I think I became interested in knowing my antecedants when I was around 16 years old. I remember asking my grandmother, Hazel Gambill (we called her “Mom”) about her mother. She told me her mother’s name was Elmira Mellen and her father’s name was George. After I was married, I started quizzing my mother and my mother-in-law about relatives and wrote down copious notes. At home, I tried to decide how to organize all of this information and came up with using a 50-foot long roll of shelf paper and writing names on individual stickers so that I could expand the pedigrees as new information became available. Once my children came along, alas, I had to roll everything up and store it in a box on the shelf because not only is this research time-consuming, it also takes a lot of space and is very vulnerable to being upset and mixed up by small children. There my box sat until in the early 2000’s I was ready to pull it out again, this time with the help of the internet.
Sometime in the 1980’s, my mother’s cousin, Margaret, became the family genealogist and tracked down a lot of information about the Squires and the Ditzenbergers. The result of her research was two bound books of over 100 pages each, of which she sent a copy to my mother, Phyllis. Looking back, I am very impressed because this was a huge effort. It was before computers were a household item, and therefore before any genealogical information was ‘online’ because there was no ‘online’. Margaret had to travel to Salt Lake City and go through the Mormon archives, as well as other hearty legwork.
Needless to say, Margaret’s work became the foundation of my research.

I have been able to use online services, spreadsheets, and other storage systems that make the work so much easier, albeit still very time-consuming. In addition, I have traveled to cemeteries to search out and take pictures of headstones. Genealogy is a hot topic now and there are a lot of people out there researching their antecedants, so not only can you find information on the main genealogy sites, but also on private blogs. I am fortunate in that my mother remembers people and can tell me stories about them, so I can not only research online, but I have a fantastic eyewitness, so to speak. In addition, she has boxes and boxes of family letters, photos and other information which I have more or less commandeered. Her house contains antiques that were built by my great grandfather, Edward Stultz, as well as by my grandfather, Fred Stultz, as well as those owned by other family members. There are old Christmas cards from family members, and she also has school textbooks which were used by family members and friends dating back to the mid 1800’s. School kids were the same then as they are now in that they wrote notes to each other on the flyleafs, and it is very entertaining to read them. The biggest treasure that I have found, however, is the family Bibles where births, deaths and marriages are recorded.

I have scanned hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, of family pictures and letters going back to the civil war and earlier, and I have downloaded census records from 1790 to 1930. In 2012, the census records for 1940 were opened, however, to date, I have not been back to look at them, so once everything is nicely organized, it would be a nice exercise for someone to look up those records. In addition, I get lost when researching family members previous to the time that they immigrated to the USA, so the field is wide open to check out England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany and the Slavic countries to find ancestors there.

Census records begin with the 1790 census, and there is a new federal census record every 10 years. The census format evolved over the decades. Prior to 1850, only the head of the household was named, with hash-marks to indicate free and enslaved men, women and children. Starting in 1850, women and children were also named. In 1890, there was a fire that destroyed over 90% of all the census records. I have not been able to find any pertinent information from the records that were left.

In addition to the federal census there are state census records, county records, ship manifests, military records, land grants, obituaries, headstones and other ways to try to find an ancestor.

I think one of the most difficult things about this research is keeping everything straight and trying to remember how I happened to find out any particular tidbit of information. Ancestry.com has copies of census pages, which are sometimes very hard to read, but they also offer family records neatly gathered onto a single page for each individual.

Another difficulty that I have encountered is with spelling. Census-takers had to write everything by hand so they sometimes misspelled, or used a nickname one time and a full name another time. When a woman got married, her maiden name was lost to posterity, so it is often difficult to impossible to track women. Names could be written with or without a middle initial or name, with or without the ‘period’ after an initial, and many other variations. For example, when looking for Phillip Stultz, I might come across Phil Stoltz, Phillip A Stults, PA Stultz, P.A. Stolz, and any number of other variations, which makes searches sometimes very tedious. And because there are usually multiple people with the same name, sometimes family members, domicile, age and other hints are necessary to determining if it is even the right person or not.

I have accumulated hundreds of pages of resources for each family. What I am publishing here is the condensed information along with some highlights where I have them.

This history is lovingly edited and written for my children, grandchildren, nieces, nephew, brother and with special thanks to Phyllis and Margaret.

Blessings, -Chandra Lynne