Have you ever wondered about your family tree? How far back can you trace your ancestry? Most people I know can't go very far back, at all. Some can't even get past their great-grandparents.I'm here to tell you that I was one of those people. Unfortunately, I was young and most of my older relatives were dying. With their deaths, more and more old pictures came into my possession. I had known the names of some of the people in the pictures as my grandmother and my aunts had told me "stories" when I was a child. But details were vague.
Fortunately, my mother remembered names and stories but she just didn't have the interest or knowledge as to how to go about finding out more about her ancestors.
I started my genealogy work in 1995. It was fun, like playing detective. I searched all the local County Records in Cleveland, Ohio and found the names of my ancestors in old City Directories. I found Birth and Death Certificates in old City Archives. Such directories and birth and death records also gave more
pertinent information about names of parents and relatives, their birth places, etc. Eventually, I was able to start finding out when my ancestors arrived in this country through boat records that gave more details about the names of towns and villages they originally came from.I also found distant relatives in this Country who had migrated to other parts of the U.S. from the Cleveland area. Using US Census Records helped out greatly. In one instance, an old postcard with faded writing on the back had been sent to my Great Grandmother in Cleveland, probably around the year 1914. The name Steven Forst was signed and it was postmarked from Terre Haute, IN. After much searching through the 1910 and 1920 US Census Records, I was able to find a Steven Forst. According to 1920 Census Records, he had moved his family to Salem, Illinois. It turns out Steven Forst was the brother-in-law of my maternal great Grandmother. He had married my Great Grandmother's eldest sister.
But many of my bigger surprises came through finding records of my ancestors in Eastern Europe, before they had even migrated to the United States. My ancestors migrated from Hungary and there was a large Hungarian community in the Cleveland area at the turn of the Century. In fact, it was once noted that, after Budapest, the City of Cleveland had the second largest population of Hungarians in the world.
