Finding Mothers

It's after 11 pm and I can't in good consience call anyone to express my excitement and gratitude for what I've just accomplished. I can only blog about it, right now, because this is the polite thing to do. I am quite excited.

I have known I have resources scarcely tapped right under my nose, and finally I am beginning to use them. It's about awareness and creative ways of milking the system.

And there are no accidents.

I just happened to find a freebie for a few days on Ancestry- which got me a ton of new stuff and at least ( ? ) one real live new cousin to swap more stuff with. I just happened to really poke around VitalSearch ( also free ) and use some of it's neat features... I just happened to shut up long enough to hear their voices whisper to me how to find them...

Girls are difficult because of marriages, naturally. It's a pain to have to keep switching your identity, trust me! If no one has a clue who you may be with, you may as well have just dropped off the face of the earth. Several of my ancestral siblings had, until I found I could search 20th century California birth records from the mother's maiden name...!

If you have read about the Winkler family, Henry E Winkler- first generation on this soil, you'll know that their burial plot in Colma was a mysterious melting pot of names. Just finding out who was in there was a gradual process... Field, Frische, Bruno... not obvious Winklers like the rest. Who were these people and how did they get permission to be buried with our family? Did they work with the Winklers and not have money for their own burials? Were they related? How?

So I went into www.VitalSearch-ca.com and set up the birth indices to look for mothers with the maiden name Winkler... and my heart stilled to see right among the top, children's names- Frische, Bruno, Field...

There were four girls in Henry and Caroline's clan. One of which I have already cracked, that's Louise Field, and yes, she's buried with her parents and brothers. Louise happened to house one of her brothers for a time, so that was a good clue... So Florence, Amelia, and Ann are/were unaccounted for.

I went back to Ancestry, typed in the last name Frische with a general birth date of 1890. Just a few down was an Amelia Frische in 1930 and 1920... I looked at the original document first to determine where her parents came from, Germany and New York, then as excitement and relief settled quietly around me, I whispered back, "I found you, girl..."

Now... to find her sisters...

I noticed the following night a child with the name Heglin. Since this resembled a familiar name Geglin- which I saw as the informant of Caroline Rohrbach Winkler's death in 1918- I thought I'd take a look... Sure enough, on Ancestry I found an Anna Heglin, and after clicking on the image of the census, found she lived with her family on Richland Avenue- a few blocks away from where Henry and Caroline lived in San Francisco and the same address on her death certificate. Anna Heglin (not Geglin) died in 1953, so she either kept the name, or more likely, stayed married to the same man throughout her life. Perfectly normal and such a relief to a researcher.

That leaves Florence, so by process of elimination and still leaving evidence in want, she must have been the one affiliated with the Bruno's.

I can't believe it, and yet I can. I found them- with their help, I'm sure.

There were three boys born to Anna, two of which served in World War I and were buried in the national cemetery (Golden Gate). I hope they had children, as they have all passed on fairly recently. And since Anna was close enough to her parents to be listed as informant (not to mention geographically close) I hope Hope HOPE her family has some of the old photos and heirlooms... I have one photo of Phillip Winkler, who was the oldest child. Only one, and nothing but death certificates of Henry and Caroline.