"Uncle Charlie"

An interesting, and very distracting, aspect of the genealogy searching process is that you get to see how all the unspoken and locked away family rumors play into your research hunches. For example, according to my father there is an "Uncle Charlie" somewhere in my family ancestry who fought in WWI. Now I have no idea if this person even existed. No proof at all. Even if he did, I don't know if he would be my dad's "uncle," my grandpa Koehler's "uncle," or a mean-spirited 100 year old joke where I give up my genealogy search and cry "uncle" in frustration? All scenarios at this point are equally likely.

Despite the fact that I don't even know if "Uncle Charlie" was real, I found myself last night locked in census search battle trying to narrow down which George Koehler in the endless sea of George Koehler's was mine. I don't know George Koehler's birthday, so that eliminates a useful narrowing tool. I still can't pinpoint a match in the records where my great-grandparents George and Florence were living together, so that was out. Most surprising to me, I can't even cross-reference my grandfather's very existence (he having been born in 1927) to find his father because, according to the 1930 census, there is no John J son of George and Florence. But here are the top search results when I plug in my grandfather's information:



Georgette Koehler! Now there's a match!

With results like that, I was getting extremely short on ideas and in my desperation I decided to look for "Uncle Charlie." And wouldn't you know it, there were some hits in the 1910 census records where a George and Charles Koehler lived together and were of about the age where they could have been in WWI. The only problem is I still had no idea which George Koehler is my George Koehler so I was essentially going off of a rumored hunch.

I so desperately wanted this person to be my George Koehler just so that the hours of research could bear some fruit. So desperate that I spent about an hour researching an alternate Koehler family history where my great-grandparents met in Philadelphia, moved to New York, split up, and remarried all while John J lived with Uncle Charlie's family in Gloucester, NJ (backed up by another family story where my grandpa lived on a farm somewhere in his childhood). All the census records could, sort of, prove this. They couldn't prove it much more than the below picture proves that 9/11 was predicted by The Simpsons but if your mind wants to believe it, you'll do anything to force that circle through the square hole.



The real truth is that I have no proof of any of the Koehler alternate history stuff or even their real history stuff. I still primarily just have a collection of leads and dates to work with. I was just getting desperate and was willing to waste precious research time chasing a silly idea based on an old family rumor and one hell of a weak connection between a George and Charlie Koehler.

So why am I telling you all this?

So you don't do what I did. When you are doing your research, stick to good searching techniques and make sure you know what you're looking for before you start looking for your "Uncle Charlie."