ROOTS & BRANCHES

“But it’s better to have that recollection verified by documentary proof.”

So read the coda to last week’s installment of “Roots & Branches.”

And whether it was the whim of deity or pure coincidence, an example of what happens when anyone relies on less than “documentary proof” was delivered into my hands.

By way of background—which I sincerely hope does not bore longtime readers since I’ve used this surname before—my mother’s maiden name was Hiester, a Berks County family in which there were several Revolutionary War and early Federal period politicians (none in my direct line, who were Pennsylvania German farmers stacked upon Pennsylvania German farmers).

There has been much written about the Hiesters.

Unfortunately, much of it is erroneous.

The family hails from the town of Elsoff, now in the German state North Rhine-Westphalia but historically part of the countship of Wittgenstein, a hilly and somewhat backward (in the best sense of the word) area about an hour or so north of Frankfurt am Main.

It’s a tale of three brothers, which in this case is true (many “three brothers” stories are myths). Elder brother Johannes came to America in 1732, and my ancestor Johann Jost and his youngest brother Johann Daniel arrived five years later. The son of Johannes was Joseph Hiester, a Revolutionary War soldier and later Pennsylvania governor.

A Hiester descendant made his way back to Elsoff in the early 1900s and although he looked at and copied church records—a good thing, documentary source-wise!—his lack of knowledge of the German naming patterns of the time led him to merge together what were two separate families and attribute an incorrect maiden name to the immigrant brothers’ mother.

A German genealogist who wrote a scholarly article on the Hiesters in the mid-1900s corrected this discrepancy, but there were even more fraught assertions made in a sketch claiming the family descended from a Silesian knight named Premisclorus Husterniz in 1329.

This sketch was repeated in a family history book by Valeria Elizabeth Clymer Hill and has been picked up in articles and books ever since.

Including what I referenced as recently having been “delivered into my hands,” in this case a church’s newsletter.

The newsletter repeats the 1300s blather along with quoting that, “It is most probable that General de Hiester, commanding the Hessian continent at the battle of Long Island, where he was directly opposed to his American namesake,” Joseph Hiester.

This “most probable,” however, becomes “almost assuredly not” when taking into consideration that the Hessian general’s name was actually Heister (a small spelling difference but a large phonetic one) and that the Elsoff Hiesters’ surname in Germany was actually Hüster, a close phonetic match to the spelling that was adopted in America.

“Errors in print” march on!

Sigh.

 Beidler is a freelance writer and lecturer on genealogy. Contact him by e-mail to james@beidler.us. Like him on Facebook (James M. Beidler) and follow him on Twitter, @JamesMBeidler.