Part two of genealogical notes on the Schaffer/Schaeffer family from Berks and Montgomery Counties, Pennsylvania
Some interesting bits of information in the old records of St. Paul’s Church in Amityville, PA, in eastern Berks County:
First, Samuel and Christiana had at least two of their children baptized there: John Jackson and Jacob Henry (as a bonus, the Civil War soldier Jacob Hill Schaffer has his own baptism date, with his parents named as Michael and Esther). Jacob Henry’s godparents were Jacob and Elizabeth Updegrove. A later census has Jacob Henry on the Updegrove farm. A tree on FamilySearch claims Elizabeth is the daughter of William Schaffer.
Second, there is a baptism entry for a Samuel Schaffer, son of William and Elizabeth Schaeffer, for 1 December 1806. If he is my Samuel, this would make him about 21 years old when his first child, Augustus, was born. As an experiment, I connected my Samuel to Elizabeth (as his sister) and William (as their father) on my Ancestry tree and suddenly five mystery DNA matches in my Schaffer cluster, all descended from Updegrove families, now made sense.
Assuming that I had (probably) found Samuel’s family, I started looking around for whence William (Wilhelm) came. Now, there are two stories of Schaffer/Schaeffer families arriving in the area in the 18th century. One involves Georg Schaeffer, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1750 and eventually brought his family to Richmond Township, Berks County. The other involves the Schaffers who were part of a group of settlers who left Schoharie, New York and resettled in Tulpehocken, Berks County. Sorting the various Schaffers who turn up in Berks and neighboring Montgomery Counties is a laborious undertaking, and some may be from neither family. But there’s work being done on getting the facts right, as seen in this FindAGrave entry, for example.
So who knows? I’m still digging.
Here’s something that recently got my attention in a book on the descendants of the above-mentioned Georg Schaffer. I include the relevant part here, alongside an excerpt from Claire Schaffer Cormican’s story of her ancestor Augustus Schaffer (Samuel’s first-born and the half-brother of my third great-grandfather, David Schaffer).
| From “The Schaffer Story” as told by Claire Schaffer Cornican (1902-1982): “At the time of the American Revolution three brothers from Stuttgart, Germany were members of a military unit, and these mercenary soldiers were hired by the British in the fight against Washington’s troops. After the defeat of the British these young soldiers remained here and settled in Pennsylvania and one who established a grist mill there was the ancestor of Augustus Schaffer who later pioneered in Ontonagon.” | From “History and Genealogy of the Georg Schaeffer Family” by Rev. David I. Schaeffer, 1949: “Georg, a son of John Schaeffer, a native of the Palatinate, was born in Reichelsheim, Hesse Darmstadt, Rhine River Valley,… crossing the ocean on the ship Edinburgh and landed in Philadelphia, August 15, [ ] 1750… It is said that Georg was accompanied by several other members of his family who settled in the vicinity of Coopersburg, Lehigh County, and another who settled somewhere in the State of Virginia. A diary verifies definitely that they were brothers. Records also show that they arrived in Philadelphia at the same time.” |
Am I onto something here? There are databases of German soldiers who fought for the British during the Revolutionary War, and so far nothing notable has turned up. While I’ve heard that “three brothers sailing to America” may be a common theme in early American settler folklore, I don’t believe that anyone intentionally made up their ancestor being a soldier for the British (as it likely wasn’t something to boast about). But… could it be that, as the story got passed down, someone remembered being told that their great-great-grandfather was a Hessian, and naturally assumed that meant Hessian soldier?
I will continue to search for credible origins for William Schaffer/Schaeffer.
