What we don't know
Most family sites present a finished tree. This one has holes, and naming them is more useful than papering over them — each of these is answerable by a specific document.
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Was Richard Norbert ever ordained?
No record found carries a clerical title for him. The family tradition says the pastoral line ran to him; the documents say it stopped with his father.
What would settle itMissouri Synod personnel files at the Concordia Historical Institute, or living family memory.
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What exactly was Wilfred's last flight?
Answered in outline and open in detail. The family account is a training accident, and the Died Non-Battle classification corroborates it — that part is settled. What is not known is the aircraft, the crew, whether anyone survived, and which body of water. The record says only North Sea or Tyrrhenian, which are two very different answers.
What would settle itThe Missing Air Crew Report for 9 March 1945 and 306th Bomb Group operational records, via NARA.
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Which Reichenbach?
The missionary was born in 'Reichenbach, Silesia'. There are two. Reichenbach in Upper Lusatia is in Germany today and its church books survive intact. Reichenbach im Eulengebirge is Dzierżoniów in Poland, and its registers took severe wartime losses. Present evidence leans Upper Lusatia, but it is not proven.<span class="tag low">unproven</span>
What would settle itThe Dresden/Leipzig Mission intake file. Mission societies recorded birthplace and home parish on entry, and he entered around 1845. One page would settle it.
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Who translated the autobiography?
The Clarke Historical Library typescript of the missionary's memoir is catalogued as translated by his grandson. That man is unnamed here and stands directly in the family's gap.
What would settle itThe Clarke Historical Library catalogue record itself.
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Where in Germany, exactly?
Carl Gottlob's birthplace is unproven and his wife died there in 1856. The family's own European parish is not yet identified.
What would settle itParish registers via Archion and the EKBO holdings in Berlin, once the town is fixed.
A note on method
Two earlier attempts at this family record contradicted each other, and the more recent one was substantially wrong: it gave the missionary the wrong first name, put his mission in the wrong county, credited the wrong seminary, and had him landing at an immigration station that would not open for another four years. All four errors came from trusting secondary summaries instead of reading memorials and congregational records directly.
Everything on this site is sourced to something a reader can check. Where the source is user-contributed genealogy rather than a document, it is labelled unproven and treated as a lead rather than a fact.