ROOTS & BRANCHES

I don’t think there’s any genealogist who doesn’t like solving a mystery regarding an ancestor. Take Mimi Reed from State College.

She wrote to me recently about the deposition for a Revolutionary War pension given by her George Fister, which mentioned guard duty at the Tile Church in Windsor Township, Berks. County. “I have searched in vain for this place/building,” she said.

Reed said she’d even asked the late John T. Humphrey—mentor to so many of us in the German genealogy world—when she ran into him at the Pennsylvania State Archives. “He had no clue,” she said.

While I know my 18^th century congregations pretty well—more in western Berks and Lebanon counties but throughout the Pennsylvania German arc to some extent—more importantly I had the gold standard available, Charles Glafelter’s Pastors and People book, which profiled all the German and Lutheran congregations from the 1700s.

He listed a Zion or Ziegel church, then in Windsor Township (and later in Perry Township when it was formed). Since Ziegel means brick or tile in the German language and Glatfelter noted that the congregation built a brick church in the early 1800s (after Fister’s guard duty but earlier than his deposition), I thought this wrapped up the case … that Fister’s deposition had been translated literally from Ziegel Kirche to “Tile Church.”

 Reed, though, did a bit more sleuthing and found a writeup on the church that said it had acquired its nickname already in the 1700s courtesy of having a tile roof (unusual for the time) on its log church building.

“Thanks for your help and knowledge,” Reed said. “I never would have found any of it had it not been for you.”

I’m glad Reed was grateful but given that she’s a sharp genealogist herself I’m only going say that she’s overselling me and underselling herself.

***

 When I first became interested in genealogy in 1984, I benefited from both the Pennsylvania German penchant for keeping records as well as goodly number of already experienced people who were willing to share what they’d already done on our families in common.

One particular family, though, was a thorny brick wall for me—one of my parental great-grandmothers was Emma Eliza Daub Etchberger and while I found family Bible information showing her father and grandfather both to be men named Peter Daub, the next generation was elusive.

I ended up using much indirect evidence to break the brick wall—and in the process prove the Daub line well into the 1600s in Germany—another family mystery involving the immigrant’s burial stayed a brick wall that I created myself until recently.

But that’s a story for next week’s “Roots & Branches” column.