John Schafer

John Schafer is a native of Minnesota.  All of his ancestors were 19th-century German-speaking immigrants who migrated to German-speaking colonies in the Midwest.  These colonies continued speaking German into Schafer’s parents’ generation, though the language was gradually lost in the period following World War II.

His years of work on his German, Bohemian, Moravian, Luxemburger, and Belgian ancestors have given him strong skills in tracking such immigrant families from the Midwest back to their ports of entry (e.g., New York, Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia).  He has also developed outstanding skills at making the leap across the Atlantic to the ancestral village or town from which almost every one of his ancestors came, and has visited almost all of these places of origin.  In a number of cases, he has re-established ties with cousins that had been broken from the time of his family’s emigration in the 19th century.

Schafer’s work on his ancestral lines have given him strong expertise in locating records on the American side of the Atlantic that enable the German (Luxemburger, Belgian) roots of his ancestors to be identified.  He also has extensive experience working in church books and parish records on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in archival research, including archival work in Germany and the Czech Republic.  His knowledge of German and Latin have proven indispensable for pushing many of his lines back to the 1700s or earlier.

As with Dr. Lindsey, Dr. Schafer has chosen his middle name as his professional genealogical researcher’s name, to honor his immigrant Schafer ancestor, Johann Schafer, who emigrated from Dreis in Kreis Daun of the Eifel region of Germany in 1856, settling in Stearns Co., Minnesota.