Hi everyone!
It's time to get to know another one of our wonderful WikiTreers. This week's member is Oliver Stegen.
Oliver became a Wiki Genealogist in December 2017. He is active in our Germany and Remember the Children projects and is one of our Connectors.
When and how did you get interested in family history?
I’ve been interested in my family’s history from a young, like primary-school age. My mother and maternal grandmother had left Thuringia (East Germany) in 1959 and settled in Lower Saxony (West Germany). Still, their roots remained strong and they kept up the connection to the Southern GDR, so I vividly remember visits in my childhood and youth (1970s and 1980s) to friends and family in Gotha, Jena, Leipzig, and Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz). At family reunions of those in the “free West”, I loved to hear the stories what it was like to grow up in “the East”, and especially listening to my great grandma Erna, who lived the last nine months of her life with us. On my father’s side, he had researched his ancestors, all of them from farming communities between Lüneburg and Uelzen, so I still have hand-copied notes from the late 1970s which I copied as a nerdy pre-teen.
What are some of your interests outside of genealogy?
I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my life to minority language development worldwide, with a particular focus on Bantu languages in East Africa. Hobbies include Beethoven (listening, analyzing, and playing his piano pieces), Tolkien (philosophical and theological background of Middle-earth), local politics (I’m a municipality committee member for environment, climate and rural development), and the interaction between psychology and mental health (models like enneagram, MBTI etc. vis-à-vis topics like addiction, burnout, autism spectrum etc.).
How long have you been on WikiTree? What brought you here and why did you start getting involved?
When returning to Germany in 2016 after 25 years abroad, I had decided to resurrect my genealogical interests. Even before that return, I had started to use Ahnenblatt, a German software programme, to compile my handwritten trees and ancestor lists. At the time, I was trying to shed some light on the family of my mother’s LNAB Graul, and after visiting the Magdeburg church archives in August of 2017 (which expanded her known Graul blood relations from seven persons to fifty-one!), I had even more handwritten notes and copies of church book entries. I was convinced that I needed an online platform, and after investigating and comparing the respectable ones available, I was impressed by WikiTree’s mission, accessibility and sustainability, and became a member in December of 2017.
At the time, my mental health had gone into a rapid downward spiral; by October 2018, I canceled all social media accounts, and in August 2019 went completely non-digital. So I thought, that also was the end of my brief WikiTree activity. Thanks to three months at a specialist clinic in 2020, I re-learned an appropriate while limited use of the digital world, and when 9th cousin (as we discovered since) Steven Greenwood contacted me in early 2021 with a request about his Gause ancestors, I cautiously took up WikiTree again. I’m very grateful to be back, praying and working hard (“ora et labora!”) to avoid the pitfalls of digital addiction.
What is your genealogical research focus?
Probably like many family history amateurs, I started with my family’s prominent ancestral names, in my case esp. Stegen and Ostermann on my father’s side, and Graul and Schlegel on my mother’s. This corresponds with a focus on rural Lower Saxony between Hamburg and Hannover and on small towns in Schwarzburg, Anhalt and various Saxon states (what is now mainly Thuringia). Due to the aforementioned mental health challenges, I’m limiting my digital involvement, so am mainly dependent on hardcopy sources. I’ve bought a number of books which compile church register data, and have been fortunate that both paternal and maternal ancestors feature in such available books. I’ve listed my “treasures” at WikiTree’s space page for German family books not available online.
(interview continues in comments)
