Becoming a Genealogical Detective

Robert W. Marlin recounts how he used detective skills to find his roots.

A four-generation genealogical chart of the author.

One of the most appealing aspects of my genealogical research has been the opportunity to play detective. At times I think of myself as a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, using my own deductive reasoning to try to get into the minds of my long-dead ancestors. To me, genealogy is more than collecting a group of documents and filing them away in a trunk. My insatiable curiosity drives me to want to understand everything I can uncover about the people who are responsible for my very existence. I want to know who they were and what they were, as well as how, when and why they lived the lives they did. For example, a quick look into the political or economic situation where your ancestors came from might tell you why they came to America when they did. They might have been fleeing famine, war or political or religious persecution. Using your imagination might even help to locate documents that tell the story of what your ancestor went through to get here.

The search for my family history began during the latter part of 1977. At the time, I assigned myself the job of finding and identifying all 16 of my great-great-grandparents. I was certain that I would accomplish this goal in a year or two and then move on to something more difficult. Here in the first year of the new millennium I have located nine of those 16 ancestors and my search slowly continues. The four-generation chart on this page shows part of what I have uncovered. In this article I will try to show you methods of honing your creative skills to look beyond the words in any given document and convert them into creative ideas for obtaining more information. The various documents you uncover become the building blocks of your family history. However, your creative imagination is the cement that binds everything together.

In my 1996 book, My Sixteen: A Self-Help Guide To Finding Your Sixteen Great-Great-Grandparents, I pointed out that there really aren’t any iron-clad rules about how to approach your research. Whatever makes you comfortable and productive is the right way for you to go. Since then I have reached the conclusion that there is one thing that I now consider a cardinal rule to be followed, preferably at the start of your genealogical research. That is, you should always START WITH YOURSELF. This means that you shouldn’t start your research with your grandparents. If you do, you will overlook everything that happened between you and them. In addition, you might find yourself spinning your wheels looking for information that might already exist, and could already be in the hands of a relative.

When I began my research, my mother, Florence Kruse Margolin, was neither candid nor cooperative. Her reason for withholding information was not uncovered for more than 15 years. She was quite cooperative in supplying information about her own family, but was not happy to tell me anything’s about my father’s family. My mother and father had gone through a bitter divorce when I was very young and the matter was never discussed with me. My mother reluctantly gave me the first names of my paternal grandparents that she thought might have been Meyer and Hilda. At the main branch of the New York City Library, I was able to uncover my first family Margolin family connection, which was a listing in the Brooklyn City Directory for the year 1933. It listed people with the surname of Margolin, along with their addresses and in many cases with their occupations.

Listed in the directory was Hilda Margolin who was the widow of Meyer. It also included her children. There was Paul, Sam, Ruth and my father William whose occupation was chauffeur. I was already aware that during this time period, my father was a sailor in the US Navy and drove a car for an admiral. The real clue here was the fact that my grandmother Hilda was listed as a widow.

This was the first time I became aware of the need to see beyond the facts in a document and concentrate on using the information to my best advantage. If my grandmother was a widow in 1933, then my grandfather died earlier and therefore, a death record must exist. In the same library room, I began to check New York City Death Indexes for the years prior to 1933. Within a few minutes, I found a Meyer Margolin who had died in 1929. I immediately went downtown to the Board of Health and filled out an application for a copy of the death certificate. When it arrived two weeks later, I quickly realized that the information it contained did not relate to my family. I learned lesson #1. Do not accept any undocumented information as fact. I corrected this error by returning to the index file and locating another Meyer Margolin who had died in 1928. This proved to be the right Meyer Margolin. The most important thing I learned from the death certificate was the name of the cemetery where my grandfather was buried.

Part of the death certificate of the author’s grandmother, Hilda Korris Margolin.

When I visited Montefiore Cemetery a few days later, it was like walking into my own past. In addition to my grandfather, I also found the gravesite of my grandmother Hilda, complete with the exact date of her death in 1962. They were both buried in a small section of the cemetery that belonged to an organization named the United Friends and Relatives.

After taking pictures of the gravesites, I went to the cemetery office to find out more about the United Friends and Relatives organization. I discovered that UFR had been founded by Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and was still in existence. The cemetery personnel gave me the name and address of the present secretary of the organization. I wrote a letter to him that same day. After leaving the cemetery I went to the Board of Health and requested a copy of the death certificate of my grandmother Hilda. I was thinking like a detective, and I didn’t want to leave any proverbial stone unturned.

Within a week I heard from UFR Secretary Jacob Levinson. He had known my grandmother personally and had a number of kind comments to make. He also put me in touch with the son of my grandmother’s sister. Later, I was invited to the annual meeting of the organization and met numerous people who knew my father’s family and generously provided me with many details of my family history. That was almost 25 years ago. I was made a member of the group and have attended their annual meetings since that time.

When the death certificate for my grandmother Hilda arrived, at first it didn’t seem to contain any information that I didn’t already have. After rereading it several times I realized that there was something new. The bottom of the page contained a box that listed the name and address of the informant, the person who had supplied the information on the certificate. In this case it was her son, Paul Margolin, who at that time (1962) lived on Carpenter Avenue in Hollis, a town just a few miles from the cemetery.

I immediately set my sights on locating my uncle Paul. This turned out to be the first real detective work that I did on my own. Only 15 years had passed since the death of my grandmother and I was certain that locating my uncle Paul wouldn’t be difficult. I tried telephone books, current suburban city directories and cross-reference directories. I was able to obtain the phone number of the people currently living in the house on Carpenter Avenue. When I called and explained why I was calling, the current resident of the house was helpful and told me that the house had been sold several times since 1962 and that he had never heard of my uncle, Paul Margolin. I felt quite discouraged. After giving the matter a lot more thought, I then realized that if the house had been sold several times, then there had to be property records of these transactions.

A couple of days later I found myself sitting at a microfilm reader searching the indexes for a copy of the records that were created when my uncle Paul sold his house. In less than 15 minutes I was looking at the paperwork that had been created when my uncle had sold his house. The records contained nothing that told me where my uncle had moved to when the house was sold. I read through the documents several times before I stumbled onto one piece of information that I almost overlooked entirely — the name and address of the lawyer who had handled the transaction.

My phone conversation with the attorney was cordial, but guarded, until I explained to his satisfaction exactly who I was and what I wanted. As it turned out, my uncle Paul had moved to California several years after my grandmother’s death. Paul had since passed away. His children were all married and his wife had returned to the east. He then told me something that almost blew me away. He mentioned a fourth brother that I didn’t even know existed. All that the attorney knew was his first name and that he lived somewhere in Florida.

In those days, finding someone in another state was quite difficult. I went to the library and searched through all of the major cities in Florida looking for my newly discovered uncle. It took almost an hour to locate him living in Jacksonville, Florida. The next step was to write him a letter. He responded in less than a week with a phone call, which resulted in my flying down to Florida the following weekend.

Tracing the Korris family in the Buffalo, New York city directory, from 1919 to 1957.

My uncle was cordial and very helpful. Because there was a 12-year age gap between him and my father, he never really got to know him. He was able to supply some information about my grandmother’s brothers and sister. He told me that my grandmother Hilda had one brother named Meyer Korris who had moved to Buffalo, New York sometime prior to 1920. He also recalled that Hilda’s father’s name was Hyman Korris. This meant that Hyman Korris was also my great-grandfather.

The following week I wrote to the Buffalo Library to see if I could find out more about Meyer Korris. They suggested a search of the Buffalo City Directories. I sent them a check with a request for a thorough search starting with the year 1915. As things turned out, the money was well spent.

The searched not only turned up Meyer Korris, but also my great-grandfather, Hyman Korris. Later, I was able to contact one of Meyer’s daughters who supplied much more information about our family.

Tracing my mother’s family was just as challenging and rewarding. Most of her family had lived for more than 100 years in the area of Brooklyn where I grew up. However, the detective work that went into my research was just as exciting and rewarding. My maternal grandfather was John Kruse who had married Catherine Frances Wild in 1907. My mother remembered that her mother had once told her that the Wild family had moved from Boston to Brooklyn, right after the great blizzard of 1888. Catherine’s father, Mathias Wild, had told my mother that he had run away from Alsace-Lorraine in France, to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army. My mother remembered that they had at least six children. Catherine had passed away in 1912, but John Kruse lived until 1956. He was in his early 70s when he died. That was about all the information my mother had.

Birth certificate of the author’s maternal grandfather.

At this point in my research, my bloodhound instincts were sharpening. The first thing I did was to visit the New York Public Library in order to search the birth record indexes for my grandfather’s birth certificate. It took me less than 15 minutes to find out that he had been born on 13 September 1882. His father’s name was listed as Louis C. Kruse and his mother’s name was Lena Bernhard Kruse.

It was now simply a matter of checking the Brooklyn City Directories for Louis C. Kruse. In less than an hour I was able to follow his trail from 1875 to 1893, which was the last year he was listed.

Tracing the Kruse family in the Brooklyn city directory from 1875-1894 (top); tracing the Wild family in the Boston city directory from 1874-1889 (bottom).

Further analysis led me to check death record indexes starting with the year 1890 and working forward. As it turned out, my great-grandfather Louis C. Kruse had died in 1893. The death certificate indicated that he had accidentally drowned at the foot of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. My own curiosity forced me to pursue this matter further. I found old newspaper files of a newspaper named the Brooklyn Eagle on microfilm and found the story of his death.

Finding the Wild family in Boston took the same route with city directories. I made a trip to Boston for the purpose of finding out as much as I could about this branch of my family. At the Boston Public Library I was able to find Mathias Wild first listed in the 1874 Boston city directory.

The last year he was listed was 1889. Knowing that Mathias and his wife, Maria Keller Wild, had at least six children during this period, my next step was to check birth record indexes. The following day I located birth records for five out of the six children. The further I went with my research, the more sharply honed my deductive and detecting instincts became.

It occurred to me that if Mathias first appeared in the city directory in 1874, then it wasn’t unreasonable to deduce two things. One was that the story about being pursued by soldiers might very well be true. The Franco-German War had been fought just a few years earlier. The second was that if deduction number one was true that Matthias probably made an effort to become naturalized as soon as possible after his arrival. The following day I visited the Boston area branch of the National Archives, which housed naturalization records for the New England area. In less than an hour, I was able locate and make copies of his records.

Brooklyn Eagle newspaper report of the death of Louis C. Kruse (7 September 1893).

Everything I have described up to this point occurred more than 20 years ago. The thinking behind that detective work is as valid today as it were then.

As I said earlier, family history and genealogy should be more than just collecting documents and filing them away. Most of the people I have mentioned were dead before I was born. However, I have conjured up a mental image of how many of them looked and lived their lives. In a few cases I later received photographs of some of these ancestors and found them to look very similar to the images I had conjured up.

Your search will be easier because technology has advanced so far and so fast. The good news is that in the past 10 years, the Internet has revolutionized the world of genealogy. The bad news is that even with all the information that is currently available through computers, one aspect of genealogical research has remained the same. That is the ability to think creatively and consider ideas that you can attempt to prove. This ability is not something that you can learn in school or on the Internet. However, developing you creative ability will allow you to take the information available in the documents you uncover online and creatively use it to uncover more facts about your family history. This creative ability is not something that is normally apparent to newcomers. It is a skill that develops over a period of time.

As earlier stated, I strongly suggest that you should start with yourself and work backwards. Make certain that you document (two or three times if possible) each link that you add to your family history. If you combine that rule with training yourself to think creatively, you can expect to come out a winner.

Good luck!

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2000 issue of Family Chronicle.