ROOTS & BRANCHES

If you’ve been reading “Roots & Branches” the last couple of weeks, you’ll realize that the arrival of the post-Medieval gazetteer of German towns put me on a “Gruber jag” … that is, I found a couple of additional generations of my Gruber family, who came from the town of Sinsheim near Heidelberg in the early 1730s.

They settled specifically in what was originally Heidelberg Township, Lancaster County, and today is Heidelberg and North Heidelberg Townships, Berks County.

Heinrich Gruber the immigrant was one of the founders of St. Daniel’s Evangelical Lutheran church, nicknamed in German Eck Kirche (“Corner Church”) since the land it was deeded was from the corner of the settler’s property from which it was taken.

After making that progress on the Gruber generations in Germany, I felt a tug pulling me to check out the cemeteries at St. Daniel’s on the way back from dinner one evening.

I recalled from some 40 years ago when I was beginning my personal genealogy research that the tombstones of both Heinrich’s son Johann Adam Gruber (1735–1807) and Johann Adam’s wife Anna Elisabetha Schauer (1744–1790) were at St. Daniel’s. I’ve been making the rounds a number of cemeteries at which I have ancestors since time has not been a friend to many of these stones.

In the meantime since my first visit in the 1980s, the folks at St. Daniel’s had intentionally “flattened” the older stones and placed them in rows.

I’m going to gripe a little since I’m a trustee of a different historic graveyard. Putting the stones horizontal may make for easier mowing but others with “tombstone expertise” tell me that when the stones are flat on the ground it subjects them more to the elements and plans such as moss. I was also chagrined to see that the grass cuttings were left atop most of these horizontal stones, a disrespect that I can’t quire fathom.

But enough of the gripes. It took the GPS feature on the Find A Grave site, but I was able to find both Johann Adam and Anna Elisabetha’s markers.

His virtually illegible while hers is still readable … and it still strikes me that her birth date is exactly 10 years off from what her baptismal date indicates. I had seen her tombstone the first time before finding the baptismal record and it struck me as odd that she would be older than her husband (possible but not often the case) and that her children would be born when she was age 28 to 47 (again, not impossible, but less likely than from 18 to 37 when using her correct birth year of 1744).

As a bonus, I found the stone for Anna Elisabetha’s grandfather Michael Schauer, an immigrant born in 1699 in Massenbach, Germany, which added him to one of just several ancestors with 17^th century births for whom I have found tombstones.