Jean Babtiste Koenig born 1866

by Caroline
(New York)

Jean B. Koenig was born in 1866. He emigrated to Havre in 1867. He was the youngest of 13 children and his mother died giving birth to him.

Her name was Catherine Miller or Mueller and his oldest sister raised him. We have a photo taken in Masvaux.

But I haven't found him by free searching the books. Where do I start? He took his wife back to visit in 1906. But I need a town and I'm stumped.

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Stumped and Can't Find What You're Looking For
by: Suzele

Hi Caroline,

First off, do you have any idea where he was born? If you have no idea, it will likely take a very long time to find him unless you get lucky.

With no starting point or information to help concentrate the search even a little, you really have to look everywhere.

If you can eliminate a country, that is better than nothing, but Germany or France are enormous, so not extremely helpful.

If you can restrict it to a region in a country, that is better, but again if the region is large and there are many many villages, you will have to look in ALL of them most likely.

Even in a small region, there are going to be thousands of villages and hundreds of pages in the cities as well to dig through.

On top of that, the writing is often horrible and requires more time.

For my research purposes, I would prefer to have a general location with no birthdate or a very vague reference to it than an exact date and no location information.

I have done this sort of research for people where I have had to look in 50 to 100 villages. Sometimes I came back with something and sometimes I didn't.

Of course I'm more familiar with these records now that I've looked through them many many times. I know more about the villages too. That helps.

There's also the possibility of records being lost or destroyed by fire.

For Alsace I can say that certain areas were hit by bombs during the various wars that passed through. In the 1800s and 1900s certain villages were mostly destroyed.

When I'm researching an area, I am mostly aware of that from the beginning, but sometimes am surprised by small and large gaps in the records.

Hope it helps,
Suzele

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