ROOTS & BRANCHES

For a long time my umbilical line—that is, the bottom line of the pedigree chart, tracing the mother’s mother’s mother’s, etc., line—was stuck on a third-great-grandmother who married a Miller, one of the most common surnames, even with the geographic area narrowed down to the Tulpehocken region of Berks County.

My friend and correspondent Brian S. Miller helped me find the right Sarah Miller, although he didn’t do me any favors beyond that since this Sarah’s mother married a (wait for it, wait for it) Schaeffer, another ultra-common, occupationally derived surname among German-speaking people.

I was reminded of all this again with Mothers Day recently, and I posted photos of my umbilical line, including two generations of tombstones as photographic representations of the earliest women in this lineage (while both of them lived into the age of photography, I’m not counting on there being any photographs of them).

The furthest-back generation, my fifth-great-grandmother Elisabetha Schaeffer Miller was born 1775. Credible information online showed her as the daughter of Nicholas Schaeffer and Maria Susanna Haag.

But that presented me with a hangup because in the mid-1700s, there were a whole flock of Nicholas Schaeffers running around that same Tulpehocken region.

Even though which Nicholas Schaeffer it was wouldn’t be germane to extending the umbilical line (that would move to the Haag family), I guess I got stymied a bit in wanting to straighten them out.

When I went back to looking at the Schaeffers, I realized that despite the large number of Nicholases, expert researchers such as the late Rev. Frederick S. Weiser and the now-retired Henry Z “Hank” Jones Jr. had done the immense job of separating these folks and firmly established Elisabetha’s parents as the Nicholas born 1730 to immigrant Peter Schaeffer (who is—you guessed it!—the son of another Nicholas Schaeffer from Relsberg in the western Palatinate0, and the aforementioned Maria Susanna Haag, born 1734, the year after her family arrived in America.

So Maria Susanna became my “furthest back” umbilical “great” and I wanted to know more about her line, particularly of her mother. I was especially interested in finally breaking through to immigration, since Maria Susanna was born just after.

Decent documentation shows her to be Maria Appollonia Dieter, born around 1710 near Mannheim and then married to Johann Georg Haag in 1724 (Note that I said “decent” documentation … there’s still some more work needed to convince me), which would finally take my umbilical line across the Atlantic with a long-ago sixth-great-grandmother.

And once I feel confident of that connection, a pedigree at WikiTree lists her father as Johann Michael Dieter—spouse unknown!

So that’ll offer another challenge—getting the umbilical line back into the seventeenth century.