Who is Samantha Rose MERGENTIME?

I don't really know who Samantha Rose MERGENTIME is, but the people searching for her who visit my website never ask that question, or put anything else about what they are looking for in the search box. All they do is put her full name "Samantha Rose Mergentime" into the search box, and let google do it's thing.

How do I know this? I enjoy writing webpages, but what makes being a webmaster really fun for me is watching my website's statistics. They tell me about the people who come to visit my website. They don't tell me people's names, but they give me a little profile of each site visitor. They tell me what town and country their browsers say they live in, what kind of browser and computer they are using and, if they came via a search engine, what the search keywords are that they entered into the search engine that brought them to my site.

If you have your own website or blog, you might be interested to know that I use the free version of http://sitemeter.com for my statistics.

We only get about fifteen to twenty visitors per day, so I can easily take a few minutes to study the profiles of our visitors. The curious thing this past week or so, is that my website has been getting about two or three visitors per day who are looking for "Samantha Rose Mergentime". They do not ever put more keywords in about her location or occupation or anything else, just her name - sometimes in quotes, sometimes not in quotes.

Who is she? That's a puzzle to me. I have tried searching for her myself, and up until now, when I am putting up this post, there have not been any webpages with that name anywhere to be found by google. I even used my favorite public records search engine, and could not find her. The closest I can find is an obituary somewhere for a "Rose Mergentime". Is this the same person? That's a good question, I honestly, really and truly just do not know.

I suppose I could try poking around family tree sites to try to find her, but I think I'd rather spend my time looking for people whose families I am studying more intensely. The Marie Mergentime whose name is on my site is there because she is a Baer family member, Baer being a surname appearing in a small twig in my Kasle family tree.

Of course, I know that the search terms people use and my site traffic will change because of writing this post, and that the Ancestrally Challenged board will also now get visitors looking for Samantha. But she isn't really here, either If there is anything out there on the web about her, it is not, as of this writing, on a page that standard web search engines can find.

People wanting to learn more about searching for folks on the web, may want to read our finding aids page.

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancest...indingaids.html

And if anyone actually knows or figures out who Samantha is, I'd like to hear about it!

One friend suggested it might be a made up name someone is using in a forum. But the traffic we are getting makes me suspect that someone has put up a blog or family website that family members are looking for, which has not been spidered yet. If that's the case, the website will need to have html that validates at http://validator.w3.org to appear higher in the hit list, and it will get spidered faster if there is a link to it somewhere else on the web.

Well, this thread finally showed up in google's search results. It took long enough!

And, what also finally showed up is a year old memorium in a bulletin in New Jersey, referring to her passing away.

http://ssdsrv.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/...th-bulletin.pdf

I don't know why it wasn't showing up in searches before, but it's there now.

To answer the question, Samantha Rose Mergentime was my precious little niece, my brother's daughter, who passed away in June of 2009 at age 3, from Atypical HUS. When you posted the original message asking the question, it was within a few days of her passing away, so it would make sense that there were a lot of people searching for her.

The obituary for Rose Mergentime that you referenced - that was my grandmother, who passed away in 2000.

I am curious who the Marie Mergentime you refer to is. There aren't many Mergentimes, and I know of one other Mergentime family that also lives in NJ (as do I). I believe my father has made contact with them at some point to try and determine if there is any relation to them, but I am not sure what ever came of that. I do know our last name was originally spelled Mergentheim when whoever my ancestor is came to the US from Germany...