Genealogy takes a touch of stubbornness and a heap of endurance
I found a lead on the Maertz-Demler line
The worst thing to do in genealogy or lineage research is to get frustrated. It doesn’t serve any purpose other than to make it an unpleasant journey, and it also often causes mistakes in trying to force a piece to fit the puzzle. Dead-ends and brick walls are extremely common and they need to be acceptable. It can also take time to confirm the truth.
My maternal grandfather’s family is one giant roadblock. While writing the lineage book for that side of the family, I have one chapter on his parents and the rest of the book is my grandmother’s line.
I’ve even put out a call for information in the past (and though I’m about to share an “aha” - I’m still open to additional information!)
I did previously knock a few bricks lose by finding some immigration records of potential family members, and then the obituary of one of them named my great-grandmother and we finally had a tentative idea of siblings for her. Why my grandfather never spoke of them, or why they came to America separately, we’ll probably never know. I even remained skeptical as to whether I had identified her actual brothers.
But recently I was going through my AncestryDNA matches and a close cousin with a surname I didn’t recognize was in the list. They only have their parents in their linked tree, but the mother had a name I did recognize - Demler. This was my great-grandmother’s maiden name.
The birth year of 1919 indicated that it could be a niece. So I looked at the two brothers I had found while writing the book. One was a confirmed brother (his obituary stated “while visiting his sister, Mrs. Marie Bowman”, which was my great-grandmother’s 2nd married name) but whether he was the same one in the immigration record was where I wasn’t sure. The other brother had traveled with someone of the same name, age, and from the same region and presumably was a brother as well. So I started going through the censuses for the brothers to find children. Guess what? The maybe brother is the grandfather of my cousin match!
It also got me looking at the passenger list in more detail and it names another brother who stayed in Russia!
So I have an update to what I know about my Demler relatives:
Marie Elizabeth Demler (1897-1983) arrived in the U.S. from Laub, Saratov, Russia about 1912. Marie’s father was Peter Demler and her mother’s maiden name was Herman. She had a brother Peter Demler (1890-1969, wife Katherine Hengenseder) who lived in Michigan and immigrated to the U.S. with their brother George Henry Demler (1888-1963) and George’s wife Anna Katherine Laikam (1888-1975), who later lived in Wisconsin. Upon arrival in New York in 1908, they were all three headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, where they only lived a couple of years before relocating. Their contact in Laub was their brother Heinrich Demler.
Their parents’ fate is still unclear, but I confirmed my suspicions and found another line of cousins in the process.
The original chapter on this family is the first chapter in My Lineage from the Roots Up, vol. 1