ROOTS & BRANCHES

In between preparing for lectures and the occasional research-for-hire job I do, I’ve been managing to sneak in more time to look at many of my own personal lines—that is, when people aren’t asking me about them, that is.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine Corinne Moretti Hauk saw an early 1900s photo on Facebook that mentioned a Beidler family in the city of Reading, and knowing that I was a genealogist, wondered if I knew if they were related to me.

It took just a U.S. Census record, a death certificate, and a baptism—all on Ancestry.com—to show that the William Beidler in the picture would have been a third cousin to my grandfather Claude Franklin Beidler.

Then later in the day on a visit to a restaurant in Lebanon County where I used to live, I was quizzed by our server whether I was related to the “Annville Beidlers,” a question at which I chuckled since I faced that question a lot when I lived there.

And, yes, I knew that we, too, are third cousins.

***

A personal line on which I made progress was a fifth-great-grandfather with the evocative name of Erasmus Buckhenmajor (phonetically anglicized to Buggenmeyer in America).

Erasmus is one of the many immigrants whose European origins were found by the late researcher Annette K. Burgert, this time in the town of Michelfeld in Baden in a region called the Kraichgau.

As was her custom, Burgert put together enough information to prove the tie between German and American records—which is the really tough part, after all!—but I’ve gone back a few times to see if there are more records to be had about these families to extend them further back in time.

In looking at the Michelfeld records, I had redoubled respect for Burgert because the Michelfeld church book was put together in a confusing “family register” format (in other words, not chronological, but by family).

I found Erasmus’s baptism in 1695 that Burgert had noted, and thought that might be the end of the trail.

But then I looked at a short index in the very back of this church book and after deciphering that the numbers in the index meant—they referred to family numbers, not page numbers!—I was able to find a second family number for Erasmus’s father Hans Buckhenmajor and when I looked up the page on which that second family number was found … it showed me the marriage of Erasmus’s parents in 1684, along with the names of their fathers (which is somewhat common in Protestant German church registers) and mothers, too (less common).

The father of Erasmus’s mother Maria Magdalena was identified as Johann Ehrenfelder, said to be a minor official in the village of Neidenstein, but alas he was not to be found in those records, leaving my “extension” at one generation.