Solved: The Thier-Disselbrede Mystery - Part 8 - Final

William Disselbrett is my kids' great great grandfather and, thus, at that top of their Mom's side of their five-generation family tree.

It's his five-generation family tree, though, that has more twists and turns than most ancestors so close to us in age do.

This piecing together of facts and hypothesis forms an overall theory that William Disselbrett and his descendants actually descend from the surname Thier, not Disselbrett.

I hope I've explained it in a way that both makes sense and is entertaining along the way.  This has been the most difficult and the most intriguing of my personal research projects since first taking up this hobby of genealogy in early 2012.

I'm grateful to the people who helped make these conclusions possible.  First, there are the institutions.  FamilySearch.org and the Church of Jesus Christ's Family History Library's vast collection of microfilms.  Thanks to the LDS church, I can see records from over 200 years ago in another country.  That's been key.

The Burlington Historical Society in Burlington, Wisconsin was of huge help. Don, there, maintains a vast collection that anyone with ancestors in Burlington is lucky to enjoy in completing their research.

I'm grateful to Pat Berens at the Reynoldsburg Family History Center who helped scrutinize the material I've presented.  Any mistakes in logic are all mine though, but when she concluded, "I think you have this right" it inspired me to take the final step of publishing my findings.

I'm grateful to fellow researchers who have searched this family's surname via William Disselbrett's sisters--Jane McCullough (Gertrude), Fred Timp (Mary Catherine), and Carolyn Gipp (Francisca)

I'm especially grateful to Debbie Bluett and Elaine Zarnstorff who are also descendants of William Disselbrett's mother Angela Elizabeth Moeller Disselbrede Koldeway.  Elaine is the one who boldly sought out the emigration records in Selm and, best of all, shared them with everyone else so they could be found and expanded upon by others.  One of the highlights of my genealogy research is getting to share the fact that I had found Elaine's great grandmother's baptismal and marriage records in Germany during my trip to Salt Lake City in February.  They weren't in any index so that find opened a lot more generations.

And I'm grateful to my cousin David Armstrong who has been a genealogical coach to me and who has emphasized, with a mathematician's sense, of the need for accuracy in one's family tree.  I'm trying to approximate that as much as I can.

Lastly, I hope, now, my father-in-law can drive down the road a few miles and visit his grandfather's grave in Browerville knowing quite a bit more about William Disselbrett and the family's name.  I've made sure William's great great grandkids do.