When Someone Not Related To You Writes About Your Family...

...it can be a wonderful boost for your research!

Dear Friends,

Apologies for not blogging for a while. I have been writing articles for publication elsewhere (i.e., genealogical journals), which has taken up a good deal of time (when the articles come out, I'll let you know where to find them!). In addition, I'm preparing to go on a research trip in the fall, so there's lots of advance research and planning going on.

However, I had to tell you about a recent exciting discovery--someone not related to my family has written a detailed article about one of my 4th great-grandfathers and some of his descendants, including my great-grandmother! Only a few years ago, Gale Ion Harris, a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, wrote an article entitled "Henry Jacob Seagondollar of Bavaria and Brown County, Ohio: Nineteenth-Century German Immigrants to the Midwest," and it was published in two parts in The American Genealogist! I was able to peruse the two parts of the article at the California Genealogical Society Library in Oakland (one of my favorite geni libraries!). Below is a sub-optimal phone-camera shot of the cover. 

Turns out the author is a retired Physics professor who has particular respect for the work of one of my cousins, Lewis Worth Seagondollar (1920-2013), a noted nuclear physicist and lecturer who had worked on the famous Manhattan Project. Cousin Worth was a great-grandson of my 4th great-uncle, Michael Seagondollar. I never had the honor of meeting Worth, as he passed away before I was aware of his existence, but I'm sure glad Dr. Harris was acquainted with Dr. Seagondollar and was for some reason motivated to study our immigrant ancestor!

A good deal of the information Dr. Harris shares in the article is familiar to me, and it's good to see that such a respected genealogist agrees with much of what I have found already. Of particular interest to me at this point are Dr. Harris's beautifully detailed source references--many of which I had not yet located or did not realize existed! In the coming months, I'll be combing through Dr. Harris's Seagondollar study in detail, and I'm immensely excited at the prospect of doing so!

My 4th great-grandfather, Heinrich Jacob Siegenthaler, came to America from Bavaria in 1840 with his wife Maria and sons Jacob and Michael, and within a couple of years they settled in Brown County, in southern Ohio near metropolitan Cincinnati. In the U.S., Heinrich was called Henry, and the family surname went through a few variations. In the end, Henry's son Jacob settled on the spelling "Segondollar," and Michael spelled the name "Seagondollar." Thus, it is easy for family members to tell whether we are direct descendants of Jacob or Michael by the way the last name is spelled. 

The Segondollar farm was in Jackson Township, Brown County.

Henry had willed his Ohio farm to both sons for their livelihoods, but Michael opted to venture out to his own farm in Kansas. In recent generations of the family, there seems to have been little or no contact between the Ohio Segondollar branch and the Kansas Seagondollar group. 

A few months ago on this web log, I wrote a post entitled Mom's Home Town and C-SPAN for Genealogy, in which I introduced you to my maternal grandfather, Clarence Everett Pryne, a.k.a. "C.P.," and his mother Lorena May Segondollar (1890-1968). Great-grandma Lorena was the daughter of Sherman Segondollar, the son of Jacob Segondollar, the brother who kept the Ohio farm. 

My 2nd-great-grandfather's tombstone, Winchester Cemetery, Ohio.

My mother remembered visiting the Ohio farm as a little girl, when it was being run by my great-grandmother Lorena's half-brother Jacob Madison Segondollar (1897-1970), but "Uncle Jake" had only one daughter and no sons to take over the enterprise, and I'm curious to learn what has become of the Segondollar farmland. You know I'll attempt to find out!

Annie

"Peace and love!" -- Sir Richard Starkey (Happy birthday, Ringo Starr!)