My next step was to identify the rest of Wilhelm Jacob Winter’s family.  This didn’t seem like an especially daunting task, now that I had a specific geographic location where he had lived.

In actuality, it proved to be as difficult as the first step was easy.
 
Part of the problem was that a lot of Winters were mentioned in the church books for this town, which turned out to be so tiny it wasn’t even a crossroads—just a fork in the road.  (The relative density of Winters in this location made me wonder why we hadn’t all turned out to be cross-eyed banjo players.)
 
The other part of the problem was that nobody named Wilhelm Jacob Winter had been born in the area at a time that would have been reasonable for him, given his age at the time the census was taken.

At this point, I didn’t know what else to do but browse the church books for all mentions of people who shared my last name.  As I encountered Winter children being born, I found myself inwardly cheering them on—“Go, Winters!”

Then it occurred to me that since my greatest interest was in seeing the parents of my known ancestors, it made more sense to look in the deaths section of the church books.  But instead of quickly finding the demise of my ancestors’ parents, I found instead that one of the couples whose last name happened to be Winter had buried their child—at only a year old.  Then I found another—and another—all while still in childhood.
 
I was more deeply saddened than I expected to be, or could rationally explain.  How could a piece of microfilm showing a page of a dusty 150-year-old book have touched me in such a profound way? All I knew about these kids was that they shared my last name—as did lots of people in the geographic area I was researching to whom I had no relation at all.

As I continued my sleuthing, I went so far as to map out all the family relationships I could discern among the Winters of this area, as well as patterns of how they named their children.  After a lot of fruitless rummaging around, in one Winter family I finally stumbled on something that would solve the mystery.  It was a pattern of naming children after their godparents.

One of these pairings stood out from the rest:  the godfather of a boy who was christened Helmuth Jacob Winter was also named Helmuth, but he was more commonly known as just Helm.  In day-to-day life, the boy’s dad would almost certainly have called his son the same thing he called his friend, the godfather.  And at a point in German history that was not far removed from the end of serfdom, with literacy still limited, it would not have been unusual for the son to have never known his full first name. 

Confusion between two first names also squared with something I had learned from the Mormons’ German genealogy expert about certain first names being broadly interchangeable—for example, Johann and Hans.
 
Finally, things started to add up for me:  at the time the son got married, a fastidious priest had most likely balked at the idea of entering a mere nickname in an official document, and made his own decision that Helm was short for Wilhelm, rather than Helmuth.

With this figured out, I went back to the records of the children’s deaths—and found that they were the offspring of the Helmuth who didn’t know his full first name.  They weren’t just any kids named Winter.  They were my own family.