Doebel/Debler/Doebler from Schwäbisch Gmünd to Baltimore

Last July I wrote "I forgot to look for my great grandmom." That was a post about reviewing my genealogy, and finding a couple lines that I had overlooked, ripe for further research. I said I would write again about it, and so here I go.

On one of those lines, my research has been very successful.

My 5th great grandmother Barbara Doebel was born in 1829 and immigrated to Baltimore, Maryland from Nandlstadt, Oberbayern, Bavaria (Germany). When I found some of her relatives on some microfilms of Baltimore church records, I got her parents names. I think I got one more generation off of FamilySearch.org because of names someone else shared on the tree. Anyhow, that is where I was in researching that family until this year. Between July and now, we were able to extend several of Barbara's lines a few more generations in microfilmed Nandlstadt town/family-book records. 

It took a few months because I ordered the microfilms I needed through the FamilySearch Catalog to be sent from their library in Utah to a local branch where I live. A few times I had the wrong film because the books spanned multiple films and it was not clear which one had which families.  

When the films arrived each time I got an email letting me know, and I drove to the library to look at them. I photocopied and then scanned into the FamilySearch Family Tree all the relevant records, as I typed in the new names that I was finding.

After going through all the relevant records for Nandlstadt, I analyzed the records for next steps. The Nandlstadt records only took the families to a certain point. The Doebler surname had various spellings in the original records, and I will use various spellings too. The earliest Doebler in my line, in Nandlstadt records, had listed the town that this earliest Doebler was from: Schwäbisch Gmünd, Niederbayern, Bayern, Germany

See that record [click here].

Using the same kinds of microfilmed town/family-books for Schwäbisch Gmünd, the line could be traced all the way into the 1500's before the paper trail ran out. Now, that is a good example of having research success after overlooking clues on my tree for a few years.