Saturday, January 19, 2013

Surname Saturday - Dork

Family researchers often have difficulty searching for surnames because first and last names were interchangeable, or names had multiple meanings.

I don't think I could get much better mileage out of an ancestral surname than Dork. I consider myself lucky. You know you giggled, didn't you?

Sure, I have to come up with better search terms because I end up at site after site of video gamers, teenager blogs, and the like. Once I weed those out, the results are pretty sparse. And there are very few of us descendants. But that's why we search, right?

snip of the Dork name in my great-great-grandfather Otto's 1869 birth record

Back to genealogy. My Dork family, including great-great-grandfather Otto, came from a tiny village called Charlottenwerder in Kreis Rosenberg, West Prussia to Lansing, Michigan in the 1880's. Here is a nifty page of old postcards I found showing some of the old buildings in Charlottenwerder (now called Redaki in Poland).

If someone in the "old country" contacts me about the Dork's or Doerk's of Charlottenwerder, I hope we're related. I'll rephrase that: please contact me!

© 2013 Sally Knudsen