How’d he get all this information?

It is common knowledge among those who do genealogical research that once you start a project of this sort, it never really ends. New information pops up, showing more links in the family, which leads to yet more research and information. It’s a vicious circle. Below is a brief description of the sources that are the basis of the Gottsacker family genealogy. Some of the information and the sources are very old and the accuracy is not perfect. If anyone reading this has more or better information, please send me an e-mail at gottsackerj@yahoo.com!

First, thank the Mormons

When I started this project in the early 1990s, the main source of genealogical information was the Mormon church. Although you could find family history information in a lot of places, it seems the Mormon church family history libraries had the most comprehensive assortment of resources devoted to genealogy. When I started this project I was fortunate because we lived in Southern California, home to one of the largest Mormon family history libraries in Santa Monica, CA.

Learning to read Latin

Based on my visit to Germany and learning about Mayschoss (see “How This Started”), I could begin to do some research on this little village of Mayschoss. I was surprised to learn that all of the church records in the Catholic Church in Mayschoss had been photographed and put on microfiche by the Mormon church. I ordered the 4 rolls of Mayschoss church records and began a long process of sitting in front of a microfiche reader, reading church records written in Latin (sometimes German and even French). As an altar boy I said prayers in Latin. I memorized the prayers. I never knew what the words meant. After 4 rolls of microfiche, I could read and understand the Latin words for wife, child, died, married, and a few other terms. Scanning the microfiche for the word Gottsacker, I photocopied anything that seemed related. From these records, I recorded all the Gottsacker births, deaths, and marriages dating to the mid-1600s in a genealogy database. It is interesting that in the 1600s (the earliest of the Mayschoss records) the church records sometimes listed our name as Godzacker, which would be a phonetic spelling of how our name was pronounced.

And a few visits…

Somehow I roped my dad, Tom (Fabian) Gottsacker, into taking a ‘genealogy’ trip to Sheboygan and Manitowoc County. We visited the Sheboygan Press and searched through their archives. We visited the Sheboygan County Recorder’s Office, the Manitowoc Country Recorder’s Office and the Sheboygan Public Library. We copied or took notes on all land transactions involving Gottsackers, county birth, marriage and death records, obituaries and news articles and city directories.

The National Archives

At one point I visted the National Archives, in Laguna Niguel, California–not too far from Irvine, CA where we lived at the time. At the National Archives I found social security, military, census and other miscellaneous information. Via mail, I also ordered photocopies of the ship manifests listing of some of the Gottsacker immigrants as passengers.

A family mailing

In early 1991, I mailed a questionnaire to approximately 60 Gottsacker families I could find in the United States. In the mailing, I requested information on parents, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, etc. Almost everyone responded and because there was a lot of overlap in the responses, I was able to correlate information from several sources. This data was the basis of the then-living American Gottsacker family tree.

Some help from others

One of the interesting things about the growth of families and demographics, especially in small towns, is that there are many interrelationships between families. Often, someone doing research on an unrelated family will find a connection with your family and sharing these links can be invaluable. I have exchanged family info with several other family history researchers: Tom Lutz, whose Sheboygan family roots intersect with the Gottsackers, Laura Buffington, whose family connects with the Gottsackers who settled in and around Portland, Oregon. Laura’s research is extremely detailed and includes visits to burial sites, death certificate information, home address listings of ancestors and a wealth of other research. Theresa Prerost, whose family also links with ours, provided information on Gottsackers in her family. Mary Dye, has been in contact regarding a very difficult part of the family to track: Mathias Gottsacker and his wife Louisa Gruenberg Gottsacker. German cousin Michael Gottsacker in Essen, Germany, who, upon learning about this research, spent lots of time researching the branch of his family in Germany to learn where we connect.