Ancestry Saturday: A Paper Maker Makes The Case For Paper

I had been looking for the naturalization of my fourth great grandfather, Bernard Dickman, for most of the last 15 months.  A digitized index was looked through.  Digital searches were made too.

Digital found nothing.

It was a look through the paper version that hit pay dirt.

Bernard Dickman was recorded as Bernard Dekman in the paper index, a misspelling that never occurred to me and never turned up in the digital searches.

Despite the misspelling, the evidence points to this being him.  He's listed as a "papermaker" which matches his 1850 Census listing with that same profession.  His age of 40 in 1852 also matches his birth year 1812 in numerous other documents, including the health department death record and Census reports.

 

You could say a papermaker made the case for paper.

Now, finding him in a ship's record is the next challenge.  By all reports, my third great grandmother was born in Germany in 1839.  If this naturalization record is to be believed, she was born after her father Bernard's emigration, which seems unlikely.  Some info is wrong.

Stay tuned.