I’ve been working on my Pitz side of my family for a few years, but it’s taken a while for me to get anywhere with them. My 2nd great grandparents are Catherine Pitz and Joannes Konzen, they were both born in Germany and immigrated to the US. They were married on 12/22/1855 in Dubuque County, Iowa, and they moved to Chickasaw County by 1858 where they lived for the rest of their lives. From Catherine’s obituary I discovered that her maiden name was Pitz and she had a half-brother John Pitz who also lived in New Hampton, Chickasaw, Iowa. Then I discovered from John/Joannes Pitz’s obituary that he was born in Mettendorf, Germany. From there I looked through Tom Pick’s microfilm index (His index is priceless, in case I haven’t said that before) http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pick/mettendo.txt and found Catherine and Joannes listed as children of Gregorius Pütz.

Since I found that information I’ve never been able to find a microfilm for Mettendorf that looked like it would have their birth information on it. I don’t know if Family Search recently added some microfilms or added new descriptions to some of them, but recently I ran across some indexes of German parish records in World Vital Records. And in those records I found indexes of birth records for Catherine Pitz and much of her family in Mettendorf. Each indexed record included the number of the microfilm they had been indexed from and that helped me determine which microfilms of Mettendorf to order from Family Search.

In the first film I looked through I found the jackpot – or at least that’s what it felt like to me. I found a ton of Pitzes/Pützes/Puetzes, however you want to spell it. In my 2nd great grandmother Catherine Pitz Konzen’s birth record in 1828, I discovered that her brother Peter was her twin. I’d wondered about that possibility before, but I didn’t have proof of their real birth dates until I looked through that Mettendorf film.

Catherine and Peter weren’t the only twins in their family. The first children born to their parents Catherine Rouller and Gregory Pitz (also seen as George in records) in 1820 were a set of twins – Anna Maria and Michael Pitz. Unfortunately, Anna Maria and Michael both died in 1820, less than a month after their births. I also found birth records for Catherine Rouller and Gregory Pitz’s sons Michael (1821) and Joannes (1824). Then I found the record of Catherine Rouller Pitz’s death in February 1833.

George Pitz’s sister Catherine Pitz gave birth to an illegitimate son named Joannes Pitz in 1808. Later that year she married Joannes’s father Theodore Jutz and Joannes Pitz was legitimized to Joannes Jutz. Catherine Pitz and Theodore Jutz had another son named Joannes Jutz in 1809 and a son named Joannes Hugo Jutz in 1812. And I discovered that Michael Pitz, son of Catherine Rouller and Gregory Pitz, married Anna Maria Kohn in 1855 in Mettendorf.

There were many other Pitzes in the records that I can’t connect to our family tree, yet. In the near future, I’ll write about the other Mettendorf and Alsdorf (Catherine Rouller Pitz’s hometown) records that I also found.