You Asked

To Jan Stau er—my German grandmother used to make something like “Grotha Clump”, but it was called Groten Hans or Mehlbeutel (Flour Bag). It’s a dumpling that you cook inside a cloth bag; the prunes with lemon juice and cinnamon (cooked separately) make a syrup. ere’s no set number of prunes, just as many as you want.

“Grotha” sounds to me like a form of Plattdeutsch, meaning large, big, great, pronounced “growta” (the “h” is silent). Clump means a clump or lump and would rhyme with the sound in oomph. So a grotha clump would be some large dumpling mass.

In tracing my grandfather and his family in the 1880 census, without realizing it I reversed my great-grandfather’s name, Ilg Pius instead of Pius Ilg. And there it was showing the whole family listed under my great-grandfather’s rst name. Probably because of his strong German accent, it was listed incorrectly on the census.

I am getting to the point where I have to think about who will get my genealogy stu —books, les, family notebooks, FTM family les, etc. I have no one in my family interested enough to want them. Does anyone have an answer for this kind of problem?

Q: My adoption papers state that my birth surname was Yackiek, but I haven’t been able to nd anyone else in the world with this name. I haven’t been able to obtain a copy of my original birth certi cate to date because of the regulations of the state where I was born. Can anyone help?

A: We decided to take a stab at Sandy’s adoption story, thinking for sure we could nd something because the name is so unusual. A Google search result shows that Sandy has been working on the adoption problem for a long time ... but otherwise, it turned up little more.

We had a hunch that the name was Eastern European and possibly Jewish. We tried spelling it with a Y and a J in searches. We were especially hopeful when we went to JewishGen. org and found 23 matches, but none of them turned out to be the right spelling a er all. We learned via Sandy’s research that her father was in the Navy with links to California. We poked around in California indexes and the Military Grave Locator. Still nothing. We turned to our good friend Gary Mokoto for help.

From: Gary Mokoto To: Lou Szucs Subject: Unusual name

I maintain a Consolidated Surname Index at Avotaynu.com that contains more than 700,000 surnames, mostly Jewish. Yackiek is not in the list with J or Y. It sounds very Slavic, and I am sure it is misspelled. Using Google, Yackeik barely exists and Jackiek is not of much help. Jaczek is a Slavic surname.

Sandy’s story reminded us of the time Lou wrote an editor’s note about our Huggins name and research in Ireland. A woman went to her local library and found the article from a Google search. We still haven’t proved it, but there’s a good possibility that we are related. e lesson learned is that sometimes broadcasting a story and a name will provide the solution—try placing the name and the story on message boards and similar places where the bigger search engines will pick it up; the audience is widened dramatically and the story is archived. Even if the results are not immediate, the chances of the story being found are increased because they can be found years later.

Sandy, you might also have better results if you post your story all in one place—while we were able to nd quite a bit of information already posted by you, we had to dig through a number of sites to collect all the details.

And note that the potential misspelling of the name is huge—the Y and J were o en interchanged. We have Serbian friends with the last name of Yekich, and that triggered the idea of replacing vowels in the name. at exercise pointed to countless spelling possibilities. You may want to consider doing a more thorough surname study by plugging multiple spelling variants into as many search engines as possible.

Send your family history puzzlers to Ancestry Magazine Executive Editor Lou Szucs and Ancestry Weekly Journal Editor Juliana Szucs Smith at editor@ancestrymagazine.com.