(9) With the new depths one can plumb with Ancestry now charging for the privilege of showing all shared matches down to 8cM, I opened up the matches for a 2nd cousin for my grandmother today. I'd looked around his matches before, but not found any conclusive coordinates.
I began pawing through some of the lower cM matches that peeled off from the main cluster of matches. Finding a clump of closely related people with common matches from ancestors born c. 1850 I quickly spied a few names that looked to be the same - Schuchman, Shookman and others. The happened to converge in the area of one of my dead ends - in the vicinity of Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany.
An ancestor from here, who had found his way to Madras and eventually Singapore had left a clue of his origin when he advertised his music school with he being "of Darmstadt". More useful, was a reply to his son asking in a German magazine if any of his father's brothers were still alive, to which he got the reply "only Peter Haller, großherzoglich hessischer Oberconsistorialkanzlist in Darmstadt, Roßdorferstraße 49".
A search for this Peter Haller reveled his parents were Heinrich Haller and Elisabeth Ahl. While my ancestor Maximilian Joseph Daniel August Haller was listed online as having two different sets of parents and widely reported to have married a Miss Lower, both of whom died in Germany. It appears there was a case of mistaken identity, with there being a Maximilian Joseph Daniel Haller (minus the August) born around the same time.
I'd previously asked a German genealogist to flesh this out, as I am not familiar with the records and can't read those I have found online. But he did not reply after I accepted his terms.
So I hoped I may find some clues in DNA matches. It seems very few Germans have taken tests. But many people from the US, with German ancestry have. So virtually all my deeper German matches are from such people, and thus the common ancestors are born in the 1700s.
Of the matches I found with links to Schuchman, Shookman, I found that there were inconsistencies in the trees, with the common issue of bridging the gap back to Germany and the leavings of novices who botch together trees with anything that comes to hand. After some time I had several relatively close matches going back to Schuchman in Darmstadt and it looked like the common link might be Philipp L Schuchmann (1748) m Anna B Rahmgens. But then I found another line of cousins, more distantly related to those first research,; and these ones had a slightly closer line to my prospective ancestors.
The prospective mother of my Haller ancestor was Anna Sophia Catherine Dielmann, who was a 1st cousin five times removed of the DNA match with the largest cM of 18, with the common ancestors of three DNA matches being Johann Andreas Kilian (1709) m Anna Margarete Ramge; and another 7 came via the parents of Anna Margarete Ramge. The first three had two descents from Ramge.
