ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column made it seem probable my former colleague Katy Barnes’s Bodenhorn lineage (her maiden surname ancestor) stemmed from a Hessian soldier named Ludwig Bodenhorn, who was found on a 1783 tax list for what’s today Bethel Township, Lebanon County.

So, I went on visits to the Pennsylvania State Archives and Lebanon County Historical Society to access some records and documents that aren’t available even at the “big house”—the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

The archives was first up since I knew they had tax lists from Lebanon County’s “Dauphin County period,” the era of roughly a generation in which nearly all of what became Lebanon County was included in Dauphin after the latter county was erected in 1785 from Lancaster County.

Heinrich Bodenhorn, Barnes’s confirmed ancestor, was found on the 1807 Bethel list with the occupation of weaver, which jived with what family papers had indicated (including that Heinrich made many fancy rugs!).

Since men were supposed to enter the tax lists at age 21 (and virtually never slipped past the collector more than two to three years), this pointed to Heinrich being born significantly later than the 1777 date found in cemetery records.

As for Ludwig, no further references were found for him. The only other Ludwig’s name was something like Windenbarg but it’s intriguing that he’s found from 1780 to 1791 … with the exception of 1783 when Ludwig Bodenhorn is named.

Research at the Lebanon County Historical Society revealed baptisms for many of Heinrich’s children at the German Reformed church in Jonestown into the 1820s, showing that his residential shift to Annville likely occurred after that.

In records relating to Annville at Lebanon Historical, I found Heinrich’s burial record, which shows his birth year as 1780. Records of the cemeteries revealed that the “Old Reformed” burial ground is now called “Jerusalem) and that tombstones for Heinrich and wife Margaretha are both still standing.

Further research in church records revealed Margaretha’s baptism in the St. John’s, Fredericksburg, Lutheran register and that her 1784 birth year was actually 1785 (since there’s a baptism for a sibling of hers in late 1783, it’s obvious that should couldn’t have been born in January 1784).

The baptismal showed Margaretha’s parents as Wilhelm and Barbara Wetzel. I found a couple of other records relating to Wilhelm (a short will and a tax list entry) but the bingo moment was when I looked him up on the online Hessian soldier index HETRINA in which Ludwig Bodenhorn had been found.

Yep, Wilhelm shows there, too.

While there’s still work to do to confirm the idea that children of displaced Hessian soldiers married, Barnes is already thinking about her next goal for the family.

“One day I would love to find out how to determine if any of Henry Bodenhorn’s woven rugs still exist somewhere,” she wrote.