I do not have the answer as to who the wife of Michael Yager was. I may never. But I want to think about it some more before I comment on the excellent response that was made in the Mailing List. I do appreciate it.
In my last note I described John Weaver and Barbara Käfer Weaver, his wife, as unknowns in the sense that I did not know why they had been selected. Actually, there is a respectable reason as was made by some commentators on the Mailing List. It goes back to Susanna Clore Weaver Crigler Yager, to give her maiden name and the surnames of her three husbands. John Weaver’s father was Peter Weaver, and Peter’s mother was Susanna. Michael Yager’s grandfather was Nicholas Yager, the last husband of Susanna.
(In finding the wife of Peter Fleshman (Sr.), Susanna was the key there because her four families turned up repeatedly in the associations in the Communion Lists that the children of Peter Fleshman, Sr., made.)
We are left with five unexplained choices for sponsors:
One of the things that I had been thinking about is that we do not have a definitive definition of the Crigler family, one element in the four families of Susanna. I am inclined to believe there were only two sons, Christopher and Nicholas, but I don’t believe anything would prevent there being another child, especially a girl.
Michael Yager was chosen as a sponsor once by Zacharias Breil and his wife Delia, who was a Clore. On another occasion Michael was chosen as a sponsor by Nicholas and Mary Willheit. Nicholas’ mother was Waldburga Weaver, so in both of these cases we see the Clore-Weaver-Crigler-Yager connections perhaps being significant.
I believe that I mentioned before that the Communion Lists shed no light. After discounted the names adjacent to Michael and Elizabeth, because of the known connection to Michael, there is no pattern to the other names. This is similar to the baptismal sponsors that we have just discussed.
Craig Kilby asks how do we know that the sequence of names in the Communion List is the seating order. In the Lutheran church, there is a prescribed pattern for people to go from their pews to the altar for Communion. It starts with the front pew on the left side and goes back from that until the left side is exhausted. Then it starts with the right side front and goes to the back. Then comes the men’s balcony and the women’s balcony.
(10 Feb 03)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.