In reverse order the roster is:
10. Andrew Edwin (Yeo) Reiff (1941-
9. Jacob Howard (Mack) Reiff (1908-1994) Buried Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd.
8. Howard Rosenberger Reiff (1880-1927) Buried Northwood Cemetery, Top of Broad St.
7. Jacob Landis Reiff (1857-1929) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
6. Abraham Schwenk Reiff (1817-1879) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
5. George Clemens Reiff (1793-1860) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Meetinghouse
4. George Hendricks Reiff (1768-1847) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Church
3. George Landis Reiff (1740-1808)
2. Jacob Reiff the Elder (1698-1782) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery
1. Hans George Reiff (c. 1659-1726) Buried Salford Mennonite Cemetery.
Those ancestors who emigrated to Philadelphia in the first decades of the eighteenth century were part of a homogeneous population of Swiss-German immigrants from the Palatinate. Initially Reformed, then predominantly Mennonite, they intermarried among people like themselves for nine succeeding generations. I am the tenth. My father, Jacob Howard Reiff, was the first to marry out of this community. His children, this tenth generation who lived in America, began with merely formal lives as Mennonites or none at all. I was consecrated at six months, 29 Mar 1942, by John J. Henert, Pastor of the First Mennonite Church at Reese and Diamond Streets in Philadelphia where our great grandfather Henry Mack used to lead the singing.
This was the only Mennonite church inside the city at the beginning of the 20th century. The ninth generation had been members there with both their parents and grandparents. But the three generations who worshiped at “New” First Mennonite Church of Philadelphia were a step removed from their rural “Old” Mennonite forebearers of Skippack and Worcester, so removed that the children of our tenth generation were not taught any Mennonite doctrines or customs at all, old or new. Shortly following the consecrations of their first two sons, these parents joined the mother's Tioga Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia.
Not to consider religion such a deciding factor, even if it seems it is. Their values were not abstractions hidden in the ground, but real. Was it Faith or Community? It was both, and both were radically different from any present experience. It was around and in me all the time.
All sides are supported by documents of varying detail dividing "New" Mennonites from the rural "Old.” The urban New Mennonites, Jacob L. Reiff and his son Howard R. Reiff, were members of First Mennonite of Philadelphia, but hey were “New” with this proviso, both had been Old Mennonites much of their lives. Their move to the city separated them from the Old, but any philosophical differences came at the insistence of Howard's wife, Anna, whose principled disagreement with the “Old” was the result of much deliberation, especially as we have seen, since she came of a family deep in Mennonite pastors and bishops. By the time of Anna’s choice for the new, her father, Henry Mack, had already begun a butter and egg business in the city (1906) and both Reiff and Mack families, who had known each other in the country, worshipped together in the city. These too left letters and documents of significance. Nineteenth century events underlay subsequent attitudes in the 20th century, which made an “Old” Mennonite into a “New.” Apologists for the new say that the public school system, choosing ministers by lot, plain dress of the clergy, their advancing age, the growing use of English, mechanical innovation and the wind of change led to the divergence ( Good, 13-14).
Abraham Schwenk Reiff ( Jun 1817 - 30 Aug 1879) the last unchanged Old Mennonite, married Sarah (Sallie) Detweiler Landis (4 Oct 1820 – 18 Jan 1891) in 1840. Between 1843 and 1860 they reared nine children. Most notable was their first son George (1846-1932), known as Uncle George to succeeding generations, who maintained the farm in Worcester much visited by his youngest brother Jacob with his son, Howard, his wife Anna and family, (Howard, Elizabeth and Florence). He also maintained the Old Mennonite ways. One purpose for which his brother Jacob first bought a car was to stay in touch with this brother, the farm and his roots; somewhat contradictorily, because Old Mennonites did not much drive. He used that car in the 20’s to travel to Worcester to take communion with those he had grown up with. Among Mennonites the week prior to communion is an important service of repentance, it and the yearly communion not to be missed. Jacob, Abraham's youngest child, stood between the Old and the New and was still going to worship with Uncle George in Worcester in 1929 when he could. In one letter to his grandson Howard, Jacob refers to his father Abraham:
“My father was always willing to pay a bill which he did know was correct in all its items. I can recall my father sent me to Norristown for a load of feed with 3 horses and in making the turn at Jeffersonville, through my carelessness, I tore off another man’s wheel of his wagon. The man went to my father and told him what I done and demanded him to pay the damage and father was willing. As I grew older I came to realize that extreme carefulness has been one of the foundation stones of my father’s success” (Letter of 27 Jan 1929).
We surmise that Uncle George obtained his father’s land in Worcester (Methacton) after his father’s death in 1879. The Worcester Mennonite burial ground there, begun about 1744, is the final resting place of Abraham and Jacob L. and probably other Reiffs, along with many soldiers who died after the battle of Germantown. Christopher Sauer, the polemicist and printer of the German Bible is also buried there with other first settlers.
Actual details are scarce, but a signal one occurs with the name "Abraham Reiff" inscribed upon a beam in the attic of the third meetinghouse. Such actualities are always wonderful, like the ornate signature of John Bechtel below in The Wandering Soul or the signature of Jacob and Anna Reiff carved in the old mill in Skippack. Sometime prior to 1771, maybe as early as 1739, that first meetinghouse had been used as a school, then rebuilt about 1804 and again in 1873. Abraham Reiff was a member of the building committee of this third meetinghouse when he so inscribed his name (The Perkiomen Region [PR] I, 104).
Trustee
He was also one of three designated trustees for the receipt of land in 1860 when that congregation had added to the "Mennonist Society burying ground of Worcester" (Wenger, 107) and he served as trustee, August 9, 1873, for the purchase of the land where the third meetinghouse was built. So his Abraham Reiff's name is preserved in relation to the Mennonites three ways, trustee for the cemetery addition, trustee for land for the new building and member of the building committee. He was ordained in 1877 as a deacon at Worcester "as an old man" (Wenger, 99) and served until his death two years later. His son, George L. Reiff (12/8/1846 – 10/8/1932), the above “Uncle George,” continued his father's service to this church, Deacon from 1881 until his death in 1932.
All these generations knew one another. Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack, refers to George Reiff’s advice in his letter of 8 Oct 1874, “that is what George Reiff said we should do.”
Worcester is notable also as a Schwenkfelder settlement. Church, school and burial ground there today hold antiquarian interest, but Abraham Reiff had originally come from Skippack where all the preceding Reiffs had lived.
George Clemens Reiff (1/14/1793 – 3/4/1860)
was the father of Abraham S. Reiff, although we must distinguish two contemporary cousins, both named George Clemens Reiff. That is, the two brothers, George and Jacob, married the two sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah Clemens, daughters of Garret Clemens. Each of these named a son George. The George C. Reiff (6/13/1804 – 11/16/1886), who married Elizabeth Detweiler in 1830, was from our point of view the cousin, the son of Jacob Hendricks Reiff, a storekeeper in Skippackville, and Sarah Clemens. This George is younger than his brother by 11 years. He is mentioned by Heckler in his History of Lower Salford (87) and in the History of Franconia Township as living in Skippackville and as having married the oldest daughter of Abraham Detweiler (d. 12/10/1830). There is a letter of his in the Henry S. Dotterer collection at the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Riffe, 108).
The older George C. Reiff, father of Abraham S. Reiff, married Maria Magdalena Bauer Schwenk (7/19/1794 – 3/28/1875) on 30 April 1814. As his son Abraham had been in Worcester, this George Reiff was also a trustee for purchase of Mennonite land in Skippack where he lived. He was one of "three Mennonite trustees, Jacob F. Kulp, Daniel Landes, and George Reiff," who executed a trust for land donated by Issac Kulp to build the new meetinghouse erected by the Old Mennonites of Skippack in 1848” (Wenger, 99).
The New Meetinghouse
This new meetinghouse ties several Old Mennonite strands together and illustrates aspects of the division between Old and the New. The seceding "new" Mennonites took over the meetinghouse in Skippack which the undivided congregation had built in 1844 (Wenger, 97), where both Old and then Old and New met for a time. But the Old or original group refused to prosecute their expropriation of property from scruples of conscience against litigation. They built a new building in 1848, slightly smaller than the old, although the deed was not made until August 21, 1849 (Wenger, 99). This was the land of which George Reiff served as trustee.
According to John F. Funk (1878) the building of a new meetinghouse illustrates what true Mennonites were all about. It also gives us a concrete means to understand the division of 1847.
“During the difficulties which occurred in the church, in eastern Pennsylvania, in 1847-48 on account of the disobedience and innovations of John H. Oberholtzer, in Bucks County, and the Hunsicker faction in Skippack, Montgomery County, there still remained, in the Old Church, so much love to God and the teachings of the Savior as to enable them, by the grace of God, to fulfill the teachings of Christ in a most noble manner, and leave to the world one of the most glorious examples of self-denial and devotion to their religious principles, presented to us in modern times.”
“The new factions claimed the old meeting-house and were determined to have it at all events. The property was one of considerable value and justly belonged to the Old Church, and any impartial judge or jury would have, without any scruples, freely accorded it to them, had they presented their claims, but instead of doing so, they chose rather to obey the scriptural injunctions “not to resist evil, and of him that taketh away thy goods, not to ask them again,” and quietly, leaving the new factions in possession, they purchased other grounds and built themselves a new house.” (Funk,128)
This account highlights the unworldly Old Mennonite belief as well as some of the deep interrelations of the Mennonite Reiffs. In acting as trustee for the new building in Skippack, George C. Reiff, was doing there exactly what John B. Bechtel was doing in Hereford, when, at the 1847 division, he became the Old Mennonite pastor at the age of 41. Bechtel’s granddaughter, Anna Mack, was subsequently to marry George C. Reiff’s great grandson, Howard R. Reiff. Neither ancestor knew the other, but they acted in accord. Their children however, Anna and Howard, became new Mennonites in 1911.
The Old Mennonites of Skippack then became the "Upper Skippack" congregation, but while they surrendered the meetinghouse they kept the Skippack Alms Book, that record of alms money with annual audits conducted yearly from 1738, the oldest such record of its kind in Pennsylvania. This Alms Book gives “a list of all the ordained men of the Skippack circuit since 1738" (Wenger, 97) and records the signatures of the three Reiffs of succeeding generations, starting with George [C.] Reiff who kept the Alms Book from 1835 to 1842, signing it four times (Wenger, 103). His son Abraham S. Reiff of the Worcester congregation, part of the Skippack circuit, signed the Alms Book three times, from 1877-79. Abraham's son, George L. Reiff, as noted, signed 34 times. Thus the Alms Book and meetinghouse document these three generations. [Prior to the Oberholtzer division of 1847 the hierarchy of the Franconia conference had been comprised of districts overseen by a bishop, but " the Skippack bishop district retained the 'circuit system' which evidently obtained in all the districts at first" (Wenger, 98). That is, the ministers of this district would rotate among the three congregations, from Skippack, the seat, to Worcester and Providence.]
Executor
George C. Reiff also served as executor of his father-in-law’s will, Abraham Schwenk (5/25/1759 – 8/6/1843) and was named as guardian of the six children of Schwenk’s deceased son, also named Abraham. Here he is again simply called, George Reiff:
"Gaurdian[sic.] of the persons and Estates of the minor children of my late Deceased Son Abraham named as follows, to wit, Isaac, Abraham, David, William, Margaret & Sarah—from the first Day of April last past, until each of the said minor Children shall attain the age of 21 years.—The sum of $500 being due to each of them on the said first day of April, and in the hands of the said George Reiff; and of the further sum or sums that will be due to them immediately after my decease…" (Strassburger, 301) We know that George Reiff adequately fulfilled that trust, because in “1854 others of the heirs acknowledged the receipt of their full inheritance from George Reiff…"(Strassburger, 303).
Nonresistence
Paradoxically for a Mennonite, but before his marriage in 1814, George Reiff was listed as a private in the War of 1812. This might explain his intimacy with his father in law, who was a Sergeant Seventh Class in the Philadelphia County Militia during the Revolution and in the Montgomery County Militia in 1786. Abraham Schwenk was "a tanner in Germantown at the time of the [Revolutionary] war, nineteen years old, a tall, fine man, he was under age, but because of his size the officers did not know it. At the battle of Germantown he went upstairs in a house as he was wounded, where a woman said that British were coming. He replied, 'Let the devils come,' and he took a large stick from the fireplace and drove them back" (Strassburger, 296).
As a son of Mennonite parents it might seem important to explain how George Reiff was a Private in the War of 1812 (Captain John Wentz's Company, Sixth Class, Fifty-first Regiment), when, "apart from believers' baptism, the most distinctive doctrine of the Mennonites is their Biblical nonresistance" (Wenger, 57). That is, that "a Christian may not participate in, or support, war or violence in any form whatever" (Wenger, 57).
Mennonites were sometimes said to have served when they did not, but were included in the rolls anyway. Philip Geisinger, Henry Geisinger and John Geisinger had petitioned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1778 for exemption from military service (Wenger, 60-2) and been penalized. Wenger reports that there are "about a dozen and half graves at the Saucon burying ground on which are Grand Army of the Republic, G. A. R. markers of the Revolutionary War, including …Johannes Geissinger (1739- 1811)…Henrich Geisinger (1737-1817)…Philip Geissinger (1732-1809) and Abraham Geissinger, (1749-1825). As John L. Ruth says, these are “the crowning irony which was to mark the memories of Jacob Yoder, John Geissinger, and their friends who sacrificed all they had to separate themselves from the Revolutionary War for conscience’ sake. For all their pains, their graves are yearly marked with American flags placed by modern patriotic organizations, who, having carelessly read the rosters of Colonel Siegfried’s militia, in their myth-making zeal designate these defenseless, dispossessed Christians as soldier heroes of the American Revolution.” (Ruth, 173) Of course there were also many Geissingers and Rosenbergers in the Saucon Valley not in the Mennonite Church. In fact however the opposite of the case is true. Some of those people were imprisoned for not serving.
If they did serve there were two ways around the prohibition. First, after the war to make a confession to the congregation and be reinstated. The second out was to not yet have been baptized, therefore not yet to be held accountable to Mennonite doctrine (Wenger, 64). Mennonites were baptized as adults. The minority of Mennonites who did serve in the American Revolution joined other denominations. The way back to the Old was not easy. To be reinstated in the offender would have had to publicly repent the war before the congregation and then submit to their vote.
Although much later, an example of this issue occurs in the nonresistant dilemma of the two sons of Henry Mack, step brothers of Anna Mack Reiff and nephews of Bishop Andrew Mack, that is, Harvey and Philip. Harvey went to France in 1918 as a conscientious objector and stayed to work for the Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee (Wenger, 75). Philip went to Officer's Candidate School at Fort Meade and became a 2nd Lieutenant with every intention of going to France as a combatant, but the war ended.
Mennonite spokesmen downplay such opposites. Wenger says that Philip G. Mack "accepted noncombatant service at Camp Meade; was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70). But he didn’t “accept” service, he sought it out and he wanted to fight. He was only noncombatant because he couldn’t get to France in time. Philip's mother, Sarah Ann Geisinger came of a long Old Mennonite tradition of noncombatants. She wouldn’t let Philip in the house with his uniform on. Also he went from the “new” Mennonites to the Presbyterians shortly after his marriage. His nephew, JH Reiff, who lived across the street, remembered that when Philip came home in his uniform his mother wouldn't let him in the house or let him stay there. As his niece Elizabeth Reiff put it, "Philip got thrown out of the communion for going to OCS instead of registering as a CO."
Wenger says Philip was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70), but it is more accurate to say that for his mother's sake Philip confessed and repented to the church and was received in that fellowship again, after which he lived at home until he married in 1925, but shortly followed the way of his sister Anna into the new Mennonites and from there, with wife Catherine became Presbyterian.
A similar situation exists perhaps with Gottshall Gottschalk, who signed the Skippack Alms Book twice in 1791 (Wenger, 102), although 6 others signed that year also. If it is the same person, Godshalk (Boorse) Godshalk (1762-1835) who is buried in Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery is on the Muster Roll of Towamencin Township under Captain Daniel Springer on 11/24/1780 (Perkiomen Region, 387-8)
Another striking example of Mennonite military service seems to exist in the life of Bishop Heinrich Kolb Hunsicker (3/7/1752-7/8/1836), who while being both a farmer, a minister of the Lower Skippack Mennonites and a Bishop, was also listed as a member of the 6th Class of Captain Dull's Company of Militia, 1st Battalion, Philadelphia Co. under the command of Col. Daniel Heister in 1778. He began signing the Skippack Alms book in 1781 even while being listed as a member of the Philadelphia Militia that same year. He signed the Alms Book 33 times, until 1832
There is a divergence of theory and practice. It is possible to suppose that the military connection was watered down, whether in the life of George C. Reiff or Philip Mack. George C. and Maria Reiff are buried in the Lower Skippack Mennonite cemetery. While Mennonites would bury strangers for the sake of charity or geography, for the most part they buried their own in their graveyards.
Most of George C.'s children are explicitly denominated as Mennonites in the immediate area.
Schwenks/Bauers
But more can be said of the Schwenk family of George C.’s wife. In 1779 Abraham Schwenk lived in Claytonville, the home of Henry Mack and Jacob L. Reiff a hundred years later. He subsequently bought a large farm in Frederick Township at Delphi, also called Zieglerville Station where he built a tannery and farmed till about 1808. Subsequent to that he owned 176 acres in Skippack Township along the Perkiomen Creek opposite Schwenksville. The Schwenks were members of Keeley's Lutheran Church to which Abraham Schwenk gave the ground on which the Lutheran Church was erected in Schwenksville. His estate was divided equally among nine children. In the will his daughter who married George Reiff is sometimes named Maria, sometimes Mary. Intermixing Mennonites and Lutherans as in Maria Schwenk’s family occurred also with Andrew and Henry Mack’s brother Peter, who was a Lutheran minister in Hummelstown in the 1880’s.
Maria Schwenk’s mother, Veronica Landis Bauer (4/10/1756 – 9/13/1840), was a Mennonite whose father, Michael Bauer (c. 1720-1784) married Veronica Landis about 1744-45. This Michael Bauer was just sitting down to a wedding banquet in 1776, celebrating his oldest daughter’s marriage to Christian Meyer, when soldiers of the Continental Army plundered the feast and carried off a wagonload of spoils to their camp (Ruth, ‘Twas Seeding Time, 91).
Michael Bauer was in turn the son of Hans Bauer (d. 1748), who owned land on the Perkiomen in 1734. In 1742 he bought 105 acres in Butter Valley in Colebrookdale and in 1743, 134 acres in Douglas Manor (also later the residence of Henry Mack). Both these properties were annexed into Hereford Township in 1753. (Strassburger, 316f). Strassburger says that Hans was "no doubt" buried in the Hereford Mennonite Cemetery, but the tombstone has been effaced so he does not appear in the Hereford Burial List compiled by Henry Mack in 1934. This Hans Bauer (d. 1748), a Mennonite, is said to have emigrated between 1708 and 1717 before settling in Colebrookdale (Strassburger, 315). Veronica Landis' mother was the daughter of another prominent Mennonite settler, Johannes Landis, of Bucks County (Strassburger, 320).
Butter Valley was a very fertile area containing Hereford and Colebrookdale, both Mennonite colonies. The first Hereford meetinghouse was built about 1743 and is the location of the oft-mentioned Hereford burial ground. In 1749 Michael Bauer inherited lands in Colebrookdale from his father. He signed the petition of 1753 to the Philadelphia Court to erect the new Hereford Township and was among the Hereford residents taxed in 1758. Michael and his wife Veronica Landis are probably also buried in the Hereford ground. Their son Samuel (1746-1822) is. There were only three children, Samuel, Fronica and Anna. Veronica married Abraham M. Schwenk in 1779.
Like Abraham S. Reiff and John B. Bechtel in the Oberholtzer Division, the Bauer and Landis trails cross very profoundly with another tributary of the Reiffs, the Bechtels and the Macks in the Mennonite church of Hereford.
George Hendricks Reiff (23 Dec 1768 - 28 Nov 1847) married Elizabeth Clemens (30 Jan 1773-13 Jun 1840) on 7 Feb1792, the daughter of Garret Clemens (1/2/1745 - 5/1/1820) of Lower Salford Township. Garret was the oldest surviving son of Jacob (d. 1782) and Barbara Clemens ( whose will of 1782 is extant) and the grandson of Gerhart Clemens (1680-c.1744-45, the Mennonite settler who arrived in 1709, married Anna H. (Anneli) Reiff in 1702 and who first makes mention of Jacob Reiff the Elder in his diary, "Anno 1723, July 2: “I settled with Jacob Reiff and remain in debt to him for the land yet L14 18s." This is the first chronological reference to Jacob Reiff the Elder. The marriage of Jacob Reiff’s grandson with Clemens’ great granddaughter marks another notable crossing of family trails.
Elizabeth Clemens herself is mentioned once, in a note in the famous diary which had belonged to her great grandfather, to which her grandfather Jacob made some later additional notes. Jacob states that “Elizabeth was married in 1763. She was then twenty years of age.” (Strassburger, 473) She had some nine sisters and five brothers. Jacob Clemens ended his years living with son John, but he had several sons. He called Gerhard the oldest but born before him were Michael, 1729, Jacob 1739, twins Gerhard and Christian 1741. There were at least some five other sons and nine daughters (471). Garret’s parents sold him two parcels of land in 1768 totaling 135 acres. Here he is called Garret Clements, Jr. after his grandfather.
George Landis Reiff, the father of George Hendricks Reiff.
George Landis Reiff (4/7/1740 – 1/24/1808) was also known as George Reiff III. That is, George II was John George Reiff (c.1692-1759), oldest son of Hans George Reiff or George I. George II was George III’s uncle. Because genealogists were unsure of the maiden name of Jacob Reiff the Elder’s spouse they took to differentiating George from his uncle and grandfather in this way. But evidence now exists that the mother of George Landis Reiff mother was Anna Landis (not Anna Maria Fischer). George III is of course the second son of Jacob the Elder.
George III married Elizabeth Hendricks on 2/15/1764. Along with his father and brother, he too is recorded as a private in Captain Barnet Haines Company for Lower Skippack in the Revolutionary War, but the same provisos for Mennonites at war may apply to him as to his son in the War of 1812. Both he and his wife, Elizabeth Hendricks are buried at Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery. Hendricks of course is an illustrious name in Pennsylvania, forever dignified by the signing of the protest against slavery by Gerhard Hendricks in 1688.
Elizabeth Hendricks (4/9/1740 – 6/25/1817) was the daughter of Leonard
Hendricks (b. Krefeld, 1698-1776, buried Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery) and
Elizabeth Turner (born c. 1712 in Pennsylvania). Leonard had named son-in-law George Reiff as coexecutor of his will, probated 3/8/1776.
If it had not begun sooner with Jacob the Elder’s wife, Anna Landis, it is thought that the Mennonite affiliation began with George’s marriage to Elizabeth. The genealogist and historian Harry Reiff says: "Elizabeth Hendricks who married George Reiff III was a daughter of Leonard Hendricks, who in turn was a son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks. The Hendricks were part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled/established Germantown in 1683 and later. These people were called Dutch Quakers-induced by William Penn to come to Penn’s colony in America. Apparently there was a strong Mennonite population in the Krefeld/Munchen-Gladback area, and Quaker-Mennonite-Reformed families at times were mixed. At any rate, Leonard Hendricks owned land in the Towamencin area of present Montgomery Co., and was considered a Quaker.”
Leonard’s father, Lawrence Hendricks (b. ca. 1670 Kriegsheim Germany, d. 1749 at Towamencin, Montgomery Co.), a Quaker and then a Mennonite, arrived in PA with his father Willem Hendricks (1649-1691) on the "Francis and Dorothy" on 12 October 1685. Lawrence’s father, William, was a Holland Dutch Mennonite who had voyaged with Pastorious in 1682 and brought his sons Lawrence and Henry with him.
Lawrence Hendricks signed the 1728 petition for the Susquehanna Road or Line" Of this list Alderfer says "the list of signatures attached to the 1728 petition contains about twelve Mennonite names. The first six signatures are of men from the Towamencin Mennonite community. The first four (Jacob Godshalk, Godshalk Godshalk, Henry Hendricks, and Lawrence Hendricks) were the original 1714 settlers in what would later become the Towamencin Mennonite community…the Hendricks brothers may have been brothers-in-law to Godshalk Godshalk, oldest son of Jacob Godshalk, the first Mennonite bishop in America, who settled first at Germantown.”
(Alderfer, 19-21).
Jacob Reiff the Elder (11/15/1698 – 2/16/1782)was the youngest son of Hans George Reiff (d. December, 1726) and Anna Maria (1662-1753), his executor and a man of wide reputation in Skippack and Lower Salford. Evidence now suggests that his wife was Anna Landis (1709 – 10/28/1788) who he married at Skippack in 1733.
Glenn H. Landis has discovered an estate settlement in 1750 for the estate of Jacob Landes who had a son, Jacob (c. 1711 – c. 1793), but also two daughters, named in the settlement as Anna Reiff and Margreth Smith. This, it is thought, is the Anna who married Jacob Reiff the Elder. Anna Landis’ father, Jacob (c. 1685 –1749), another Mennonite émigré of about 1726, bought land from Derick Johnson in Germantown in 1727, bought further land in Franconia, Montgomery Co. in 1734, and sold both plots to his son Jacob in 1748.
Harry Reiff puts the argument like this: "She (Jacob Reiff the Elder’s mother) died after her son Jacob (with whom she lived for the last years of her life) had changed from the German Reformed Church to the Skippack Mennonite meetinghouse, possibly because Jacob may have married Mennonite Anna Landis. I believe I told you of the Anna Landis theory that Jacob married the daughter of Skippack Mennonite Jacob Landis. Also Jacob had become disillusioned of the German Reformed congregations…and he may have changed religions in disgust" (Harry Reiff, Letter of 3/1/2003).
Jacob the Elder had two sons, Jacob Jr. and George III. It is hard to conclusively prove whether he was a Mennonite later in life because of the records which Mennonites essentially did not believe in keeping, but a summary of some of the argument goes like this:
The oldest son, Jacob Reiff Jr., the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89), who voted for the Pennsylvania convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, seems to have followed his father's early Reformed tendencies, since he participated in the founding of the Wentz Reformed Church. His brother George, as we have seen, married a Mennonite.
Jacob Jr.'s children however got him into the Mennonites in a big way,
especially his son John Reiff (12/5/1759 – 2/6/1826) who married a daughter of Bishop Christian Funk and became a minister with that prescient, if defrocked divine, who endorsed the American Revolution. This John Reiff signed the preface, with other ministers, of the English version of Funk’s Mirror for all Mankind (Norristown, Pa.,1814). In 1814 Jacob Reiff (Jr.) donated land for the first Funkite meetinghouse in Skippack (Wenger, 350), the same land that his son John later retitled to the Dunkards after the Funkite demise.
So much more can be said of Jacob the Elder’s activities in every way that they must be given a separate article unto themselves.
Hans George Reiff
Hans George Reiff’s arrival in Pennsylvania and Skippack is so early that his name is used as a benchmark to identify the boundaries of Michael Ziegler’s first land purchase in 1717, “beginning at a reputed Corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” (Straussberger, 419). It seems evident from this first, that Reiff had been there long enough to identify Ziegler who came to Germantown in 1709 (Alderfer, Several Documents, 28) and second, that Reiff lived in close intellectual as well as physical proximity to these Mennonites. Ziegler, an early Mennonite minister, is designated as a trustee on the first deed of the Skippack Mennonite congregation (Alderfer, 28) that conveyed the 100 acres in 1717 for the Mennonite school house and burial ground.(Straussberger 415). He probably was the cause of Reiff being asked to witness the further trust agreement of that behest in 1725.
When Ziegler in 1734 applied to the Land Office for a resurvey of this tract of 100 acres new lines of demarcation were given, implying not only that Reiff was deceased, which he was, but also that he had originally been the only point of reference available for the deed, thus a very early landholder indeed. Instead of saying “beginning at a corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” the resurvey says, “beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending…to a post thence North East by the land of Jacob Colph (421). The resurvey gives the original survey date as December, 1717. “In pursuance of a warrant …dated the tenth day of September in the year 1717…there was survey’d and set out unto Michael Ziegler…in December, 1717 a certain tract…beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending thence…to a post…by the land of Jacob Colph.” (Strassburger, 423)
Much more can and will be said of Hans George Reiff and his son Jacob.
Works Cited
Joel Alderfer, "Several Documents Relating to Early Franconia Conference Mennonites." In Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania, Newsletter Supplement, July, 1984.
Richard Warren Davis. Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners. Vol. II. 1997.
Douglas L. Good. The Growth of a Congregation: A History of the Hereford Mennonite Church New Order. Bally, PA. 1988.
Christian Funk. Mirror for all Mankind. Norristown, PA,1814.
John F. Funk. The Mennonite Church and Her Accusers. Elkhart, Indiana: Mennonite Publishing Company, 1878.
The Perkiomen Region [PR] Originally published by the Historical and Natural Science Society of the Perkiomen Region, Pennsburg, PA, 1921, republished by Adams Apple Press, 1994.
Fred J. Riffe. Reiff to Riffe Family in America, 1995.
John L. Ruth. ‘Twas Seeding Time: A Mennonite View of the American Revolution. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1976.
Ralph Beaver Strassburger. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Gwynedd Valley, PA, 1922.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA. Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Mennonite Publishing House, Scottdale, PA, 1985.
Acknowledgments
From driving to Skippack with inchoate desire in 1974, finding old copies of the Goshenhoppen Region at the first stop, to the next day contacting the editor and going on a dig with him and his students at the Jacob Reiff farm, considering which removes it is remarkable that my brothers and I lived through aspects of the important Mennonite passages of life, 1) non-resistance 2) service among alien or deprived peoples 3) agricultural experience, 4) separation from the world. Unconscious origins without knowing.
Acknowledgments are due to my brother Robert A. Reiff who accompanied me in these searches of war records, ship lists and newspaper accounts in the beginning of this effort in 1974.
The modern work on many of the names included here stems from the geneology of Harry E. Reiff, Reiff Families in America, 1986. Reiff to Riffe (1995) by Fred J. Riffe pays tribute to him as does Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners, (1997) Vol II by Richard Warren Davis. His influence extends beyond his printed works. He has long contributed to genealogy forums and has willingly corresponded at length with interested parties. He is the source for the first modern printed reference by Davis that Hans George Reiff “was in Pennsylvania by 14 Feb 1718 as he owned land next to Michael Ziegler at Bebber Twp., (later Salford twp.) according to the deed bearing that date from David Powell to Michael Ziegler.” Davis indicates his debt in a footnote as a “letter from Harry E. Reiff of Ambler, Pennsylvania, September 1994. He has generously corresponded on many subjects of the background and foreground of this present effort and has seen these manuscripts which pass here as biography, although none of the errors likely to be found are his doing, quite to the contrary, he has saved this narrative from error a number of times with his meticulous attention to detail and reasoned judgments.
