Steinfirst Serendipity

Bird's-eye view map of Titusville, Pennsylvania, 1896, by Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler

The city of Titusville, Pennsylvania, in Crawford County, was incorporated on February 28, 1866.  So today is the 159th anniversary of that event.  Happy birthday, Titusville!

But I've never had family in Titusville, so why do I care about this city?

Well, you never know when or where you're going to find people researching the same families you're working on, or even used to be working on.

Last year I was giving a presentation to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Pittsburgh.  The topic was resources to help find maiden names, one of those perennially difficult research areas.

Several of the examples I use in that talk come from research I did many years ago on the (Jewish) Steinfirst family of western Pennsylvania.  Various members of the family were in Pittsburgh at different times, ranging from 1880 through to the present day.

And would you believe it, someone at the presentation recognized many of the names in the examples I used?  That's his family!

I began my research on the Steinfirsts in 2005 and pretty much stopped in 2010.  I had never determined where they emigrated from in Europe or even whether Steinfirst was the original family name.  One branch of the family, the Stones, I knew did not start out with that name, but I had not learned what the name was in Europe.

And now I know!

Steinfirst, which I had thought was a name the family had created here because I couldn't find anyone outside the family with that name, was actually the name in Europe, albeit spelled a little differently.  Stone was originally Stamm; I had been focusing on names that either started or ended with "Stein", so I was way off and doomed to failure.

More records have become available since I stopped researching the family, which made some of these discoveries possible, along with dedicated research by other individuals.

And even though I am no longer actively researching the Steinfirsts, I am still fond of the family because of the amount of time I put into the research, and I was really excited to have answers to some of the questions I was stuck on years ago.  Plus I'm sharing the research I did with the person at my presentation, so I'm adding to his knowledge of his family.

That's one of the really cool aspects of genealogy:  helping other people find more information about their families.  It just makes you feel good.