Thanks, Jerry

My Schultz Genealogy Gets a Boost
Yesterday afternoon, I called a complete stranger in Minnesota whose great-great grandfather was the brother of my great-great-great grandfather.

If you visit some of the major genealogy websites like Rootsweb.com, after you poke around a bit you could find that I am a compulsive genealogical information hound. I leave messages scattered all over the internet in hopes that someone will find one that is pertinent to them also, and contact me with information.

Four years ago, a man named Jerry Truhn did just that. He had been helping a relative of his research her Schultz ancestors, and he found a query I left on on Genweb World Project website about my Schultzes who just happened to come from the same town in what is now Poland. He had done some research in church records, rather accidentally transcribed way more Schultz information than what pertained to the immediate line on which he was working, and as he read my post, he recognized that he had the info I was looking for.

He tantilized me with a few interesting tidbits, like a half-dozen siblings of my great-great grandmother whom I never knew existed, and the names of my great-great-great-great grandparents. Then he promised to flesh out the post with more information, just as soon as he could go through his notes.

A few nights ago, a cousin (first cousin once removed, to be exact) contacted me, remembering about some promised further Schultz information I had talked about. Oh yeah, I thought, I wonder what ever did become of that?

I went back through my old emails. Jerry had had one thing come up, then another, then another. Then, he had been in the hospital. In his last email he confessed he'd been diagnosed with cancer. He said he would get to me as his energy levels allowed.

But I never did hear from him.

So last week I searched around those genealogical websites to see if I could find some recent posts by him with a recent email address.

Instead, I found his obituary. He was only 63.
http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/message/rw/localities.northam.usa.states.iowa.counties.story/1081

So, after a little detective work (which truly is something I love about genealogy), I tracked down the relative with whom he was working on these Schultzes, and gave her a call. Tonight I've printed out a 38 page report of all the Schultz descendents I have on file, a copy of all the email correspondence I had from Jerry, two articles I found on the internet about her parents and grandparents, and a letter summarizing it all, and I'll ship it all off to her tomorrow.

What Jerry was not able to fill in for us, hopefully we'll be able to piece together for ourselves.

As I like to say, the one good thing about history is that it doesn't change, it will wait for me to find it.

And I'm much closer to finding a huge chunk of my history than I would ever have been without Jerry's answer to my query.