I have been collecting information on the story of my family for many years.  This website is an attempt to share that information with others.  So that my family can learn about their history.  So other relatives can determine possible relationships.  To save other researchers the trouble of doing work that has already been done, and to give them a place to look for potential connections. And to keep alive some memory of the departed, especially the victims of the Shoah.

If you find that you are related to anyone on these pages, or think you might be, please contact me, I’d love to hear from you (see the bottom of the page).  Ich kann auch Deutsch lesen!

The website is a work in progress, I will continue to add pages.  Currently, I am trying simply to put the data I already have into the webpage format.  Once that is done, as I get new data, I will add it.

A list of Family pages:

KLEINSTRASS

LUFT

BAUM

BAER

EISENSTÄDT

FLÖRSHEIM

HIRSCHLAND

BASSEVI

ROSENSTERN

GERNSHEIMER

HOCHHEIMER

JACOBI/WITKOWSKI (overview)

    JACOBI I

    JACOBI II

    WITKOWSKI

    ALEXANDER

PAPPENHEIM/MÜHSAM (overview)

    PAPPENHEIM I

    PAPPENHEIM II

    PAPPENHEIM III

    MÜHSAM I

    MÜHSAM II

    MÜHSAM III

    SORAUER

    BAGINSKY

    SCHWEITZER

Bonus pages:

JACOBI family tree

BAUM family photo

Index:

Click HERE for an index of family names found on these pages, with links to the pages on which they appear.

Most interesting pages:

If you just want to get right to my more interesting pages, you can read about (click on the names): Emin Pasha (African explorer), Erich Mühsam (anarchist), Maximillian Harden (helped cause WWI), the Bassevis (back to before 1500), the Pappenheims, the Gernsheimers, the Flörsheims (shoes), or the Kleinstrass family.

About me and my family

Who am I and who is my family?  Click HERE to find out more.

Where’s the Kester page?

If you ended up here looking for Kester relatives, and aren’t finding any, THIS page will tell you why.

About Sources:

The information on these pages comes from many sources and was collected over a period of many years.  Much of it comes from other people and their research.  I have tried to identify and credit them appropriately.  If I have missed crediting someone, or used their data in a way they didn’t want it used, please let me know.  Other information came from published works: books, articles, websites.  Again, I’ve tried to give credit where it was due.

Other information comes from more “primary” sources: interviews with people, looking at old birth, marriage, and death records.  Visiting towns where my ancestors lived, visiting graveyards. 

I do rely on people who find these pages to provide me with updated information. If you found this site, and think it’s worthwhile to have this information here, then please email me and let me know what can be added or what needs to be corrected.

If you want to know where a particular piece of information came from, contact me, I’ll be glad to tell you.  If I know.  When I started doing this I wasn’t very good about recording sources.  I’ve gotten a lot better.

Accuracy:

I GUARANTEE that there are mistakes and inaccuracies in the information on this website, especially for the older data.  Getting the older data requires looking at copies of 100 to 200 year old documents.  The range of legibility varies widely, both due to the quality of the copies as well as to the use of old styles of German writing, written with various degrees of penmanship.  For information collected from books or family trees or other people’s data: at some point someone else tried to read old documents; who knows if they were any better at it than I am?  Add to that the fact that in the days before driver’s licenses and income tax returns and social security numbers, people were more casual about their names.  Someone might go by the name of Gelle or Elle or Gellechen, and it didn’t really matter.  There was no “official” name or spelling; people in her village would know who she was.  Other information comes from people’s memories.  Sure, we remember our parent’s names and birth dates (hopefully).  But a lot of the information can come in the form of “Uncle Bob seems to remember that his mother told him that her aunt had a cousin and she thinks her name was...” 

Bottom line:  Take all data on this site (or any genealogical site!) with a big grain of salt...  Again, contact me. I’ll tell you how reliable I think a particular piece of data is.

Privacy:

How much data to publish on sites like this, especially about living people, is a recurring topic of discussion among people doing genealogy.  Many people won’t publish anything at all about living people.  There are generally two reasons for keeping this high degree of privacy. First, to thwart identity thieves.  Second, just out of respect for other people’s privacy; that maybe they don’t want their names listed online.  The other side of the argument, the reasons to publish information about living people, is first for completeness, so people can see who their relatives are, but also so that people can find the sites (through search engines) and thereby find out about their families.

On this site I’ve decided to publish information about living people, but only a limited amount (name and birth year).  Regarding the issue of identity thieves, there simply is not enough information here to be of use to them (you’re NOT still using your mother’s maiden name as your secret word to access your bank accounts, are you???).  The waiter who took your credit card the last time that you went out for dinner has more useful information for stealing your identity than anyone can get from this site!  As to the general issue of privacy, the fact is that, like it or not, our names are constantly being made available on the internet for all kinds of things.  To pretend that we can preserve people’s online anonymity by not including their names on genealogical sites is unrealistic.  That said, if someone objects to their name being listed here, just let me know, and I’ll remove it.

Using this information:

The purpose of this website is for individual researchers to see who their ancestors were, who their relatives are, what has happened to their families, and how they fit into these family histories.  You are welcome to read the information, show it to others, or save it for your own personal use.  You should NOT copy it and publish it on any commercial or religious websites, like Geni.com, ancestry.com, or familysearch.org.  Why not commercial sites?  I don’t want someone else selling the data that I have collected or charging for it.  Why not religious sites like the LDS (Mormon) associated familysearch.org?  Click HERE to find out.  If you want to include some of the data on your own personal website, just ask me.  It’ll probably be okay.

I hope you find the information both useful and interesting!

Technical

This website was created on an Apple iMac, by me, using iWeb, Apple’s website program. The family data has been saved, and the lists of people generated, using Reunion, a genealogy program for the Mac.