MYSTERY MIKE – a ghost chaser call for help
I know, I know… I’m overdue in my storytelling, and I promise to get back to that soon on this blog. I do love sharing family stories. Many of them come from family lore, backed by my four decades of research in ancestral towns and on the internet. Some even came by the grace of this very website, through distant relatives who found it one way or another and helped me connect some of our common dots.
So now I turn to this blog not so much with a story as a request to help me solve one of my greatest genealogical frustrations: the life and origins of my father’s maternal grandfather, Michael Alexander Naujoks. I can trace the heritage of four of my eight great-grandparents back at least six generations to the 18th century. Most of the others are all traceable one way or another, but Naujoks remains a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma, to quote Winston Churchill.
Michael – or Michel as his name often appears in the German diminutive – was born in 1862 and died in 1926, that much I know. I can document his marriage to my great-grandmother, and census records tell me where he lived in 1900 and 1910. I know some other fun details about his life, but many facts are clouded by his propensity for – how can I respectfully say this about an ancestor – either simplifying, exaggerating, or downright lying about the truth.
For starters, where was he born? His death certificate, filed by his daughters, declares that he was born in Memel, today known as Klaipeda in Lithuania but then part of Prussia and from 1871 to 1923 part of the unified state of Germany. My grandmother told me he was born in Lithuania and as a boy moved with his family to northern Germany. Completely plausible, but defiantly unconfirmable, and mystery Mike didn’t help the situation.
On his marriage registry for the City of New York in 1898, he lists “Moscaw, Russia.” On his US passport application filed in 1904, he swore to being born in Skarn, Germany. A town by such a name never existed – much like a city named Moscaw – more likely he meant Scharn, Scharren, or Scharrendorf, all of which do exist, in different places.
Next mystery: when did he emigrate? I was able to find the ship’s manifest for a 35-year-old Michael Naujoks disembarking the Halle when it docked in Baltimore in 1897, sailing from Bremen (not far from a town called Scharrendorf), and listing his occupation as a sailor, which corroborates family stories. It also states that from 1891 to 1896 he had also been in the United States visiting an uncle in Dayton Ohio – and while there are still records of Naujoks family living in that city, that detail was never in the family lore. I was able to find a 1938 Ohio death certificate for a tailor named Michael Naujoks born the same year as my guy, but a few months earlier. Cousin? That migrant from 1897? Who knows…
About that passport application – that was for a 1905 trip taking his two daughters to visit the Naujoks family in Germany, something I remember my grandmother telling me about even though she was only four when they took that trip. I have ship’s manifest for their return trip, but rather than being accompanied by my great-grandmother there was a travel companion listed as another daughter, 22-year-old Anna Najouks. Again, no family lore tells about this, though he was 35 when he married my great-grandmother and it would not be surprising for him to have had a daughter by a previous relationship.
Michael Naujoks, wherefore art thou? Whence came you? If anyone reading this blog can shed some sort of light on this mystery, I would be grateful.
So The Story Goes Like This... 