Why I do genealogy

I made a decision a few days ago that Maria Ana Muller, daughter of Johanes Muller and Anna Herholzer, was almost surely the Mary Ann Miller that married great-great grandfather Morand Bushu in 1838.  That decision prompted me to begin a search for the Herholzers; they could be ancestors.

The good news is the name is unusual enough that I don't get a bazillion hits when I run searches. There are, of course, several ways to spell it; in America, those several ways become many ways.  But for the moment, I'm just interested in seeing what's out there.

And the bad news is: Not much. Geneanet has too many hits for me to determine if someone is working on this family, but the ones I've traced are in the wrong place. I'll need to find a way to narrow down the search, probably by date. Ancestry has two public trees that include Joseph and his wife. Neither tree provides any information about Joseph or Helena's families (and there seem to be many errors although I don't know all the dynamics yet, so I could be wrong). And there are just two German records to be found for Joseph, and one of them isn't about our guy.

But one is: Joseph Herholzer married Helena Rheinhart on 16 Apr., 1798 in Birndorf, Waldshut, Baden. He is 24. There is no information other than the fact they were Catholic. (Earlier I obtained baptism records for some of their children, so there's enough official note of them that we know they're real.)

But the Herholzers arrived and planted themselves in the social fabric of their new world; the Herholzers in America made their mark. They were mentioned lots in the Catholic records of Perry County as they and their relatives and friends were baptized and married (and died). Something about them made their neighbors like them enough to have them as sponsors of kids. I like these people, from the little I know of them, and that has not been my universal experience when meeting ancestors. (Some of them are not nice; I accept that one doesn't choose ancestors, but bumping into ones you like is pretty fortunate.) But I'm disappointed that there is so little evidence of others researching the family (although there's a man in California, a descendant of Elizabeth Herholzer Rudy, who has gathered material about her).

And this brings me to the point of this short blog:

One purpose of doing genealogy, at least for me, is to honor family. If you're famous, or have famous relatives/ancestors, there's lots of information about you. But if you're Joseph Herholzer, who could only afford 15 acres when he brought his family (wife and 5 children) to the US in 1817 or so, whether anyone cares now who you were is a crapshoot. Not exactly a profound observation, probably not at all unique. But I think a lot of people wonder why genealogy is so popular.

Maybe it's just to keep ordinary people from being forgotten.