ROOTS & BRANCHES

I serve as a trustee on the Bern Cemetery Company’s board, the arm’s length entity for the burials grounds around Bern Reformed United Church of Christ, the congregation in Berks County of which I was once an eighth-generation member.

One of my fellow trustees is Ron Bair, who has a passing interest in genealogy and occasionally sends a query my way.

Recently he’d been given some pages from a family history compilation as documentation of a tie between his late mother Stella C. Zerbe Bair and a lady named June Kerns, who lived less than a mile away from Stella on Bernville Road (Route 183) in Bern Township.

The extract from the family history compilation mentioned neither Stella nor June, so Ron was little flummoxed on how this documented a tie between them.

Since I love a good puzzle, I set out to some of the most used genealogy sites to see if they could reveal this tie. Also influencing me was the fact that I had known both Stella and June, the latter being the mother of a guy who was just a couple years ahead of me in high school.

First I needed to find out more information about June to see where she fit into the compilation that Ron had been sent.  

Coming to the rescue was June’s online Find A Grave memorial, which identified her as June Irne Reifsnyder Kerns and the daughter of David Earl Reifsnyder (1899–1977) and Sara Irene Miller Reifsnyder (1901–1988).

David Earl’s Find A Grave memorial named him as the son of a David Ernst Reifsnyder (1866–1961), a person who was in the compilation, along with his wife Ellen E. Lamm Reifsnyder.

I should take a second at this juncture to give the caveat that Find A Grave listings are generally proof of nothing without further sourcing, but Ron wasn’t looking for footnotes, just leads, and Find A Grave is often great for that.

Stella’s Find A Grave listing, however, did not connect with any further ancestry, so I went to the large database of user-submitted pedigrees on FamilySearch.org that bears the simple name of “Family Tree.”

As with Find A Grave, FamilySearch Family Tree entries are proof of absolutely nothing in and of themselves. And since the idea is that for each person in the world there should be only one listing, there are not infrequent battles between two or more people who each have their own ideas of which parents and records belong to a certain individual.

At first glance, Stella’s FamilySearch Family Tree didn’t appear to have any connection with June’s ancestry shown in that compilation Ron had received.

But then I expanded Stella’s Family Tree back a few generations and it revealed … a Lamm ancestry, likely the same family as June’s Lamms who married the Reifsnyder.