Family books for North American Localities

Karen;

Good to hear from you.
I came in this afternoon intending to turn on my machine and to write a general message about how to write a family book for a North American locality.
Lefor would be a special case.
I vaguely recall that Daniel broached this subject with me some time ago. I was not encouraging.
I made a trip with my kid to Stark Co ND to hunt up the original homestead, located South of Richardton on the Hart River. It could have been then or on a subsequent trip that I stopped in Lefor and found the priest to St Elisabeth's and asked to see the church books They were simply names with no details seldom even a date rather just the year. It was very discouraging at the time. Someone has compiled(summarized) all this data in the Lefor Centennial which Daniel must have a copy. You will not get anything more from the KBs. Summaries of the KBs for Hebron and Glen Ullin which someone had sent to me were similarly disappointing. Copies of those parts of the centennial book of use is in an expanded version will be found in the Josefsdorf-ND file which is available at Banat-Books.
I think St Elisabeth's in Lefor is now closed and probably the KBs have been transferred to the Abby in Richardton.
When Josettte Hatter and I published the volume "From the Banat to ND" I combed through every thing that might prove useful, including family histories in possession of ND Banaters who over the years I was able to beg from Banat list subscribers as they were noted on the list. I had no special plans at for them at that point. There was much useful information in the various centennial books published for ND counties where Banaters settled, especially accounts of the early settlement days. I got all the early Stark Co newspapers on microfilm--------the early one, published in Dickinson, was in German and later another in English, I made copies of all articles having to do with Banaters.
In a similar way I combed through the libraries of the three different Donauschwab institutes in Munich, and Institute at the Univ of Tuebingen as well as the IfA in Stuttgart. The latter yielded copies of the Donauschwabisch Familien Kalender with which you are more than familiar.
All this ended up in a series of folders in file cabinets and there was far too much to include every thing we had in the book.
After spending some 30 years looking at KBs I suspect the the nearly uniform uselessness of American KBs is due to that KBs in continental Europe served as a kind of civil registration and therefor had to follow government protocols while no one really cared here. You can include the UK since they had their own separate civil registration as you are certainly aware.

So now a suggestion for a possible roadmap to create a family register for a NA locality.
I am advised by AKdFF colleagues that what we have in mind should not be referred to as a family book but rather as a family register. I can live with that.
When I was abstracting passenger ship records I noticed that some localities seemed to be interrelated more than others. I noted about six localities in a post to the list at that time. I remember that three of these were College Pt NY, Mansfield OH and Wyandotte, MI. I've forgotten now what the others were. These appeared to be good candidates for creating a family register.
Since it is super easy to pick Banaters out of the US Federal census--------by nationality they were Hungarian but they speak German. I have actually done this for Mansfield Ohio and Pete Schmidt who we can thank for adding this file to his website at the old Rootsweb website. When Ancestry wiped out the website, thanks to David Preston we were able to salvage the file and put it up as attached to Banat Books. It has 677 entries but many of these are duplicates since the file contains entries from both the1910 and 1920 census. This is the core data (or framework)to build a family register. In a separate file from the Banat passenger ship data base there are entries for 837 Banaters whose destination is Mansfield Ohio. It is a simple matter to match the people in these two databases. So now one knows the village of origin of each of these families(most of them anyway) and one has the beginning of a family block . Knowing the place of origin a reference to the appropriate Banat family book will yield the necessary details to create the family block for each family.
Obviously there are few complete sets of family books to cover all localities. There is a mass of computer talent on the list and it may be possible to post a working version of the register on a dedicated site where those interested could inspect it and if they possess a copy of the necessary family book could fill in the missing data.
One now lacks the death dates of these folks in this country which can be found in civil records on Ancestry and or Family search. Moreover, the "Family Trees" section of these two websites contains a surprising number of Banaters. These have to be used with some caution. Some are uncritically copied from each other but with a bit of judgment one can coax out useful information and bits of data.
Now comes the exploratory part. Keep in mind how the authors of Banat family books are masters of the many details of the history of the locality-------how did inhabitants move between nearby towns, what were the business connections, when were additions made to the town with an increase in population, when were businesses created (brick works, schools established, etc.) anything of historical note. This means in the case of Mansfield mining the local library for whose records which might apply, local employment records, membership records of local Donauschwab social organizations, etc etc.

Dave Dreyer