unknown’ in the name field. So I do what I can to find the names, especially the maiden names of the women. Yesterday, I received the SS-5 for my 2nd cousin, twice removed, Frank L. Craner. The reason I requested it was there in all its glory: his mother’s name was Mathilda Shepard Ogden. I rejoiced. But, then I began to wonder. Shepard and Ogden are names I’ve run across in my NJ research. Who are her parents? I looked at her dates. Oh no, she’d probably be in the 1880 census. But, maybe not with her parents. Maybe there’d be hope for me. No. Her parents were Isaac S. & Ann E. Ogden. Another unknown. What was Ann’s maiden name? The search continues.

West Virginia? Yes, most of my ancestors did not stray far from Philadelphia or South Jersey, but a Craner escaped to West Virginia. This wonderful state has a project to place scanned images of vital records on line. And, guess who I found? My escapee, Richard Craner.

This is exactly the sort of thing the internet should be used for. While some states are requiring photo id & proof of kinship to request vital records that are too old to be any use to identity thieves, others are making scanned images available. ( Arizona is another state doing this.)

Not to mention that New Jersey blocks out the cause of death, even on records over 100 years old. Now, why should it be a secret what my G-G-G-Grandfather Ansel Irelan died of in 1892?

Of course, New Jersey Vital Records does not exactly have the best track record when in comes to genealogy requests. How much easier it would be for them if they just scanned all those old records and put them on the internet. Then they wouldn’t have to deal with us pesky genealogists anymore!

More cousins. I came across an obituary for Louise V. Funston who was the wife of Walter F. Funston. Walter was the son of John H. Funston who was the brother of my great-grandmother, Anna May Funston Carman.

Thankfully, it was not a Philadelphia obituary in which you are lucky if it lists a spouse. The obituary was from the Times-Leader in Wilkes-Barre and listed not only her spouse and children, but also her birth date and place and her parents names. So, I was able to find her in the 1900-1920 censuses with her parents and siblings.

See Walter, Louise & family in my database.