A win in 2024, and on to 2025

It was just a year ago when The Legal Genealogist resolved to take that trip.

To go to Germany in 2024 and walk in the footsteps of my German ancestors.

It’s a trip that was supposed to have taken place a while back. I’d scheduled the time, blocked off the calendar, cleared the decks and was all set to go in — sigh — September 2020.

Yeah, nope. Didn’t happen then.

But this time last year I resolved to do it. To finally go and stand in the church where my great grandparents were married and where all of their children, including my paternal grandfather Hugo Ernst Geissler, were baptized. And to walk in the footsteps of my all of German ancestors in the German State of Thüringen and in next-door Sachsen-Anhalt, for my grandfather’s side of the family, and in Bremen and environs for my grandmother’s side.

And here at year’s end, I can finally say it: Done.

2024 resolution complete.

Been there, done that, and with the planning and guidance of German genealogist Ursula Krause even got the photos — like this one of the main square in Bremen with the Rathaus (Town Hall) on the left and St. Paul’s Cathedral on the right.

So… what’s on the list for 2025?

Sigh… writing up what I did in 2024.

I’ve managed, so far, just one blog post about that trip — telling the rest of the story of the little boy born in Chicago in 1895 but who wasn’t with his parents on the 1900 census. In They called him Ernst, I wrote about what an extremely kind German researcher found for me, the record of that child’s death in his parents’ hometown.

But there’s so much more. I need to write about the tiny church in Bremen where my grandparents were married. And about all the even tinier churches in Thüringen where generations of my ancestors were baptized and married and in whose churchyards they were buried.

I need to process the pictures and record the details and, as much as I can, tell those stories.

That’s my goal for this upcoming year.

So… what’s on your genealogical resolution list for 2025?

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Resolved and resolved 2024!,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 31 Dec 2024).

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