How to Use Obituaries to Determine Family Relationships

 If you read this last blog post, you know that I was sorting the parents for Gottlob Ortlieb and his children and stepchildren. He had two different wives, Paulina and Frederike and Frederike was previously married before she came to be Gottlob's second wife. In Emma's obituary, there was a brother named Rudolph, which is a name I had not come across before as a sibling. I did some research on him and found his obituary which really added to my confusion. It listed his parents as Gottlob and Fredericka, who is not the mother of Emma. I then located Fredericke's obituary, which listed NINE children (yes nine), all of whom I had never heard of except Rudolph and Ida (but she had an incorrect last name). 

I wanted to know whose parents were whose so I went to work finding the obituaries for all the children in this family. I also wanted to know what the relationships were. Each time I found an obituary, I made a column in a table. I had all the family members listed on the leftmost column and if one was mentioned in the obituary, I colored it in yellow. Then, I marked the rest of the columns in grey since typically deceased siblings are not listed. Here is what it looked like when I was done:

Do you want to guess which obituary I found last? It was the obituary for Amanda (Ortlieb) Schaff that connected every single sibling (except one that remained in Germany) from each relationship all in one place! That was a gold mine to find. Once I had made my chart, I colored in the children of Gottlob and Paulina in dark green, Gottlob and Fredericka in medium green, and Fredericka and her first husband in light green. I had done what I had set out to do! If you want to see the family, check it out here.