Spotlight ~ Mystery Person M268

Documentarian Weblog ~ Stardate 12061.9

volgagerman.net

So, today I headed downtown to the Family History Library (Salt Lake City) to try to track down some information on John Jacob Lebsack. He was my husband's great-grandfather and was a German from Russia. (That's the part that is so interesting. I could never understand when the family would talk about their ancestors being German, but from Russia. I didn't get it, so I decided to learn about it.) I am working on gathering information for his story because he is such an interesting character. His story will be coming soon. 

This is the story of Mystery Person M268. I went up to the counter on the international floor and the fellow there, Alton Sissel, tells me it's my lucky day. His wife, he says, is a German from Russia (or her family was, I'm not sure). Anyway, he tells me this as I am showing him the printouts of things I had found online and wanted to look for at the library about the village of Frank and Brunnental (two German colonies along the Volga River in Russia, see map above). John Jacob (Elder Sissel says to me, Johan Jakob, ["Yohan Yacob"] in German and I smiled.) was born in Frank in 1858 and moved to Brunnental (a daughter colony of Frank) in 1863 and then immigrated to the United States in 1892. Elder Sissel told me that he himself had been on the board of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. He found me later and began showing me John Jacob's family tree from the AHSGR. He said I was very lucky to be able to see that and I would have to pay someone from the society to look up this information. This info he was showing me was from his personal flashdrive and not available on the internet. He is going to give me access to all of this information. I have some of it already on my Ancestry tree, but it will be great for confirmation.

So we found John Jacob and his father was Andreas Lebsack. Attached to all of the names on this tree was the number M268. Brother Sissel said he could show me what that meant as the library had copies of the AHSGR's magazine called Clues which would give us contact information for the person M268. So M268 was a person, the person who gave this information to the society. He took off to go find the copies of Clues, as we didn't find them on the floor we were on. He brought me the latest copy, 2008, and we looked up and transcribed contact information for eight people who were working on the Lebsack name. M268 was not listed in this copy and he said he would take me up and show me where the Clues were located and we could look and see if we could find M268. By now I began calling M268 "her", several times I had said "she" and then added "or he", but then I just started calling her "she". I just had a weird feeling.

While Elder Sissel was off looking for Clues, another lady found the two maps I had seen online and they were huge, something like 36" x 28" and had names listed for each of the houses. On the back, it gave information about who they were - like, Georg Löbsack was a farmer, etc. It was like hitting gold in a mine, except that it will be hard to prove that the Andreas Löbsack on the map is our Andreas Löbsack because all of the families gave their children pretty much the same names (Andreas also had a son, Andreas). I'll post more on the maps when I've had a chance to give them a good going over. I was able to scan them while I was at the library. 

Sister Sissel came with a book to try to help me find the Normannia ship manifest from Dec. of 1891. The Stroh family (my husband's grandmother's side) emigrated to the U.S. on the Normannia, but I have had no luck in finding the family on a ship's manifest. I had found John Jacob's original ship manifest on the Ellis Island website, (He emigrated with his family on the SS Aller in 1892 [see photo below].),

but I could not find the ship that his third wife (Mary Catherine Vogel Stroh) and her first husband traveled on in Dec. 1891. I have scoured the internet and can't even find a crossing with the dates I have. So back to square one on that. I need to firm up those dates. But I digress.

Elder Sissel took me upstairs to the top floor of the library. The third floor had the copies of Clues, something about they were from the "American" Historical Society of Germans from Russia and they were in English is what sent them upstairs. He took me all the way to a back corner, down a long stack of books to the very corner. We were at the very top back corner of the library looking to see if we could find M268. Most of the copies were hardbound and Elder Sissel could just check the index to see if "she" was listed. I asked why she wouldn't be and he said that the person could have let their membership in the society lapse or could have passed away. I was guessing that this was a person that had been working on the name quite a while ago. Well, we worked our way back from the early 2000's and into the 1990's with no luck. Then we found "her" in the 1980's, and, lo and behold, she was my very own mother-in-law. There was my husband's mother, there in the back corner of the Family History Library with all of her contact information from the 80's! She passed away in 1993 when my son, only her third grandchild, was just 3 years old. It took me aback. Literally, I stepped back. I was amazed because I had known somehow that this person was special. I had felt it the whole time. Elder Sissel asked me on our way back downstairs if I thought she was with me on my search and I told him, "She sure is!" So Mystery Person M268 is Evaleen Lebsack Mitchell, my husband's mother, my only son's grandmother.

Many thanks to the Sissel's and all of the others who helped me today. Elder Sissel spent several hours with me and he said he really enjoyed it. As did I.  :)