Documentation Questions
I have a few documentation questions generally. Both of my great-great grandparents emigrated from what was then the Austrian-Hungarian empire in the early 1900s (probably 1905 for GGF and 1909 for GGM). One of the biggest things I'm having trouble finding is their actual place of birth! The documents I have found (largely through Ancestry.com via my universities subscription) have been vague (simply stating Austria or Yugoslavia depending on what was going on geopolitically at the time). I suspect this may largely be due to the fact that Ancestry mostly has indexes of these documents, but not the actual documents themselves.
I have no idea where to even begin to request their actual death certificats (I do have dates of death for both) or naturaliztion papers (I have "first papers" application date for GGF) which I am hoping will have more clear locations for their places of birth. I know they moved to Milwaukee, WI and basically stayed there the rest of their lives (living variously in little nearby villages like West Allis, Wauwatosa, etc.)
I guess I'm just feeling particularly overwhelmed because the family lore is that they were from Croatian/ Slovenian border towns, so I'm wondering if this is worth all this effort if it's only going to reveal that they were born in what is currently Slovenia! Especially because they listed "Slovene" (and German) as their native languages on various immigration manifests, census documents, etc. I'm mostly kept going by the (limited) hope that at least one of them might have been born in a Slovene-speaking part of what is now Croatia. Because Slovenia's citizenship process is much more strict and I would not qualify. My family has always considered ourselves to be both Croatian and Slovenian, but this renewed search into the ancestry has me questioning that!
The other overwhelming thing is that my GGF seemingly just threw letters at the ground and put that down for any and all of his paperwork. Sometimes his last name is spelled with a Y and sometimes with a J and sometimes it's a germanified version (think "chk" to replace the "k" sound in slavic languages or "tz" to replace the "c" sound) and sometimes it looks like a traditional slavic name. From the index of his marriage certificate, it looks like he used a nickname for his first name as well. (It's like he was thinking, nope! None of my ancestors are ever going back, let's make this the most complicated!) I know this is common, especially when it's someone else writing it down based on what he was saying like immigration manifests, but how do I pull the paperwork together to prove this is the same guy?
Maybe this is more venting than a question, but any advice or help in the right direction would be very appreciated!