ROOTS & BRANCHES

Is there a genealogist out there who’s going to turn down a free family history book?

Well, not me … especially when it’s one that’s titled Our Pennsylvania German Families: A History and Genealogy of the Ancestors of Eva Minerva Baer Barnett Who Settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Her Descendants.

The offer came from a friend of mine who is a descendant of this Baer family. The name of the book’s author, Edna Barnett Chelson, was familiar to me, but after nearly 40 years of slogging around the genealogy world, I can’t recall how and where I might have encountered her.

No matter. It was a delight to get this 600-page compendium.

Much of Chelson’s work appears to be printouts of the so-called register format from Family Tree Maker software, which has the advantage of showing off many of her “in progress” notes about various family members.

This was useful to me as a way of comparing notes since a number of the families she includes are either some of my actual direct lines or ones that I’ve researched for others. She used many of the sources that are in my own personal library, too.

Chelson shows many of the immigrants’ origins in Europe, including the Swiss ancestry of the Baer family in the town of Ottenbach, Canton Zurich.

Sadly, there are a number of lines (Strunck, Gicker and Weber) for which I’ve solved the village origins that she didn’t have. This leads me to believe that Chelson and I must have communicated long ago before I solved these lines—back when communication by postal letter was much more in vogue. I so wish I would have been able to get that information to her! To some extent today we genealogists stay more in our own silos except for connecting to the Internet!

Of course, genealogy is never finished and if you want to get a work in print … there’s a point you have to just stop and say “time to publish.”

The author also includes many family photos and a goodly number of source documents such as wills.

I also liked that she has a chart in the front of the book outlining the immigration data (or lack thereof) for the dozen-and-a-half immigrants she had identified—showing year of arrival, name, ship name, and origin in Europe if known. She also included a map that shows the immigrants names superimposed on their hometowns, giving the reader a visual context for the origins of the immigrants in relation to each other.

All in all, Chelson’s work was a delight to start reading and I’m planning to delve further into the book over time. In a time when many genealogists’ notes get lost through generational transfer (read: disposal!), it’s great to see her life’s passion preserved.