ROOTS & BRANCHES

I recently caught up with a fascinating book titled Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, which was written a couple of years ago by Nicole Eustace, a history professor at New York University.

The book won a Pulitzer Prize and profiles an episode in 1722 when a Native American man was killed in what’s now Lancaster County and how war was averted through a circuitous path that led to a conference in Albany, New York, between the governors of the mid-Atlantic colonies and the Iroquois confederacy, which claimed supervision of the Native American tribes in the Susquehanna River valley where the murder took place.

When the book was first described to me by Historical Society of Pennsylvania President David Brigham a year ago, talk of a conference in Albany rang a bit of a bell with me.

A fairly large portion of my ancestry consists of what I call the “Hank Jones Germans,” who came to New York state as a mass migration in 1709 and after various machinations and misfortunes there, dispersed around the mid-Atlantic, including the Tulpehocken Creek region of Berks and Lebanon counties.

The leading genealogy chronicler of this mass migration has been Henry Z “Hank” Jones, the Disney child actor who produced seven books on these 800-some families en route to becoming part of the genealogy world’s most exclusive club as a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists.

Pretty much from the beginning of my genealogy searches almost 40 years ago, I had heard the tale repeated that the families who migrated to Tulpehocken had been invited by Pennsylvania Gov. William Keith while he was at a conference in Albany.

I had never bothered myself to find out why Keith was in Albany for that conference. If I had, I would have understood the irony that while on the one hand Keith was making peace with Native Americans over the murder—on the other hand, he was inviting the German families to an area that Pennsylvania had not purchased from its native inhabitants, ensuring a future crisis that wasn’t resolved until the early 1730s (conveniently after Keith was gone from the scene in Pennsylvania).

I was surprised that the author hadn’t heard this part of the story; although it wasn’t technically germane to the overall thrust of her book—which was how starkly different the idea of “justice” was to Native Americans—it would have been a great addition to her material on Keith, which shows him to be a confirmed double dealer.

So what’s the moral to this story?

Having looked at the story of the Germans through the lens of a genealogist, I needed to look at it more as a historian to find the full richness of how the migration to Tulpehocken began.

But maybe a historian, even a Pulitzer Prize winner, needed to look through the lens of a genealogist to get the fullest picture, too.