Unraveling the Past: My Genealogy Journey and the Mystery of Names

We moved back into our bathroom this week. It’s amazing how much larger the shower feels. We didn’t really gain all that much space – maybe two inches of width. But the floor is an inch lower and the ceiling is about a foot-and-a-half higher now. Plus, the glass wall lets in so much more light, even though it’s frosted.

We went to Oldest Daughter’s dance recital Saturday. She’s been teaching at the dance academy she attended for the last year, and it was neat to see what her students have accomplished. Several of them danced in Nutcracker and I could see a lot of growth in them even in the last few months. The girl who played Masha the first time I performed as Drosselmeyer four years ago graduates this year, and I may have gotten a little misty-eyed watching her senior solo. She’s a sweet kid, and I wish her well.

We got the maple tree limb taken care of as well as a dead apple tree taken out. While the tree guys were here, I had them grind about a dozen or so stumps around the property. I’d been meaning to do it for some time, but while we’ve got a trailer to carry the stump grinder, we don’t have a vehicle with a hitch to pull the trailer.

And the string on the wind chimes we’ve had for eight or so years wore out this week. I knew I’d have to figure out to restring them. I was just hoping I’d get a little bit more time. It won’t be easy because the strings are tied to a pin that’s about 2/3 of the way down the pipe. I don’t know how I’ll reach it or how I’ll tie a new string to it.

Genealogy

Newspapers.com announced free access for Mother’s Day weekend—several genealogy sites do things like that—so I spent a few hours poking around to see what I could find. I startled a bit when I found an obituary listing my brother’s full name in Washington state, but it turned out to be in regard to a marriage in 1948. Our parents weren’t married until 1959, so once I saw that date, I knew it wasn’t him. It still surprised me.

Likewise interestingly, there are several Harold Muellers in Ohio and Texas. Dad didn’t have a middle name for some reason, so it makes it a little easier to weed out the wrong ones. But one of them was a pastor in western Ohio for several years, so his name pops up often in wedding and funeral announcements.

I found another exact name match for a cousin, Ottilie  Louise Schirmer. The second child of JC Mueller and Louise Schirmer, she was born in 1878 in Texas. I found though an Ottilie Louise Schirmer who graduated from high school in Portage, Wisconsin—in 1908. She can’t be my “Aunt Tillie,” but it’s so odd to find such exact name matches for names that I’d consider rare.

There used to be a website, HowManyOfMe.com, that would take your first and last names and give you a count of people sharing that name across the US. It seems to have gone dark back in October of 2022. That’s a shame. It was a fun site to check out, and one I’d pay to get running again. But even the parent company seems to have gone away, so it looks like it’s down for good.

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