ROOTS & BRANCHES

My high school classmate Pete Engel is an absolute wizard when it comes to things mechanical, especially car engines.

As a matter of fact, he occasionally posts photos on Facebook of the screwy situations he runs into fixing vehicles that have obviously neglected by their owners.

Well, I probably should place an asterisk next to “obvious” since I’m such a mechanical no-nothing that many times I don’t get the joke from the photos he posts!

Engel likely knows more about genealogy than I know about engines—not meant to be the “damning with faint praise” that it could be interpreted as!—but asked me one day if I’d help him find some information about the family of a deceased neighbor of his in Delaware County.

He had seen some interesting items in the deceased’s home that appeared to come from the deceased’s maternal grandfather named Frank Yaeger, with a monogram in a difficult-to-read font that made the middle initial indecipherable. Engel was interested in this middle initial as well as birth and death dates for Yaeger and his burial place.

Engel had some tidbits of information: His neighbor’s mother’s married name was Grace Haring and he knew she died May 13, 1985, and was 78 years old, which he correctly intuited to mean she was born in late 1906 or early 1907. 

The names were common enough (and having a good number of spelling variants) that I wasn’t able to get productive results directly from the Pennsylvania death certificates database on Acestry.com or from Find A Grave.

Instead, knowing about when Grace was born, I found the family in the 1910 and 1920 U.S. censuses, which also gave me her mother’s name as Emma. Going back before Grace was born, to the1900 census, confirmed the family and noted Frank’s parents were born in Germany.

A Philadelphia marriage index entry showed Emma’s maiden name of Kurtz and with that combination of names, I was able to do a death certificate search for her, which called her a widow when she died in 1951 and listed her burial at Lawnview Cemetery / Memorial Park in Montgomery County.

Armed with all this information, I was able to limit the time period to search for Frank’s death certificate and it yielded paydirt.  He, too, was buried at Lawnview. The certificate noted his birth as Dec. 20, 1871, and death of death as Dec. 26, 1943.

And the elusive middle name? It was Leonard.

 Engel graciously noted he owes me a beer or three next time he’s in my area. Although I may hold out for the favor of an expert second opinion on a car problem if I’m ever in need!