ROOTS & BRANCHES

It was billed as a gathering of cousins, but not all cousins through the same ancestry.That’s because the nexus was Cindy Cruz from Kansas, who was visiting Pennsylvania to be part of the 300^th anniversary of the Tulpehocken settlement in what’s today Berks and Lebanon counties, and her relationships to other people with whom she’d come in contact during her genealogy research.And so the six of us gathered at the Heidelberg Family Restaurant between Robesonia and Womelsdorf recently for a meal and much conversation.For Cruz and her sister LaRita, it was a chance to meet some people with deep Berks County roots.For me, it was an opportunity to be in the presence of old and new friends.There was Pernell Staudt, up from Silver Spring, Maryland, who I met at a conference a few years ago. Faithful readers of “Roots & Branches” will also recall that last year we collaborated on solving the mystery of Anna Margaretha Gräter Lieb Staudt, who is my ancestor from her first husband Hans Michael Lieb and Pernell’s through her second husband Matthias Staudt.It took putting both our heads together to figure out that the surname Chrädern was the phonetic equivalent of her actual maiden name, Gräter. I found her baptism in German church records and Cruz added additional information from her searches.Then there was Brad Smith, now a honcho at the Berks History Center, who I’ve known since the days when I was on a Pennsylvania German festival steering committee in Lebanon County.I was noting that I’ve become a confident lecturer but that years ago, starting out, I recall being no great shakes.But Smith was nice enough to recall that one of my earliest lectures left an impression on him. The presentation is titled “Germany to Pennsylvania: 18^th Century Odyssey” and helps debunk the use of one particular source that was written as propaganda to exaggerate the perils of immigration. While it was one of my first, it was the one I most thoroughly researched and, indeed, Smith remembers that it changed his opinion of that popularly quoted source, Gottlieb Mittelberger’s “Journey to Pennsylvania,” which he was paid to write by German princes seeking to discourage their subjects from emigrating.And, finally, there was John Grimes, one of my earliest mentors in genealogy.Grimes still lives in Womelsdorf, the so-called “hub” of the Tulpehocken, and has been instrumental in putting together the 300^th anniversary events.For me, however, he will always be the man who patiently devoted a full afternoon to helping me fill in the long Tulpehocken ancestry of one of my great-grandfathers, Jacob F. Etchberger, connecting me to many of the most significant families from the original migrations that started from upstate New York in 1723: Weiser, Walborn, Batdorf, Stupp, Braun, and Dieffenbach (I’m also descended in other lines from Rieth, Zeller, Hain, and Anspach of this migration).What a pleasant evening!