The Moyer Clan

One of my main genealogical focuses has been the family branch to which I owe my name -- the Moyers.  According to Charles Roberts' History of Lehigh County Pennsylvania and a Genealogical and Biographical Record of its Families (Vol. 3, p. 930), the progenitor of this clan was Wilhelm Meyer, who owned land in the towns of Lowhill, Lynn, and Weisenberg in Pennsylvania.

Wilhelm had at least one son -- Johann Peter Meyer -- and Johann Peter's large family left a great many descendants.  According to Roberts, most of the children moved to Ohio.  My own ancestor, Peter (Johann Peter's son), stayed behind in the Lehigh Valley.  My goal has been to track as many family lines as I can, but with at least 16 children, it's not easy.  Miraculously, I found much of the family carefully enumerated in a newspaper article.

The Library of Congress' Chronicling America website is a fantastic resource.  That's where I located an article from Ohio's Western Reserve Chronicle originally printed on 11 October 1865 (annotated at right).  The article is an announcement to heirs of Johann Peter, concerning his land.  Johann Peter's living children are listed first, followed by his grandchildren by his deceased children, grouped by family.  Below the fold is my attempt to make sense of each of the ninety-two names mentioned in the article.

Determining accurate ages

John Trittenbach -- my 4th great grandfather -- was born about 1783 somewhere near Easton.  In 1810, he married Catharine Barnett, and spent the next few decades producing children who would vex future genealogists like me.  Based on the censuses from 1820 to 1840, it looks like John and Catharine had nine or ten children, of which I've identified six...all girls.  More than any other family in my tree, the Trittenbachs have stymied efforts to pin down their birth dates.

Take, for example, daughter Amanda (married William Mock).  I have identified her in the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, which respectively imply birth years of 1824, 1820, 1811, and 1808.  This has the somewhat dubious effect of making her 18 months older every birthday.  Her church burial record indicates that she was born in 1812.  What's a researcher to do?  Until a solution appears, I've simply been averaging these numbers to 1815.

A bigger question is why we have this vast range of dates for Amanda's birth.  As I understand it, birthdays generally weren't carefully tracked until the latter half of the 19th century.  But it's a completely different matter to believe that you are aging 50% faster than everyone else around you.  One conceivable theory is that vanity led Amanda to fudge her age a bit, but that she cared less the older she got.  Or maybe she just liked lying to census takers.  I may never know.

Stehley? Staley? Staly? Google tricks for variant spellings.

I have a 3rd great grandfather by the name of Gottlieb Stahley.  This is the kind of name that can give a genealogist agita.  There are probably a dozen different ways to spell both his first and last names.  Most genealogy sites have a wildcard function that eases the pain somewhat.  But what if you are searching on Google?  Well, the trick I use is to run a search like this:

Gottlieb|Gotlieb|Godlieb|Gottleib|Gotleib|Godleib Stehley|Stahley|Stehly|Stahly|Staley|Staly

The pipes mean "or," so the above string will find every combination of the listed names...thirty-six in all.  I don't have time to run thirty-six separate Google searches, so this is a great little shortcut.

By the way, this particular search helped me break through a huge brick wall.  I found Gottlieb in a list of headstone transcriptions, which further yielded a bonanza of information on that branch of my family

Old World origins

One of the things I really love to do is find ways to visualize data.  I do this for mundane things in my everyday life, and this compulsion has carried over to my work in genealogy.  Recently I decided to make a table of my ancestral origins.  This is the result:

Country	Region	City	Surname(s)	Immigrant(s)	Date	%
Italy	Calabria	Gioiosa Ionica	Loccisano, Sfara	Vincent Loccisano	1939	25.0%
Italy	Calabria	Cardinale	De Fazio, Rotiroti	Elizabeth De Fazio	1926	25.0%
Germany	Hesse	Angersbach	Miller/Möller, Eifert	Conrad Miller & Maria Eifert	1882-1887	12.5%
Germany	Prussia, Posen	Pogorzela	Pritz, Zuelke	Louis Pritz	1892	12.5%
United States	NJ/PA	Phillipsburg/ Easton	Sauder, Barnett			5.5%
United States	PA	North Whitehall	Mertz, Boyer, Klotz			4.7%
United States	PA	Lynn	Schmidt, unk.			3.5%
Germany	Württemberg		Gerard	Catherine Gerard	1816	3.1%
Germany	Palatinate	Dielkirchen	Benner, Stoller	Valentine Benner	1856	3.1%
Germany	Württemberg		Stehley/Stähle	Jacob Stehley	1814	1.6%
Germany			Moyer/Meyer	Wilhelm Meyer	1740-1760	1.2%
Germany			Trittenbach/ Drittenbach	Johann Michael Drittenbach	1749	0.8%
United States	PA	Heidelberg	Delong			0.8%
Germany	Alsace	Oberbetchdorf	Kressley/ Grässel	Jacob Grässel	1754	0.4%
Germany	Palatinate		Neff	Anna Neff	1730-1760	0.4%

My goal here was to account for every immigration event in my family tree, and to determine the percentage of my ancestry tied to each event.  Of course I couldn't pin down every immigrant, so I simply listed the U.S. region of the relevant family branch.

So I am 50% Italian.  I've traced about 35% of my ancestors to Germany, or at least to areas that were culturally German, via nine separate immigration events, which I think is amazing.  The remaining 15% of my heritage is unaccounted for, but based on last names and locations in eastern Pa., I suspect it is mostly German as well.

Finding ancestors in online newspaper archives

One of the earliest stories my dad shared about our ancestors was that my 2nd great grandfather was a railroad engineer who died in a train wreck. My dad loved trains so I think this story particularly resonated with him. The upshot of such a sensational death is that the story is easy to find in newspapers.

Nathan D. Moyer (b. 1849, Lynn, PA) was the youngest child of Peter Moyer and Catherine Girard. As a teenager he got a job with the Jersey Central Railroad and would eventually become the oldest engineer on the line. On the morning of 9 October 1909, the air thick with fog, his train collided with another near Siegfried Station in Northampton, PA. The engineers of both trains were killed. Dramatic, yes, and made more dramatic when some bulls being carried by one of the trains escaped and gored two women.

My dad had a copy of the story from The Globe (Bethlehem, PA), which is the longest news article I have found on the matter, clocking in at 700 words or so. But some quick Google searches revealed the story was reported far and wide, even warranting a blurb in the New York Times. The best part is that, while searching online for articles about Nathan Moyer's death, I stumbled on some remarkable stories concerning his life.

An 1898 article in The Scranton Tribune, included at left, recounts two incidents in which Nathan's quick thinking saved lives. Within the span of a week, he twice prevented his engine from running over people: first a small boy, then an old woman and a girl.

Nathan wasn't always so lucky, however. The next year, in 1899, The Easton Free Press reported that Nathan's train ran over a man on the tracks. It appeared to Nathan that the man deliberately knelt on the rails, making it a possible suicide.

Decades earlier, in 1876, a report on internal affairs for the state of Pennsylvania listed railroad accidents. The relevant text reads, "Cornelius Brown, stealing a ride on a coal train; jumped from the train while in motion, and had one leg crushed below the knee. -- Nathan Moyer, engineer; Edward Murta, conductor."

I'm glad I availed myself of these online newspaper/book archives. It has helped provide a clearer picture of my ancestor's life and profession.

Thanks, Dad, for the inspiration

My dad was an avid genealogist.  It was a lifelong passion for him.  He would often take trips to cemeteries to photograph the gravestones of long-dead relatives, and at he attended family reunions with pen, paper, and a lot of questions.

Once, when I was fairly young, he showed me a hand-drawn pedigree chart--my ancestors, carefully arranged on a piece of paper.  I remember being keenly interested as he told me some of their stories.  But the genealogy bug never quite bit me like it had bitten my dad.  I was always peripherally interested in his progress over the years, regularly asking him how he was coming with the family history.  I listened intently to all his new discoveries and enjoyed pouring over the various descendant charts he printed out.  But genealogy was always his hobby, not mine.

Dad died on May 26, 2011.  He was quite young, and it was very unexpected.  During the weeks that followed, my thoughts kept returning to our family history--my father’s legacy.  I knew that I would be the one to preserve all his work.  It wasn’t so much a decision as it was a simple fact.  Still, I was somewhat daunted.

Sometime over that summer I worked up the courage to log into his Ancestry.com account (thankfully, Dad was never one for imaginitive passwords).  The next few months were some of the most amazing of my life.  Browsing the family tree and piecing together the steps my dad had taken was a wonderful, eye-opening experience.  I had finally been bitten by the genealogy bug.

And so, genealogy became one of the many gifts my dad gave to me.

It’s been about a year now, and I feel like I’ve grown somewhat from a credulous newbie, unquestioningly accepting every possible lead as fact, into a hardened skeptic, making tentative hypotheses and seeking documentation.  I still have a lot to learn, though, and I decided that starting a blog is a good way both to organize my thoughts and find others who are researching my ancestors.