Moose / Mussgnug

A few weeks ago, I discovered a convoluted and distant familial relation with a coworker’s wife, just through casual conversation: His wife’s aunt married my great-grandfather’s cousin. (Or was it nephew? I had worked it out and am too lazy now to go back and look because it doesn’t really matter). This branch of my family was from the Taylorsville/Statesville area of North Carolina, which is where her family still lives. That coworker brought me a newspaper from Taylorsville, though it’s all modern news and people I don’t know anything about, but still kind of neat.

Today, I walked up on that same coworker having a conversation about his German heritage and the meaning of his surname (“unruly”) and I once again brought up my Taylorsville folks: The Mussgnugs. He asked what it meant, and I had to look it up. I honestly never thought about it. Some genealogist I am.

Instead of scanning today, I’m linking to this information about the Mussgnugs. The author takes a stab at what he thinks Mussgnug translates to from German, but instead, I took “Muss” and “Genug” and plopped them into Google Translate. The result: “Has Enough.” I’ll interpret that as saying my folks came from humble and modest background.

There’s a brief history on the Mussgnug/Mussgenug/Moose family here. My Mooses came from Anthony Moose in Taylorsville.

Mary Catherine “Molly” Moose Ambrotype, circa 1867

Mary Catherine "Molly" Moose Ambrotype
Mary Catherine “Molly” Moose (b. 2 Feb 1866, Alexander County, NC; d. 2 Apr 1953, Raleigh, Wake County, NC)
Wife of Alonzo Patrick Benfield
Ambrotype (Glass etching)
Given by Vera R. Harrison

A few notes on this one:
An ambrotype is made by etching the image onto glass (in reverse, on the back side), and giving it a subtle tint. There is a dark sheet behind the glass that helps to see the image, but with just the glass itself, it is very hard to see. Images like this are always in cases to hold all the pieces together. It is impossible to scan an item like this, and because of lighting and reflection on the glass, it is difficult to take a picture of it. This image is a composite of two photographs I took, which I blended together to remove as much light glare as I could from the image itself. (Fun!) I didn’t worry about the light glare on the metal frame.