Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Rabbit Hole!

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:
 
1)  Have you been down a genealogy rabbit hole lately?  What was it, and what did you find?  [If not, go find a rabbit hole! Try your FamilySearch Notifications or Ancestry.com Photos or Stories.]

2)  Share your rabbit hole chase and results in your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, BlueSky or other social media post.  Leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.

Here's mine:

On Friday, I received an email from FamilySearch with a Notification about new Memories.  I clicked on it and saw several notifications for my 6th great-grandfather, Johan Peter Ruth (1704-1771), who died in Cumru, Berks County, Pennsylvania Colony.  They were images of  pages uploaded by another FamilySearch user on FamilySearch Family Tree, and two of them were about probate records.  I checked my RootsMagic tree and noted that I don't have a probate record, so RABBIT HOLE here I come!

The images provided a summary, but did not provide the actual images of the probate records.  I immediately thought "I wonder if they are on FamilySearch Full-Text Search?"  They were not.

Plan B was "I wonder if someone has put them on the Internet?"  I Googled [Johan Peter Ruth Berks 1771] and was rewarded with several results, including FamilySearch Family Tree, WikiTree, and Jeff's Genealogy Info (https://jeffsgenealogy.info/MooreLine/g0/p606.htm).  That provided another summary of his life, including more info about his probate records.  And the page included a source citation for the probate record:  

 Pennsylvania Probate Records, 1683-1994. Images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. County courthouses, Pennsylvania. URL:   https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1999196, #185 pr Penn Probate, Berks Co., file: "Estates 1752-1799 Resher, Gabriel-Seitzinger, Nich."; folder: "Ruth, Peter CU 1771", images 1501-1577. Eldest son's petition for real estate partition names Peter Ruth's widow and fourteen surviving children, image 1523.

This probate packet on FamilySearch Digital Microfilm is over 70 pages long.  The petition is on images 1523-1524.  The promise of the eldest son and administrator, Michael Ruth,  to my ancestor, George Ruth, is on images 1535-1536.  There is a multi-page iuventory of the personal estate (total over £1,300), and a description of  all of the real property (total over £5,300).  There were 14 children named as heirs, and a widow's thirds.  In the end, my 5th great-grandfather George Ruth was promised £358.  Now I know where the land was, and have excellent original evidence naming all of the children of Johan Peter Ruth and his two wives.   I downloaded six images from the probate file.

But that's not all!  I went to Ancestry.com to my family tree profile for Johan Peter Ruth, and clicked Search.  I wanted to see if I could find a 1704 birth or baptism record for Johan in Wallhausen, Rhineland Pfalz (?), and two marriage records.  I found a baptism record from Kindenheim in Bavaria that matched the date that Jeff's Genealogy Info had.  But wait - the parents of the Bavaria Johan Peter Ruth is different from what is quoted on FamilySearch and Jeff's site.  Uh oh.  Someone has either the baptism date and place wrong or has the parents wrong.  I'm sticking with the Wallhausen family for now.

I checked the FamilySearch Full-Text Search, FamilySearch Images, and FamilySearch Catalog for records of Wallhausen, Rhineland-Palatinate and found no records at all.  A search in Germany Births and Baptisms indicate a few Roudt or Ruth baptisms entries but none for this Johan Peter Roudt, assuming he was born in Wallhausen.  Perhaps he was not born or baptized in Wallhausen.  

Also on the list of Search results on FamilySearch was the image of the 1733 immigration record in Philadelphia that lists Peter Roudt as a passenger on the Pennsylvania Merchant of London  ship out of Rotterdam and Plymouth.  I didn't have that either. I downloaded the entire PDF of the passenger list on the FamilySearch Memories page.  

So the result of this rabbit hole (two hours of effort and critical thinking) was that I know a lot more about Johan Peter Ruth, that I had a baptism error on my tree (and pehaps on many other trees too), and that I need to transcribe the probate pages (because, apparently, nobody else has done that).

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