I am looking for Diacont's in the United States?

Question

I am trying to find more of my family history

Answer 1

Hey David,

A quick search on Diacont using ZABASEARCH turns up more entries than they will post. If you focus the search on a state, it will bring up some entries in each state.

There were no GENFORUMs, so did not list the General site.

There are Diacont family entries, at various web sites, some listed below, and that should help you to contact other people interested as well.

I put some search tools below, and the LDS Family Search site has entries of ancestors.

These should help you.

Answer 2

I can tell you that the surname is German, but you probably already knew that. The only way to find your own family history is to do the research.

Start with downloading a software program called "Personal Ancestral File" from the Mormon church at http://www.familysearch.org. Then fill in yourself, your parents, grandparents...whatever information you have.

The key pieces of information that help in genealogy research are birth, marriage and death records. We also use census records back before 1930 (there are federal privacy laws that keep a lot of information private for 72 years after the event), land records, school records, etc. Whatever you can find that shows who someone was, who their parents were, etc. Church records are particularly important, especially back before the days of birth certificates and marriage licenses...which was only in the last 80-130 years.

After you go through the information that you know, talk to your parents, grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, old neighbors of your grandparents, pastor at your church...anyone who might know about the family. Once you're sure you have all the information that people had tucked away in their heads (and much of it might be inaccurate...people "embellish" when they think they have an audience...as any genealogist and you'll hear all the stories of royalty and false links to US presidents), but keep the information well-documented so that you can go through it for nuggets of truth.

Then you get to do the real work. Going to libraries or County Clerk offices where your family lived, pull up the records that give real information...dates of birth, marriage, death...parents' names, witnesses at marriages (usually family or very close friends), land transfers, probate records (wills), etc. Keep copies of everything and keep them organized.

Read through old county history books and published biographies of local families at the library. You'll be surprised how much information is in there.

Census records are a great source of information, but rarely do we put stock in the spellings of names and places. If there's a place where spelling didn't count it was in the US Census Bureau. Sometimes we have to be very diligent in finding people because of how badly names were spelled.

Military service records are also great sources of information. In recent generations, you can get this information from the funeral home where people were shown. Older generations will be on the internet and available for search, then you contact the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Military Service Unit in St Louis MO if you want more information from their service records. These are great records and really help give a well-rounded idea of who our ancestors were and what they went through.

When you get back to the generation that immigrated to the US, we start pulling passenger records. For people coming here after 1892 from Europe, the primary port was Ellis Island. Those records are at http://www.ellisisland.org. Before that the primary port was the Port of New York at Castle Clinton. Those records aren't completely transcribed yet, but many are. They are found at http://www.castlegarden.org.

Other ports are Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Savannah and New Orleans. Not all records will be on the internet and not all records still survive. But we try them all until proven otherwise. Also, many of the records from Europe (the ports from which they left) are now being put online, especially Rotterdam, Hamburg and Bremen. There's a series of books for your German ancestors that you can cut through all the other searching with by going to a large library. They're called "Germans to America" and are quite thorough.

Some of the sites that will be most helpful are:
www.familysearch.org
www.ancestry.com
www.genealogy.com
www.ellisisland.org
www.castlegarden.org
www.cyndislist.com

Just beware. We don't know how accurate anyone else's research is, we have to verify it all for ourselves. I've seen trees put up on the internet that were HORRIBLE. They had kids giving birth to their parents, they'd find an ancestor with a unique name and pulled the last name of the next person they found with that first name and assume that was the person they needed...nothing proving it to be true.

We work in facts, not assumptions. Assuming one David Leinberger living in the right county and of roughly the right age is the one we're looking for is a horrid mistake. He might have 3 cousins of the same age and in the same area, but no one knows which one is your ancestor until you prove it with documents. Once you go off on a bad limb once or twice, you'll regret ever doing that again. But when you get that tree done well and done accurately, it's the most amazing feeling.

Genealogy is very addictive and I hope you enjoy tackling your own tree.
Hope this helps a little...good luck.

Answer 3

have you tried rootsweb? or ancestry.com?