ROOTS & BRANCHES

Before I was a genealogist, I was exposed to just a little bit of my genealogy – enough, I suppose, that when the time came in my 20s that I decided to tackle it, I was primed and ready to take things further.

There were two main sources for this little bit of genealogy.

My father’s mother, Dora A. Etchberger Beidler wrote down a list of the ancestors of both she and her husband, Claude F. Beidler. Since she knew as back as her own Etchberger great-grandparents and her husband’s Beidler grandparents, this gave me a pretty good start on my father’s side.

But on my mother’s side – there was a book.

This book was a privately printed by the Reading Eagle Press in 1941 (later I would learn it was a “revised and expanded” edition of a book originally published in 1903 in Lebanon) by Valeria E. Clymer Hill.

This book was typical of American genealogy in the first half of the 20^th century.

There was a “coat of arms” attributed to the Hiester family.

An origin of the name was given (said to be German for a species of lark) and it was pointed out that the name was originally spelled “Huester.”

And a remote knightly ancestor, one Premiscloros Huesterniz, who lived in the town of Swineford in Silesia in 1329, was held out as the “original” Hiester ancestor.

But probably the part of the book that held the most fascination for me was the description of a Hiester descendant returning to town of Elsoff in the countship of Wittgenstein and finding the baptisms of the three Hiester brothers who came to America in the 1730s.

When I began my own genealogical journey in the mid-1980s, I returned to this book as a starting point.

I knew enough even then to be wary of “coats of arms” and knightly ancestors (especially ones for which many generations separated them from the immigrants).

It took a degree of training, however, to figure out that the Hiester descendant who returned to Elsoff had conflated the baptisms of children in two families. He apparently didn’t know that many German men of the time used “Johann” as a prefix name and instead went by what we’d call their “middle names” (Later I would find out that a German genealogist had figured out this discrepancy and published an article about it decades earlier!).

And it was still later, when I gained an appreciation of proper sourcing for genealogy, that I realized the most valuable part of the book was a section titled “Hiester Record,” which was a translation of a narrative written by William Hiester, a son of one of the Hiester immigrant brothers.

The narrative recounted his father’s origins, included wonderful facts such as who was at his father’s funeral as well as talking about much of William’s life.

As a matter of fact, there were so many insights gained from that narrative that it merits a column of its own!