Pope's Pop Placed Personals

According to a German newspaper, Pope Benedict's father met his wife through the 1920s' equivalent of craigslist. I can't really stand in judgment, since my paternal grandmother's parents met in much the same way.

Bild am Sonntag said 43-year-old Joseph Ratzinger senior placed an advertisement as a "low-level civil servant" seeking "a good Catholic girl, who can cook and sew a bit ... to marry as soon as possible, preferably with a picture," in a Bavarian paper in March 1920.

The second advert in the Altoetting weekly Liebfrauenbote stressed the gendarme Ratzinger's "irreproachable past" and said that while it would be "desirable" if his bride had some money, it was "not a condition" for marriage. [Link]

What About the Heritage of Her Cats?

Seen on craigslist:

Yank Seeks Christian SWF - 43

[snip]

American Christian Single, White, Male, age 43, slender, attractive, professional, financially secure seeks a Christian Mail-Order Bride of Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Hobbies include: genealogy, drumming in church Christian rock band, and cats.

[snip]

[Read the whole ad]

Oddly enough, this ad was not posted by David Duke, for whom genealogy is also very, very important.

Missing Any Irish Friends?

Serious researchers of Irish genealogy have long depended on the eight volumes of The Search for Missing Friends: Irish Immigrant Advertisements Placed in the Boston Pilot, edited by Ruth-Ann Mellish Harris, Donald M. Jacobs, and B. Emer O'Keeffe (Boston, Mass.: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1989-). Now these records are coming to the Internet, albeit in abstracted form, through Information Wanted, a website of the Boston College Irish Studies Program.

The Missing Friends advertisements, dating from 1831 to 1921, were placed by those seeking information about an Irish immigrant to America, and contain a varying amount of identifying data.

The advertisements contain the ordinary but revealing details about the missing person’s life: the county and parish of their birth, when they left Ireland, the believed port of arrival in North America, their occupation, and a range of other personal information. Some records may have as many as 50 different data fields, while others may offer only a few details. The people who placed ads were often anxious family members in Ireland, or the wives, siblings, or parents of men who followed construction jobs on railroads or canals.

Anyone finding a relative will still want to consult the original text, but the online index will surely help speed their research in the right direction.