ROOTS & BRANCHES

It was my dad, the late Richard L. Beidler, who first told me about the vigilante in the family.

Of course, I’m using the phrase “in the family” extremely loosely. As I later learned from a long out-of-print book titled X. Beidler: Vigilante, the Montana pioneer John X. Beidler stated he was born in Mount Joy, Lancaster County.

His parents were John Beidler and Mary Hoke, also of Lancaster County, likely of Mennonite origin, and that was enough for me to realize that they did not stem from my own Beidler immigrant ancestor, who lived in Montgomery County and whose only son, Conrad Beidler, left the Trappe area for Berks County.

Since the next two generations in my immigrant’s Beidler family are well-documented (all staying in Berks County), I can be confident that any relationship with X. Beidler would be pre-immigration.

It was when I came across the book on the vigilante recently that I wondered about his parents. They are not named in the book, which is equal parts a memoir that “X.” dictated late in life and clippings about him from other sources.

Working with U.S. Census records, I was pretty sure I found he and his orphaned siblings in the 1850 census in the Harrisburg area, which paralleled the account in the book.

Looking at earlier censuses (which inconveniently name only the head of household and give age rages for others), it looked to me as if the vigilante’s father was a John in the Manheim Township area (not far from Mount Joy).

But what gave the whole thing a boost was when I found a database on Ancestry.com titled “Genealogical Card File, Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, Lancaster, Pennsylvania” that listed information relating to “X.” and his family, contributed by Jackie Lou Beidler of California.

The card noted she contributed the information in 2006, so when I found an e-mail for her, I was skeptical if I’d get a response but she did reply. “John X Beidler is the brother of my great-great-grandfather, Henry Mercer Beidler,” she wrote.

Jackie noted that the “X” doesn’t stand for anything.  “The boys were responsible for having their Sunday Meeting shirts ready for Sunday,” she wrote. “It never failed – one of the brothers would forget their shirt and would take his, leaving him without a clean shirt.  So he decided to take a piece of coal and placed an ‘X’ on the back of his shirt to put a stop to it.  Seems it was taken in the humor John intended. So friends started calling him ‘X’” (The editor of book on the vigilante says it stood for “Xavier,” which seems to be strange name for a Pennsylvania German in that era).

Jackie write that X.’s siblings followed diverse occupations. “Of his family, John and Anna’s children would grow up to become: Doctor of medicine, druggist, real estate investor, postmaster general, life insurance agent, inventors, writer of books/poems, mayor of Texarkana, Ark., Indian scout, miner, seaman, stagecoach driver, bricklayer and broom maker,” she wrote.