Success at NEHGS - the Mehlman Family at last

Mehlman, Johann Carl

Gale 1752, Farmer. Age 25, from Palatinate. 1.1.-.1. Indebted for 2 freights, [fl] 151,4.0.

Signed his name on Indebtedness List as "Meelman", but "Mehlman" (as in ship's list and

sometimes in lists in Nova Scotia) is much more likely to have been the proper German form.

Halifax – Vict. List. Sept. – Oct. 1752 (list N^o. 8) – John Carl & Dorothea Melman

                    "       "     Feb. – April 1753                           same two names

Lunenburg – Return of Arms, Dec.  1753 - Carl Meilman – Rudolf's Div.

 Return of Divisions, July 1754 – Carl Meelman – Rudolf's Div, G-3, with a "house"

30-Acre Farm Lots – 1753-4 Allotment List – John Carl Meilman – La Have, A-4

Live Stock Distribution, 1754 – {Carl Mehlman}  - Lot N^o. 129 – 6 sheep, 1 sow, 1 goat

                                                       {Nicolas Berghaus}             

Baptism, 17 July 1854 – Charles, of Charles & Dorothea Mealman                       (Roll II)

Vict. List June 1755 – John Carl, & Dorotha Melman (nos. 1072/73), Chalres Melman (no. 1377)

    "     "   Feb.- May 1756 – Chal. Doro^y, & Jn^o Mehlman (nos. 103/-4/-5)

Baptism, 1 Sept. 1756 – Caspar, of Carll & Dorothea Mielman                                (Roll II)

Vict. List. Jan. – May 1757 – Carl, Dorothea & John Mehlman & later, toward end of list,

                 Caspar Mehlman

Cattle Expedition, 1756 – Carl Melman (name horizontal)

Baptism, 23 April 1758 – {John Michael and Sybilla} twins, of Charles & Dorothea Muilman    (Roll II)

      "       , 4 May 1760 – Ann Catherine, of Jn^o Charles & Dorothea Mailman                 (    "    )  

Registry of Town Lots, 1760 – Jn^o. Carl Mehlman – Rudolf's Div., G-3

   "            30- Acre Lots, 1760 – Jn^o. Carl Mehlman – LaHave river, A-9; as "Carl Meelman"

Lutheran church – Johann Carl Mehlman, signed  Membership Roll of 1775 but does

   not seem to have paid his dues, as his name does not appear in church account book

Mr. Money's Burial Register, 26 June 1791, buried "Jas. Mailman" aged 79 [Source of a

  "James" Mailman, aged 79, is an enigma; & his being buried by Mr. Money, if the

 Mehlmans were Lutherans. To be sure, there was obviously a good deal of dissention 

 among the Lutherans, & some splitting, but so far as we have records of it, 

 almost all, I think, later than this].    

Source: The "Foreign Protestants" and the Settlement of Nova Scotia The History of a 

Piece of Arrested British Colonial Policy in the Eighteenth Century. Winthrop Pickard Bell. 

University of Toronto Press, 1961. Co-published by Centre for Canadian Studies, 

Mount Allison University 1990.

.

.

Now, this is a great idea!

In the past year I have learned that quite a few of my ancestors came from an area of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia called Petite Riviere. That would be the infamous Drew family (only because they are causing me all kinds of grief sorting them out) and the Sponagle family. And countless others.

Countless others - really?

Well, every time I add a wife or husband to the family, yes, I add -sometimes only mentally - their families. (I don't want things to get out of hand, you know). I wonder how many people each of us is truly related to. Maybe I don't want to really know - my head might explode. So, yes - countless others.

 I made a wonderful discovery a few weeks ago about Petite Riviere - it has a Facebook page! I cannot express exactly how I feel looking at all the photos posted there, and the comments from some of the 1822 friends of the Facebook page. Wonder, gratitude, connection, completeness, universality, family... the list is long, and grows with time.

Paul Harmon started the page in order to share his extensive collection of photographs of Petite Riviere and neighboring towns. I wonder if he realizes just how incredibly important this page is to me? While I haven't seen old pictures of my family members (that I am aware of) the possibility remains. It is fun to read the comments and see the surnames that I recognize from pages of early Nova Scotia census reports.

A trip to Petite Riviere has made it's way to the top of vacation destinations for next year!

Sponagle... Sponagel.... Spannagel?

However you spell it, we've got them!

The weird thing is I had this information sitting on my digital desktop for a couple of weeks. What I have is a listing of anyone named Sponagle that was recorded in one of 33 sources contributing to the Lunenburg Vital Records.* 

All I knew, as of 9:00 this morning, is that Mary Ann Sponagle was born on 16 July 1795 in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, had married William Park Drew on 19 January 1820, and that she died with a will in 1880. I found their marriage record - really more of a contract - through Ancestry.com and the Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics Online Service. The thing that was puzzling me is William Park Drew and Philip Sponagle signed the contract, rather than William and Mary Ann Sponagle.

Just seemed odd to me.

I assumed that Philip would be her father or possibly brother, if her father had died.  I put Philip in the space Mary Ann's father would go. Unfortunately the dates didn't match up, so I deleted him from the record, and decided to put him in as her brother because the dates indicated he could be that. For some reason, you can't add siblings unless you have a parent listed. I wonder why that is?

A quick search of Ancestry.com turned up no records that matched his dates. Phooey! So I tried out my favorite new trick when I come to a dead end...

It's located in the lower right hand corner of a profile page > Recent Member Connect Activity - it might say you have not connected with other Ancestry members researching XXX yet. Learn more.

DO IT! - click on the Learn more button.

A new page appears with a list of people who are also searching for the same or similar information. It shows what they are looking for and while they may not have the information yet, they might have found other information you could use...like parents, siblings, children etc. Except there wasn't any Sponagle information that I didn't already know.

The eureka! moment today was when I clicked on a link located in the box below the recent member box called search the web ..., and voila, Neil Sponagle has a website. That looked very promising. And it was!

We've got lots of Sponagles now! And it is only 10:35am. And, yes, I did go back to my listing of Lunenburg Vital Records to verify the information.

It's a good Sponagle day!

* Lunenburg Vital Records can be accessed through: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~canns/lunenburg/index.html


.

Aaaaarrrrrrrrgh!

Too many Lemuel Drews!

In January I finally found the vital records for "our" Lemuel Drew family at the New England Historic Genealogical Society library in Boston. The Lemuel Drew family that our great-great grandmother Drucilla Drew Mack came from. The helpful folks at the library pointed me in the right direction and helped me find the correct roll of microfilm (and taught me how to use the microfilm reader too) from the Nova Scotia collection that would provide me with a copy of the listing for the Lemuel Drew family. And it did. Here they are:

(Click on photo to enlarge)

Only I'm not sure now that this is the right Lemuel Drew family. It seems that these Lemuel Drew fellas like to marry women named Mary. And they also like to name their sons Lemuel and their daughters Mary. Fiends!

So I started a spreadsheet of Drews, and collected as many as I could find in the Lunenburg area of Nova Scotia.

Actually, not so many... you see, the family that I am looking for was around in the 1700's and, on the census forms in that time period, only the head of household was named. The rest of the members of the family were indicated by number; as in 5 males and 3 females. Darn it!

In frustration, I retreated to the online databases that I normally use - Ancestry.com, Familysearch.org, and Americanancestors.org. Let's just say there was a lot of mumbling under my breath during many sessions at the computer. And no additions to the spreadsheet either.

So, I started trolling through the message boards on Ancestry.com. Ding ding ding - we have a winner! I found a website by following a message thread that happen to mention South Shore Association (from the Lunenburg area of NS). Not much new there until I clicked on a website owned by one of the members. He had a listing of a zillion surnames. YAY!  I now have lots of new information on some Drews, and some Cohoons. The spreadsheet grew a little...

Back to the census records in Lunenburg with new names to look up. Nope. Still too early. Now what? I went to the Nova Scotia GenWeb Project site (just Google it). What a wonderful resource that is! I visited there last year when I was looking for Mill Village and Liverpool Macks. I was able to download cemetery records for Queens County, as well as Vital Records for Liverpool. Not the actual documents, but a listing of names and dates. Certainly enough to get started.

Well, they have a huge listing for Lunenburg County as well, and I now have a nice collection of Drews for the spreadsheet, including a couple of will extracts. So this, combined with information gleaned from Simeon Perkins diary volumes one through five, I should be able to put the proper Drew puzzle together. I hope.

This is what prompted the whole search...

Drucilla Drew Mack's death certificate. It wasn't easy to find and it offers some disturbing information. Not that she died of old age - good for her! But who the heck are William J. Drew and Mary Manning?????

Burton was the informant for all the relative data... could he have been mistaken? It seems like he should know who his grandparents are though. But who am I to talk? I didn't know any of my grandparents except for Nana Mack (aka GiGi), and I only remember her as a kid, when she taught me how to knit and bake apple pies. She was 95 the last time I saw her. She passed away at 106. Good genes, huh?

So there you go. Even if you don't know your ancestors, you can get to know them. It just takes some work.