There was a fire that destroyed records for some of those who immigrated through Boston. It may have destroyed the ones you are looking for. Google it and see if it pertains to the years you are looking for.

Did anyone apply for citizenship, Alisande? Do you know where the 'missing' daughter was born -- look for female births on that day in that place?

I believe that many times when the child was unnamed it was because the child did not survive.

She was born in DC, and the birth announcement I saw was just a newspaper listing of all the births that day, each identified by the parents' names and the baby's gender. No names were listed.

Kris, I learned the fire destroyed records prior to 1883.

Brushworks, it didn't occur to me (I don't know why) to try different spellings. I'll do that next time.

Thanks, all!

In my several years of research, I have noticed that the "name change at Ellis Island" didn't happen so much, but almost all of my ancestors anglicized their first names later -- then the 2nd or 3rd generation sometimes shortened or anglicized the surname. Try searching with wildcard letters (like J*n*s for Janos) and phonetic spelling. Also try searching just the first name or just the last name -- I found one relative that way.

Did you try searching at Ellis Island.org? But, remember, not everyone came through New York, many entered via Detroit, New Orleans, and other cities. Some of mine came via Baltimore.

Look for naturalization paperwork, search for uncles, aunts and cousins (may have traveled together), draft registrations for clues. Also, check the websites of historical and genealogy clubs, and of libraries, for the cities where they settled -- they may have resources, such as indexes of court naturalization records, that Ancestry doesn't have. Same for state records -- I found Kentucky records by searching the state historical society database online..

Unfortunately, with all the tremendous recordkeeping that went on, there are significant chunks that are missing, mostly due to fires. I haven't found arrival and naturalization information for a couple of my great-grandparents, or my dad's military records -- all lost in fires.

As for the missing child -- did you search further on her mother? If you find her in a later census be sure to open it and read it yourself -- she might be living with that daughter who is now married. Search for the mother's maiden name (marriage record) and her death certificate -- daughter might be listed as next of kin. Also, just search with her date of birth, place, and last name -- she might turn up in another record.

Good luck!

Did you follow all of the lines as far as you could including the new wife? I've been able to get more info about people by following their friends or other family.

Names are often hard to follow even for people born here in the US. People would switch their names around and sometimes go by a middle name or stop using a name and go by another.

Also, Ancestry's search engine is not flawless -- I was searching once for a great-aunt, even though I knew her full name, location /year of birth, I found the record I was looking for on page 13 of the results -- with the exact same spelling etc I was looking for, well after pages of sound-alikes, similar, same initials and such. I normally wouldn't have searched that many pages, something inspired me to do so that night -- lesson learned!

Another thing is when you make Ancestry trees, you can sometimes view other people's trees. I'd look for those trees for everyone you can find, someone may have the info you need. You have to pay attention because a lot of people will just add a name that seems close without verifying that it is the actual person.

Yes, some people add pictures and comments without facts. A picture showed up on our tree and was identified as my uncle. He certainly looked like my uncle as an adult. However, I knew it couldn't be my uncle because he was 18 months old in 1902 when he arrived with my grandfather. The picture was of a man in a Hungarian military uniform dated 1912.

We removed the picture along with the false information.

I appreciate all the tips!

I'll look up the marriage record, etc. on the first wife when I get back to Ancestry at the library. I discovered her first name, the city where they were living, and the baby's birth on my computer at home. Hadn't thought about how to get more info on the mother, so thanks, Raee! And thanks, also, for the tip about not giving up on the search results (as I've been doing) when they start listing sound-alikes, etc.

Anglicizing first names is something else I hadn't thought of. The toddler and infant were Michael and Martha. Does Michael sound like an Austrian name to you? It sounds a little iffy to me.

My family name got changed slightly when my great great grandfather arrived in this country. (Can't remember without looking it up whether he was 2 or 3 greats back...) A relative on mom's side changed his first name from Abraham, to Eberhard, in this case possibly sometime after arrival. So names get changed for all manners of reason. And spelling was more fluid back in the day...

It seems that Michael could be original; here is a list of German variations -- I'm guessing that Austrian names might be similar, if they were in a part of Austria close to Germany: Might be different if they were close to Slovakia, Italy or Hungary

OH that didn't copy/paste correctly at all. Well, some are Michal, Michel, Mikkel, Michus, Michak, Michalek, Miecio, Mitek, Mikhail, Mikol, Milo, Micha

Martha might originally have been Marta?

Did you know that you can search on Familysearch.org for free on your home computer? This is also a LDS site (as is Ancestry.com) and has many many of the same records.

Yes, I heard about Familysearch.org recently and have been on it a lot. That's where I accessed so many censuses. Love looking at those handwritten entries! The 1925 New York census can't be viewed, however. They give you the data for an individual name, but you can't view the original document to see who's living with them.

I was thinking Martha might be pronounced Marta, but you're right--it could have been spelled that way originally.

My experience in genealogy research has shown that mostly it was the immigrants themselves who were the ones to change their names. For example, many/most Italians changed one vowel of their surname - either dropped the ending vowel altogether, or changed an "i" to an "o" or an "e" to an "a," etc. To me, they did it as a way of representing their new start in a new country.

No, "Michael" most likely wouldn't be the name given in Austria. It would more likely be Mikkel, Michel, or Michal. In Italy, it would be Michele (pronounced mick-ELL-ay).

Yes, Ancestry's search engine leaves much to be desired. I wish we had the ability to click on a column heading to sort by the spelling of the surname, or the date, etc. But, you *can* filter the results to a small degree. For example, you can narrow the name results by changing to "Exact," "Sounds Like," "Similar," or "Soundex," or a combination of those. You can narrow the date range to the exact year, or plus-or-minus 1, 2, 5, or 10 years. And, as Raee mentioned, you may need to look through lots of results before you find what you're looking for. After all, someone has to be the last one listed, and that could be the one you want!

Alisande, send me an e-mail with all of the information that you currently have, and I will see what else I can find for you.

For around 50 years, ending at the end of WW1 in 1918, "Austria" was part of a very large country known as Austria-Hungary, formed by consolidating many different areas into one. While the language of the Austria part of this empire was and still is German, its populations include people living today in many separate countries but whose languages included Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Roumanian, some Italian, and many others (thanks Wikipedia for details).

Someone who came to the US during the existence of the A-H Empire, called "Austria" for short by some, could have been from any of many very different geographic and cultural areas and might have spoken any of the many different languages as a mother tongue. So what other forms of Michael to think about? It would be very hard to narrow it down.

A few immigrants came into the US from Canada and do not show at the usual eastern seaport cities. A few of my wife's ancestors came through Canada because it was easier and cheaper. We have not found any record of her nth grandfather crossing from Canada. We have found where he was in Canada before crossing and a newspaper article mentioning him after he arrived in the States, but no immigration record.

A few Scots changed their surname when immigrating to escape a notoriety attached to his or her clan. At one time in Scotland, a horse thief was considered the lowest of thieves. The problem was that due to the tight knit nature of the clans and their culture, if one member of the clan was thought to be a horse thief, then all members of the immediate clan was shunned and treated as thieves by their neighbors. It did not matter how good and upstanding a person might be.

And some immigrants came to the US to escape the war in Europe. When the war ended, they returned to their mother land. According to Pennsylvania records held in Philadelphia, over 10,000 returned within the first year of peace and the records were considered no longer important and were destroyed.

So, you may see an ancestor come to USA, but seem to have disappeared from your tree. It's because they didn't remain here.

If you have ancestors you believe may have been coal miners, check the state mining records. Mines keep very accurate records of mining accidents and deaths.

I lost 3 ancestors in PA mining disasters.

Mining Explosions & Accidents

Ellis Island opened as a immigrant station on Jan1st 1892. If they came earlier through the port of NYC they came to Castle Garden. Were they German? If so there is a series of book called Germans to America that goes by years and lists all the immigrants by name. Many large genealogical libraries carry the series of book. I have found my ancestors in that series of books. If you give the name and approximate birth date I could help you search.

Joann

Good point, Elmer -- that has been true in my family, where all records from the 1890s and early 1900s list them as being from Russia, because the country was part of the Russian Empire of the time, but they were from Lithuania specifically. And, it takes some imagination to search the records for names that have been transliterated from another language, written in Cyrillic text, back to Lithuanian or to English.

I agree, that's a good point, Elmer. My great-grandmother lived in England but was born in Prussia. I discovered only recently that her town in Prussia is in an area we now know as Poland.

Although I've lived for the past 40 years in coal mining country, I was born and raised in NYC, where most of my family lived (plus some in NJ and CT). No coal miners among us, but that's sad about your ancestors, Brushworks.

"Germany" wasn't unified as a country until the mid to late 1800s- until then, it was separate little kingdoms, dukedoms, city-states, etc. At the time, Poland was a landlocked region and (I believe) part of Russia. Much of what is now eastern Germany, and the region running along the sea until Lithuania, was part of the Kingdom of Prussia at that time. Today's Polish city Gdansk (of Lech Walesa fame) used to be the German city of Danzig. The Russian province and city of Kaliningrad, just south of Lithuania today, used to be the German Koenigsberg.

Germany lost all of its East Prussia and Poland gained much of it while its borders were shifted westward and northward at the end of WW 2.