ROOTS & BRANCHES

It began with a Friend request on Facebook that I almost deleted since I thought it might be one of the increasingly annoying situations in which someone’s account has been kidnapped by someone else.
I recognized Laura Muha’s name from having worked with her a few decades ago at what was then the newspaper in Harrisburg (which now isn’t located in Harrisburg any longer … not much of a newspaper any longer, for that matter, either!).
But I took a chance and accepted the Friend request from Muha and it turned out to be my real former co-worker and not some Internet clone!
It turned out she had a great story to tell about research on her great-great-great-grandfather, the immigrant ancestor on her mother’s paternal side.
Muha, who works now in New York City, said his name was Theodor Friedrich von Kronenfeldt, but at some point after coming to this country, he anglicized it to “Frederic Crownfield.”
“I know he was born in the Kingdom of Hanover and was living in Baltimore by 1833, but despite a lot of digging, I haven’t yet found his birth or immigration records,” Muha wrote. “I do, however, know a bit about his life in this country, because he was active in the German community and his name appears with some regularity in The Sun during the 1830s and 1840s.”
She zeroed in on this ancestor because of a publication she has in mind. “Though I have a longstanding interest in genealogy, and have been collecting information on various branches of the family for years, he’s of particular interest to me right now because I’m working on what I hope will be a book about his five granddaughters (my great-grandfather’s sisters, all of whom were working artists in NY in the late 1800s and early 1900s), and I have reason to think that he was a significant influence on them.”
Muha says she has reason to think “he believed in the value of education for women—his daughter took college-prep classes in the 1850s—and that attitude seems to have flowed down through the generations to benefit at least some the granddaughters I’m writing about.”
What motivated her to reach out to me is another good story that she related in her first message: “I’ve been using your books for years to help research the German side of my family but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t look closely at the author’s name,” Muha wrote.
“Today for some reason I did, and did a double take as I realized the author was the same person I worked with years ago at The Patriot-News. Now that the nickel has dropped, I just wanted to say thanks—the books are terrifically helpful.”