Archive for November, 2009

WWI Military Records from Germany

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

I found a source for the muster records and other military records for German soldiers in this war. Not all are immediately available to me. I was able to identify at least two dozen records for members of the families Hasselbacher, Bayerl, and Gnugesser. Records for cannoneers are not yet available. I await these anxiously. I have my grandfather’s WWI diary, but cannot tell where he fought before he was bombed from an airplane-perhaps a first in Sept 1914. You can see an introduction and some of the records here.

These military records have some basic family information including information about parents andd spouses. I think they will be useful to tie up some loose ends such as the Hasselbachers of Eschenbach and Markt Erlbach.

Addendum: The remainder of the records are now on-line including my grandfather’s. They tell exactly where and when he fought, where he was wounded, and what he did after.

Individual Historical Summary for Wolff Hasselbacher

Monday, November 9th, 2009

I am experimenting with formats for adding narrative summaries of known information about individuals. This will also allow me to link up documents and information scattered throughout the site. I am not sure I have figured out the best way yet. I started with Wolff Hasselbacher, my 9th Great-Grandfather, and an ancestor of the vast majority of all known modern Hasselbachers. It is he, for example, that ties together what I call the Illinois, New Jersey, & Nebraska Hasselbachers; and the Hazelbakers.

This iteration was prepared with Omni-Outliner which is as it sounds, an outlining program that I like for organizing my thoughts. The problem is to elegantly turn its output into something that looks good in the HTML language of the web and for which the code is not so complex that I cannot understand and modify it. I do not think I am there yet, but it is a start. Expect to see a fair amount of non-uniformity for a while. (But you already are used to that, aren’t you!)

Military Records of Peter Hasselbacher 1777-83

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Following my acquisition of the Doctoral Thesis of Erhard Städtler related to the Ansbach-Bayreuth Regiment, I took another swing at outlining what we know and do not know about the timing and circumstances of the conscription of Peter Hasselbacher (Hazelbaker) in 1777. A high priority for the family, it seems to me, is to obtain a copy of the relevant muster lists that are available in the Public Documents of England, and which may be available on microfilm in Nürnberg. Stadtler shows us a sample page of such a list from 1883.

I also present a time-line of Peter’s first year in Virginia during which he met and married Elisabeth Shively.