PMP Keith Birkemeyer says investigative skills and photo identification are critical for both his day job and genealogy hobby. On the right are Harry and Nina Birkemeyer with their grandson Keith. Below are a few sisters of Keith’s grandparents on the Heckman side of the family.
A pest management professional studies his genealogy to deepen his family roots.
Many pest management companies can trace their roots back decades through previous owners and layers of management. It’s something of a family tree when one factors in people buying businesses or moving from one to another. Keith Birkemeyer, an Associate Certified Entomologist (A.C.E.) and owner of Gilbert, Ariz.-based ProBest Pest Management, has spent 22 years in the industry, all the while interested in genealogy.
“I grew up in a small town of about 850 people in Glandorf, Ohio,” Birkemeyer says. “Many of the town’s residents are related, so I always wondered about my ancestry. As weird as I am about bugs, I also like gravestones because they can tell you a lot about history. I ran into a set of gravestones in Luraville, Fla., and it finally dawned on me that most of the family died of yellow fever transmitted by mosquitoes.”
“I’m a public health professional, first and foremost,” he adds. “Mosquitoes have killed more people than anything, and fleas are probably second.”
Birkemeyer spends four hours a week investigating his family history online and in graveyards. But while Birkemeyer wants to trace his own roots, he wants to help others, too. For instance, he spent 10 hours taking photos of every cemetery stone at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. He plans to upload the images to www.findagrave.com to help relatives of military personnel who might not to be able to visit the site in person.
Birkemeyer began his formal genealogy work 11 years ago, and has about 27,000 names in his family tree. They’re not all related, but he scours the obituaries from the county in Ohio where he’s from and often links them via children or marriages. This research has enabled him to trace his paternal (Birkemeyer) roots to about 1870 and his maternal (Heckman) ones to 1760. Genealogy helped Birkemeyer learn his paternal ancestors probably arrived in the United States in the 1800s from Germany. He also discovered ancestral links to Holland and Belgium.
While he hasn’t come across a famous relative, Birkemeyer has discovered a few characters in his tree — including an uncle who had nine marriages, three of which were to previous wives. Another relative had a more respectable claim to fame: His great-granduncle carried the U.S. flag in the Civil War and is buried in Atlanta.
Genealogy is a hobby for Birkemeyer, but there are plenty of similarities between his after-hours interest and chosen profession.
“Pest management and genealogy can include a lot of detective work,” he says. “Sometimes it isn’t easy, but the legwork has to be done. Questions such as where did the bed bugs come from, who brought them in and when, for example, are similar to questions used to investigate family history.”
Birkemeyer uses software programs to trace his family, but archives and online tools can only take one so far. He has only one regret: “One thing I wish I could do over is talk with my great-grandparents and grandparents about the stories of their lives.”
You can reach Jacobs, a Cleveland-based freelance writer, at jacobs3927@gmail.com.
Leave A Comment