Okay, so, yesterday (or, at least, what I recollect of it) was interesting. First of all, I got some very exciting mail. I've been corresponding with one of my distant cousins about the family of my great-great-great-grandfather, Frederick Adams (b. 21 December 1833; d. 3 April 1890), who I believe was the son of John Adam (b. 7 January 1788; d. 13 November 1848) and Barbara Adam nee Heiser (b. 18 April 1790; d. 17 February 1870). (The fact that Frederick's family is buried right next to John and Barbara certainly doesn't hurt in drawing the inference. I still can scarcely believe I've visited John Adam's grave.) The cousin I've mentioned is descended from one of John Adams' brothers.
Anyway, she sent me a packet of copied documents pertaining to the family. And wow! What a treasure trove! First of all, it includes a number of handwritten documents pertaining to John Adam's estate. In addition, my relative sent two pages of Fraktur. Fraktur is a style of Pennsylfaanish Deitsch illumined folk art, in which a sort of old German calligraphy is used for a variety of sorts of documents. Apparently someone in the family has copies of two Fraktur sheets by John Adam's brother Jacob - not necessarily done by Jacob's own hand, but at least dictated by him, and containing a brief account (in German, naturally) of his family origins and a list of his children. And now I have beautiful copies of both pages, and wow they are gorgeous.
Also included in the packet were photocopies from microfilm of pages from an assortment of parish registers, all of which contain entries relevant to the Adam(s) family. Some of those registers were from a local church in my hometown. Others, however, were from the Adams' ancestral hometown in Germany: Schlaitdorf. It's extremely difficult to make out the writing in these pages, unfortunately. Old handwriting can always be a challenge to decipher, especially when the font is small, the page is somewhat dark, and the language happens to be German (and at times Latin)! And there's a lot of it.... Now, with the sort of basic vocabulary range involved in these things, I probably have enough German and Latin under my belt to get the gist of it all if I had a perfectly clear transcription. And I'm very set on the idea of getting a good transcription to include in the appendix of my Ahnentafel. I may have to consult with a few of my German-speaking friends to see if any of them have the eyesight and handwriting-deciphering capacity to lend some assistance.
I'll be honest, I'm not wholly sure what I spent yesterday doing. It's even worse because I foolishly stayed up until 5:00 AM! It's not like I was getting any of my work done, either. Noooo, that would have been far too wise. Instead, I think I was searching through newspaper archives again to gather some additional scattered documentation. Part of it was spurred on by my discovery of where someone had posted online a copy of my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob H. Long's obituary while searching for more information about my great-great-grandmother Sarah's first husband Henry Frey. My great-great-grandfather John Christian Rhode was her second husband, just as she was his second wife.
Incidentally, I think I've made progress in figuring out who the first wife was (likely Emma Helen Snellings of Virginia, who apparently died in 1888), and it seems that there was perhaps a daughter I didn't know about. Where it started to give me a headache was when I heard that seemingly the daughter (Mary) of John and Emma married a son (Jacob) of Henry and Sarah... I mean, awkward though that might potentially have made family life, there aren't any untoward genetic consequences or anything. It just means that my grandfather Dick (who, well, lived up to the moniker) and his double half-cousin Elmer would, statistically speaking, both trace a quarter of their genetic make-up to John's DNA, a quarter to Sarah's DNA, and then the other half to other individuals - Emma and Henry for Elmer, and William Clayton Raihl and Kate Raihl nee Adams for Dick. That's actually no different than any ordinary first cousins, I think. I could be wrong about that. I was never that great with this particular sort of calculation.
Anyway, I stayed up finding a couple of extra sources from the newspaper archives. Some articles were of questionable relevance but I copied them over anyway. One that is interesting is a list of attendees at a Schaefferstown woman's 58th birthday party. My great-great-grandparents Adam and Mary (Mountz) Stick are among the attendees, along with my great-greatuncle Richard Stick. So, too, is Mary's father, I believe. In addition, we find Adam Stick's first cousin Adam Nagle (b. 1893), along with Adam Nagle's wife and son. Regarding Adam Nagle's family, I've seen a number of brief snippets in the newspaper indicating a close friendship with the Billman family, so that's something worth investigating further. Also, my great-great-grandmother Mary had a niece named Emma Speiss (nee Mountz), and I found an article mentioning the celebration of the 37th wedding anniversary of Clarence W. Speiss and Emma Mountz. I hadn't had her husband's name before, so that was a pleasant find. It also mentions their two children. Given that the article is from 1963 and that Emma only died five years ago, it's totally possible that those children are still alive today. I'd love to find out.
Also last night, I took up a related project. See, I've been collecting a lot of obituaries and funeral descriptions, and also a few articles about weddings. So I went through all of them and excerpted the bit about the event that included time, location, and who officiated. (That wasn't found for all of them, but it was for some.) The result showed a few instances where the same minister appears more than once. So then I went and attempted to look up more information on those ministers and their churches.
For instance, Rev. Hiram Gibble officiated at the funeral of my great-great-grandmother Kate Raihl nee Adams in 1904 and then my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob H. Long in 1908. I investigated Hiram Gibble and found that he was a bishop of the White Oak district of the Church of the Brethren and was indeed, as Kate's obituary indicated, stationed in Manheim, Pennsylvania. He was appointed bishop just over three months before Kate died. The Church of the Brethren is a group descended from Alexander Mack's Schwarzenau Brethren. Jacob Long may have been one of Bishop Gibble's parishioners, since his obituary describes him as a member of the "German Baptist Church", another old name for that group. Various newspaper articles indicate that Gibble could preach in both German and English.
Now, I'm not sure why Gibble was at Kate's funeral. He wasn't the only minister officiating; so was Rev. James A. Heitler of Rothsville, which is also where the services were held. As I investigated Rev. Heitler, he was certainly an interesting fellow. He was apparently a successful businessman from Lebanon County who moved to Rothsville in the 1880s. He was a cigarmaker, a furniture manufacturer, a photographer, an undertaker, and eventually decided to become the minister of the United Zion Church in Rothsville. What a busy bloke!
Anyway, the two articles about Kate's death variously describe the site of her funeral service as "United Zion church at Rothsville" or "Zion Children Church, at Rothsville". (It initially seems like an odd discrepancy, no? Keep reading.) Finding information about this congregation seems to be difficult, but it seems plausible that it was part of a somewhat obscure denomination called the United Zion Church, which is a splinter group of the River Brethren, a revivalist group with Mennonite origins and 'Dunker' (German Baptist Brethren) influences. The splinter group, led by renegade River Brethren bishop Matthias Brinser, was originally known as United Zion's Children. Could Kate have been a member of either the United Zion Church or the German Baptist Brethren? I'm intrigued by either possibility!
Next came the case of "Rev. W. S. Brendle", who in 1925 officiated at the funeral of my great-great-grandmother Catherine Elizabeth Root (nee Mowrey)'s sister-in-law Jennie Mowrey nee Ziegler. Jennie was "a member of the Reformed Church at this place [i.e., Denver]", though the services were held at "Ream's Memorial Lutheran Church". "Rev. W. S. Brendle, of Denver" also officiated at the funeral of my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Mountz (Adam Stick's father-in-law) in 1926. The obituary didn't mention Jacob's denominational affiliation.
A fairly quick search showed that, within the Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS) and later within the Evangelical and Reformed Church (which resulted from the 1934 merger of most of the RCUS and the Evangelical Synod of North America [ESNA]), Winfield Scott Brendle was the pastor of the four churches in the Reamstown charge, including St. John's Reformed Church in Denver - but in 1931, he was also listed as the pastor of St. John's Reformed Church in Sinking Spring, which explains why he would have been at Jacob Mountz's funeral. Incidentally, the Evangelical and Reformed Church later in 1957 would merge with another denomination (the Congregational Christian Churches) to form the United Church of Christ. So if W. S. Brendle were still in ministry at that time, he likely would have been a UCC pastor from then on.
Fourth, I took a look at one "Rev. O. E. Pflueger", who officiated in 1907 at the funeral of Jacob Mountz's father Isaac and in 1909 at the funeral of Jacob Mountz's wife Priscilla. Both services were conducted at "Zion's Church". Isaac's obituary classifies him as "a member of the Lutheran congregation of Zion's Church". I don't have Priscilla's obituary per se - just an article reporting on the funeral - but her father Jonathan Rauch's obituary identifies him as "a member of Zion's Lutheran Church". And, sure enough, I learned that O. E. Pflueger was the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania.
The final case I looked at last night was of "Rev. Rollin T. Reiner". Now, in 1961, Rev. Reiner officiated at the funeral of my great-great-grandfather Adam Stick, who was "a member of the United Church of Christ". (I wonder what group Adam Stick was with before the UCC formed? After all, the UCC was just four years old by then. Might he have been part of the Evangelical and Reformed Church?) But in 1991 - yes, that's right, thirty years later - one "Rev. Rollin T. Reiner" officiated at the wedding of Adam Stick's great-granddaughter Melissa Adams nee Daubert, my mother's first cousin. Thirty years later, and still dealing with the same family! But that wedding occurred at "West Lawn United Methodist Church" in West Lawn, Pennsylvania.
So what did I find? Well, back in 1951, Rollin T. Reiner was a pastor of the West Lawn congregation of the Evangelical United Brethren. The EUB was formed in 1946 by a merger of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (New Constitution) and the Evangelical Church, which itself was a re-merger of the Evangelical Association and most of the United Evangelical Church. (Incidentally, those members of the United Evangelical Church that did not re-merge in 1922 became my denomination, the Evangelical Congregational Church.)
So anyway, in 1951, Reiner was an Evangelical United Brethren pastor, which he also would still have been at the time he officiated at Adam Stick's funeral. But in 1968, the Evangelical United Brethren Church merged with the Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church, and from then on Rollin T. Reiner was pastor of the West Lawn United Methodist Church. Rev. Reiner's EUB background also explains why I found him listed in 2003 as a trustee emeritus of Albright College, an Evangelical Association school that later became an EUB school and is now affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Reiner had also at some point acquired a Doctor of Divinity degree.
So then I went to bed, and probably got about two hours of sleep, which I believe included some rather disturbing nightmares, the fundamental gist of which is thankfully now beyond me, but which certainly involved grave mortal dangers. In class this morning we received back our tests from last week. I indeed did well, having made only two errors. One was on a question that, as I admitted then, I could have gone either way with. The other was a simple transcription error: I meant to write 'F', but I for some reason put an extra line at the bottom and made it an 'E'. How silly. Shame I didn't catch that when I was skimming back through it to triple-check. So anyway, while mine was only the fourth-highest grade in the class, it'll do.
The rest of the lecture was informative and I took notes in my notebook while multitasking by resuming last night's search through newspaper archives. I started out by transcribing a very lengthy article (which I'd found last night but deferred for the sake of sleep) about a terrible factory fire in Womelsdorf in 1939 that left several families homeless. The article indicates that my great-great-greataunt Lillie Reinhold nee Mountz's house was externally scorched by the conflagration. Right before class ended, I successfully located the obituary of my great-great-great-great-grandmother, "Mrs. Isaac Mountz (nee Rebecca Matthew)", who died 17 October 1899 and whose obituary appeared in the next day's Reading Eagle. Success! I was quite glad to locate that.
Now, I had planned to return to my room right after class and resume sleep, but instead I ended up staying in my classroom for the next 1.5 hours to continue churning away at searching through the archives. Most of the things I actually found and chose to transcribe were fairly peripheral, like obituaries or articles mentioning the spouses of distant uncles, but I did finally locate the death notice and then the obituary of my great-great-great-great-grandfather Jonathan Rauch, who fought in the Civil War. I'd already had the newspaper account of his funeral, but it took a while to pin down his obituary.
I still haven't found anything for his wife, because all I know is that she died "about three years" before he did. I now know his death occurred on 30 October 1906 (previously I'd just had it around early November 1906), but that still doesn't get me any closer than "probably sometime in 1903" for his wife's death. And that is waaaaay too much material to search through. So I gave up for the morning, went and grabbed a rather swift lunch, and then came back here and slept for a couple hours until, somewhat refreshed, I rose and got a (somewhat minimal) amount of real classwork done, which I hope to increase tonight. Now after a belated supper and some time spent conversing with a friend I haven't seen for a while outside of her dorm, I'm back to my room to complete this post and get to work, to whatever degree of capacity my growing headache and fatigue will permit tonight...
Anyway, she sent me a packet of copied documents pertaining to the family. And wow! What a treasure trove! First of all, it includes a number of handwritten documents pertaining to John Adam's estate. In addition, my relative sent two pages of Fraktur. Fraktur is a style of Pennsylfaanish Deitsch illumined folk art, in which a sort of old German calligraphy is used for a variety of sorts of documents. Apparently someone in the family has copies of two Fraktur sheets by John Adam's brother Jacob - not necessarily done by Jacob's own hand, but at least dictated by him, and containing a brief account (in German, naturally) of his family origins and a list of his children. And now I have beautiful copies of both pages, and wow they are gorgeous.
Also included in the packet were photocopies from microfilm of pages from an assortment of parish registers, all of which contain entries relevant to the Adam(s) family. Some of those registers were from a local church in my hometown. Others, however, were from the Adams' ancestral hometown in Germany: Schlaitdorf. It's extremely difficult to make out the writing in these pages, unfortunately. Old handwriting can always be a challenge to decipher, especially when the font is small, the page is somewhat dark, and the language happens to be German (and at times Latin)! And there's a lot of it.... Now, with the sort of basic vocabulary range involved in these things, I probably have enough German and Latin under my belt to get the gist of it all if I had a perfectly clear transcription. And I'm very set on the idea of getting a good transcription to include in the appendix of my Ahnentafel. I may have to consult with a few of my German-speaking friends to see if any of them have the eyesight and handwriting-deciphering capacity to lend some assistance.
I'll be honest, I'm not wholly sure what I spent yesterday doing. It's even worse because I foolishly stayed up until 5:00 AM! It's not like I was getting any of my work done, either. Noooo, that would have been far too wise. Instead, I think I was searching through newspaper archives again to gather some additional scattered documentation. Part of it was spurred on by my discovery of where someone had posted online a copy of my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob H. Long's obituary while searching for more information about my great-great-grandmother Sarah's first husband Henry Frey. My great-great-grandfather John Christian Rhode was her second husband, just as she was his second wife.
Incidentally, I think I've made progress in figuring out who the first wife was (likely Emma Helen Snellings of Virginia, who apparently died in 1888), and it seems that there was perhaps a daughter I didn't know about. Where it started to give me a headache was when I heard that seemingly the daughter (Mary) of John and Emma married a son (Jacob) of Henry and Sarah... I mean, awkward though that might potentially have made family life, there aren't any untoward genetic consequences or anything. It just means that my grandfather Dick (who, well, lived up to the moniker) and his double half-cousin Elmer would, statistically speaking, both trace a quarter of their genetic make-up to John's DNA, a quarter to Sarah's DNA, and then the other half to other individuals - Emma and Henry for Elmer, and William Clayton Raihl and Kate Raihl nee Adams for Dick. That's actually no different than any ordinary first cousins, I think. I could be wrong about that. I was never that great with this particular sort of calculation.
Anyway, I stayed up finding a couple of extra sources from the newspaper archives. Some articles were of questionable relevance but I copied them over anyway. One that is interesting is a list of attendees at a Schaefferstown woman's 58th birthday party. My great-great-grandparents Adam and Mary (Mountz) Stick are among the attendees, along with my great-greatuncle Richard Stick. So, too, is Mary's father, I believe. In addition, we find Adam Stick's first cousin Adam Nagle (b. 1893), along with Adam Nagle's wife and son. Regarding Adam Nagle's family, I've seen a number of brief snippets in the newspaper indicating a close friendship with the Billman family, so that's something worth investigating further. Also, my great-great-grandmother Mary had a niece named Emma Speiss (nee Mountz), and I found an article mentioning the celebration of the 37th wedding anniversary of Clarence W. Speiss and Emma Mountz. I hadn't had her husband's name before, so that was a pleasant find. It also mentions their two children. Given that the article is from 1963 and that Emma only died five years ago, it's totally possible that those children are still alive today. I'd love to find out.
Also last night, I took up a related project. See, I've been collecting a lot of obituaries and funeral descriptions, and also a few articles about weddings. So I went through all of them and excerpted the bit about the event that included time, location, and who officiated. (That wasn't found for all of them, but it was for some.) The result showed a few instances where the same minister appears more than once. So then I went and attempted to look up more information on those ministers and their churches.
For instance, Rev. Hiram Gibble officiated at the funeral of my great-great-grandmother Kate Raihl nee Adams in 1904 and then my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob H. Long in 1908. I investigated Hiram Gibble and found that he was a bishop of the White Oak district of the Church of the Brethren and was indeed, as Kate's obituary indicated, stationed in Manheim, Pennsylvania. He was appointed bishop just over three months before Kate died. The Church of the Brethren is a group descended from Alexander Mack's Schwarzenau Brethren. Jacob Long may have been one of Bishop Gibble's parishioners, since his obituary describes him as a member of the "German Baptist Church", another old name for that group. Various newspaper articles indicate that Gibble could preach in both German and English.
Now, I'm not sure why Gibble was at Kate's funeral. He wasn't the only minister officiating; so was Rev. James A. Heitler of Rothsville, which is also where the services were held. As I investigated Rev. Heitler, he was certainly an interesting fellow. He was apparently a successful businessman from Lebanon County who moved to Rothsville in the 1880s. He was a cigarmaker, a furniture manufacturer, a photographer, an undertaker, and eventually decided to become the minister of the United Zion Church in Rothsville. What a busy bloke!
Anyway, the two articles about Kate's death variously describe the site of her funeral service as "United Zion church at Rothsville" or "Zion Children Church, at Rothsville". (It initially seems like an odd discrepancy, no? Keep reading.) Finding information about this congregation seems to be difficult, but it seems plausible that it was part of a somewhat obscure denomination called the United Zion Church, which is a splinter group of the River Brethren, a revivalist group with Mennonite origins and 'Dunker' (German Baptist Brethren) influences. The splinter group, led by renegade River Brethren bishop Matthias Brinser, was originally known as United Zion's Children. Could Kate have been a member of either the United Zion Church or the German Baptist Brethren? I'm intrigued by either possibility!
Next came the case of "Rev. W. S. Brendle", who in 1925 officiated at the funeral of my great-great-grandmother Catherine Elizabeth Root (nee Mowrey)'s sister-in-law Jennie Mowrey nee Ziegler. Jennie was "a member of the Reformed Church at this place [i.e., Denver]", though the services were held at "Ream's Memorial Lutheran Church". "Rev. W. S. Brendle, of Denver" also officiated at the funeral of my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Mountz (Adam Stick's father-in-law) in 1926. The obituary didn't mention Jacob's denominational affiliation.
A fairly quick search showed that, within the Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS) and later within the Evangelical and Reformed Church (which resulted from the 1934 merger of most of the RCUS and the Evangelical Synod of North America [ESNA]), Winfield Scott Brendle was the pastor of the four churches in the Reamstown charge, including St. John's Reformed Church in Denver - but in 1931, he was also listed as the pastor of St. John's Reformed Church in Sinking Spring, which explains why he would have been at Jacob Mountz's funeral. Incidentally, the Evangelical and Reformed Church later in 1957 would merge with another denomination (the Congregational Christian Churches) to form the United Church of Christ. So if W. S. Brendle were still in ministry at that time, he likely would have been a UCC pastor from then on.
Fourth, I took a look at one "Rev. O. E. Pflueger", who officiated in 1907 at the funeral of Jacob Mountz's father Isaac and in 1909 at the funeral of Jacob Mountz's wife Priscilla. Both services were conducted at "Zion's Church". Isaac's obituary classifies him as "a member of the Lutheran congregation of Zion's Church". I don't have Priscilla's obituary per se - just an article reporting on the funeral - but her father Jonathan Rauch's obituary identifies him as "a member of Zion's Lutheran Church". And, sure enough, I learned that O. E. Pflueger was the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania.
The final case I looked at last night was of "Rev. Rollin T. Reiner". Now, in 1961, Rev. Reiner officiated at the funeral of my great-great-grandfather Adam Stick, who was "a member of the United Church of Christ". (I wonder what group Adam Stick was with before the UCC formed? After all, the UCC was just four years old by then. Might he have been part of the Evangelical and Reformed Church?) But in 1991 - yes, that's right, thirty years later - one "Rev. Rollin T. Reiner" officiated at the wedding of Adam Stick's great-granddaughter Melissa Adams nee Daubert, my mother's first cousin. Thirty years later, and still dealing with the same family! But that wedding occurred at "West Lawn United Methodist Church" in West Lawn, Pennsylvania.
So what did I find? Well, back in 1951, Rollin T. Reiner was a pastor of the West Lawn congregation of the Evangelical United Brethren. The EUB was formed in 1946 by a merger of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (New Constitution) and the Evangelical Church, which itself was a re-merger of the Evangelical Association and most of the United Evangelical Church. (Incidentally, those members of the United Evangelical Church that did not re-merge in 1922 became my denomination, the Evangelical Congregational Church.)
So anyway, in 1951, Reiner was an Evangelical United Brethren pastor, which he also would still have been at the time he officiated at Adam Stick's funeral. But in 1968, the Evangelical United Brethren Church merged with the Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church, and from then on Rollin T. Reiner was pastor of the West Lawn United Methodist Church. Rev. Reiner's EUB background also explains why I found him listed in 2003 as a trustee emeritus of Albright College, an Evangelical Association school that later became an EUB school and is now affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Reiner had also at some point acquired a Doctor of Divinity degree.
So then I went to bed, and probably got about two hours of sleep, which I believe included some rather disturbing nightmares, the fundamental gist of which is thankfully now beyond me, but which certainly involved grave mortal dangers. In class this morning we received back our tests from last week. I indeed did well, having made only two errors. One was on a question that, as I admitted then, I could have gone either way with. The other was a simple transcription error: I meant to write 'F', but I for some reason put an extra line at the bottom and made it an 'E'. How silly. Shame I didn't catch that when I was skimming back through it to triple-check. So anyway, while mine was only the fourth-highest grade in the class, it'll do.
The rest of the lecture was informative and I took notes in my notebook while multitasking by resuming last night's search through newspaper archives. I started out by transcribing a very lengthy article (which I'd found last night but deferred for the sake of sleep) about a terrible factory fire in Womelsdorf in 1939 that left several families homeless. The article indicates that my great-great-greataunt Lillie Reinhold nee Mountz's house was externally scorched by the conflagration. Right before class ended, I successfully located the obituary of my great-great-great-great-grandmother, "Mrs. Isaac Mountz (nee Rebecca Matthew)", who died 17 October 1899 and whose obituary appeared in the next day's Reading Eagle. Success! I was quite glad to locate that.
Now, I had planned to return to my room right after class and resume sleep, but instead I ended up staying in my classroom for the next 1.5 hours to continue churning away at searching through the archives. Most of the things I actually found and chose to transcribe were fairly peripheral, like obituaries or articles mentioning the spouses of distant uncles, but I did finally locate the death notice and then the obituary of my great-great-great-great-grandfather Jonathan Rauch, who fought in the Civil War. I'd already had the newspaper account of his funeral, but it took a while to pin down his obituary.
I still haven't found anything for his wife, because all I know is that she died "about three years" before he did. I now know his death occurred on 30 October 1906 (previously I'd just had it around early November 1906), but that still doesn't get me any closer than "probably sometime in 1903" for his wife's death. And that is waaaaay too much material to search through. So I gave up for the morning, went and grabbed a rather swift lunch, and then came back here and slept for a couple hours until, somewhat refreshed, I rose and got a (somewhat minimal) amount of real classwork done, which I hope to increase tonight. Now after a belated supper and some time spent conversing with a friend I haven't seen for a while outside of her dorm, I'm back to my room to complete this post and get to work, to whatever degree of capacity my growing headache and fatigue will permit tonight...
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