ROOTS & BRANCHES

Some recent nice weather spurred me to visit one of my favorite places, the Historical Old Graveyard of Bern Reformed United Church of Christ in Berks County.
Regular “Roots & Branches” readers will recall that last fall correspondence with my distant cousin Pernell Staudt led me to conclude that despite having trod through this burial grounds for much of life, there was one additional direct-line ancestor to which I had never made the connection.
This was Anna Margaretha Gräter, born in Sulzdorf, Wuerttemberg, in 1728 and married first to my ancestor Hans Michael Lieb and second to Pernell’s ancestor Johann Mathias Staudt.
Pernell’s sources named had her maiden name as “Schradern” and I thought they were simply trying to make sense out of a surname spelling that didn’t make sense.
Anna Margaretha’s name was actually rendered “Chrädern” —and when accounting for German phonetics, in which a “Ch” is often pronounced like an English “K” and in which the leap from a “K” to a “G” sound is very slight (as is likewise with D’s and T’s in German). The final N is a variant of the -in feminine ending used in German.
This made “Chrädern” into an understandable spelling variant of “Gräter.”
So I made that recent visit and while I didn’t get a great photo—as with many tombstones, these face east and therefore don’t make for great photos in the afternoon with the sun behind them—I did wander around and was struck by the number of brown sandstone memorials with writing on their backs.
In the Berks County area, reddish-brown sandstone was the tombstone material of choice only for a relatively short time—from right after the Revolutionary War until the early 1800s.
Its reputation as a softer stone than marble or granite made it ripe for replacement by those latter materials. And while part of the bad reputation is that the inscriptions weather more easily, some researchers believe that actually these stones were intentionally carved more shallowly and painted.
But what fascinated me on this trip to the Bern graveyard was looking at the backs of those stones and wondering what was written on them.
While they are probably just a Bible verse, poem or song … there could be more actionable family information, too (And, truthfully, even if they’re just a verse or song—that’s worth knowing, too!)
When I got home, I went to my copy of the graveyard transcriptions done some decades ago by a professional researcher. In some cases, there are notations about the backs of stones, but not nearly as many as actually have writing.
Not that I needed another project, but I feel this one calling me.
I guess it’s a case of “leaving no stone unturned.”
Or unread.