ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I began my genealogical journey in the 1980s, I benefited from a correspondence network of many Berks County genealogists who already had been plying the fields for years.

One of those people was Beulah Stoudt Follmer, who at the instance of John Grimes (one of the very earliest people who had helped), wrote to me with the framework on my Stoudt line from my fourth-great-grandmother Catharina Philippina Staudt back into the first half of the 1500s in Germany!

Since I have only a couple of lines that far back in time, I’ve always been interested in this family even though it was not research I had done myself.

As a result, when I learned that a history of the German-speaking Staudt-Stoudt-Stout families in eastern Pennsylvania was being published for the first time in 42 years, I decided I needed to get on the bandwagon and buy a copy.

Led by Ellen Kramer, the national family historian of the Staudt-Stoudt-Stout lines who succeeded to the role after Follmer’s death in 2009, information all the German-speaking lines was computerized over the last decade, including thousands of descendants of the surname’s multiple 1700s immigrants.

The new set of publications runs nearly 2,000 pages over three volumes. It contains a 40-page introduction/reference section with maps, some ancestral lines back to the early 1500s, a master index.  

It was interesting to leaf through the volumes, learning about the family’s century of publications on the families and also learning more about my own immigrant ancestor, Johann Michael Staudt, the earliest male in the families, coming to America in 1733.

But my real head-snapper was the book’s assertion that a cousin of Johann Michael, namely Anna Katharina Staudt, was married to Franz Krick, arriving together in the same ship in 1731.

And why would that be of interest to me? Well, that’s because I have two Krick lines, one of each on my father and mother’s side, from daughters of the said Franz. I’ve sporadically researched the family but have never pinpointed their European origins.

But here in these volumes the Krick family—the surname of which was originally spelled Krück and today is often spelled Crick or Creek—is shown united with the Staudts, which makes sense since they the did settle in proximity to each other in Berks County.

While there’s some additional documentation I’d like to find to cement this Krick tie, it’s exciting to find a lead to such a longstanding mystery!

A few sets of the reprint are still available for $175. To be buy one, send a check payable to: “Ellen Kramer” c/o Mrs. Ellen Kramer, 101 South College Street, Myerstown, PA 17067.  For questions, call or email me at (717) 866-5425 or familyhistorylady@comcast.net.