ROOTS & BRANCHES

If you’re followed the last couple of “Roots & Branches” columns as I have become aware of more information about one of my ancestral families named Miller, you might be thinking, “Wow, doesn’t this give you hope that even lines involving common names will be solved!”

But if you’ve followed “Roots & Branches” through its 20 years and more than a thousand installments, you know that probably a better thought is “Be careful what you wish for.”

In this case, in which I was examining my so-called “umbilical line,” otherwise known at the mitochrondrial DNA (mtDNA, for short) line, to make a Mother’s Day Facebook post, I discovered that I was related to a genealogy correspondent of mine named Brian S. Miller.

But in addition to finding the European hometown of the first of my Miller lines – as well as the welcome news that I’m related to the late Schuyler C. Brossman – I also was left with a new and even more perplexing brick wall.

My new “terminating mtDNA ancestor” (that is, the farthest “mother’s mother’s mother,” etc., who I can name) is Elisabeth Schaeffer Miller.

From her 1776 baptismal record at Altalaha Lutheran Church in the Tulpehocken Creek area of Berks County, it’s known that her father was a Nicholas Schaeffer.

But here’s what makes this into a deal: “Nicholas Schaeffer” was the equivalent of “John Smith” at this time in the Tulpehocken.

In part, that’s due to Schaeffer and its spelling variants being a common German occupational name, meaning “shepherd,” of which there were apparently many when German commoners started taking surnames in the Middle Ages.

But, in this specific situation, it’s due to what are nicknamed the “Hanks Jones Palatines,” after Henry Z “Hank” Jones, the Disney-child-actor-turned-genealogist who spent loads of time and money researching the first mass migration of German-speaking people to America in 1709.

Among those 800-something families was a Johann Nicolaus Schaeffer, who was born in the 1670s in Relsberg in the Palatine, came to upstate New York and eventually became part of the first German wave to Tulpehocken in 1723 (A quick note for the uninitiated: German men usually went by what we’d call their middle names at this time).

Which, of course, might make you think there’s an O. Henry ending to this column – that “OK, you found the Nicholas who was Elisabeth Schaeffer Miller’s father right off the bat.”

Yeah, well, not so fast. If you’re reading closely, you’ll do the math that the immigrant Johann Nicholas is probably a good candidate for Elisabeth’s great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather.

But where this gets really complicated is the “pyramid of Nicholases” that the immigrant started.

Following the German pattern of the time, Johann Nicholas named one of his five sons Nicholas.

At least four of the five of immigrant Johann Nicholas’ sons named sons Nicholas. With this third generation of Nicholases born between 1722 and 1736, they are all unlikely to be Elisabeth’s father.

Obviously, separating the Nicholas Schaeffers is likely to be quite task.