Obituary Scrapbooks

Ouch!  It's been nearly a month since I posted last.  I've been putting siding on and painting the garage that I'm building, so I do have an excuse, but I'll try to post more consistently.

My aunt let me scan two obituary scrapbooks that my grandfather David D. Fast #112786 and great-aunt Minnie Fast #315950 (brother and sister) had kept.  This is a great resource for a couple reasons.

First, they contain obituaries of people I'm interested in but haven't had the time to find - for example, their sister Margaret died at age 29, and I have always wondered why.  Aunt Minnie pasted her obituary into her scrapbook, so I will translate it to see what the cause of death was.  There are lots of other collateral ancestors whom I would never take the time to research, but the obituaries contain brief life histories of them.

Second, these scrapbooks add members to their FAN club (Friends, Associates, Neighbors) and to that of their parents (since they were collecting obituaries, many of them are from an older generation).

Here's a clip from Aunt Minnie's scrapbook:

 

I'm not going to write a formal source here because I don't want to put the name and residence of my aunt online for privacy reasons.

Knocked Down a Brick Wall (Part III)

See Part II for the previous part of this story.

I had been staring at the list of baptisms and marriages from Mennonite church books in West Prussia in Part II for a couple months and not making any progress.  But then Glenn Penner sent me a record related to a Martin Fast in Schönbaum from the Schönbaum Lutheran church book on LDS film #208392, and they proved to be the key to unraveling the mystery.  Getting help from a fellow genealogist is always a good idea.

This is what Glenn sent me in blue:

Deaths:

26 Dec 1797 Frau Maria geb. Wiens eine Mennonitin, des Martin Fast Eigengaertner und Hackenbudner zu Schoenbaum 38J

The record says that Martin Fast's wife Maria Wiens died on 26 December 1797.  Suddenly I remembered another record that I had looked at months ago that contained both Martin Fast and Maria Wiens!  That was a land record from the village of Fürstenauerweide, where Maria Wiens inherited a 1/8 share of a piece of land from her parents.  Could this be the same Martin Fast and Maria Wiens in that land record?

Here is an image of that land record:

Fuerstenauerweide Grundbuch Blatt 13, Kreis Elbing, Malbork, Poland, Archive, Fond 341, File 198.  Accessed online at https://mla.bethelks.edu/archives/VI_53/Malbork/Fuerstenauerweide/Fuerstenauerweide%20Grundbuch%20Malbork%20Archives%20Fond%20341%20File%20198/IMG_0872.JPG on 25 July 2016.

Maria Wiens was one of four children who each inherited a 1/8 interest in tract #3 in Fürstenauerweide.  Since she was married, it gave her husband Martin Fast.  And it listed their six children, Peter, Johann, Isaac, Jacob, Cornelius, and Catharina.  These were six of the seven children that I suspected were children of my Martin Fast, children who were listed in my Excel database:

So now I had the six children definitely tied together.  And I had their mother Maria Wiens.  The last child Anna (line #599) turned out to be the child of Martin Fast's second wife, so she would not have been listed in the land document as an heir of the first wife.

Even better, the land document listed Maria Wiens' parents, Martin Wiens and Maria Loepp:

After doing a little more research, here is the descendant chart that I ended up with.  The people that I knew about a couple months ago when I started this project are circled in red.

While it's hard to read the details on this small chart, I added Martin Fast's wife, Maria Wiens, who was my 4-greats-grandmother and her parents, my 5-greats-grandparents Martin Wiens and Maria Loepp and a bunch of collateral ancestors as well.

Some days I feel as though I don't make much progress in my genealogy research, but this was one of those days when it all came together. 

Knocked Down a Brick Wall (Part II)

See Part I for the beginning of this story.

After leaving the Martin Fast family for five years since I didn't know what to do on it, I recently decided to take another look at it.  Whenever I find records of Fasts in West Prussian church books, even if they don't seem to be related to me, I put them in a database.  I'm always adding new records to this database, so I have a giant Excel spreadsheet with over 1100 records that I can sort by first and last name. 

A couple months ago, I took another look at the database, and I found something very interesting:

I had a bunch of records related to Martin Fast living in villages that were not Mennonite villages (highlighted in yellow).  The village name is the rightmost column, the child is the column to the left of that, and then the father Martin Fast is the column to the left of that.  I didn't know if they all the same Martin Fast or not, but it seemed possible.  I was especially intrigued because my 3-greats-grandfather Isaac Fast was a son of a Martin Fast from Schlobitten, and here was a Jacob Fast who was a son of Martin Fast from Grafschaft Schlobitten (line #598).  Could my Isaac and this Jacob be brothers?

So I checked the locations of the villages in Kartenmeister and plotted them in Google Earth using the latitudes and longitudes from Kartenmeister.  The villages of Kurau, Schönbaum, Schlobitten, Windeck, and Robach turned out to be widely scattered in East and West Prussia, but they were all out of the main Mennonite area.  (I couldn't identify a village called Gross Stein - line #594.)  Here's a map of the villages:

Based on the dates of the baptisms and marriages from 1801 to 1820, the father Martin Fast could be the same person.  Intriguing, but still not very strong proof.

I asked Glenn Penner what he thought of this, and he had just recently extracted records from the Schönbaum Lutheran church book on LDS microfilm #208392.  He gave me a couple records that related to Martin Fast!  Read on to Part III to see what I found next.

Knocked Dolwn a Brick Wall! (Part I)

I've been stumped for two months now.  That's a long time to be unable to figure something out, especially when the answer is right in front of you.

When I started working on my 4-greats-grandfather Martin Fast #660209, I hardly knew anything about him.  Here is descendant chart that I had:

All the information that I had about him came from the marriage record of his son Isaac Martin Fast #51802 (b. ABT 1790), my 3-greats-grandfather, when he married in Reinland, West Prussia, in 1813.  And here is the marriage record:

Marriage record of Isaac Fast and Catharina Fast, 8 December 1813, Tiegenhagen Mennonite Church, West Prussia, Kirchen-Buch, 1780-1831, p. 102.  Accessed at http://mla.bethelks.edu, Congregation #314, on 14 October 2012.

From the record in the Tiegenhagen church book, you can see that Isaac Fast was the son of Martin Fast, who was from Schlobitten.  The village of Schlobitten was not in Glenn Penner's list of Mennonite villages in West Prussia, so I searched for it at Kartenmeister, which is an incredible list of villages in East and West Prussia.  It turned out to be a village in East Prussia.  I searched the online records from East Prussia, but I couldn't find Martin Fast.  That was five years ago, and I didn't know what else to do, so I just left it.

A couple months ago, I thought I should take another look at the records to see what I could find.  That will be Part II.