ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column  talked about Our Pennsylvania German Families: A History and Genealogy of the Ancestors of Eva Minerva Baer Barnett Who Settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Her Descendants by Edna Barnett Chelson.

As I noted, this 600-page compendium has loads of good information on a variety of families, many of which are my actual direct lines or ones that I’ve researched for others.

Since in many cases Chelson includes her hints, clues and research notes (in addition to names, narrative information and dates), I could see where some of her research left off and mine had continued, including two families (Gicker and Weber) from the German countship of Wittgenstein and one from Spendlingen, an emigration hotspot in the Rhineland (Strunck).

 For the Wittgenstein families, I had benefited from the work of Jochen-Karl Mehldau, who created databases of all the extant church and civil records from Wittgenstein and made them available to American researchers for a fee.

Since I already knew that my part of Berks County was like a “Little Wittgenstein” in the 1700s—prominent families such as the Hiesters traced their roots to Elsoff in Wittgenstein—I quizzed Mehldau on quite a number of the local immigrant families and hit paydirt on several.

This included both the Gicker family (originally spelled Gücker), who were traceable in Elsoff’s church records back into the early 1600s. Chelson’s notes indicate she was on the right track linking the family to Elsoff.

I’m not a descendant of any Gickers by blood but I feel a kinship to them because the land I now own was in the Gicker family for a century before it was broken up in the 1870s.

I’m also not a descendant of the Matthias Weber family mentioned in Chelson’s book but I do descend from Matthias’s brother Hermann. They also hail from Elsoff and are found in its abundant church records back several generations.

And to show you how families from the same village stuck together in America … well, immigrant Matthias Weber’s granddaughter Catharina married one of the many Daniel Gickers in this family.

When traced earlier than the Gickers, my land was once part of a massive 451-acre tract that was bought by Matthias Gicker from the Penn family.

The Strunck family was one of fascination for me for a long time; in the Hiester genealogy passed down to my mother and me, our Hiester immigrant’s wife was named as Elizabeth Strunck but with no hint of parentage.

Through much research and considerable use of indirect evidence. I was able to connect her to a group of siblings who were all children of 1744 immigrant Weymar Strunck from Sprendlingen, the church records of which were able to identify the family to the late 1500s!