*[Deine Wohnung ist sehr schoen.]
[I have been away for a while from these Notes for a variety of (good) reasons. Eleanor and I are members of the Delaware Photographic Society and they hold an international exhibition of work which has to be judged. One of the judges came from Germany and we, with others, hosted him. This involved feeding him, bedding him, and taking him to several local sites where he took many photographs. His English was good but still we had to resort to the dictionary once in a while. More or less simultaneously with this, I have put up two web pages and I’ll just give the URLs for them: www.kenbak1.info and www.pa.palam.org ]
Recently one of the editors, Dr. Thomas W. Jones, of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly sent me the December 2006 issue in which he has an article that pertains to people in the Robinson River Valley. Some of the families discussed are Germanna families and others are “English”. The big difficulty that he faced in his research was the lack of records. His article was entitled “ Uncovering Ancestors by Deduction: The Husbands and Parents of Eleanor (nee Medley) (Tureman) (Crow) Overton ”. As these names show, she was married three times and only one of them, the last, has a record.
Germanna researchers will recall that Susanna Castler, who married Samuel Klug, the Lutheran minister at the German Church, became a widow about 1764. Shortly thereafter, she married Jacob Medley. In tracing the history of the subject Eleanor, it seemed that she might be from the Klug family or from the Medley family because of the associations exhibited in a variety of documents. The Klug family does have two unnamed daughters and possibly Eleanor was one of these two.
After examining the evidence, much of it inferential, Dr. Jones did decide that Eleanor had been born a Medley. Along the way, he discussed the Klug, Medley, and Lotspeich families with brief mentions of other Germanna families. If you are from one of these families or the Castler family, you may want to read the article which is not light reading. The reasoning is very involved, though Dr. Jones lays it out rather clearly. The conclusion that he arrives at is never stated explicitly in any record but he believes the available evidence shows Eleanor’s nativity and marriages. (I am reminded of the work of Nancy Moyer Dodge who has done some good work based on the implied evidence of many documents.)
The issue of the NGSQ is Volume 94, No. 4 for Decemember 2006.
*[Your apartment is very pretty.]
(05 Feb 07)
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.