ROOTS & BRANCHES

Some of the best experiences, I’ve found, come out of a “think on your feet” type of situation.

Case in point: I was invited to speak at the Dillman Family Association’s 20^th Anniversary Genealogical Conference, held earlier this month in the Harrisburg area.

The Dillmans, let me tell you, are no average family association! They bring along a library and many artifacts to their reunion … and even have a photocopier to facilitate sharing of paper materials!

The point people for my talk were Andrew Stillman and Don A. Dillman and I’ll admit that I was prepared to give one of my more popular talks, “Researching German Families in Pennsylvania” without too many changes from my standard script.

Then I forgot my laptop bag at home and only discovered it when I was well beyond the point of no return to get it.

Fortunately, I had sent an electronic copy of my handout for the talk to them earlier in the day, so we hustled before my talk to assemble copies (that photocopier came in handy!).

Not having my laptop and the PowerPoint presentation on it gave me the opportunity not to “stick to the script” but react to what I had been hearing while listening to the two dozen or so hardcore Dillman genealogists talk about their passion to find connections.

There were several Dillman immigrants and everyone is still working on getting more people placed in their respective branches.

Many brought up different spellings of the name and that led me to lead off my presentation by telling the folks that I had never researched Dillman as a surname, but that I had encountered it as a given name—it was the name of the eldest son of Lebanon County immigrant Johann Daub, whose name I found in records variously as; Dilman, Dielmann, Thylman, Tillman, etc.

My mantra on this was merely to stay very flexible when determining a “proper” spelling because there was much less stress on standardized spelling of names than today. In addition, I reminded them that many records were created by others (pastors, courthouse clerks, census enumerators) who might not have cared so much about spelling.

I had not honed in on Stillman’s name before meeting him, but was struck by his story: His Dillman ancestor became a Stillman after being taken prisoner during the Revolutionary War and ending up in Canada.

Andrew only caught on to this through DNA when his Y chromosome test matched those in the Dillman clan.

 All in all, it was great spending time with the Dillmans and seeing them trying to weld together their various branches.

In a time of so many fractures, it’s always great to see people coming together!