Ancestry Magazine

Taking a look at ethnic records can help uncover new details of an immigrant ancestor’s life.

In central Ohio, on any given weekend you can find church services being conducted in Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese. These congregations are bound not only by religious belief, but also by language. And so it was with our ancestors.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” These words from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” inscribed at the Statue of Liberty, bring to mind the men, women, and children who left their homes and families in far-away lands looking for better lives in America.

Discovering the lives of our immigrant ancestors is the reason many of us pursue genealogy. But there is more to researching immigrant ancestors than finding their naturalization records—there’s also the matter of ethnicity, a factor that can have a tremendous impact on our research.

Churches
The population of Lancaster, Ohio, in 1840 was less than five thousand, and the small town’s Lutheran church, St. Peter’s Evangelical, had been in existence for over thirty years. So why in 1843 did a second Lutheran congregation form and have services that alternated Sundays with the St. Peter’s congregation? Ethnicity.

English members of Lancaster’s St. Peter’s church formed a separate society. Germans held their services one Sunday; the English held their services the next Sunday. And three years later, the English members sold their interest and built the First English Lutheran Church —less than two blocks away.

Understanding how ethnicity and language played roles in the history of these congregations can lead to new avenues of research as well as to a better understanding of an ancestor who may have been a member of one of the congregations. If members of the family suddenly drop from the records of St. Peter’s, it may not be an indication that they moved from Lancaster ; they—and their records—may have just changed churches.

City and county histories, as well as the written history of a church itself, regularly include the ethnic makeup of churches in a given area. These resources can be particularly helpful when you’re looking for the nearest church that shared an ethnic identity with your ancestor.

Newspapers
While obituary research is a cornerstone of genealogy, many family historians focus only on the daily or weekly newspapers in the area, ignoring a potentially rich vein of information—foreign language newspapers.

In the mid- to late-1800s, it was not unusual for a U.S. city to have newspapers published in languages other than English (German newspapers, in fact, had the highest circulation numbers in some cities). The 1872 Williams’ City Directory for Cincinnati lists forty-seven daily or weekly newspapers. Of these, nearly one-third were published in a foreign language or for a specific ethnic group.

An announcement or an obituary for a person with a strong ethnic identity, like an immigrant or first-generation American, might appear in a foreign-language newspaper even if the same announcement isn’t found in an English counterpart. Why? Language binds communities, and a publication that focuses on a subsection of a larger community will cater its news to include more information about memb ers of that subsection.

Start your search for foreign-language newspapers by contacting state historical societies or visiting state libraries. If it’s impractical to visit a state’s library, you may want to call instead to find out if microfilmed versions of the newspaper you’re seeking are available through interlibrary loan.

Neighborhoods
My ancestor John Johnson was enumerated in 1850 in Bloom Township, Morgan County, Ohio. His place of birth is listed as Upper Canada, and his naturalization records were no more specific. Considering that Upper Canada represents approximately the southern half of the present-day province of Ontario and that Johnson is an excruciatingly common surname, I didn’t have enough information to start digging into Canadian records.

When emigrants like John Johnson left their homelands for America, they would often be followed by family and neighbors who would also be followed by family and neighbors. The result of this chain migration? Just like mass migration, communities of people from the same small section of a homeland would congregate together in new neighborhoods in America.

This is good to know because, as a family historian, when you want to solve a location problem for your own ancestor, you may be able to find clues within the neighborhood.

To do this, look first at the census records of an ancestor’s neighborhood, paying particular attention to the information listed about your ancestor’s neighbors. What were their names? Where were they born? When did they immigrate to America? Take this information and extend your search for the neighbors’ naturalization records, passenger lists, church records, and death records and obituaries. You may find that rather than just seeing an Irish neighborhood, you’re looking at clusters of immigrants from Tuam or Ennis. And, armed with this information, you can look for your ancestor in those specific areas across the pond.

In my situation, I found that other residents of Bloom Township and Morgan County were also from Upper Canada. By digging into the records of these other residents, I’m hoping I’ll be able to pinpoint a hometown for John Johnson north of the border as well.

Language Trouble
Even for all the good that ethnic record sources serve, there’s a potentially frustrating side to them—the language barrier.

Realize before you start, however, that you don’t need to speak Italian in order to make headway through an Italian-language document. But you will want a basic familiarity with key words and phrases to help you pick out genealogical details.

For a simple list of genealogical words in numerous languages, select the Share tab at FamilySearch.org. For more personalized assistance, you may have better luck focusing on mailing lists, like the ones at RootsWeb. From there, you can post specific language questions or even search previous posts to see if your question has already been answered.

That worked for me recently when I found a Hungarian inscription on a tombstone at a cemetery in Columbus, Ohio. One line stated “Clan Odsj 310 N.H.Z.”—a term I wasn’t at all familiar with. A search in the CROATIA-L archives at RootsWeb revealed that “N.H.Z” stood for Narodna Hrvatska Zajednica, or National Croatian Society.

Conclusion
Our ancestors came to America looking for a life better than what they left behind in their homelands. But, while they left their native lands, they didn’t leave behind their ethnic identities. As a researcher, it’s always a good idea to keep that fact in mind and dig into sources that reflect your ancestors’ ethnicity.