Walking through the records on George H. Van Antwerp on Family Search it is evident he had to deal with a lot of loss in his life. Growing up we were always told that he drank himself to death, but that may not be the case in evaluating the records. I am going to attempt to document here what we know and what we still need to figure out. George H. Van Antwerp was born to Eugene and Cora Van Antwerp. His name on his birth certificate was recorded as Vanawerpt. He was born 23 OCt 1901 in Millbrook Township, Mecosta, Michigan. Birth record His parents moved to San Diego, CA sometime prior to 1910. 1910 Census record His mother appears to have died or left by 1920. 1920 census record It appears he had two children out of wedlock or at least we can't find a marriage certificate. Leslie Roy Van Antwerp 1921 Leslie Troedel) and Rose Laura Van Antwerp (Rose Laura Sheperd) 1922. He would have been 19 or 20 in 1921 when Leslie was born. Arletta would have been 16. Leslie's birth 1921 and death record 1952 1930 census has Rose and Leslie as Van Antwerp and as step daughter and step son to Frank Troedel. It appears that he married a Verna Melville and had a son Ronald. (Verna's obituary 1926) Ronald seems to have been adopted by his grandparents or someone in the family as he took on the name of Melville and is not noted as living with his dad in the census records. He is noted on George's obituary, so it appears he remained in contact to some extent and lived nearby. Obituary 1963 He married again. Sarah Walker in 1929 and had a son Robert E. Need to find out: 1. What happened to his birth mother. Whether there are any other records linking him to Arletta Cox and Rose Sheperd. 2. Is Leslie's birth year 1919 (death record) or 1921 birth record?

Helps for German Handwriting

https://script.byu.edu/Pages/German/en/intro.aspx

https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Germany_Handwriting

Reinhold Papenfus Death Certificate

Links to Schaffhausen Pictures

http://www.4shared.com/dir/oxN7GhJ3/Schaffhausen_1.html
http://www.4shared.com/dir/I47ZLiXi/Schaffhausen_2.html
http://www.4shared.com/dir/aE0qSAOQ/Schaffhausen_3.html

Schaffhausen, Switzerland

Megan, Doug & I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Wilchengen & Siblingen Switzerland the beginning of July 2010. We stayed in Schaffhausen, Switzerland which is the county seat. It was so neat to visit the nearby villages where my grandmother and great grandparents lived!!! We saw the church where they were probably married and the town well where my grandmother most likely drew water as a child! We searcehed through the archives twice and were able to get information from church records dating back to the 1600's! Since we didn't have much time to decipher everything, we took pictures of the pages we thought might be pertinent. I haven't had the chance to go through them, yet, but I'm excited to find out how they fit into our family. We had a couple of missing links we were looking for so hopefully they'll match up! It ends up that Gisel (Gysel) and Kuebler there are like Smith and Jones here so it's hard to tell what is pertinent and what isn't. I'm posting some of the pictures here and will post more as we decipher things.
Sue

Pommerania

Reinhold Papenfus is supposedly from Rummel, Germany. It is pretty evident that he was from Germany. His death certificate, naturalization papers, and many census records state that he was from Germany. However, they do not have specifics. I’m not sure where we got Rummel from unless it was what he told his children and it was passed down. It is hard to find any place in Germany called Rummel, thus it may be logical to conclude that the place was actually Rummelsburg. Burg may have just been left off. If this is the case then Reinhold’s hometown may have a more interesting history then thought. Rummelsburg was actually once a district of Pomerania, a province of Prussia. Germany illegally annexed Prussia in 1932. In 1947 with the treaty of Versilles, the land belonging to Prussia was redistributed between many countries including Poland which ended up with Pomerania. Rummelsburg was given a Polish name of Miastko. Many of the original inhabitants of Pomerania were forced to leave and much of their culture and history was lost.

http://feefhs.org/
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/text/versaillestreaty/ver027.html
http://members.aol.com/pommern1/content.html#HS

Family History

Here is my first attempt at getting my family history in an accessible format, so there can be more collaboration in our individual efforts on our family history research.