ROOTS & BRANCHES

Some people revel in what appears to be the randomness of life while others flatly opine “There are no coincidences.”

Either way you slice it, email conversations I’ve had recently brought up some interesting intersections with both of the people reaching out to me.

One was Roger Getz of Lititz in Lancaster County. His grandfather spent decades trying to track down their immigrant surname ancestor, Johann Peter Getz, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1744.

“Three gravestones of Peter Getz, his wife and another Getz are cemented into the wall of an old church in Lancaster,” Roger Getz wrote. “The church historian hasn’t a clue how they got there or what happened to the bodies!  Other old Getz’s just vanished!”

 When I told him that I had several ancestors on the same ship (Phoenix, arriving Oct. 20, 1744), Getz was perplexed since he didn’t see Beidlers the list. Of course, it was simply the case that these were some of my maternal ancestors, Weymar Strunck and Johann Phillip Machmer.

I mentioned this to Getz since both of my families were from Sprendlingen near Alzey in the Rhineland of Germany, and I know from researching the area that there were other Sprendlingers on the ship.

 My second conversation recently was with Pernell Staudt, whom I already knew to be a distant cousin in the large Berks County Staudt (Stout, Stoudt, etc.) family.

He was wondering if I had any knowledge of the Shrader/Shradern/Schroeder family in the western Berks County area (which I did not) or the Lieb family there stemming from a Hans Michael Lieb who died in 1754, leaving a widow named Anna Margaretha who soon after married Johann Mathias Staudt in 1755.  

As we were beginning to trade information, I discovered that I had researched the Liebs many years ago and pretty much forgotten that I did!

But what I found when I went back to my notes is that I had concluded that the Anna Margaretha in the will had a maiden name of Gräter.

I’m still sure that Hans Michael Lieb was married second to Anna Margaretha Gräter in 1748 in Sulzdorf, Germany, before coming to America with his father-in-law Caspar Gräter.

But I’m no longer as confident that this Anna Margaretha is the wife named in the will … so I’ve asked Staudt for more information on the Schradern connection. He’s done a lot of digging on this and I’m definitely glad he’s raising the issue since it wouldn’t be the first time that a man married consecutive wives with the same given names.

We also talked about the Himmelberger family since my Lieb connection (Hans Michael’s daughter Maria Margaretha) married into that family. Staudt’s ancestor had land transactions with a David Himmelberger, who is a collateral relation of mine but a direct-line ancestor of my friend Valerie Gehr.

And it turns out that Staudt and I are both descendants of immigrant Joseph or Yost Hiester.

Random or coincidence? You decide!