Meet the Hintz family

Mabel Hintz married Harvey Hanson
November 12, 1919

I mentioned my Hintz family reunion in an earlier post.  My father's mother was Mabel Hintz (b July 29, 1900 d September 26, 1978). She was the oldest daughter of Karl Hintz and Minnie Groll (or perhaps Krull or Kroll). 

[update: 8/30/2013 - Thanks to cousin Carol who caught a major error here. Karl Hintz was married to Anna Uhlenbrauck.  His father Frederick Hintz was married to Minnie Groll. Holy cow, budding genealogist, get the details right! Look for the 8/30/2013 post for a family tree chart with the right info in it. Thanks a million Carol.]


There are hundreds of descendants for Karl and Minnie and after my conversation yesterday with my newly-found Ohio Hintz cousin I expect there are many more we haven't yet discovered.

One of the recent serendipitous events in my life happened just an hour after my Mom passed.  My sister and I stopped at Mom's apartment to see if she had any funeral instructions among her papers.  While there, her phone rang, a surprise since very few people knew her new phone number.  The caller was my cousin Carol who wanted to stop by with forms for my Mom to update for the upcoming Hintz family reunion.  The timing seemed strange, but was strangely comforting.  I met with Carol that afternoon and was overwhelmed by the information she brought to share.

Mom had told me that there was family information shared at the Hintz reunions, but she never remembered to find her copies for me.  She couldn't remember who was collecting the information and didn't have a contact.  Turns out Carol made that happen for Mom.  (Thank you Carol!)  

The information Carol shared with me was overwhelming.  The Hintzes have been keeping a database of all the descendants of Karl and Minnie and updating it annually by having family members revise their own information, adding birth, marriage, divorce and death names and dates to reflect changes in their families. Carol adds this all to the database and prints out family spreadsheets for each family which are distributed at the family reunion in September.  I updated our family's information (forgetting to add a death date after my Mom's name - guess that was too new yet) and will attend the family reunion in a couple of weeks.  

Today I finally looked through the data provided by Carol.  Most of these folks are collateral families, but near and dear to my heart as these were the cousins I played with growing up and the uncles and aunts (actually my Dad's uncles and aunts) who always took an interest in our activities.  I've created a citation for this data collection and I've begun to enter the data for my grandmother's descendants - 140 names so far and 35 more to do.  

Grandpa & Grandma Palmbach (Mabel Hintz)
holding my brother Dale with cousin Daryl
Did you ever think you'd have almost 200 descendants by 2010?

There are 12 other Hintz families, luckily only one that is larger than my grandmother's and the rest half or less the size of my family.  

This data collection is a treasure trove and I'm hoping to have it added to Legacy before the reunion so I can print off family group sheets and or pedigrees for the families.  I'm fascinated to learn about the families of cousins whom I haven't been in contact with for 40 years.  I'm looking forward to the family reunion to gather stories that will help flesh out what is currently just a huge list of names and dates.  Adding color to this data will take a long time, but the connections are now there to make that happen.

Someone is watching out for me, making sure I continue to document our family history.  For that I am grateful.  And now I know when the family reunion is.  Hoping lots of Hintzes come.