Bach FAQ 82
Did the Bachs Once Come from Papua New Guinea?..
No, no, no, the Bachs aren’t from Papua New Guinea. But – as strange or, rather, silly as that may sound to 99 percent of all Bach enthusiasts – for the “passionate and dedicated” Bach genealogists among us, it’s fascinating:.
These days, people no longer rely solely on traditional methods to trace their ancestors. In other words, they no longer search only in church archives. Like so many other things, genealogy has now also gone fully “digital.”..
The market leader with an invaluable database – and I mean that seriously – is the U.S.-based portal Ancestry.com, a real company. It offers a membership service. Using the contributions of many millions of people, mainly Americans, it purchases entire databases of historical church records, ship manifests, immigration documents, and government records, primarily in Europe. And it publishes them. There, members can access the data and browse online. Anyone who has ever spent five hours searching on a microfilm reader at a regional church archive will greatly appreciate the difference between “somewhere” and being at their own computer..
But then: Ancestry.com is also a community of everyone searching for their ancestors. And this is where it gets exciting. Are you looking for Grandpa Hermann? He might have been married to Aunt Hertha. And she’s already found other family members. Along with old photos to go with them. Now Emma in Hamburg, Germany and Terri in Dallas, Texas are sharing their experiences. Is it complicated so far?..
Next step. Since we’re so used to everything being fully digital these days, you can now also incorporate entire family trees from Ancestry into your own research. The “best” part is: This includes all the errors as well. And what does that mean? If an amateur genealogist is sloppy in his work and mistakenly identifies the wrong great-grandfather as his own, he enters that person into his family tree. If another genealogist then adopts this sloppily researched information, chaos is soon complete..
And that brings us to Veit and Papua New Guinea. Someone, an amateur researcher, or perhaps just a joker, has decided that Veit’s birthplace is Papua New Guinea. And ever since that happened, the claim has been spreading further and further across the internet. We’ve come across it many times already. Maybe one day we’ll be able to eliminate it again..
So... it's 14,000 kilometers (... 8,700 miles) from Wechmar to Papua New Guinea. That's not where the Bachs came from..
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