ROOTS & BRANCHES

Steady readers of the “Roots & Branches” column know I have a special affinity for the burial grounds of Bern Reformed United Church of Christ, now owned by the Bern Cemetery Company, of which I am a trustee.

I was raised in this Berks County church—almost literally, since my mother was often there “until the last light is out,” a my father often put it—and it was at the church’s historic old graveyard where I had my first genealogy epiphany some 40 years ago.

And even as a child, I recall hiking to the top of the rolling hill of that graveyard with my mother.

We’d visit the graves of her Hiester ancestors.

We’d give a chuckle at the tombstone of Tillie Balthaser, born in the 1800s but having an “orphan” stone with no death date.

And we’d also give a nod to a singular wooden memorial well up that hillside, the only clue to the identity of whose grave it marked being a Civil War veteran flag holder.

Fast forward to just a few years ago when Patrick Donmoyer, director of Kutztown University’s Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, reached out to tell me exactly how singular that wooden marker was—it was the only memorial of that material left in Berks County!

Donmoyer asked whether he could preserve the wooden marker at his Kutztown center and replace it with a new wooden memorial.

The Bern Cemetery Company trustees were happy for the swap, and Donmoyer and fellow cemetery enthusiast Mike Emery, administrator at Cornwall Iron Furnace Historic Site in Lebanon County, performed the delicate job of removing the marker.

After a painstaking process of finding the right species of wood (pine, as it turned out) and letting it dry out before cutting it to the size of the old marker, Donmoyer and Emery were ready to install the new marker on the historic graveyard last November.

Donmoyer and Emery had attempted to find out the identity of whose grave the wood marked but had been unsuccessful.

When the new marker was installed, a bevy of local media ranging from the newspaper to TV to radio stopped by for ceremony, and that publicity included our lack of knowledge about who was buried under the marker.

And that publicity led in no time flat to what appeared to be a solid lead to the identity of the person when someone emailed us, directing us to an online Find A Grave memorial.

For a person who was a Civil War soldier, no less—matching the flag stand attached to the old wooden marker.

For person who was at the Battle of Gettysburg, no less.

But you know what they say about things “too good to be true?” Yes, as next week’s “Roots & Branches” will show, this is one of those stories.