The biggest obstacle was obvious. I live in the Chicago area and I cannot just hop into the county clerk office or local church in Worms, Germany. What was so frustrating was that I KNEW the results were somewhere online. After all, the Worms records were more completely available online than many many other German cities. I had found the records of her husband (great grandfather), sons, and even a daughter that had died as a child. The family had no information about her. All I knew was what an uncle, now deceased, told me about his paternal grandmother. "She was selfish and mean. She didn't like my mother and didn't even care if her own grandchildren were starving during WWII. We would climb her fenced yard to steal potatoes from her garden." Wow, nice grandmother wasn't she? That explains no information on the family side I guess. Another problem is her surname. Many German records on Ancestry.com for instance may have been transcribed by those whose native language is English. ä translates into ae. Kränzle in the US (and sometimes in Germany ) is Kraenzle. Elisabeth also lived during a time when German writing was transitioning from the old (beautiful but tough to decipher) Gothic script. And what if the particular clerk or priest just had lousy or sloppy handwriting?
I wrote out Kränzle and Kraenzle hurriedly in cursive and looked at it to see how different it may appear if I had no clue her name was Kränzle. Found her! Ancestry thought great grandmother was Elisabethe Krauzee!
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| 2 May 1946 death record of Elisabeth Kränzle nee Knell |
great grandmother
Elisabethe Knell Kränzle
b: 28 February 1873 Biblis, Hesse, Germany
d: 2 May 1946 Groß-Bieberau, Hesse, Germany
***click on document to enlarge for easier reading***