ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” noted that after many years of off-and-on effort I had pinpointed exactly where my immigrant surname ancestor Johannes Beydeler’s land was in what’s now Upper Providence Township, Montgomery County.

But I ran out of space in the column to say why this was particularly important to me, given that nothing dating to Johannes’s time from the 1720s to 1770s remains on the property.

Or perhaps the proper phrasing is “to say again” why.

That’s because I’ve written a few times over the years in “Roots & Branches” about the enduring mystery of the maiden name of Barbara, wife of Johannes’s son Conrad Beidler.

It appears that “Barbie No Name” (as Valerie Gehr, who used to portray her when I also assumed period garb as the “spirit of Conard Beidler” at the house he built) was already married to Conrad in the mid-1750s, before he bought the mills in Robeson Township, Berks County, that took them away from what later became Montgomery County.

Since many people in this time period did not range far to find marriage partners, and given that Conrad likely had to apprentice somewhere to learn his trade as a miller, I’ve always felt it likely that Barbara might be the daughter of the miller where Conrad apprenticed. Add to this that Barbara was only baptized late in life—making it possible if not likely that she was raised Anabaptist—and my full theory is that her father could be an Anabaptist miller within two or three farms away from Johannes Beydeler’s land.

But until this juncture, that “center point” of Johannes’s land has eluded me. Now with that in pace, it’s going to be on my genealogical agenda to track all the property owners (particularly if any are Anabaptist millers!) within say three courses of the original Beidler tracts. Also relevant is that to find mills and millers, in this period of time you need to find creeks.

On the southwest side of the original Beydeler property, that should take the radius to the Schuylkill River in the vicinity of what’s today Royersford, and the Mingo Creek flows into the Schuylkill around there.

And on the east and north sides those three courses will go as far as the Perkiomen Creek (and its western branch) and perhaps even to its tributary, the Skippack Creek.

Also relevant is that the mapping of what was then all Philadelphia County in 1777 is still a work in progress, so I might wait a bit until it finishes the rest of what was then the townships of Providence and Limerick before giving it my full attention.

Sounds like “so many creeks and mills … so little time.”