The following is an announcement from Marianne Goss:
If you're as interested in finding out more about your ethnic group as in identifying your ancestors, a freelance researcher/writer in Chicago may be able to help you.
Marianne Goss says that if she were given an ancestor's nationality and birthplace in Europe, she could write a brief paper touching on such subjects as the region's ethnic and linguistic origins, history and politics, religion, traditional livelihood, customs, when and why the major immigration occurred, and how the first generation of immigrants lived in America.
"I believe that ancestor seekers are interested in more than names, dates, places, and relationships," says Goss, who has been a newspaper reporter and university editor and writer. The narratives she wrote about her own Slovak, German, and Luxembourger ancestors, in which vital statistics are supplemented by historical context, gave her the idea that others people might also want ethnic histories.
To make sure she's researching the right ethnic group, Goss needs to be told a town or region, not just a country, and a language or nationality. In addition, an approximate decade of immigration would help to identify who controlled the country at the time.
"One of my great-grandmothers was from a tiny minority in Belgium that spoke Letzeburgesch. If I hadn't known what language she spoke, I would have been researching the wrong group," Goss says. "And my Slovak ancestors said they were Hungarian on their immigration papers because their country was controlled by Hungary then. It's important to know such facts in order to write an ethnic history."
Goss is researching only European ethnic history for now because she's most familiar with it. A history would be six pages at most, and Goss is charging $25 a page. She would provide the histories via postal or e-mail, as requested. She can be contacted at mgoss2@yahoo.com.
