A few years ago, I discovered that August Scheppelmann, my late wife’s grandfather, made a journey back to his hometown of Nienburg, Germany in 1922. This occurred when I was looking for his original immigrant arrival in 1897. I posted about this second voyage and you can read it at http://www.collectingancestors.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1026&action=edit
One interesting fact included in the passenger list for his “second” arrival was the fact that he was naturalized in 1902. I spent some time — and some money — obtaining paper copies of his declaration and naturalization papers through the mail.
This morning, I looked through the recent collections added online by Ancestry.com and there was the heading: All Pennsylvania, Federal Naturalization Records, 1795-1931. Needless to say, I quickly checked it out by searching in this collection for August Scheppelmann. Bingo. Up popped his Declaration of Intent record and his Petition for Naturalization record.
This demonstrates how much easier and quicker it is in 2019 to do genealogical research with the tremendous expansion of online databases on Ancestry.com and other database providers. And it reminds me to keep checking the database collection announcements from Ancestry–and its competitors too.
Leave a Reply