Published June 30, 2025
| 1 Comment | Leave A ReplyAt the very beginning of my genealogical journey, I was armed with a few sketchy family trees written down by my mother and my Gramom (dad’s mother).
What Gramom knew about her husband’s Beidler ancestry terminated with his grandfather Henry W. Beidler (1820–1871).
When I made my first visit to the State Library of Pennsylvania, I did what just about every greenhorn of that pre-Internet era did and looked at shelf after shelf of surname family histories there at that repository and of course there was one titled Beidler Family.
I recall chuckling to myself “Gee, I thought this would be tougher.”
But after looking through that family history book by the venerable A. J. Fretz (a prominent Pennsylvania historian of the early 1900s), I could tell already that he wasn’t talking about any Beidlers who came to Berks County, but rather was following the line of a Mennonite immigrant named Jacob Beidler, who settled in Bucks County.
Over time, I realized that there were several different families with somewhat interchangeable spellings of Beidler, and had learned enough genealogical methodology to know that going back one generation at a time, from most recent, was the best way not to end up in a blind alley.
Estate papers showed by Henry W.’s father was another Henry or Heinrich, and that the old Henry’s father was Peter.
Peter, in turn, was easily provable as the son of prominent miller Conrad Beidler. All of these generations were in my home county of Berks County, making the searches much easier, even decades at all.
It took a retired professor from Florida to show me that Conrad’s father was John or Johannes and a signature match between John’s will and a 1727 oath of allegiance upon arrival in Philadelphia proved that this Johannes, who signed his surname as Beydeler, was the immigrant generation.
It took until 2010 for me to connect Johannes to a German village, which turned out to be Gerolsheim in the Palatinate. It was an April 1727 marriage between Johannes Beuttler and Anna Maria Riebels that showed they were wed … and then must have quickly “gotten out of Dodge.”
The marriage record gave Johannes’s father as Bernhard Beuttler, but the furthest back this trail has gone is the 1690s when Bernhard was a church council member in Gerolsheim.
Given the evidence that the correct European spelling of the name is Beutler (plus or minus a letter or two), the preponderance of this surname is found in Switzerland, but no Bernhard Beutler has surfaced to connect to any of them.
In the meantime, I’ve been in contact with a number of people with Beidler roots, but none more evocative as another man named Jim Beidler, who like me is the son of a Richard Beidler.
And, yes, that’s another story, and will be the subject of next week’s “Roots & Branches” column.
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For Sale
The Best of "Roots & Branches", Fifth Edition published July 2017, edited by Terri J. Bridgwater.
It contains a selection of columns from Beidler’s award-winning newspaper column (currently published in the Altoona Mirror), which is the only syndicated newspaper column on genealogy in Pennsylvania.
The book can be ordered online, or purchased directly from Jim when he speaks at a conference.
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5 hours ago
I believe my Johannes Heinrich, father and son, have been sorted by a deed naming Louisa “Livesa” and a baptism. Still, there’s my “princess” question predating when they’re married on the ship Batavia, 1700’s Hesse-Darmstadt.