What in the world is a Wesselowski?(And solving a Mystery)

Julius Wesselowski

The Wesselowski family name is one that is carried by only a lucky few. In fact, only about 37 people in the world can call it their own. This is largely due to a German family choosing an alternate spelling from the slightly more common 'Wesselowsky', and a man named Julius Wesselowski being one of the only members of that family to have sons. Then there is the fact that many Wesselowskis chose to change their last name to one of two variants: "Wessley" or "West". My maternal grandpa is just one of the ~37 with the surname. However, whether or not Wesselowski was my grandpa's family's true surname has long been debated. Thanks to DNA, however, those rumors have come to their conclusion. This post will tell the full story of the Wesselowskis, their families, and the genetic findings that changed my personal family history.

The Children of Emilie Wesselowski and Efroim Franz Brück

These are the biographies of the 7 children of Emilie Wesselowski and Efroim Franz Brück. They ended up all over the world in Germany, the USA, and Brazil. Several faced persecution as a result of being ethnic Jews during Nazi Germany.

Martha Brück

Birth Record of Martha Brück

Wesselowski Family Postcards

Thanks to my first cousin 1x removed, Sonya Wesselowski, I have some postcards and photographs of Kurt Wesselowski and James Wesselowski, both of whom were soldiers during WW1, and several of the photos have them in uniform. They were the children of Martin Wesselowski and lived in Germany. You can see them below:

James Wesselowski Postcards

Photo of James Wesselowski

Transcription Tuesdays: The Burial Record of Albrecht Kruszynski (Kurrentschrift)

This was one of the more difficult transcription pieces I have done. It is written in the old Kurrentschrift, a nightmare script that was eventually outlawed by Hitler. It is no longer used and is a bit of a pain to learn to read, especially if you don't know German (like me- I only know English and can get by in Spanish). I might make a post later about how I learned to read it. It was not a very fast process and I still have difficulty depending on who wrote the document.

Census2Ged 2.0

Great news! I have now made another release of my original program Census2Ged. It now works with the 1880, 1900, and 1910 U.S. Censuses. You may recall my original post about it here, I won't repeat everything that's already in it for the sake of brevity, but I will include a link to GenScriber, the program you need to use for your transcriptions in order for them to work properly with my program. It is the most fully featured transcription tool I know of, and you certainly won't be disappointed with it.

Analyzing Sources

As an IB school, my high school is very focused on teaching good writing and researching standards. A lot of these apply very directly to genealogy. For analyzing sources, we use the acronym OPVL.

The letters each refer to a different element of a source to analyze. O stands for ‘origin’, P stands for ‘purpose’, V stands for ‘value’, and L stands for ‘limitations’.