1

How to Use the Book

Structure

This book is intended to be as simple to use as current software and the creativity of the author can make possible. Both are limited.

This first chapter describes how the book is organized and how to use it to find information about the family members who interest you. There are three chapters and two appendices in the book. The second chapter tells how to look up families in Appendix B, the index to all of the marriages in the family database. The third chapter tells how to interpret the information about each family. This family information is contained in Appendix A.

Some information in my files is missing from Appendix A. I have over 3000 copies of original documents from Luxembourg, Germany, France and Belgium. These documents have been transcribed and translated from the original 17^th to 20^th century, hand-written Latin, German and French, and are recorded in the database. They are not included in this book so that its size and price can be reasonable. All of these documents helped me to record the family history as accurately as possible. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t make mistakes. It also doesn’t mean that I found all of the relevant documents. For example, a document recording a marriage is likely to tell where each of the couple was born. However, it will not tell where they plan to live. It is difficult, but not impossible, to trace a family back in time. It is a matter of luck if one can manage to trace a family forward in time.

Relationship to the first book

Don’t throw my first book Wittry, Witry, Vitry: A Family History away. This book does not replace it, but supplements it. In essence, this book replaces only two chapters in the first book that have become obsolete. It does, however, replace my second book Wittry, Witry, Vitry: The Family Tree – 2001.

Other families

The first book contained information about two other families in Appendices B and C. One is a family from Kentucky, named Wittry. The other is a family from Louisiana, named Vitry. Both believe that their roots are from Alsace-Lorraine in France. To date we have been unsuccessful in finding a relationship between our families, or in demonstrating that the sharing of the same name is only coincidental. I have not included these families in this book, but continue to maintain communication with them in the hope that a common ancestor might come to light.

Expansion of the family tree

In the five years since the first book was published, the number of people in the family tree has more than doubled by the time that Wittry, Witry, Vitry: The Family Tree - 2001 was published six years ago. It has grown by another 30% since then. Part of this is due to people sending me information about their branches of the family. Part is due to the fact that Luxembourg released another 15 years of records, thus extending my sources of information from 1880 through 1894. A second release included records from the years 1895 through 1923. Part is due to the kindness of Rob Deltgen, a distant relative and an accomplished genealogist in Luxembourg. He is summarizing records for public use, and forwards to me any that he thinks might be of interest. Those of you who cannot find all of your immediate family information in the first book should have better luck here. If you don’t, it is because nobody has provided the information to me.

My research into the family tree for the first book ended where the available records ended. There are no known records of the family in Luxembourg before the early part of the 17^th century. That was the time when pastors of parishes first began to record baptisms, marriages, and interments.

At the time I finished my original historical research there were no available records after the date of 1880. This was due to national laws that generally prohibit general access to records less than a hundred years old. The purpose is to avoid fraudulent use of the information.

As I neared the end of my research I discovered that I had been far more interested in the dead than in the living. Certainly the book was not for the dead, so, I began to search out the living. I obtained addresses from known relatives. I searched the Internet for addresses of people who bore any reasonable variant of the family name, and wrote to them. A surprising number of people answered my letters and provided information.

Then, I began to publish a newsletter four times a year. This generated more incentive for people to give me information about their families. People like to see their name in print. Besides, if a person is sending me payment for a copy of the newsletter, it is a simple matter to enclose a bit of new information in the envelope.

Finally, I began to add to the family tree the parents of people who married into the family. The software that generates the tree in Appendix A is capable of adding that parenthetical information to spouses.

For all of these reasons, as well as the passage of time, the content of the family tree has grown significantly. People began to tell me that they found it difficult to find the information they wanted. And when they found it, it was often out of date. That clearly demonstrated that it is time to offer the family an updated book.

Expansion of the index to marriages

In the first book each marriage of a male Wittry/Witry has a sequence number. The printed family tree contains these marriages in the order of that sequence number. Because the original book was already large - 505 pages - I only provided an index based on an alphabetized list of the women who had married these men. Many people are interested in the family even though the name Wittry/Witry doesn’t appear in their ancestry for a number of generations. An example might illustrate. A man from Germany attended a reunion of the family in Luxembourg in April, 2001. He brought his two sons. It was the great-great-grandmother of the boys who carried the name Witry.

All of this goes to say that many people find it difficult to locate themselves or their parents in the family tree. For this reason Appendix B of this book contains a complete index to all marriages, both by the name of the wife and by the name of the husband.

Finding a person

The way to find a person in Appendix A is to first find an associated marriage in the index in Appendix B. If the person is not married, you will need to know the names of the person’s parents or other ancestors. Find the appropriate marriage in Appendix B. Note the sequence number of that marriage. Then look in Appendix A for the marriage with that sequence number. It is just that easy. Good hunting.

Other information in the first book

The first book, Wittry, Witry, Vitry: A Family History, contains a lot of background information that is missing from this book. If you want to know more than you can find in Appendix A of this book, you might want to refer to that book. It tells of the origin of the family name. It tells about famous people and places that bore a variant of the family name. It describes the history and culture of the early centuries of our forefathers. It describes how people lived in the old country, why some of them emigrated, and where they went. It also contains brief stories of different family groups, things that could only be learned by careful analysis of the details in Appendix A or even by reading the original documents from past centuries.

Future books?

It is highly unlikely that I will ever write a replacement of the first book Wittry, Witry, Vitry: A Family History. My research found a few records from the 1600's and none from earlier times. From everything that I have been able to learn, there are no older records to discover. The only records that are likely to expand my knowledge of the original families in Luxembourg will be newly released records from Luxembourg. By past practice, no new records should become available until about 2016. Then it would take me two years to study those records, extract family information from them, compile a new family tree book to replace this one, and then have it published. This would take us to 2018. At that time I will be 86 years old. Only God knows if I will be alive, or what my health will be if I am.