ROOTS & BRANCHES

S. Nicholas “Nic” Stoltzfus has authored an inviting family history titled German Lutherans to Pennsylvania Amish: The Stoltzfus Family Story (Morgantown, PA: Masthof Press, 2019; order from Masthof.com).

The family’s story is a compelling one. While they came to America as persecuted Amish headed by immigrant Nicholas Stoltzfus, just a few decades deep in Europe they not only belonged to the mainline, established Lutheran church but two generations were university-educated pastors.

The family also ping-ponged back and forth between Thuringia in central Germany and Zweibruecken on the western edges of what was then the loosely tethered Holy Roman Empire. Some generations died young, orphaning children at young ages.

In addition to having an interesting background, there are features to this coffee-table book that just allow it to stand head and shoulders above others.

The first is simply that it was done as coffee-table book in a size that allows for larger maps and charts. But the graphic appeal of the book doesn’t stop there. It is loaded with photographs and illustrations pertinent to the family’s history in Europe and then their early generations in Pennsylvania.

Included in the book are some imaginings of “days in the life” of the family, and these are properly marked as speculations, though tied to available evidence.

In addition to telling the family story through six generations in Europe and America, the book’s second part is a history of the house immigrant Nicholas Stoltzfus built and the dramatic circumstances that saved it from the cusp of destruction—including intervention by a former Pennsylvania governor.

Nic Stoltzfus was assisted with photography from his filmmaker father Elam, and his cousin Rosalind Beiler (a professor and author of an important book in the Pennsylvania German studies world on German land entrepreneur Caspar Wistar) was also an important contributor.

A small, motivated group of Stoltzfus descendants visited Germany in summer of 2018 and uncovered new documents relating to the family, including an attempt for marriage permission from civil authorities to marry an Anabaptist farmer’s daughter. That document even includes information that cements the family’s ties to central Germany.

It’s logical to think about how much interest such a book has to non-Stoltzfus descendants (although this clan became so large that for a time it was the most common surname—Amish or non-Amish!—in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, and all are descended from immigrant Nicholas) but I can make a pretty substantial case for it being a worthwhile read by anyone with German-speaking ancestry.

That’s because it gives a good amount of accurate detail on German history from the 1600s and 1700s, which is often not the case in family history books. Included in the book is an extensive bibliography of sources that will help other families planning such projects.