Astronauts to Ancestors - Real Research Breakthroughs Via The Internet

That made me wonder if the U.S. Census Bureau had ever been faced with counting persons who were actually "off planet"? The question isn't as spaced-out as it would first appear. Although there were no U.S. manned space flights in 1960, the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission was "off planet" in the census year 1970. There were no US manned space flights in 1980 but the Space Shuttle went up three times in 1990 and twice to that point in 2000. Had the Bureau ever had to count astronauts in space on Census Day and if so, were there any special measures required? There could be a column in it.

That was my mission on the Internet: find all the flight dates for NASA's 1970, 1990, and 2000 launches and see if any of the astronauts were up on the Census Day for those years.

Space Pinball

Now all I needed was dates of the Census Day for those three censuses. No problem, I thought. Finding genealogical information on the Internet is my hobby. I'm good at this - it will be a no-brainer.

I started, quite sensibly it seemed, with the U.S. Census Bureau's web site. Using their on-site search engine, I tried various combinations of the census years and "census day" but wasn't able to find what I needed right away. I did find the census day for the 2000 census was April 1st - nope, no space shuttle missions flying on that day. Now I only had to find two more dates. So I turned to some general search engines. I've been using Northern Light and Google in combination with some success lately. Using these search engines, the answers I sought did not pop out at me immediately. I was perilously close to being stumped. I even resorted to that old form of information - books - and tried to find the dates of the modern censuses. My personal genealogical library has several general references on the U.S. Census - but none which provided the date of the censuses past 1930.

The problem, of course, is that the details from the 1970 and 1990 censuses will not be available to the general public for many years to come. So the dates of these censuses are not as interesting to current users of census information such as we genealogists.

I returned to the results provided by the search engines and prepared to "surf". Perhaps the dates I needed were located on pages linked off of the results of my search? I don't think the term surfing really does justice to the act of wandering around the Web from site to site. It's more like bumping into one web site and then bouncing to another. More like a steel ball in a pinball machine - from bumper to flipper to bumper to bumper and so on until the ball finally comes to rest.

So, I started pinballing around the Internet. The search engines had provided me with a wealth of census-related sites. I explored the most promising sites and quickly found a good one on the 1930 census titled What to Expect from the 1930 Census. This site is one of those valuable sites hosted by a fellow genealogist which provides general information of interest to all of us. The What to Expect site describes which states and counties have been soundexed and what questions were asked by the 1930 census. It did not provide me with what I was looking for but I was glad for the information it did have since the 1930 census is due to be released in April of 2002. As with all interesting web sites, I was now thoroughly side-tracked from my main objective. What to Expect from the 1930 Census turned out to be a sub-page of a larger web site. I started to explore the whole site. As with many pages put up by our fellow genealogists, this researcher had many family history interests besides the 1930 census. It turns out that the site's main page was Resources for German Genealogy on the Internet. Always on the look-out for interesting and useful web sites, I continued to pinball through the various categories on the site. My own German ancestry made my ricocheting of potential value to my future research.

Ignoring My Germans

On the Resources for German Genealogy on the Internet, one of the sub-categories was Emigration and Immigration. In reviewing that category, I happened to notice links regarding the Hamburg Passenger Lists. It is estimated that one third of all immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe between 1850 and 1934 are listed in the Hamburg Passenger Lists. Hamburg was a major port of departure during this period and their passenger departure lists managed to survive the Second World War. These lists have been microfilmed by the Family History Library onto 486 rolls of microfilm. Most of these passenger lists have been indexed. I was peripherally aware of the Hamburg Passenger Lists but as I was not ready to delve into my German research, I had not yet consulted them.

In common with more ports of embarkation and arrival, modern Hamburg is beginning to recognize the value of its immigration history as an adjunct to general tourism. Bremen, another major German port of departure, is using U.S. passenger arrival records in an attempt to reconstruct passenger list database for ships out of Bremen. Arrival ports such as Galveston in Texas have also developed passenger arrival databases. Perhaps the most anticipated project for creating a passenger arrival database is that underway for the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island. Some 17 million records of passengers arriving through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924 are being entered into a searchable database. Well, Hamburg has also begun the process of putting their departure records into a database - and even better, they've put some of their results online already. The Hamburg Link To Your Roots site allows searches of passenger departure lists from 1890 too 1893 at the time of this writing. The data for these years is by no means complete yet.

From naturalization records, I knew that my German ancestors immigrated in 1891. The Hamburg Link To Your Roots site included partial records from the year 1891. I decided to take a chance and enter my surname of interest. It wouldn't take too long - I probably wouldn't find anything anyway. I could soon be back to my search for the census dates for 1970 and 1990.

Search Screen from Hamburg Link To Your Roots

I was shocked when I received a hit back showing what had to be my great grandmother - Auguste SCHREIBER. Her age matched up nicely with her death records. She traveled as a seven year old girl in the company of her mother and five brothers and sisters on the steamer "Kalifornia". Her siblings's names matched census information. The family traveled in Steerage with three bags of luggage. Although I am not given to interpretive dance, I perform the genealogical dance of joy when I saw that she and her whole family were listed as being from Salzwedel in the Provinz of Saschen.

I printed copies of each of the individual passenger departure records for the whole family. Printing from a Netscape browser conveniently labels the printouts with both the date of printing and the URL where the information was found. I wanted to be able to return to this information again as well as share it with my cousins.

After my initial excitement subdued somewhat, I thought more carefully about what I had found. As an extracted record on an Internet database, I had been provided with a lead to the original records. I needed to follow up this lead by consulting the original Hamburg Passenger Lists. The LDS provides an excellent description of the Hamburg Passenger Lists available online through their FamilySearch's Research Guidance. After consulting how the microfilmed records were organized, I visited the online Family History Library Catalog and determined the individual roll of microfilm I would require in order to view the original record. I scurried up to my local Family History Center, ordered the microfilm, and waited.

Things To Do While Waiting For Microfilm

Salzwedel's Town Website
(I somehow managed to miss the heavy metal Motörhead concert)

As if to prove the old adage that there is a nugget of truth at the core of every family "tradition", I was amused that the passenger lists had mentioned my great grandmother's town of origin as being Salzwedel. Both my great aunt and my grandfather had insisted in person or in family documents that their mother was born in Salzburg. Well, at least the got the "Salz" part right.

I then spent some time reading about immigration through Hamburg on a site related to the Hamburg Link To Your Roots site. In pictures and text (thankfully in an English version), Emigration Port Hamburg shows just what it was like to leave from Hamburg. Using the Emigration Port Hamburg site, the Hamburg Link To Your Roots site, and the LDS' Hamburg Passenger Lists Research Guidance, I was able to combine a searchable database, a description of the source records from which the database was created, and a description of the process which made the records themselves. Thus the Internet provided both its traditional ease-of-search function with historical background and a detailed explanation of the records.

Hamburg in 1890
Source: Emigration Port Hamburg Web Site