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Family Tree of Peter Witry

Structure

The tree begins with Peter Witry, born about 1575, whose wife’s name is not known. It will probably never be known, since I have not found any records that far in the past from the area where he lived. Peter’s marriage is identified as sequence 001. Succeeding marriages are shown in numerical order by sequence number. The sequence number scheme was designed to keep the families in order, oldest child to youngest child in each generation of each branch of the family tree.

The marriages are shown with just the children and the children’s marriages, if any. This technique makes the book bulkier than its predecessor, but it also makes it easier for you to gain a perspective on each individual family. In the previous book, the grandchildren of a couple could be scattered throughout the whole book. I hope you find the new format more convenient. Certainly it will be easier for you to organize replacement pages when I publish updates to families.

The marriages and their children are listed in sequence number order. The first person listed in the marriage is the parent who is a direct descendent from Peter Witry (seq. 001.) The second person in the list is the spouse. The spouse is followed by the children from oldest to youngest.

The marriage of Peter’s oldest son is sequence 002. The marriage of the oldest child of the second Peter is sequence 003. The sequence of marriages progresses from the oldest married child to the oldest married child of the next generation. Thus, all of the families of descendants of the oldest child of the first Peter will appear before the record of the second child of Peter. If a person married more than a single time, the second marriage will appear in the same family list, but will be placed after all of the descendants of the first marriage.

This is an accurate description of the organization of the marriages in the book. However, it might be confusing. If you browse the book a bit, it will become clear. It would be best if you begin browsing a family that is very familiar to you.

Contents

The items of data for each person are coded in an abbreviated fashion to save space and to limit the size of the book. The abbreviations are as follows:

- generation number of the person beginning with 1 for Peter Witry (there are 14 generations in the family) followed by the family name in capital letters, followed by given names

a: ‑ any alias or other name(s) by which the person was known

b: ‑ date and location of birth

c: ‑ number of children of this marriage

d: ‑ date, location and cause of death

h: ‑ name or number of the house where the person lived

i: ‑ any interesting fact, including the date, if known

r: ‑ the letters b‑birth, d‑death, m‑marriage, x‑other, to indicate that

a copy of the original birth, death, etc. record was translated,

and a copy of the translation is in the database (Note that if you

want a copy of the original document and its translation, it is

available for the asking.)

f: ‑ name of the father of the spouse of the descendent

m: ‑ name of the mother of the spouse of the descendent

t: ‑ any title by which the person was known

v: ‑ village or town where the person lived

w: ‑ date and location of the marriage (wedding)

The people in the tree

Not all members of the family are in the tree. It will never be complete, and it would not fit in a book if it were complete. To know who is in the tree, it is necessary to trace the history of my research into the family and the rules I developed over time for inclusion and exclusion.

When I started looking up documents for births, marriages and deaths in the family, my first rule was to find as many of my own direct ancestors as possible. Therefore, I traced each of the paternal and maternal ancestors of my father as far back as I could find records. I also included all of the children of these couples.

When I began to look for the grandchildren of these people, I realized that I was in danger of making the job bigger than I could accomplish, and of making the tree bigger than most members of the family would be interested in. So I developed another rule. I would try to find the children of any married Witry man., I would try to find the marriages of these children, and I would try to find the children of these marriages - the grandchildren of the original couple. Another way of saying it is that I tried to find any marriage where one of the parties was a Witry, and any birth or death where at least one of the parents was named Witry.

Finally, I developed a last rule - that I would record the names of the parents of any person who married a Witry. This would hopefully give anyone a head start when trying to trace his or her own non-Witry ancestors.

If any reader of this book wants to know more about ancestors who are not named Witry, I recommend accessing the website deltgen.com to study the largest single-source tree that I know of. Rob Deltgen, the genealogist who developed the tree is a cousin of ours and is in this book. Thanks, Rob.

Tracing your ancestry

To trace your ancestry, first find your marriage or the marriage of your parents in the index in Appendix B, and note the sequence number in column 3. Look for the marriage with that sequence number in this chapter. If the first parent in the marriage married again, that subsequent marriage will be listed in the same family listing, but will follow the last child of the previous marriage.

To search downwards, note the sequence number of the marriage of a child in the family of interest to you. If this marriage produced children, the sequence number in front of the wife’s name tells you where to look in this chapter for the family of that marriage. In this way, you can discover all of the descendants in the marriage that you looked up in the table in Appendix B.

To search upwards, go back to Appendix B and look up the names of the parents in the family of interest to you (the same names you originally looked up.) The right hand column in the table contains the sequence number of the paragraph that contains the records of the parents of the person listed in the marriage you started with. That person is a direct descendent of Peter Witry (seq. 001.) If there are two sequence numbers in the right hand column, it means that the second parent in that family is also descended from Peter Witry.

Let’s take my family for an example. Start with me. Why not? My wife’s name is Nancy Link. In Appendix B you will see that our marriage is sequence number 193. In Appendix A the record of our marriage says that I am generation 10. Our oldest son is listed immediately below our names and his marriage has the sequence number 194.

Now let’s look for my ancestors. Look for my wife’s and my name in the table in Appendix B. You will see the sequence number 192 in the right-hand column. That is the sequence number of my parents. Returning to Appendix A, look for marriage 192 to find my parents and my siblings.

Now let’s look for my grandparents. Look up my parents’ names in Appendix B. You will find the sequence number 182 in the right-hand column. Back to Appendix A. The marriage with sequence number 182 lists my grandparents. Go back to Appendix B one more time to look up their names. Note that there are two sequence numbers in the right hand column. The first is for my grandfather, who is descended from Peter Witry (seq. 001,) and the other is for my grandmother, who is also descended from Peter, but by a different line of descent.

If you have the patience to perform such a search, and don’t make any mistakes, you will be able to trace all of the generations between you and Peter Witry. If you don’t have the patience, or if you get stuck, write to me. I will be happy to send you a list of your ancestors. This method of looking up ancestors is a bit tedious, but it is less tedious than the one in the old book.

Multiple marriages

In tracing your ancestry, you could run into a complication if an ancestor was married more than once. Which marriage is the one you descended from? The right-hand column on the table on page 2 lists the sequence number of the first marriage. Return to that marriage in this chapter and read through the marriages and children within that family to locate the specific marriage you descended from. To help you identify multiple marriages, a number like [2] is shown in front of to the name of the person who has multiple marriages.

This same convention is used to identify people who have married other people within the family. An example is my grandparents, John Wittry and Barbara Wittry (seq. 182.)

The future

Well, that is it. There is no more text after this point. The remainder of the book is the appendices with the family tree and the table of marriages. Like a new car, the book immediately became a bit obsolete as soon as I sent it to the publisher. I will be telling you of changes by means of the quarterly newsletter. My hope is that by using this book you might learn more about your family, you might meet new cousins, and you might send me new information. Enjoy!