ROOTS & BRANCHES

When people say “There are no second acts in American lives,” they’re shortening an F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation and turning it on its head in the process.

That’s because the full quotation is: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.”

Well, proving the point Fitzgerald really wanted to make is my friendship with Ken Weaver, once of central Pennsylvania and now of Florida (with occasional forays back to Lancaster and Lebanon counties).

In the first incarnation of our acquaintance, he was the middle school principal of one of my daughters.

The second phase of our friendship has come from him adopting genealogy as a passionate hobby, in which he combines his professional beginnings as a German teacher with searches for Pennsylvania German ancestors, particularly in his home area of the Cocalico Valley, particularly the towns of Ephrata and Akron.

Weaver says that he’s aware that none of the things he’s started finding are “earth-shattering” in terms of importance, but there seem to be to many things, especially related to the weekly Ephrata Review newspaper, for everything to be mere chance, so he’s dubbed them “un-coincidences.”

As happens with many things like this, it began out of the blue when Weaver received an e-mail from a friend who told him Weaver’s photograph had run in the Review’s “Years Ago” column, which had snippets of articles from 10 to 110 years past.

“She sent me the photo and there I was as the lead in the junior class play at Ephrata High School with the class president giving two tickets to opening night to the president of the borough council,” Weaver said.

Next time Weaver was in the area, he went to the Review office to buy a copy of the paper, as well as going down the street in Ephrata to the Historical Society of the Cocalico Valley.

At the society, he was availed of librarian Cynthia Marquet’s intense institutional knowledge and showered with tidbits – including properties bought by his great-grandfather and then sold by his grandfather (who died soon after Weaver was born, so seeing his signature on the deed was treat) – as well as an original 1909 commencement program from Akron High School, at which the grandfather Lyte Oram Buch was a commencement orator, just as Weaver would be 60 years later at Ephrata High School!

Weaver also found old school pictures of his grandparents in elementary school, his mother’s yearbook and an old store ledger book with entries of purchases by his great-grandfather.

Weaver became a Review subscriber, which gives him access to past issues, too, and he found a front-page article about a genealogy book an Akron woman was writing on his Becker family – which led to chicken potpie dinner at the author’s home as well as the discovery that they have a family relation to the current editor of the Review.

“I am more than ever convinced that you can take the boy out of Ephrata, but you can’t take Ephrata out of the boy!” Weaver concluded.