ROOTS & BRANCHES

There’s truly been a run on the market when it comes to making new Beidler connections, and possibly some others in my personal genealogy.

At the 45^th reunion of my Schuylkill Valley High School class a couple of years ago, another member of the “class of ’78” Teresa Schultz Mohler told me that her daughter married a man named Beidler and inquired about whether that was a relation to me.

I’ve answered some variant of this question loads of times during the 40 years I’ve been doing genealogy and since Mohler indicated the man was Berks County, I was able to state pretty confidently that we were at least distantly related since I’ve never found an unrelated Beidler in Berks County.

Mohler was able to do some sleuthing on her own and when combined with a Memorial Day weekend Facebook I made showing the generations in my Beidler line, she determined that I’m a “third cousin, once removed” to her son-in-law, which is not too distant, genealogically speaking.

Then when I recently taught four sessions on Pennsylvania German genealogy for Historic Trappe in Montgomery County, a lady came up to me afterwards and asked, “Are you related to the Host Church Beidlers?” and of course I had to say, yes, three generations in my line were buried there.

So it turns out that she’s Kathryn Moser and part of the Strickler clan who married into Beidlers and was a second cousin, which is even closer and more uncommon to find!

But the “small world” wasn’t complete yet. I posted a photo of meeting Moser on my Facebook author page and received a comment a different high school classmate, Rosemarie Knoll Zorrilla, that Moser was also a cousin of hers, and wondering if that made Zorrilla and I cousins.

 Well, as it turns out, since I was a cousin of Moser’s on her father’s side, while Zorrilla was a cousin from her mother’s side, that we might be called “cousins-in-law” but nothing more.

However, I wasn’t quit done with this yet. I knew I had ancestors by the name of Knoll or Noll in the Myerstown area in Lebanon County and wondered what Zorrilla knew about her Knoll lineage.

It turned out she knew a lot, but when I went back over my records, I discovered that there were two Knoll / Noll / Null families in the 1700s from different immigrant families, and that Zorrilla’s from one of those immigrants and that mine is from the other one.

Also at the Historic Trappe sessions, one of the virtual attendees talked about a project in which all of the members of a particular class at Hamburg, Schuylkill Valley’s neighboring district, traced back to just four immigrants.

I wonder what such a project would show about my own high school class.