ROOTS & BRANCHES

Especially since there’s still an 18^th century house he built that’s still standing, my fifth-great-grandfather Conrad Beidler is one of the ancestors get quite a number of inquiries about.

For instance, recently Dave Madary of Lititz, Lancaster County, reached out and wrote, “I was looking into the Beidler homestead and saw your name associated with the family history. I discovered while working on my family history that I am also a direct descendant of Conrad Beidler. Through my AncestryDNA test I also show connections through that side of the Beidler family. Hoping to touch base and see what info you may have on the family!”

As I noted, since Conrad is a relatively remote ancestor and likely to have thousands of living descendants, it doesn’t particularly make me bat an eyelash to hear from a new distant cousin.

But when Madary sent along his Ancestry family tree and some additional details, they were of the variety that made me sit up in my chair a little straighter.

That’s because our connection is even closer—we’re both descendants of Conrad’s great-grandson Henry William Beidler—and Madary’s descent is from a son of Henry’s I had no previous knowledge of.

Probably because the son was born when Henry was just 21.

And with a mother to whom he wasn’t married.

Way before Henry married my ancestor Caroline Kintzer and started having children almost a decade later.

Oh, yeah, it’s one of these “sowing wild oats” situations!

The son from whom Madary descends was named Jordan Coller or Koller and he’s been assisting historians in Fayette, Missouri, because moved there from Reading, Pennsylvania, after the Civil War. 

“Jordan became a very successful and wealthy businessman there, and left money toward the construction of town buildings,” Madary wrote.

A quick check of his information from the Ancestry ThruLines tool tended to corroborate the connection—a “first cousin, once removed” of mine showed up there!

It was enjoyable connecting with Madary and made me chuckle when I recalled the ending of the front-page mention of Henry’s death in 1871: “ … and was in every way an excellent and good man.”

***

In last week’s “Roots & Branches” column, immigration guru Rich Venezia of Rich Roots Genealogy solved reader Thomas Liszka’s concern that his great-aunt shouldn’t have needed to naturalize by identifying a temporary quirk in naturalization law that took citizenship away from Americans who marriage aliens.

Which prompted Liszka to ask the next question: Was the citizenship of children similarly stripped? The answer is that, no, they were protected by the 14^th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause.

As I frequently say about genealogy (well, usually about German history): It’s only complicated and confusing until you get to the details … and then it’s really complicated and confusing!