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Ayer/Ager/Eger/Egger/Hager/Ayers/Acre
On one DNA site, FamilyTree DNA, they ask you to list on your data the country of origin of your earliest known female ancestor on the straight female line (mother's mother's mother, etc.) and to do the same for the earliest known male ancestor on your straight male line. These are two lines out of however many you are researching, but they are the ones that matter to two kinds of DNA. When I filled out that form I was amused to find that those two particular lines of mine go back to Germany. I was amused, because it makes me sound really German, when, compared to all my other lines, I'm really not. Not much, anyway. And in both lines, for me, you have to go back about five generations to get to Germany, so it's really not a significant part of my makeup, overall.
Still, my great-great-great-grandmother was born in 1838 in Pennsylvania to parents who were in the process of immigrating from what is now Germany to what is now Iowa. Their last name was ... maybe Eger? I am so confused about how it was spelled, and I'm also not clear about how it was said. I know for a fact the family ended up in Muscatine, Iowa, but they are invisible on the census and I suspect it might be because of yet some other spelling of the name. My 3X great-grandmother pops into existence at age 18, living in what looks like a boarding house and with her name spelled Ager by the Iowa census-taker. Where is the rest of her family? She had an older sister (I will return to the older sister) and parents but she's not living with them. Her name is also spelled Ager on her marriage record, a few years later, but on her daughter's baptismal certificate it is spelled Eger. She died giving birth to her daughter, so I guess she wasn't around to say how her maiden name should be spelled. Or maybe Eger was the correct way, and the spelling was provided by family who knew that, as opposed to those silly census-takers who spelled it like it sounded.
Maybe. Except I don't know what it sounded like.
I've never found very much on the family, though given the year they arrived they ought to count among the founding families of Muscatine. I do know what became of her older sister, because her older sister married and she and her husband became venerated founders of the community of Dumont, Colorado. Her older sister raised her little girl, too, at the behest of the child's father, whose name was also German -- Elshorst. The place I'd like to research them, of course, would be Germany, since that's where I will find earlier generations, but I don't even know what their damn name was. I've only mentioned here two versions of it, Ager and Eger, but when you do web searches on those names all these other alternates come up. My AncestryDNA has matched me with a man descended from a Hager, but there are a few other lines where he and I might overlap as well, so that's not a certain connection. I am super grateful for one useful piece of information. The older sister, under her married name, Theresa Chinn, lived a long time in Colorado, and regularly shows up in the federal census consistently listing her own place of birth, not as Germany, since Germany didn't exist yet as a nation, but as Württemberg. So at least I know a little better where in Germany they were from. Whatever their name was. *g*
On one DNA site, FamilyTree DNA, they ask you to list on your data the country of origin of your earliest known female ancestor on the straight female line (mother's mother's mother, etc.) and to do the same for the earliest known male ancestor on your straight male line. These are two lines out of however many you are researching, but they are the ones that matter to two kinds of DNA. When I filled out that form I was amused to find that those two particular lines of mine go back to Germany. I was amused, because it makes me sound really German, when, compared to all my other lines, I'm really not. Not much, anyway. And in both lines, for me, you have to go back about five generations to get to Germany, so it's really not a significant part of my makeup, overall.
Still, my great-great-great-grandmother was born in 1838 in Pennsylvania to parents who were in the process of immigrating from what is now Germany to what is now Iowa. Their last name was ... maybe Eger? I am so confused about how it was spelled, and I'm also not clear about how it was said. I know for a fact the family ended up in Muscatine, Iowa, but they are invisible on the census and I suspect it might be because of yet some other spelling of the name. My 3X great-grandmother pops into existence at age 18, living in what looks like a boarding house and with her name spelled Ager by the Iowa census-taker. Where is the rest of her family? She had an older sister (I will return to the older sister) and parents but she's not living with them. Her name is also spelled Ager on her marriage record, a few years later, but on her daughter's baptismal certificate it is spelled Eger. She died giving birth to her daughter, so I guess she wasn't around to say how her maiden name should be spelled. Or maybe Eger was the correct way, and the spelling was provided by family who knew that, as opposed to those silly census-takers who spelled it like it sounded.
Maybe. Except I don't know what it sounded like.
I've never found very much on the family, though given the year they arrived they ought to count among the founding families of Muscatine. I do know what became of her older sister, because her older sister married and she and her husband became venerated founders of the community of Dumont, Colorado. Her older sister raised her little girl, too, at the behest of the child's father, whose name was also German -- Elshorst. The place I'd like to research them, of course, would be Germany, since that's where I will find earlier generations, but I don't even know what their damn name was. I've only mentioned here two versions of it, Ager and Eger, but when you do web searches on those names all these other alternates come up. My AncestryDNA has matched me with a man descended from a Hager, but there are a few other lines where he and I might overlap as well, so that's not a certain connection. I am super grateful for one useful piece of information. The older sister, under her married name, Theresa Chinn, lived a long time in Colorado, and regularly shows up in the federal census consistently listing her own place of birth, not as Germany, since Germany didn't exist yet as a nation, but as Württemberg. So at least I know a little better where in Germany they were from. Whatever their name was. *g*
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My Huber line spent time (about 60 years) in Wurttemberg on their way from Switzerland to America. I've also found ongoing boundary changes and place name changes are as frustrating as the lack of consistency on personal names.
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