Dead Ends

George William Meyer Family

 Awhile back, while checking out the newly discovered Charles City digitized newspaper website, something caught my eye. On the very same page as my 3rd great grandmother Mary Meyer's death notice was an advertisement for a Meyer's clothing store. This caused me to pause. 

As you may recall, Mary Meyer is my oft written about genealogy brick wall. She died at age 42 with few records and nothing to reveal who her parents were. Could the same Meyer who owns the clothing store be related? I didn't know. I don't recall ever having looked for Meyers in the Charles City area. I have looked for them in Galena, Illinois until I get blue in the face because that is where she meets my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck and gets married. John was such a nomad before and after that (living in Galena only a few years), that I has just assumed that they had left Galena living Mary's parents, if they were still alive or had immigrated with her, behind. But perhaps it was possible they had moved as a family group to Charles City.

So I dug into William Meyer the clothier, and soon learned that his name was actually George William Meyer and that excited me greatly. Many families of that time followed a prescribed naming practice with their children. The first born son was named after the father's father and the first born daughter was named after the father's mother. Indeed, John and Mary Kuck's first two children were Anna and Henry Kuck, named after Heinrich and Anna Gerken Kuck. The naming tradition then called for the second son to be named after the mother's father and the second daughter to be names after the mother's mother. Those children were named George and Lydia Kuck. (George is my 2nd great grandfather.) So seeing a George Meyer was encouraging. 

George William Meyer the clothier though was a handful of years younger than Mary but I was still assuming that perhaps George was a family name and since George wasn't anywhere in my Kuck line until my 2nd great grandfather's birth, it likely came from Mary's side of the family. I kept digging and turned up George's father John Henry Meyer and two siblings. From death notices for this family, I learned several things. This family immigrated to America in two different waves with the earliest wave comprised of George and a couple of his sisters being in the right timeframe as my Mary might have immigrated. There were five sisters in all and finally this family immigrated from Germany. The first two fit with my Mary Meyer but the last one, coming from Germany was did not mesh. 

All the records from my Mary Meyer says she immigrated from Switzerland. Switzerland does share a border with SW Germany and back in the days of her immigration, that border was still sort of politically fuzzy, but the George Meyer family appeared to come from NE Germany, near the polish border, on the complete opposite side of the country. Still, records are often written by survivors with fallible memories and since my George was still a young boy when she died, things might not be accurate. 

Despite how much I dug, I could not turn up the names for all the immigrating sisters of George William Meyer the clothier so I couldn't at least tie Mary to the family by name. So I finally turned to DNA. If I could find a direct descendant of John Henry Meyer, I could compare our DNA and if we matched, that might point to my Mary being one of his daughters. I started sorting through other members trees and finally found one with a direct descendant but Ancestry informed me that they either weren't a DNA connection or didn't have a DNA test linked to their tree. I have no way of telling which is which so I wrote a polite DM explaining what I was wondering and sat back to wait. Like many sites, users aren't always very active or notice that indicator in the upper corner stating they have a message and so I'm still waiting on many messages I've sent over the decades. 

But this particular person noticed and responded right away very enthusiastic to help. They indeed had a DNA profile but it wasn't attached to Ancestry. It was through a third party. We found that Ancestry no longer allowed third party DNA profiles to be uploaded to their website so I found another website where we could compare them and the descendant of George William Meyer uploaded their profile. Again, we have to wait for a few days while it processes the information but the answer came back that we are definitely not related. 

While disappointed that this is apparently a dead end, there is still a chance. It could be as we genealogists call a misattributed paternity. There could be infidelity somewhere along George William Meyer's line that wasn't known about. However, I will likely never know if there was and so for all practical purposes, I have come to a dead end.... again. But perhaps another Meyer will turn up in the right place at the right time and someday I may be able to finally learn the parentage of my 3rd great grandmother Mary Meyer and can stop writing so many blog posts about the subject.