Ann's Words

This morning as I’ve been working in my German records, I came to the family of Johann Carl Rieker who married Sÿbilla Herrmann on 12 November 1823 in Grossgartach.  Sÿbilla is my 2nd cousin, 5 times removed.  She was the mother of 18 children.  Only one of these children (#17) died at birth.  The rest lived, but only 3 lived to adulthood.  The rest died in their first year of life.  Those 15 babies lived long enough to be anticipated, named, held, fed, loved and nurtured, and then mourned and buried.

How does a mother do that???

Of the 3 children in this family who lived, the first daughter bore an illegitimate daughter, who lived to marry.  Only the 2nd son, Johann Heinrich lived to marry and have his own children (he had 5 who all lived to adulthood).  The 16th daughter, Christina Friederika, lived, but never married.  Every other child child in this family died.  The children came almost every single year.  Sÿbilla was pregnant from 1822 to 1846.  There were no breaks in her childbearing.  Sÿbilla went on to live until 1884, 82 years.  Her arms must have ached to hold her lost babies.  I am grateful for temple work that reunites families like this one.

I have posted about women like this before.  I just feel they need to be remembered and honored in some way, and so I will do that here.

This is my office.  I keep an important piece of artwork in front of my face every day.  It’s called “Carried by the Covenant” by Joseph Brickey.  This woman represents, to me, these mothers who loved and lost.  She watches over me every day as I do my German research in old documents gathered and collected while we were in Germany.  As I work with these records, I honor and remember these good women from my ancestral village of Grossgartach.

Carried by the Covenant by Joseph Brickey

I spend anywhere from 4-6 hours a day working with the records I digitized while visiting the Rathaus in Grossgartach last fall.  I am THRILLED to have these records.  They contain the birth, marriage and death information for a whole village of my ancestors.  Below is the story of how I digitized the records.

Work in the Leingarten Archives with Grossgartach Records

I am carefully and systematically working through these record books, page by page.  I’ve started with the Family Registers.  There are several large volumes.  On the first page of each family’s entry, the husband and wife are listed with their birth, death, and marriage information.  It also lists their parents at the the bottom of that page.  The second page lists their children, with birth, death and marriage information, listing their spouse if they married.

I am working my way through the alphabet in these volumes.  For the last few weeks, I’ve been working through the “R” families.  It’s such a thrill when I happen across my closest ancestors.  Above is the Ranger family.  The third child listed is my Great-grandmother, Susanna Fritz.  She was born before her mother married Johann Georg Ranger.

On the page below is #3 child, Rosina Barbara Rieker, my 3rd Great-Grandmother.

Below is the entry for Johann Dietrich Rieker’s family.  He’s my 5th Great-grandpa.

This work is time consuming and sometimes tedious as I check every single person, merge any duplicates, standardize dates and places, correct spelling, add missing information, attach any source documents, and complete each family.  It’s like putting a huge family puzzle together and once I get started, I have a real hard time pulling myself away from it.

Here’s a summary of what FamilySearch sent me of my work in 2025.  I added 3.7k people to FamilySearch and attached 37k sources.  I also added 140 new memories or photos.

I love working with original sources and these documents.  I love that I can read the old German handwriting.  Zoom in on this page at take a look at the different handwriting made by the different people creating the family entry.  I love everything about family history work, I really do!